Independence today? History instructs, but don’t take seriously the ‘what ifs’ of the past and future
Philip Bowring says while national borders are fluid over time, from Europe to the Middle East and Asia, the study of history should not blind us to present realities. National leaders, in particular, should heed the lessons of why empires rise and fall
One man’s independence is another’s sedition. Global maps of national borders are seldom static for long. Empires rise and fall. Constituent communities come to reject being part of a larger entity. One hundred years ago this year, the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly for the nationalist Sinn Fein. Four years later, Ireland was independent of England for the first time in hundreds of years. Thus began the dissolution of the British empire.
August 20 is the 50th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a last gasp of Soviet westward expansion. That Russian tutelage ended with the 1990 Soviet collapse. Another empire bit the dust. Not long afterwards, the Slovaks opted for their separate independence.
Sometimes-petty nationalism can lead to disasters. The collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires saw the division of Europe and the Middle East into so many barely differentiated states in the 19th and 20th centuries. They spawned countless small wars, some of which are still in progress, and young states oppressing minorities more severely than they had been when a minority in a great empire.
Empire is not always a bad thing. Thus, if the American empire, one based not on occupation of land but on commerce and the almighty dollar, is beginning to fracture, the global consequences may well be far more negative than the empire’s evils. The collapse of empires often leads to the collapse of trade.
