In Western Europe, after two devastating wars in less than
three decades, responsible political leaders decided that their countries had
had enough. Instead of constantly fighting to move borders and to right past
wrongs they chose to make national borders symbolic and to forget old
grievances. It was a highly civilized, mature decision and what ensued from it
has been called the Long Peace, lasting for the past seventy years.
The same can’t be said about the world beyond Europe’s
confines. While peace prevailed among rich industrial nations, there have been
numerous conflicts elsewhere – many of them lasting as long as the Long Peace
and/or causing a huge number of casualties. Quite a few are still dragging on
and new one keep breaking out all the time.
Those are post-colonial wars, waged mostly by countries that
either gained independence after World War II or were carved out of crumbling
colonial empires. In many cases, their borders were drawn relatively recently,
their concept of nationhood and national allegiance remains raw and their
experience of self-government is limited. Borders are fought over between
neighbors and internal conflicts between ethnic groups and religious
communities keep flaring up.
Europe has not been immune from such tensions which in some
cases gave rise to open warfare. There was the case of postcolonial Ireland,
which remains divided to this day. Most glaringly, there was a full-blown,
bloody civil war in former Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav civil war was an important example. It showed that
even in the heart of Europe a post-colonial conflict could not occur and rage
unabated. Western European nations kept wringing their hands helplessly while
practically within the earshot of the Venice Lido medieval thugs kept
slaughtering each other and executing civilians.
But former Yugoslavia also provided an example how United
Europe can heal post-colonial wounds. A couple of years ago I happened to be in
Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, the country’s Independence Day. Expecting – and
dreading – lots of jingoistic rhetoric and a military parade to show off the
Croatian armed forces, I was treated to a performance by a small military unit
jiggling rifles and a reading by a moth-eaten poet declaiming socialist realist
verses about blood and honor. There was a handful of spectators, most of them
foreign tourists.
Later in the day, a bunch of tough-looking middle-aged peasants
in military fatigues gathered by the tomb of Croatian strongman Franjo Tudjman
and said the Catholic mass.
There are still unresolved ethnic conflicts, grievances and
border disputes among southern Slavs. There are anti-Serb graffiti on Zagreb
walls. But the new countries have wisely decided to stop the never-ending
tit-for-tat, opting instead for the promise of peace and prosperity held out by
EU membership.
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine – along with other
micro-wars across the former Soviet Union – are typical post-colonial wars.
True, Russia keeps those conflicts alive for its own nefarious purposes, but
even without its interference many of those conflicts, including perhaps the
one in Donbas, would have continued in one form or another.
Ukraine also qualifies as a typical post-colonial state. It has
not had a national government in modern times, its territory is a random
amalgamation of lands taken from other nations while parts of the historic
Ukraine now lie within Russia. It has taken Russian aggression and sick
anti-Ukrainian propaganda in Moscow for Ukrainians to start melding into a
united nation.
This process really began only in 2014.
To extricate itself from post-colonial conflicts, Ukraine needs
to join the European Union, and it needs the European Union to be strong and
unified in its purpose. And not only because of the Russian threat.
The
post-colonial virus is currently spreading across Central Europe and it could
become rampant if Brussels becomes unable to check its advance. Hungary has
been developing irredentist notions for some time now, dreaming of reversing
the 1918 Treaty of Trianon. A weak Ukraine could give Hungarian rightwingers a
better chance to recover chunks of former Hungarian lands than Romania, Serbia
or Slovakia. Newly nationalist Poland may also develop an interest in getting
back parts of Western Ukraine.
At the same time, Ukraine itself is a sleeping giant. If it
becomes a member of the EU, it could be a major force for good. If it is left
to shift for itself in the post-colonial neighborhood and to build up its own
military capabilities, it could quickly become a destructive and destabilizing
regional power.
And then there is Russia.
Russia is a bit of a post-colonial
hybrid. Unquestionably, it was a colonial master of an enormous land empire,
having conquered and exploited vast territories all around its national core.
In some ways, it remains an empire, even though it prefers to call itself a
Federation. But it has always been a strange empire, in which Russians, rather
than playing the rose of a traditional master race, were themselves treated as
colonial subjects by their rulers. Along with other 14 ex-Soviet republics that
broke off from the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia actually has its own
Independence Day, celebrated every year on June 12th.
Other colonial powers tended to go through a period of crisis
when they lost their empires. France suffered the trauma of the Algerian war
which lasted for more than seven years, and a war in Indochina, where it was –
luckily for the French – supplanted by the Americans. Britain gave up its
overseas territories more peacefully, but it also went through three decades of
national malaise as its colonial possessions in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean
gradually peeled away.
What is happening in Russia now is more similar to what happened in the 1960s
and 1970s in those colonies, and what still goes on in many of those countries.
Like many newly independent states in Africa, Russia seems unable to govern
itself. Since gaining independence quarter of a century ago, Russia has seen
only one transfer of power.
Since 1999, it has been under the rule of a corrupt
and cruel strongman on the model of Mobutu Sese Seko, Jomo Kenyatta or even Russia’s new
friend Robert Mugabe, all of whom were presidents for life.. And, like many other
postcolonial states, Russia is living off the industrial, transport and social
infrastructure it inherited from pre-independence days – in its case, from the
communists – building very little that is new and watching the old
infrastructure crumble.
Sergey Brin, the Soviet-born founder of Google, once described
Russia as “Nigeria with snow.” By a wide variety of measures, ranging from
corruption and inefficiency to lack of health care, low standards of living and
poor quality of infrastructure, it is indeed little different from Nigeria.
But
if Russia indeed resembles so much a post-colonial state, it only stands to
reason that it is will not be able to avoid the same kind of social turmoil and
civil strife that tear apart such countries.
