Many of the problems since independence are admittedly homegrown. I am not sure that the DRC would be a prosperous place if the Europeans had never come. But after five centuries of European violence, slavery, paternalism, colonialism, exploitation, and aid to prop up bad rulers after independence, the DRC is an extreme example of why the West’s successive interventions of exploitation, colonization, foreign aid, and nation-building have not worked out well.
White Mischief
If you thought European colonization was bad, decolonization was not much better. Planners did decolonization as a crash utopian program to create whole new nations overnight. The decolonizers decided the boundaries of the decolonized from on high. The Europeans did this with little consideration for of the wishes of the locals, usually just keeping the colonial borders, even when they were of very recent invention, or having European officials make up a partition line. One thing today’s nation-builders could learn from their colonial predecessors: once you get in, it’s very hard to constructively get out.
The West decided what a nation was, determining the boundaries of the new nations. It decided which peoples got their own nation and which did not. The results are as bad as with other Western top-down schemes in the Rest. The West imposed its map of the world on a quilt of thousands of linguistic groups, religious creeds, tribes, and racial mixtures. The West’s drunken parallelograms did not give nations to some existing ethnic nationalities (e.g., the Kurds) while creating other nationalities (e.g., the Iraqis) where none existed before.
The resulting “nations” started their ill-starred journey with ethnic and nationalist grievances. Nations whose territory is disputed by different groups are like landowners whose property rights are insecure. The insecure landowner will divert effort away from investing in the fertility of the soil or constructing a lovely house and toward litigation and shotgun defense of his property. Nations with insecure borders will have more civil and international wars. They will devote more effort to defense and less effort to investing in the productive potential of the nation. Gangsters will exploit ethnic hatreds to promote their own self-serving agendas.
As George Bernard Shaw said: “A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation.62
This is not to say that all of the nationalist and ethnic conflicts are the West’s fault. No matter how the West drew the map, there would have been some conflict. No scheme of Western mapmaking would have led to utopia.
However, the West has plenty to answer for. As David Fromkin’s wonderful history of the Middle East after World War I, A Peace to End All Peace, puts it, Woodrow Wilson’s speeches about what would not happen during Western drawing of borders of the Rest was an excellent prediction of what would happen. Wilson said “that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels or pawns in a game,” and definitely “not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people…for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.” Then the West bartered about peoples as if they were pawns in a game, for the sake of its exterior influence or mastery. It partitioned territory for the sake of short-term gain with little thought of the long-run consequences for the people living there. Even after decolonization, the West played with peoples as chess pieces in pursuit of the West’s own security aims, frustrating the right of peoples to choose their own destiny.
The political crises that make the headlines today, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq, the Kashmir dispute, the war on terror, and brutal civil wars in Africa, have some roots in past Western treatment of peoples as “pawns in a game.” Look behind a modern-day headline and often you will find the machinations of some long-forgotten colonial planner.
There are three different ways that Western mischief contributed to present-day grief in the Rest. First, the West gave territory to one group that a different group already believed it possessed. Second, the West drew boundary lines splitting an ethnic group into two or more parts across nations, frustrating nationalist ambitions of that group and creating ethnic minority problems in two or more resulting nations. Third, the West combined into a single nation two or more groups that were historical enemies.
Alberto Alesina and Janina Matuszeski of Harvard and I have analyzed statistically whether countries with artificial borders do worse on economic development.63 We have two measures of colonial mischief in forming countries. The first is the percentage of the population that belongs to ethnic groups that the borders split between adjacent countries. The percentage partitioned is strongly correlated with the ethnic heterogeneity of the population, which previous studies have identified as another determinant of under-development. This is plausible, since the more heterogeneous the population, the more likely it is that arbitrary borders will split more ethnic groups. To make sure that the share of partitioned peoples is not just proxying for ethnic heterogeneity, we control separately for heterogeneity. Former colonies with a high share of partitioned peoples do worse today on democracy (see figure 29 for illustration), government service delivery, rule of law, and corruption. Highly partitioned countries do worse on infant mortality, illiteracy, and specific public services such as immunization against measles, immunization for DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus), and supply of clean water.
Fig. 29. Democracy and Partition in Former Colonies
Our second measure of artificial borders is more exotic, if not crazy. We reasoned that “natural” nations would determine their borders by some complex organic process, again depending on factors such as the spread of a unifying culture or the location of ethnic groups. Colonial bureaucrats on the other hand, are more likely to just draw straight lines on a map, without regard to realities on the ground. So we devised a mathematical measure of how wiggly or straight are the borders of every country in the world. We found that artificially straight borders were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunization, and less access to clean water—all measured today. The straight hand of the colonial mapmaker is discernible in development outcomes many decades later.
