Why Do So Many States Stay Intact?
On the face of it, it is puzzling that more states
do not simply fall apart. Why do their components not fly off in a thousand
different directions? It has happened to some in recent years: Lebanon,
Yugoslavia, Somalia, Liberia, Zaire, even the vaunted Soviet Union. Why not to
others? What can account for the staying power of so many state organizations,
most with tens of thousands of workers toiling in hundreds of different
agencies with countless sets of varying procedures, goals, interests, pressures,
and incentives? All these are scattered across variegated territories with diverse
populations. The potential for interagency turmoil, mad grabs for scarce
resources, forces pulling in different directions, contestation of
internalized global
forces, and conflicting priorities seems endless – and all that in an
organization harboring the feasibility for inflicting tremendous
violence.
Surveying European expansion across five
centuries, David Strang found remarkable ability of non-European polities – at least
those that were recognized as sovereign – to survive.1 He
found only eleven that went from sovereign to dependent status between 1415 and
1987, and fifteen non-European polities that merged or underwent dissolution.
What was striking about the last half of the twentieth century was how many
states were created – unprecedented numbers in the annals of world history – and
how few disappeared, dissolved, or imploded. In fact, during the years of the
Cold War, one is hard pressed to point to more than a handful of cases in which
states vanish or fall apart – perhaps Pakistan and Nigeria for a spell,
certainly Lebanon, and then some.
REFERENCE:
1 David
Strang, “Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion: Realist and
Institutional Accounts,” International
Organization 45 (Spring 1991): 143–62.
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