I was reading
Vladimir Putin's Op-Ed in the New York Times and it got me thinking again about the United Nations. My distrust of the organization is not new. I think it's a corrupt vehicle for greedy parasites and stealth world socialists and marxists.
But lately I've been thinking that not only the U.N. is bad, but some of what people consider the civilized norms that the institution is intended to promote are bad. In other worlds, the U.N. isn't just bad because it's a failure at what it does. It's also bad to the extent that it succeeds!
Prior to the 20th century, conquest of one nation by another was something that happened frequently. Nations were not considered to have a fundamental right of existence. Nations were created, destroyed, merged and fractured with great regularity. It was an accepted reality of global politics.
However, during the 20th century, not starting with the U.N., but growing as a general sentiment expressed in the world of international politics and in the failed League of Nations, was the idea that invading another country is wrong. Conducting wars of conquest is wrong.
This assertion is, I think, generally accepted by at least the world at large. The consequence is that international borders have become virtually set in stone. The only time they change is when a state fails so badly that it breaks up into smaller states (the origin of the world Balkanization), such as in Sudan and South Sudan and, of course, the Balkans, or, theoretically, when two independent states jointly agree to merge (has that happened in modern times?).
Many current nations didn't even exist until the early 20th century -- Iraq, Jordan, Israel or Somalia. In fact, if you look at a
historical maps of
Africa from the early 19th century, the borders are almost unrecognizable compared to modern maps. But now, every nation's sovereign borders are considered inviolate, and wars of aggression, no less conquest, attract international outcry.
And therein lies the problem. We have determined that even the worst nations -- nations that are essentially lawless no-man's-lands like Somalia, are "too big to fail." We acknowlege, enforce and revere their borders long after those borders cease to contain anything like an actual functioning nation state.
These facts -- new nations only form from the dissolution of sufficiently failed nations and wars of conquest are not acceptable -- are almost an ironclad recipe for slow decline. The only direction we willingly let nations go is down.
In previous times, an utterly dysfunctional land would be considered ripe for takeover by a more-functional neighboring land. This is how all successful states grew. There was no sense that Somalia had a "right" to be Somalia instead of, say, Northern Kenya.
The United States may never have been settled at all, if the right of natives to their native lands had been respected, or it may have stopped as a little coastal strip, or with the Louisiana purchase -- at whatever point it was at when the modern world's towering respect for international borders took hold.
This would have been a disaster then, and it's a growing disaster now. We view successful nations as having equal rights of existence to failed nations. We even recognize the right of our sworn enemies, Iran and North Korea, to exist.
We've abandoned the creative destruction that has been the engine of world progress, because we're no longer willing to throw away bad ideas when they're shaped like a nation. It's entirely possible that the current national borders are, in many locations, bad ideas. The idea was touched on in Iraq by the proponents of the three state solution, but even this solution stopped at the borders to Iraq.
It's as if no U.S. car company was ever allowed to go out of business. Ha, yes, I know it seems we actually think this way now. Anytime one of the big three looks like it's in real danger of failing, the government steps in. But once upon a time, the big three wasn't the big three. There was competition with Packard, AMC, Hudson, Dodge, and many others.
Imagine if the list of U.S. automobile manufacturers was frozen in 1920 with all of them being considered "too big to fail" or having a "right of existence?" What kind of dysfunctional, parasitic government tenant corporations would we be saddled with?
We enforce the existence of failed nations, unless they fall apart into smaller states. But smaller states are less capable states: they have fewer resources, fewer people, they're less capable of great things. Switzerland is a wonderful country, but nobody looks to it to lead the space race. Swiss ideals of industry and culture will never dominate the world, because the Swiss are content being an insular people. But even if tomorrow they changed their mind, if they decided to invade and acquire failing Italy to the south, the entire world would have a proverbial cow. It would never be allowed.
Instead, Italy will be able to continue with, in the words of Animal House, its "long tradition of existence" no matter how utterly it has failed as a nation. This despite the fact that Italy in the form of its current borders is less than 150 years old -- a blink of the eye, in historical terms.
This excessive respect and veneration of national boundaries serves, of course, the entrenched interests. The elite. The holders of the reins of power. It's rent-seeking and cronyism on the international level. They all make a lot of noise about the spread of freedom and democracy, but the minute one of them started spreading freedom and democracy in the way that we know worked historically -- conquest -- the rest of the world would have a fit. They're far more interested in maintaining the status quo.
So we're stuck with a lot of ossified states, coasting along on their guaranteed right to exist, until they become so utterly failed that their own citizens tear them apart from within, condemning them to chaos or Balkanization. Historically, we'd been moving away from the city-state. It was a failed model. But that's the only direction allowed, now, and that means trouble down the line.
