I remember 1989. We watched the Berlin Wall fall on CNN, my father wondering aloud if any of those people crossing through Potsdamer Platz in both directions as if it was just another city square were blood ties.
I was sixteen at the time, attending a small private school near Los Angeles. Soon there would be Soviet exchange students among us - the children of Glasnost and Perestroika - mixing the dialects of Central Russia with Southern California slang. Soon the face of the Red Menace would no longer be a wrathful Khrushchev slamming his shoe on a UN desk, but a tough and pretty girl sharing her father's memories of Stalin-era deprivations, a blond and boyish kid sharing his own memories of Brezhnev-era children's TV. And soon the Soviet Empire would be disappeared altogether into history books, dusty archives, and the cloudy waters of individual memory.
Conservative intellectuals penned elegant paeans to the imminent triumph of worldwide liberal democracy and bourgeois capitalism, and graying statesmen delivered well meaning but unintentionally disturbing platitudes about the "New World Order." You could "follow the Moskva / Down to Gorky Park / Listening to the wind of change." We were "watching the world wake up from history." But beyond the sentimental dirges celebrating German reunification, and the pop hits invoking Joyce, old ghosts were being exhumed, and new phantoms emerging - in the Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka, on almost every continent. There were random horrors outside provincial capitals in former colonies, and mass executions of young brown-eyed men less than a day's drive from Paris. Over tea and cigarettes, a young Serbian woman I knew was asked by a friend what they were fighting about. "Scraps of real estate, old grudges," she said, "nothing."
In his seminal 1994 essay "The Coming Anarchy" Robert D Kaplan presciently and prophetically described the primary forces shaping the post-Cold War world. Over time, he implied, it would be less the brie and caviar niceties of twentieth-century international relations, rumors of war (between states), and its occasional actuality. There would be few moments worthy of the cover of Life Magazine. The new history, he said, would be shaped increasingly by sub-national and trans-national forces: "disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels." Fragmentation, sectarian conflict, and terrorism would replace national consolidation, nationalism, and the Great Game, as the new miseries, and not always just abroad. It would be the geographers, not the political scientists or international relationists, who could best describe this world. The maps, like the politicians with their nationalist pretensions, would often lie.
What if I was to tell you that Iraq does not exist, or at least has little reason to exist today beyond the division of oil revenues? Certainly you have heard it by now. You wouldn't be surprised. But what if I said that any number of nation-states around the globe - not just the brutal, corrupt autocracies of the post-Ottoman, Arab-Muslim world - are if not already then becoming political fictions, fragmenting from within, and threatened from without by the forces of globalization. You believe you are traveling to a country in South America, but that wealthy coastal enclave is likely to be more of a city-state today than a national capital, whose middle and upper-class residents prefer to wall themselves in from the troubles of the interior than sacrifice for the greater good of the country. They prefer to pay for private security rather than social security, state prisons rather than state schools.
The same is increasingly true of China, whose nouveau riche east end is perhaps more likely to be absorbed into the broader East Asian political, economic, and cultural ecosystem - which includes Taiwan - than Taiwan being re-absorbed into China. A provincial official told one academic out loud but off the record in recent years that China - which has spent more than 1000 of the last 2000 years in pieces - risks fracturing into twelve nation-states more than the region or the West risks being menaced by a new Chinese imperium. Unrest is now a daily occurrence in that country, and believed to be widely under-reported. And many of the same internal and external forces stalking China are also stalking India; democracy like autocracy is prone to demagogy, and may be making them worse. If the "united" in "United Nations" was at times facetious in the last century, it may be the "nations" part that is more than a little presumptuous in this century.
We call our work in Iraq and in the Balkans nation building; that is a misnomer. Nation building is not only the construction or reconstruction of critical infrastructure, but the process - often long, and unpleasant - of playing local and regional forces against one another, suppressing ethnic and religious minorities, and forging national institutions and a common national culture. The nation-states of Europe did not arise from the mists of history but a methodical process of statecraft, turning lords into earls with the careful dispensation of carrots and sticks, and making certain minorities knew their place, often at the end of a sword. The continent's Jews, Basques, Muslims, and others know something about nation building. There were reformations and counter-reformations, revolutions and civil wars. Nation building in Europe and the broader West was terrible, and successful. It made Shakespeare and Bach, Voltaire and Wagner, Edward Hopper and Ernest Hemingway possible, and also the ghettos of London, and the boarding schools of the Plains, where Navajo girls were whipped for whispering in their native tongues. The road to national consolidation leads not just to the lovely and distinctive capitals of Western Europe, but to the camps, and the crematoriums.
