Joe Nation wrote:At the end of the World Wars, it seems to me, officials have been quick to draw new boundaries for places, sometimes with better results than others. Wasn't Iraq, as it is now defined, just the result of some 1930's British cartographers' work of an afternoon or two? The nice straight lines are always a giveaway. [..] Other examples abound: French Indo-China becomes North and South Viet Nam 1954, about the same time as John Foster Dulles was drawing the permanent North/South line in Korea. (Laos, which had been part of the French possession, had been split off from FIChina in 1907. )
All true, but you'll also notice that people havent gotten away with carving new borders in the sand (or clay or forest) anymore in those last 50 years... Even ethnic insurgents trying to carve their own state out of non-existence have been quite systematically ignored or renounced in the same 50 years.
The dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia are markedly different in the sense that the world accepted and recognized the new states exactly to the extent that they fell apart, literally, along the seams; that is, along the borders of the individual republics that already, nominally, made up constituent parts of the respective federations before.
Attempts to go beyond that, on the other hand, have met with consistently stiff resistance. Croatia, Bosnia, even Kosovo (soon) - ok. But a Republika Srpska, Krajina, or independence for the Albanian part of Macedonia - no can do. Moldova, yes; Transdniestria or Gagauzia - no.
Even entities that tried to secede along already existing adminstrative borders that were of lower than primary republican level - ie, the autonomous republics
within Georgia or Russia (Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia) that tried to in turn split off - were wholly ignored, apart from Kosovo (and that only after the war - and after a decade of non-violent resistence that was scandalously ignored by the West for exactly this reason).
Instead, there was always the tightrope of condemning separatism while urging the national government to accept varying degrees of autonomy for the minority in question.
Calls for any kind of unification with bordering states, meanwhile, have met with even more straight-line denials. Talking about an independent Kosovo is one thing, but calls for Greater Albania are still very clearly beyond the pale.
(I'm leaving aside the Iron Curtain comparison, since, outside the Soviet Union anyway, it never suspended national borders.)
In that sense I gather that the occupiers as well as the international community at large will resist any form of territorial subdivision within Iraq, too, at least until religious/ethnic civil war really engulfs the country (not just targeted bombings and assassinations, but neighbour-against-neighbour slaughter). And even then it will probably push for some kind of far-reaching division into autonomous, constituent parts of a
nominally, at least, still unified Iraq. Annexation by neighbouring states will only happen if neither the US nor the UN feels it has any kind of grip on the country whatsoever, and have pulled their hands off it altogether. By then we would have entered a different era.
Joe Nation wrote:So far there is nothing about dividing Iraq in the various media, except for this thread, and I take that as a good sign.
Well, indeed - for all the talk of the relative state of anarchy reigning Iraq now - a true ethnic/religious civil war leading up to new
borders - with all the ethnic cleansing that entails - would be a wholly different story still, that would make the current situation look merely like an introductory chapter. For the ethnic/religious map of Iraq is at least as muddled a patchwork of enclaves and mixed cities as that of Bosnia-Herzegovina was.
Just consider this map (click the thumbnail) - enough to make your heart sink...
