It’s worth asking about the difference between
nation-building and state-building.
10th anniversary of invasion of Afghanistan and still we confuse war and occupation, nation-building and setting up a government.
State is the government – the bureaucracy, administration,
laws, standing army …
Nation is the sense of shared identity that makes a people
feel more like Americans than Virginians or more like Italians than Venetians.
That’s a tougher thing to create. (It wasn’t until AFTER the Gettysburg Address
that we got the term “the United States is” rather than the “the United States
are.”)
It seems like there are at least two errors we’re making in
Afghanistan.
1. We
keep talking about a war. It’s not a war. The war quickly ended. Now it’s an occupation.
2. We
keep talking about nation-building when really all we’re doing is state
building. Their sense of self is tribal, not national.
We never did nation-building in the Marshall Plan. Japan and
Germany were very much nations before WWII. All we did was some economic
development and some state-building. That’s a terribly impressive, but much easier, task. Or, put differently, rebuilding a government and economy within years after a war is a huge but doable task. By contrast, there is no evidence that outside forces can build a nation in just a decade or two - or even at all. History suggests that this is a task that has to be done organically and over a generation or two or three.
No comments:
Post a Comment