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The Strange Enthusiasm for Separatism

Last month, I noticed an odd article by G. Pascal Zachary on Obama and Africa, and today its more misguided sequel has arrived. Zachary calls for more political fragmentation in Africa: The birth of South Sudan is a momentous invitation not to despair over the travails that the people of this new landlocked and impoverished […]

Last month, I noticed an odd article by G. Pascal Zachary on Obama and Africa, and today its more misguided sequel has arrived. Zachary calls for more political fragmentation in Africa:

The birth of South Sudan is a momentous invitation not to despair over the travails that the people of this new landlocked and impoverished nation surely will experience, but to celebrate another step toward closing what Pierre Englebert, a professor of African politics at Claremont College, has called “Africa’s secessionist deficit.”

This is a truly terrible idea. The states that emerged from the colonial period are undoubtedly artificial in many respects, their borders arbitrary, and their national identities often have limited meaning for many of the inhabitants. It does not follow that splitting them up into newer, no less artificial states will alleviate any of the practical problems these populations face. It might be a different story if this process of fragmentation could be achieved through peaceful devolution and grants of autonomy, but in practice separatist movements either resort to violence or must retaliate against violence. The government in any state that has colonial-era or post-colonial independence borders is not going to accept the loss of territory, resources, and population that separatist movements represent, and there are enough governments around the world that face their own separatist problems that they have no interest in supporting them elsewhere. An added danger of such separatism is that it will likely be drawn along ethnic and/or religious lines, and those identities will then become sharply politicized. That in turn will produce the potential for large-scale crimes and atrocities against the civilian populations of the separatist regions.

It should be noted that Zachary is enthusing over South Sudanese independence because it is a “a new nation, without precedent, either in colonial times or traditional pre-colonial times.” Not being grounded in any earlier polity or tradition is hardly encouraging for the development of the country. Yes, some countries can develop and succeed without this (e.g., Singapore), but they are very few and the circumstances of their success are highly unusual. There are not many examples of successful separatist movements in post-independence African history, and one that did does not provide evidence for Zachary’s enthusiastic support for more separatism. Since Eritrean independence, Eritrea has sunk into authoritarianism and has waged major, fruitless wars with Ethiopia. South Sudan is very much at risk of suffering the same fate. Splitting up these larger states merely internationalizes what were previously internal conflicts, and that can potentially be more disruptive to regional stability than a civil war inside a single state.

Decentralization can be very beneficial if it involves establishing genuine local control by the population over its own resources and makes government more directly accountable to the population. It can also devolve into the creation of criminal statelets ruled by corruption and brute force. It can also lead to the emergence of an international dependency that stagnates because of its lack of resources. Finally, such states can be treated as either the battleground of more powerful neighbors, or they can be reduced to little more than satellites of a more powerful neighbor.

Zachary says later:

In the global conversation about Africa, there are few greater taboos than to cheer for political fragmentation and the rise of new nations.

I don’t know that it is exactly a taboo (witness all the Western gushing over South Sudanese independence), but if it is it would seem to be a pretty well-grounded one. There may be a particular case here or there where establishing a new, formally independent nation-state makes more sense than keeping a population in the limbo of being formally part of a state that has long since ceased to function. There might be a case to be made for the formal independence of Somaliland, which has been doing many of the right things to thrive and succeed. That shouldn’t be turned into a general invitation to separatism across the continent.

Zachary reminds us that the Kosovo precedent will keep coming back to haunt us for a long time:

Did not the independence of tiny Kosovo receive the full measure of support from the very Western nations who worry that Africa might someday fracture into a hundred nations or more?

Yes, and this was a horrible mistake on the part of the governments that recognized Kosovo’s independence. The deed has been done, but there’s no reason to replicate this error elsewhere, especially not when we’ve seen the sort of government that Kosovo has now.

What we should remember about the South Sudanese example is that South Sudanese independence was the result of a process that all parties agreed was the best way to resolve the pervasive conflict between Khartoum and the south. Just because it proved to be a useful means of (temporary?) conflict resolution in Sudan does not mean that it ought to become a model for political change throughout Africa. In other cases of protracted civil war, partition may end up being the least bad option, but it isn’t something to be encouraged or cheered as something obviously desirable in itself.

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