Earlier this month I talked about BRICs, states which by different ways are advancing firmly toward membership in the big-power club. But today’s theme is going to be the embryo states — as yet unborn, still pecking at the eggshell or newly hatched. In most cases they have their origin in a failure of the mother state, or in a state’s failure to impose itself by force on a geographically concentrated ethnic minority.
In biological terms, these states are at the other end of the evolutionary chain : their populations are normally small ; their history, traumatic, dominated by wars and ethnic conflict ; their national identities, doubted ; their neighbours, generally hostile ; their political and economic viability, more than questionable. The international community regards them with a mixture of contempt and concern, and generally delays or refuses the recognition that would allow them to prosper. Yet they keep on struggling to survive. Like chicks, some manage to break the eggshell, but others become failed states or are reabsorbed into bigger states. Some remain in a no man’s land.
Eastern Timor and Western Sahara arrived late at the decolonization process, and were colonised by states that had themselves just been decolonised, tragically changing one colonial power for another. But Timor was able to exercise self-determination and became a democracy, while the Sahara was trapped, first in the geopolitical nets of the Cold War, and later in the West’s fear of Islamism. Kosovo and Palestine both have the bad luck that parts of their territory have a holy or foundational character for their dominators. But here the outcomes have been different. In the face of Serbian intransigence, the United States gave the last peck to hatch the Kosovar state, but Washington is unwilling to support a Palestinian declaration of independence.
One odd case is Somaliland, a small territory which broke away from Somalia in 1991 and which has just held its second democratic elections. Free elections in the Horn of Africa are newsworthy in themselves, but if, on top of this, the opposition wins, and the government hands over power peacefully, it is more like a miracle. In Ethiopia, Kenya and Zimbabwe in recent years, the governments of internationally recognised states lost the elections, then fixed them to win, and got away with it. Yet the international community drags its feet about recognising this young state, which can apparently give lessons in democracy not only to its parent state Somalia, the classic failed state, but to all its neighbours.
In most cases these embryo states are not sustainable or viable on their own : for survival they require international recognition, the need for which becomes a stimulus. In spite of clichés, Kosovo has one of the lowest crime rates in Europe (below Sweden) ; Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s Palestinian government is amazing the international community with the seriousness of his reforms ; and the “rebels” in southern Sudan are carefully preparing the independence referendum included in the 2005 peace agreement.
Since divine-right theories went out of vogue, a state’s raison d’être is its capacity to protect the lives and liberties of the people who live in a given territory. But sovereignty is often a mere license for robbery and repression. Experts such as Pierre Englebert have proposed international "de-recognition" of states that have become kleptocratic tyrannies with no prospect of improvement. However, new states are being born into a Hobbesian world where there is no glimmer of justice or equity, but only a struggle for survival where chance, circumstances and, above all, the geopolitical godfathers that one may have at a given moment, determine your chances of success. Consider democratic Taiwan, which year by year keeps losing international recognition in favour of China, the world’s biggest dictatorship.
