Our Brave New World (Part One) : The Phantom "Emirates"
It has been assumed, since the end of the Cold War, that globalization is irreversible and that technologies, cultures, and markets are spreading, merging, and interacting at an ever quicker pace. This is certainly true. But what if, in addition to globalizing, the world is also splitting into separate and antagonistic sub-worlds? Two of them in particular, which ironically came into existence and have been growing as free riders in the Western-shaped universe, now pose a threat to the West.
The Wastelands
First, there is what we might call the Wastelands. These are the many countries that have descended into chaos in the last quarter-century, and those that may follow them at any moment. As early as the 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington pointed out that disorder was sprawling in the border zones between civilizations. In the ensuing years, Robert D. Kaplan wrote even more specifically about what he termed the "coming anarchy." The 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, which originated at least in part from chaos zones, drew the attention of global decisionmakers to the strategic threats implied by these areas. The "Arab Spring" revolutions of 2011 and events such as the terrorist attack in Benghazi were reminders that chaos is spreading rather than receding, and that, in the space of some twenty years, it has become a permanent fixture of the world.
Foreign Policy has been running for several years a "Failed States Index" (FSI)—renamed the "Fragile States Index" this year—that lists those countries where government and society do not work, or work very badly. According to the 2013 index, at least sixty out of one hundred and seventy-eight countries fit into that category. In other words, one out of three.
After years of instability, Somalia is struggling to build a government. The speaker of Parliament is not unlike a traffic cop at a particularly dangerous and sometimes violent intersection.
The methodology of ranking states on the FSI can be debated. While government disruption and social underachievement (in terms of poverty, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy rate, and similar measures) are often connected, there are many cases where they are not. Moreover, there are states that remain strong despite widespread social ills (think of Iran, which ranks thirty-seventh on the FSI), or where society remains intact despite a powerless government (think of Lebanon, which ranks forty-sixth).
Still, it cannot be denied that most of Foreign Policy's "most fragile states in the world" are indeed fragile, or even disintegrating. Somalia, ranked number one on the FSI in 2013 and number two in 2014, evidently disappeared as a functioning country many years ago. The same is true of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Haiti, Syria, and Libya, a few of the other paragons of failure.
There are several reasons why governments cease to function. For one, many states are semi-fictitious. One UN member state out of two is a former colony that became independent between the late 1940s and the early 1970s and was originally carved out according to the colonial powers' interests, rather than according to ethnic or religious or even sound geographic realities. No wonder that once the former colonizer withdrew formally (by granting independence) or informally (by removing military or administrative personnel), the new state, having no experience in being a state, simply began a slow-motion unraveling.
Other non-functional countries may be more homogeneous or even more deeply rooted in history but nonetheless lack the traditions of a civil society predicated on the assumption that the state is not the private property or the booty of a ruler, a family, a tribe, a brotherhood, or a party, but something that belongs to all citizens.
It is also the case that for some countries, demographic or societal change—ups and downs in birthrates, changes in family patterns, mass migration, religious or linguistic upheavals—along with a lack of ongoing development, tips them from barely to non-functioning.
The political chaos of the Wastelands started in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, right after the end of colonial rule. The Democratic Republic of the Congo never recovered from the hurried withdrawal of the Belgians in the summer of 1960, in spite of a brief restoration as the Republic of Zaire under president Mobutu Sese Seko in the 1970s. Chaos then spread to parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, carried along by various guerrilla groups and drug trafficking. It made inroads in the former USSR and former Communist East European countries (especially in the Balkans) in the 1990s as the dominant political paradigm—communism—disintegrated. Ever a latent threat in Islamic countries, where a "public good" culture has never taken hold for religious or societal reasons, it has grown dramatically there since the Arab Spring.
