Dealing with legacy of colonial conflicts

While the Third World War has not been formally declared, conflicts throughout the world are reaching levels unseen since 1944.

Of course, for the large majority of people throughout the world, news about these conflicts is just part of our daily news, but another share of our daily news is about the mess in our countries.

This is so complex and confusing that many people have given up the effort to attempt any form of deep understanding, so I thought it would be useful to offer ten explanations of how we succeeded in creating this mess.

The world, as it now exists, was largely shaped by the colonial powers, which divided the world among themselves, carving out states without any consideration for existing ethnic, religious or cultural realities.

This was especially true of Africa and the Arab world, where the concept of state was imposed on systems of tribes and clans.

Just to give a few examples, none of the present-day Arab countries existed prior to colonialism. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, the Gulf Countries (including Saudi Arabia) were all parts of the Ottoman Empire.

When this disappeared with the First World War (like the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires), the winners – Britain and France – sat down at a table and drafted the boundaries of countries to be run by them, as they had done before with Africa.

So, never look at those countries as equivalent to countries with a history of national identity.

Colonial powers

After the end of the colonial era, it was inevitable that to keep these artificial countries alive, and avoid their disintegration, strongmen would be needed to cover the void left by the colonial powers.

The rules of democracy were used only to reach power, with very few exceptions.

The Arab Spring did indeed get rid of dictators and autocrats, just to replace them with chaos and warring factions (as in Libya) or with a new autocrat, as in Egypt.

The lesson is that without creating a really participatory and unifying process of citizens, with a strong civil society, local identities will always play the most decisive role.

So it will take some time before many of the new countries will be considered real countries devoid of internal conflicts.

We are all witnessing religious fighting and Islam extremism as a growing and disturbing threat. Few make any effort to understand why thousands of young people are willing to blow themselves up.

There is a striking correlation between lack of development/employment and religious unrest. In the Muslim countries of Asia (Arab Muslims account for less than 20 per cent of the world’s Muslim populations), extremism hardly exists.

And few realise that the fight between Shiites and Sunnis is funded by countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran.

Those religions have been living side by side for centuries, and now they are fighting a proxy war, for example in Syria. Saudi Arabia has been funding Salafists (the puritan form of Islam) everywhere, and it has provided nearly two billion dollars to the new Egyptian autocrat, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, because he is fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, which predicates the end of kings and sheiks and power for the people. Iraq is also becoming a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, defender of the Sunnis, and Iran, defender of the Shiites.

In a world more and more divided by a resurgence of national interests, the very idea of shared governance is losing its strength, and not only in Europe.

The UN has lost its significance as the arena in which to reach consensus and legitimacy. The two engines of globalisation – trade and finance – are not part of the UN, which is stuck with the themes of development, peace, human rights, environment, education and so on.

While these issues are crucial for a viable world, they are not seen as such by those in power. Conclusion: the UN is sliding into irrelevance.

A very important element of the mess has been the growth of what its proponents, especially in the financial world, call the “new economy” – an economy that contemplates permanent unemployment, lack of social investments, reduced taxation for large capital, the marginalisation of trade unions, and a reduction of the role of the State as the regulator and guarantor of social justice.

So, a final point: never be satisfied with what you read in the newspapers, always try to get additional and opposite viewpoints through the net.

This will help you to look at the world with your eyes, and not with the eyes of somebody else who is probably part of the system which has created this mess.