What is taking place abroad today is more like nation un-building. The former Yugoslavia will likely become seven independent nation-states in the end. Given the option of becoming masters of the new Iraq, the Shiites chose instead their own private fiefdom in the south; only the Sunnis wish to see a strong, unitary Iraq. And Saddam Hussein's Ba'athists, like Tito and his men, hailed from a minority (Hussein from the minority Sunnis; Tito was half-Croat, half-Slovenian in a Serb-plurality country), and generally treated the majority as the proverbial cancer in the hills. Tito murdered more than 200,000 people during the second world war (most of them Serbs), invited into Kosovo more than a million ethnic Albanians to dillute the Serbian majority, and made many promises in bad faith to them. Ba'athist brutality against the Shiite majority and Kurdish minority is well-documented. Tito made a demagogue like Milosevic and national disintegration more likely than a legend like Havel and national consolidation. Saddam Hussein may have made ethnic cleansing and the end of Iraq possible as well. For the moment Iraq remains a country.
It is easy to speak of fragmentation, eroding national borders, and weakening central governments in distant, unfamiliar places. It is something else to speak of them within one's own hemisphere, and with respect to one's own country. But there is no divine right to the borders of the West, nothing eternal about its nation-states, even America. The city-states of ancient Greece - built on the suppression of tribal allegiances in the opening centuries of the first millennium BC - fractured along cultural and economic lines in the late fifth and fourth centuries BC. Democracy failed. For the past forty years, a well-documented constellation of forces - cultural and economic, sub-national, regional and global - has been assailing the fabric of American social cohesion. Some of them are reviled by liberals, others by conservatives. But you cannot repeal the 1960s, or roll back the forces of globalization, whatever the fantasies of the new populists, and nativists. The American southwest will remain an intermediary zone, not quite America or Mexico, dependent both upon illegal immigration and smuggling, and the prison and deportation industrial complex. It is good not to imprison men for sodomy or women for terminating pregnancies, but what does this mean for the prospect of retaining a national culture?
When the smoke from the last car bomb has finally cleared, and the last of the war dead buried, Iraqis may well be thankful not to face of prospect of being disappeared by state security forces in the dead of night, or drafted into some insane border war. But just as Iraqis have learned already what acute ills even so much as the prospect of democracy can bring in the postmodern age, they will learn in the coming years about the chronic ills it brings today, from rising crime and economic inequality to loss of state supports; a new kind of cynicism will set in, one not unfamiliar to us. The rich will be able to buy themselves protection in gated communities and the poor - if they are lucky - will live in one of the country's more culturally cohesive (as in more religious, and conservative) "zones" better able to cope with the myriad new social ills. And one day - perhaps when the oil runs out - the country may choose to call it quits altogether, ending what was for many the bad dream of nationhood. As the century progresses, the map of the Arab world may come to look more like its Ottoman self, with stronger local governance and weaker central governments, open borders, and the free flow of goods, people, and ideas - good and bad. Inter-tribal rivalries over water will replace inter-state rivalries over oil, and as the threat of environmental refugees grows - from eroding top soil, desertification, global warming - the threat of bloodletting may not desist. We trade one dystopia for another.
Today, if you follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park you might pass a group of street kids washing their clothes in the river; there are more more than 700,000 of them in the new Russia. You will pass an environmental protectorate, where wealthy elites with mob ties have constructed massive domestic monuments to themselves; they are unrepresented on official maps. When there is a murder - especially of a well-dressed man - you know not to look, or tell too much. You try not to think too much of Chechnya, or the troubles in the south. My Russian friend lives in a gated community outside Moscow. He writes codes for a multi-national with satellites in North America and Taipei. He worries about the threat of Indian outsourcing, and recalls the Gorbachev-era - with its tolerated subversion, hope and decay - fondly. He worries about the kind of world his young son will know. "Sometimes I think I know," he says, "and I don't think I like it."
Other governments may fall in the coming years, most of them likely bad, and some of them in the Arab-Muslim world. Perhaps the neoconservatives and liberal hawks will deserve some of the credit, and blame. But I am not quick to praise the lords of this new church. They don't know where the star is leading us this time, anymore than the Magi. If we are to believe Eliot though the Three Kings had humility, and uncertainty. These are qualities in short supply among the demagogues and opportunists of the Washington elite. Is the world being born today the new Jerusalem or the new Jericho, the walls this time vulnerable to internal and external forces alike? What old demons will democracy unleash, and what new devils will it empower? What will democracy mean in a world of eroding borders and weakening central governments? What do we tell the mother of an Iraqi girl dismembered by a suicide bomber, that she was a blood sacrifice for liberal democracy or a victim of the coming anarchy? I am reminded of the last line from Carolyn Forche's great epic poem "The Angel of History." It is an elegy for the horrors of the twentieth century. It casts a wary eye on this one. "The worst is over," she writes, "the worst is yet to come."