In some places, chaos has resulted in the partition of existing states and the tentative formation of smaller but more cohesive countries. Somalia, for instance, has de facto broken into at least three sub-countries—the almost functional Somaliland in the north, the totally un-functional rump-Somalia in the south, and the semi-functional Puntland in between them. Christian and Animist South Sudan broke away de jure from Islamic Sudan in 2011, only to devolve into ethnic conflict two years later. Some experts foresee similar outcomes in the Middle East's currently disintegrating countries, namely Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss these Wastelands simply as countries in a death spiral that profoundly disconnects them from the functional world. More often than not, the militias, guerrillas, terrorist networks, jihadi brotherhoods, criminal groups, and other warlords that overthrow or challenge regular governments in many countries and turn them into Wastelands rely on state-of-the-art equipment: weaponry, cars, planes, drones, communication or monitoring devices. Djaffer Ait Aoudia, a French-Algerian journalist who visited Taliban-ruled Afghanistan a few weeks before 9/11 and wrote a stunning report for the conservative French weekly Valeurs Actuelles, knew beforehand that the jihadist fighters were equipped with automatic weapons and half-tracks; he was however surprised to find, amidst the country's squalor, fleets of four-by-four cars and well-managed and well-tended military and administrative enclaves, complete with air conditioning, Danish furniture, Japanese computers, and advanced telephone systems. The same is true, according to many reports, in other chaotic countries where the overlords of the Wastelands are sophisticated users of computer, Internet, and mobile technologies and networks, and know how to write or alter programs or otherwise break into functional countries' operating systems and databases.
The predatory rulers of the Wastelands may have looted parts of their equipment from the societies they overthrow. But they contrive to get new supplies from functional countries as well, either as presents from those who see them as useful pawns in their geopolitical games or as donations from NGOs or simply by purchasing them. The more powerful they become, the more attention they must devote to taking care of the populations they control in terms of food, shelter, medicine, and so forth. If these goods must be purchased, revenue will be required, and having no economic development to draw on, the Wasteland rulers will have little choice but to create an illicit and high-profit economy based on drugs (Latin America, the Sahel, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Burma), diamonds and other precious stones (Africa), human trafficking (Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, the former USSR), or piracy (Indian Ocean, South China Sea). And of course additional revenue can be generated by money laundering.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, global criminal or illicit economic activities generated some $870 billion in 2009, or one and a half percent of the gross world product (GWP) and seven percent of world trade. The activities they undertake to support their failed states link the Wastelands as providers to Western countries as receivers.
Wastelands rulers need skilled personnel to run their equipment and handle sophisticated financial activities ranging from Internet operations to business management. They can hire proxies, recruit politically or religiously motivated fellow travelers, or just send off family relations or people already in their ranks to be educated in functional countries, as is increasingly the case. If necessary they can set up humanitarian NGO fronts or infiltrate existing NGOs. Immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from the Wastelands who settle in Western countries often remain under their former rulers' sway, either as a result of brute intimidation or through familial or tribal pressure. Lobbies and influence organizations in Western countries can thus exert geopolitical leverage on behalf of the Wasteland overlords.
In this respect, the worst-case scenario is for the Wastelands to turn into new kinds of states—not the territorial states that have shaped history at least since the Renaissance, but rather predatory "network states" like the early Scythian, Arab, and Mongolian steppe and desert empires. When such networks hide behind utopian revolutionary ideologies—think of the Andean drug traffickers masquerading as Marxist guerrillas—they are dangerous enough. When they adopt a totalitarian religious outlook, they can be lethal. Jihadist Islam, Sunni and Shia, which is creating rings of "emirates" and "Islamic states" in the Wastelands of Libya, the Sahel, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and Iraq, has heavily invested in drugs and other illicit activities and is securing beachheads among Islamic immigrant communities in Europe and North America. Gilles Kepel, a French sociologist who has studied radical Islam for the past thirty years and who for years was confident that it was on the decline, recently wrote an alarming book, Passion Française, about its growth in Islamic enclaves in France. According to him, immigrant Muslim neighborhoods are now jointly dominated by drug gangs and Salafist or jihadist "religious police" who insist on a complete rejection of the French way of life and of Western democracy and human rights. No wonder that several thousand Muslim youths from European countries have joined the jihadist fighters in Syria; or that, according to Joëlle Milquet, the Belgian interior minister, they are likely to be, upon their return to Europe, a "major concern."
(See Parts Two and Three)
© Michel Gurfinkiel & World Affairs, 2014
Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think tank in Paris, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum.