[lit-ideas] Bad Borders, that monstrous legacy
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 14:50:16 -0700
One of the books I got in the mail today was New Glory, Expanding America's
Global Supremacy by Ralph Peters, 2005. He is a retired Army intelligence
officer and doesn't seem to be a great admirer of the continental Europeans,
more specifically the "old Europeans." For the most part he exempts Britain
from his criticism. Britain is our ancestor and though we may squabble, our
squabbles are family affairs. Britain has much more in common with us than
with any nation on the continent.
On page 9 Peters writes, "The greatest obstacle facing the world isn't
terrorism, but that monstrous legacy of European colonialism, bad borders.
Terrorism is a manifestation of failure, not a cause. Drawn in European
capitals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the state
boundaries the colonial powers forced upon so much of the world, from Africa
through the Middle East to Southeast Asia, remain the leading source of
friction and conflict between states - and often with them. Borders
demarcated to please kings, czars, and Kaisers took no account of the
affinities or hatreds of local populations. Now tens of millions who wish
to live together are divided and hundreds of millions more who wish to live
apart are forced to remain together. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the
'liberation' era was that none of the heroes or villains of the struggle
could see beyond the world Europe had designed for them.
"Since the end of the Cold War every conflict in which the United States has
been involved has been to some degree a legacy of Europe's colonial era -
including the liberation of that Frankenstein's monster of a state, Iraq.
We are cleaning up the messes left by Paris, Berlin, and even London, while
Europeans chide us self-righteously. We Americans may have broken from
Europe politically as a result of our revolution, but we remain as miserably
in thrall to European rules for diplomacy and concepts of international
order as colonialism's victims do to European-imposed borders. We need a
diplomatic revolution. Then we need to lead the world away from the failed
European model of statecraft."
The above is from Peters' introductory chapter entitled "A Brief World
Tour." I shall presumably learn what he means by "diplomatic revolution" in
subsequent chapters.
Lawrence
Other related posts:
