The recent (and apparently expanding) conflict between Georgia and Russia has caused me to take a step back and consider the nature of relationships with separatist portions of various countries.
My primary question is, why do countries almost always fight to keep their country intact, when the related costs of annexation seem so high, and when splintering seems to happen quite frequently anyway? Now clearly, allowing a separatist state to become independent isn't always (or probably even often) the answer. However, in some instances, I wonder what the incentive is for union.
Looking at South Ossetia and Abkhazia (the Georgian provinces currently the focal point of the Georgia/Russia conflict), they were nearly autonomous areas over which the Georgian government exerted almost no control. Tibet, Kurdistan, and East Timor (now its own sovereign country) might be somewhat analogous examples. All are also areas that I don't believe have large amounts of diversity in terms of separatist beliefs (almost everyone wants out).
I can only think of two good reasons for disallowing secession. One, they are of some strategic importance. Perhaps they provide a disproportionately high tax base (unlikely in these cases), lie over valuable natural resources (true for Kurdistan), provide your only access to coastal ports, etc. Reasons like this are difficult to quantify, but make sense to me on some levels.
Two, it's bad precedent. If you let one renegade region opt-out, so to speak, then what will you do the next time a group of ten farmers holed up in some corner of your country sign a petition requesting independence? This "slippery slope" argument makes much less sense to me. Or, more pointedly, if you're really concerned that allowing one region to secede will beget other regions requesting the same thing, you probably have nothing approaching a stable government.
To ask the question more pointedly, what pragmatic advantage is China getting out of ruling Tibet? Wouldn't they be better off geo-politically to hand them the metaphorical keys to the car, establish trade relations and an embassy (or not) and wish them luck? Correspondingly, what was Georgia getting out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia -- contentious areas over which they ostensibly had no real control? If they were afraid that such an overt concession to Russia amounted to appeasement, I would counter that keeping these provinces under the Georgian flag didn't exactly do much to advance Georgian autonomy.
Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but I just wonder about the nearly universal propensity for countries to do everything possible to keep every existing acre of their current sphere, even when the maintenance of that space could potentially destabilize the parts of the country that are happy to be in the fold.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
Kosovo was big news over here, as was the fact that the United States and almost all of Europe came out and recognized it very quickly afterwards. Most people here seemed to be against it. In fact, in Serbia some protesters rioted and attacked the US embassy there. My area is ethnically a bit different from the rest of the country, and at the time of Kosovo, there was a lot of talk about it seceding (elsewhere in the country, not here).
I think a lot of it comes down to conflicting ideas of what constitutes a country. Especially here in Eastern Europe, borders have changed so much, and religious and ethnic groups have become so entrenched, any changes are seen as bad changes – not to mention that most people have very set notions of what constitutes a given country, and that these notions, usually ahistorical and unrealistic, are often in conflict. China thinks that Tibet is part of China; Tibet disagrees.
In regards to Georgia, from what I understand, the two regions the Russians have occupied became de facto independent as soon as Georgia seperated from the USSR. Georgia's claims to them seem to be somewhat limited at best. Which does not necessarily mean Russia should just go ahead and invade, but it bears consideration.
I think it comes down to, more or less: can a given ethnically/culturally/whatever semi-autonomous region support itself as a country? If it can, and they are able to get a reasonable percentage of the population (I’m thinking at least a supermajority here) to agree, I don’t know that I have much of a problem with them becoming their own country. Florida could probably be its own country; Ft Lauderdale probably couldn’t.
Point well taken. I agree for the most part, though using your example, I think Ft. Lauderdale should consider whether they can realistically exist independently before casting their lot (be it by voting, protesting, or detonating bombs).
In terms of Russia invading, for better or worse, these regions were part of Georgia, and I think they rhetorically (if not militarily) have the best of it.
I still think countries would be better off being realists about issues like this instead of traditionalists.
It's fun discussing this with you though. We should start a blog or something.
I agree that the Russians are involved with the whole thing for fairly shady reasons, and that they seemed to have been angling for this to happen for a bit now. But, currently, it is what it is and I'm not sure it's anything worth getting too overwrought about.
And: someday soon, Ft Lauderdale will be free of the hated Floridian yoke!
There is a possible explanation for Russian motives that I have not yet seen discussed anywhere, and it's the "Stalin" angle. Increasingly, across the post-communist world (I include China), Stalin is seen as an impressive figure who defeated Hitler and maintained the Soviet Union's position as a leading world power.
Yes yes, he snubbed Mao for years and was denounced by Khrushchev for, you know, the butchering of uncounted millions of people- but he was a powerful ruler who frightened his neighbors. In a world where the name "Russia" has come to be associated with environmental disaster, laughably backward technology, and a national economy organized by the Russian equivalent of Tony Soprano, a few Five Year Plans have come to seem to many a reasonable trade-off for international respect.
So, it would not surprise me at all if Putin was attempting to cement his dominance of the nation's political scene by proving that he can return Russia to a prominent place on the world stage. Much of recent Russian military policy has seemed geared to offset the unpopular weakness revealed by the potpourri of nations which split off after 1991, the subsequent extension of NATO ever eastward, and the military quagmire in Chechnya. The quick, clean conquest of a border state would fit in with the renewal of Russian bomber flights over US naval groups earlier this year, and their saber-rattling over control of the soon to be pristine arctic sea lanes. All are steps intended to signal to the Russian people that they may be sliding back into a one-party state, but that as a consolation they can once again look forward to compelling their neighbors to live in fear.
Post a Comment