From Sir Mark Sykes to the War on Terror
When today many around the world are blaming the Americans for everything that goes wrong, it’s kind of refreshing to go back to an era when everything was the Brits’ fault. If only the British had not promised the same piece of land—Palestine, where else?—to three different parties.
The story begins with an Arab sheikh and a British diplomat. The Arab was Emir Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, the sharif of Mecca and Medina. The Hashemite dynasty of Hussein traced its ancestry to the Prophet himself, but hardly attracted allegiance in the Arab world as a whole. During World War I, in which Britain and the Ottoman Empire (which included the Arabs) were on opposite sides, Sharif Hussein was afraid that the Ottomans were about to depose him. He contacted the British in Cairo in 1915 and offered to switch sides. The British war against the Ottomans in the Middle East was not faring well, so they were tempted. Hussein offered a revolt of the Arabs against the Ottomans, mentioning his contacts with rebel secret societies in Damascus. However, there was a catch—the Arab didn’t want to exchange one imperial master for another. Hence, Hussein said that the British must promise independence for the Arabs after the war (implicitly assuming he would be their new leader).
Hussein’s message caused bewilderment in Cairo. The British commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, contacted London for instructions. The British sent a neophyte diplomat, Sir Mark Sykes, to supervise the negotiations. Sir Mark decided to accept Hussein’s terms, with an exception. With Sykes’s guidance, McMahon sent a le
tter to Hussein on October 24, 1915, promising “to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the sheriff [namely, the Arab rectangle including Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia], with the exception of those portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo.64 The French thought of western Syria—what is today Lebanon—as within their sphere of influence, given their longstanding ties to the Maronite Christians of Lebanon. The British could not afford to offend their French allies. Nobody knew whether McMahon meant also to exclude Palestine. Jews and Arabs later debated what exactly McMahon had meant by “districts,” which was not an Ottoman administrative term. Twenty years later, McMahon would say that he did mean to exclude Palestine from Arab control, but that assertion may have been colored by subsequent events. Most historians brave enough to venture an opinion think that at the time, McMahon only meant to exclude Lebanon.65 McMahon’s language was (intentionally?) vague enough to accommodate the Arabs’ desire to possess Jerusalem as part of an independent Arab kingdom. Hussein objected even to the exclusion of Lebanon, but agreed to postpone that question until after the war.
But before the end of the war, the British promised parts of Palestine to two other parties. In 1916, Sykes met with French diplomat Charles François Georges-Picot to negotiate the postwar division of the Middle East between the Allies. On February 4, 1916, they secretly reached agreement in Paris. Some of those straight borderlines that Alesina, Matuszeski, and I found to have had bad consequences were drawn by Sykes and Picot in Paris in 1916.
Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, northern Palestine would go to the French sphere, southern Palestine would go to the British, and central Palestine (including Jerusalem) would be an Allied condominium shared by the British and French (and even Tsarist Russia, but she was kicked out after the Bolsheviks took over).
The British weren’t done giving away Palestine. Sir Mark Sykes and others talked to Zionist leaders about their support for the Allied war effort. The British offered a quid pro quo—Palestine. On November 2, 1917, the British foreign secretary issued the famous Balfour Declaration: “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Why did Sir Mark Sykes and the Brits promise the same piece of land within two years to three different parties, the Arabs, the French, and the Jews? The British felt desperate about their fortunes in the war, and were eager to have all three peoples on their side. Ironically, in view of all the trouble it would later cause, Mark Sykes got little out of selling Palestine to three different customers. The French had their own life-and-death struggle in the war and hardly needed any inducement to fight with the British. The Arab revolt amounted to deployment of Hussein’s son Faisal and a few Bedouin tribesman in the British invading army in Palestine and Syria, far short of the fictional book and movie version of the Arab revolt by T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”). A small sign of the artificiality of the Arab revolt is that Mark Sykes himself designed the flag of the Arabs as a combination of green, red, black, and white. Variations on this design are today the official flags of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and the Palestinians. As to the value of the Jews on the Allied side, Mark Sykes had apparently read a few too many of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Jews’ influence on world affairs.
The British Palestinian triple-cross still causes the blood to flow today. Despite Woodrow Wilson’s and the League of Nations Charter’s idealistic call for national self-determination, the British and the French cared only for their imperial interests.
After the war, the French agreed to give up any claims to Palestine in return for the British recognizing their control over Syria. The British abandoned their protégé Faisal, who had already formed a shaky Arab government in Damascus, but offered Iraq to him as a consolation prize. Faisal and his heirs were to continue in power in an independent Iraq until 1958. However, the imposition of an alien monarch on Iraq, which had been cobbled together from three different Ottoman provinces—containing Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis—hardly set the stage for stable nationhood. The stage was set for Saddam Hussein, who emerged from a series of military coups after the fall of the monarchy.
