[Newsbot]

<strong>Filibuster Cartoon</strong>
<strong>Title: </strong> <a href="http://www.filibustercartoons.com/archive.php?id=20070108" target="_blank">The Exiles Return</a> (click to view)
<strong>Date: </strong> January 08, 2007

The Ethiopians drove the Islamist warlords out of the Somali capital of Mogadishu a couple weeks ago, and have now thrown their support behind the so-called \"Transitional Federal Government.\" <br> <br>As I mention on my new blog, the TFG is a gang of mostly-western educated and funded Somali exiles with high ambitions of installing a democratic, pluralistic government in their former homeland. Until recently, the grim irony has been that Somalia itself has been too hostile to even let them safely enter the country, let alone the capital city. <br> <br>But with the ouster of the Islamists and the recapture of the capital, the TFG is nominally \"in power\" and the western world seems more on their side than ever. The US has even started bombing Somalia to drive the Islamists even further out, in the first US-African bombings in over a dozen years.

[Rhoffman]

Yeah.... I hadn't even thought of that. Makes you wonder if the Somali people would accept leadership from a group that'd been out of the country for a decade.

[andrewcool]

I thought there was like a peaceful area of the country where its considered its only country. Its very peaceful, however countries don't recongize it as its own.
These are where the exiles coming from.

[Psudo]

J.J.'s Head of State Update post on Somalia makes Somaliland sound preferable to the TFG. It also states that "the international community believes Somali unity is what's most important", which begs the question "Why?" Why is larger, war-torn nation preferable to a relatively secure, smaller nation? If it's not, what reason does the international community (including the US and the UN in a rare moment of agreement) have for pretending they want unity under the Transitional Federal Gov't?

[JJ]

I agree, but supporting national unity is one of the oldest, and most established protocols of foreign relations. To support the breakup of a state is an enormous taboo, almost akin to waging war.

I think the logic is that if all states mutually recognize the national unity of others, we'll all be safe from meddling. So in other words, if Canada, for example, backs Somali unity, we won't need to worry about Africans, or any other foreign government supporting the independence movement of Quebec.

[Pitchfork]

JJ wrote:

I think the logic is that if all states mutually recognize the national unity of others, we'll all be safe from meddling. So in other words, if Canada, for example, backs Somali unity, we won't need to worry about Africans, or any other foreign government supporting the independence movement of Quebec.

I agree supporting separatist or partition movements could open up ugly cans of worms, but some areas of the world need less unity.

[Antropos]

JJ wrote:

I agree, but supporting national unity is one of the oldest, and most established protocols of foreign relations. To support the breakup of a state is an enormous taboo, almost akin to waging war.

This isn't entirely accurate. In recent years the world community had little trouble supporting the breakdown of USSR, Yugoslavia and even Timor. This policy had been going on since WWI (the separation and formation of many central and east European countries) and continued after WWII in the non-European parts of the world (Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan and South/North Korea).
All in all I'm highly skeptical about the enormousness of this taboo.

Perhaps the reason for this lust of unity is different? I know very little about Somaliland, but here are a few speculations (I'll ignore Puntland since it isn't much better then most of Somalia) :
- Somaliland is a safe heaven for African pirates.
- Somaliland is actively involved in trafficking of drugs or other illegal products.
- Somaliland has close ties with local anti-western countries or parties, those forces have strong influence in Somaliland, or the country prefers to stay independent from the west.
- Somaliland's government prevents (or is expected to prevent) western companies from investing in it's natural resources (such as copper, tin and other minerals), or in other ways closes or restricts it's market.
- Abdullahi Yusuf is a great guy.

As I said, these are mere speculations, but they are more reasonable than taboos or other diplomatic niceties.

P.S.

JJ, could you place a link to your new blog in a more visible place (for instance, next to the "PayPal" and "Forum" buttons)?

[JJ]

Well there are exceptions to every rule, and in the case of actual empires the situation is clearly different. After the world wars everyone was very much in favor of colonial independence of course, but that was because they didn't see imperial unity as a legitimate practice of nationalism. Now that we have all these new independent countries, however, the convention is pretty strong that we must all support the integrity of these borders.

Even when you look at North and South Korea, as you mentioned, most governments in the world are nominally in favor of the eventual goal of "Korean Unity" just as we were all nominally in favor of "German unity" before that policy became a reality.

Africa is really a prime candidate for border re-examination, since the borders of most African states are extremely arbitrary lines drawn by Europeans. But again, the thinking is if we start revisiting these matters now, where do we stop? If we say Somalia would work better as three independent states, why not Kenya too, or Ethiopia. In fact, the Somali Islamists are saying just that, that Ethiopia and Kenya should be broken down to unify their Islamic populations into one new homeland. So it is, as Pitchfork said, a true can of worms to open up, since picking and choosing which states to start deconstructing can be very a hypocritical business. So much easier to just adopt the blanket policy of "we will defend all nations' right to protect their borders and territorial integrity."

It's the same policy that we see in Iraq every day. Why can't we just abolish the British-invented anachronism that is "Iraq" and give the Kurds and Shiites and Sunnis their own countries? Defending Iraqi unity is generally a position that is just taken for granted, because it is one of the key assumptions upon which our entire regime of modern statecraft is based on.

[ejacksonian]

Well, the problem is, either we break it for them, or they break it regardless of how we feel. We can try to piece the whole thing back together, just to watch it crumble because the pieces don't actually together. It's like putting a square object into a circular hole; we would have to cut corners.

[Psudo]

JJ wrote:

Africa is really a prime candidate for border re-examination, since the borders of most African states are extremely arbitrary lines drawn by Europeans. But again, the thinking is if we start revisiting these matters now, where do we stop? If we say Somalia would work better as three independent states, why not Kenya too, or Ethiopia.

In classical liberal economic theory, it is thought that allowing individuals to pursue their own access to goods and services without government interference would enable them to flourish dramatically. The USA, Hong Kong, Canada, and others have demonstrated how relatively unregulated capitalism does, indeed, work that way. Makes me wonder if there's some valid analogy between that and the forming of national borders.

Democratic drawing of borders, however, does have an inherent weakness. Small areas with strong 'national' identity are likely to push for independence only to be conquered by stronger or internationally-backed conquerers. North and South Vietnam, for example, were 'united' because the communist-backed North conquered the no-longer-western-backed South. They were unable to draw their own borders because military powers didn't like what they'd drawn.

Africa has no shortage of dictatorial military powers. If all foreign pressure backed out of the area, would relatively peaceful, democratic regions have a real hope of enduring? And if the self-drawn national borders argument became widely accepted, isn't it more likely that the moral foreign influences would leave and the immoral ones would stay?

Even if we step back in an effort to allow them freedom, we'd still have to continually act to prevent international pressures from removing that freedom.