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Too Many Flags?
By Juan Enriquez*
During the last half of this century, there has been a trend toward more and smaller states. Three quarters of the flags saluted around the world today did not exist 50 years ago. As the number of sovereign states in the United Nations has increased from 51 to 185 (soon to be 187), the rate of new-country creation has varied. From 1950 to 1990, 2.2 new states were created per year, up from an average of 1.22 per year from 1900 to 1950. The 1990s have seen extreme instability: From 1990 to 1998, the rate was 3.1 new countries per year.
Historically, the dissolution of countries has been primarily a consequence of wars between states. Today, governments have more to fear from within than without. Groups within states are asserting their ethnic, religious, linguistic, regional, or national identities and questioning the integrity and legitimacy of existing countries. Internal turmoil increasingly leads to abrupt border changes.
So far, the Western Hemisphere seems immune to secessionist impulses. But its national boundaries are neither as simple nor as stable as they appear. Leaders throughout North and South America subscribe to a “it can’t happen here” mentality. But contrary to popular perception, secessionism is not simply a product of ancient nationalist impulses and catastrophic social unrest. It is also driven, in part, by globalization, which breaks the world down into its component parts, even as it draws these parts closer together.
Countries in the Americas are subject to the tug of new centrifugal forces along their borders. Not only is secession less traumatic, it also may lead to greater prosperity for wealthy regions. The growing tendency among governments to justify and base their authority on the grounds of maintaining economic efficiency has opened the door to secessionists who can legitimately claim that they are not reaping the benefits of economic restructuring. Today, governments wishing to keep their borders intact must treat their citizens as if they were shareholders capable of downsizing the state as if it were a business conglomerate.
The more globalized the world becomes, the less traumatic it is for nationalists to split from states. Small countries and national groups hoping to avoid domination by larger neighbors sometimes find open borders their best ally. Consider the Québecois. Driven by the perception that 25 million English Canadians are culturally overwhelming 5.7 million Francophones, they periodically try to separate from Canada. Integration with the United States might seem counterintuitive. But if it is just as easy for Québec to trade north-south as it is east-west, Canada’s market, much less its laws and rules, is no longer essential to the province’s survival. Another example is the Basques in Spain: Increased autonomy within the European Union has strengthened their local governance.
Throughout history, countries have sought to expand. But today, the goal of most wars is to make countries smaller rather than larger. Small countries are among the fastest-growing and most effective traders in the postwar era. Certain regions within large states may not only be viable as separate states but also may be far more productive when unbundled from their traditional borders.
Democratization, in many cases, is increasing the secessionist drive. Over the last two decades, almost all of the Americas have evolved toward greater democracy and respect for human rights. One consequence is more support for, and legitimacy accorded to, the rights of indigenous minorities. As the United States and other developed countries demand respect for the rights of minorities throughout the world, it is harder for these states to ignore legal challenges posed by indigenous groups within their own borders.
The United States has often been a strong supporter of existing borders throughout the world. Its role as guarantor of the status quo has been most visible in Latin America, where, under the auspices of the Monroe Doctrine, it has staged more than 75 military interventions since 1851. But it is getting harder for the United States to police the Western Hemisphere. Traditional justifications, such as expanding one’s territory, fighting off European imperialists, or opposing communism, are now largely defunct.
The old adage “my country right or wrong” is under siege. If a government emphasizes that its fundamental raison d’être is to privatize, limit services, eliminate bureaucrats, and balance budgets, those areas and citizens that most benefit or suffer from globalization may question how the state helps them. A lack of trust increases demands for regional autonomy: “If the guys in the capital won’t take care of us,” the argument goes, “we shall take care of ourselves.”
Sovereignty has become unbundled from federal rulers to territorial authorities and individuals. This development implies that the basis for a state’s continued existence and success no longer rests on its control over a specific territory or its funding a large army, but on the legitimacy of its rule, its economic performance, and its ability to reconcile diverse ethnic, religious, and national aspirations. The Americas may not have generated many new states in the last century and a half, but this does not guarantee that they will not in the future. In an era of globalization, the secessionist impulse knows no geographical boundaries.
References
Fernand Braudel’s A History of Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 1993)
Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle’s The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998)
Francis Deng and Terrence Lyons, eds., African Reckoning: A Quest For Good Governance (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1998.)
David Elkins’ Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995)
Juan Enriquez’s Flags, Borders, Anthems and Other Myths (forthcoming)
Gidon Gottlieb’s Nation Against State: A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993)
Robert Jackson’s Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Robert Kaplan’s An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future (New York: Random House, 1998)
Peter Katzenstein’s Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)
Kevin Kelly’s “New Rules for the New Economy” (Wired, September 1997)
Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987)
Douglas McGray’s “The Silicon Archipelago” (Daedalus, Spring 1999)
James Minahan’s Nations Without States: A Historical Dictionary of Contemporary National Movements (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996)
Joseph Nye Jr.’s “In Government We Don’t Trust” (Foreign Policy, Fall 1997)
Nye’s “The World Economy: The Future of the State” (The Economist, September 20–26, 1997)
Kenichi Ohmae’s The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Economic Regional Powers (New York: Free Press, 1995)
Saskia Sassen’s Losing Control? Sovereignty in An Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
Lester Thurow’s The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World (New York: Morrow & Co., 1996)
Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992)
Endnotes
*: Juan Enriquez is a researcher at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, where he is working on a book about the new American states. Back.