To complicate matters further, the British had already promised Faisal’s brother Abdullah the Iraqi throne. Abdullah was the only member of the Hashemite family left without a kingdom after the war (the paterfamilias Hussein continued to rule back home in Mecca and Medina, with his son Ali as heir apparent, although they were conquered by the rival Saudi family shortly thereafter). After Abdullah threatened to make trouble, Winston Churchill decided to split off the lightly populated part of Palestine east of the Jordan River (called Transjordan and then, simply Jordan) and give it to Abdullah. After Abdullah’s assassination in 1951, his grandson King Hussein was to later play a large role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Hashemite family is still in power today, under King Hussein’s son Abdullah II, with the country known formally as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
In Syria and Lebanon, the French were supposed to carry out League of Nations mandates that would result in eventual independence. In Lebanon, the French added Tripoli, Beirut, and Sidon to the traditional Maronite area around Mount Lebanon, giving their Maronite Christian allies control of what were majority Muslim areas. This later caused a Christian-Muslim civil war that destroyed the independent state of Lebanon.
The French treated Syria with a heavy hand, more like a colony assimilated to the metropole than a mandate moving toward independence. Arab bitterness at the French betrayal contributed to the emergence of nationalist radicals in Syria after independence.
Back in Palestine, the British took it over as a mandate, inheriting their own problem of how to reconcile the irreconcilable promises they had already made to the Arab and Jewish inhabitants. They were not very successful. At the time, the British were content that they indirectly controlled Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq through the League of Nations mandate system. Combined with some influence in Persia, this gave them a land bridge (and later air routes) from their possession of Egypt all the way to India. Egypt was also the apex of their Cairo-to-Capetown area of control in Africa. It worked out nicely in the head of some British imperial Planner, but at a price we are still paying today.
Of course, the mélange of peoples in the Middle East didn’t need British help to hate one another. Much more was to happen to bring the Middle East to its present unhappy state. But the British duplicity about Palestine and Arab independence did not help set the region on a path toward peaceful development. Table 7 summarizes some of the salient events in the region divided up by Sir Mark Sykes.
Partition of India
The British also applied their genius for remaking other people’s maps to the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Lord Mountbatten, the viceroy of India who supervised partition and independence, hired a public relations expert to burnish his image for folks back home. After the massacres at partition, four international wars, two genocides, six secessionist movements, and umpteen communal massacres later, it looks like his lordship needed all the PR help he could get.
The burning issue in the partition, of course, was whether and how to award separate rights of national self-determination to Hindus and Muslims (the British ignored the national aspirations of smaller groups such as the Sikhs, which would bring its own bitter consequences). The Congress Party of Gandhi and Nehru campaigned for independence for one unitary Indian state, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs from Peshawar to Dhaka. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was initially a member of the Congress Party, but he left—fearing domination of the Muslim minority by Hindus in the Congress Party. He founded the Muslim League, which called for a separate state for Muslims: Pakistan, or “the land of the pure.” But since Hindus and Muslims were mixed together all over the subcontinent, how could you come up with a plan to carve a Muslim nation out of India?
This intermixing was the result of a complex
history that included the Muslim Mughal dynasty that the British raj replaced. Until the last days of the raj, there were Muslim princes ruling over majority Hindu princedoms and Hindu princes ruling over majority Muslim princedoms. The only areas with a Muslim majority were in the extreme northwest and the extreme northeast, separated by a thousand miles, and still containing large minority Sikh and Hindu communities. The most populous states of India with a Muslim majority were Punjab and Bengal, both of which Jinnah wanted to include in his Muslim state. But Muslims made up barely more than 50 percent in each state.
To add to the complexity, Muslim areas in the subcontinent had little in common. Bengali Muslims were virtually indistinguishable from Bengali Hindus in every aspect of culture (language, food, clothing, music, etc.) except religion. Muslims within what is now northern India spoke Urdu. Bengali speakers in what became East Pakistan were affronted when Urdu later became the national language of all of Pakistan.
In the Muslim North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), ethnic Pathans (also known as Pakhtuns, Pashtuns, Pushtuns, or Pukhtoons) were separated from their fellow Pathans in Afghanistan by the Durand Line, an arbitrary boundary between Afghanistan and British India laid down by a previous British bureaucrat. Peshawar, the capital of NWFP, was the traditional winter home of the Afghan kings. The Pathans preferred either an independent Pukhtoonwa, uniting all Pathans, or a Pathan-led Greater Afghanistan. At the time of partition, NWFP had a Congress-allied government led by a charismatic advocate of nonviolence, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (the “Frontier Gandhi”).
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