Why did Nation-building efforts failed in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Kingmaker]

That Is why you and your over the dinner table fascist professor's model are being opposed so vehemently.

To be fair, that's not why I'm opposing it. I dislike it because it doesn't seem to have explanatory or predictive power, and I strongly suspect it's not truly falsifiable in any meaningful sense because the axes seem rather nebulous. (Some of the examples given are also pretty silly, e.g. contrasting Belgium with the United States for political deadlock.)

Diversity, for example, means having multiple groups within your society, unless one of them is a majority. It could be religious divisions, unless it involves the Irish, apparently, in which case it doesn't count. The UK was apparently never diverse, not even in 1714. Subnational divisions like you have in the US or UK today don't count, even if there are marked cultural distinctions between the regions. Political diversity counts, but only if the dominant party tries to execute the losers, because otherwise every multi-party democracy would qualify. Or maybe diverse just means expansionist, since it apparently includes the Romans and Nazis (and I'd guess the Austrians and Spanish as well).

Really, this theory just seems like an unnecessarily convoluted way of getting to a much more modest claim about diversity leading to conflict in the absence of a homogenizing factor. It certainly doesn't appear to describe anything.

[Purple]

The problem here is that wealth is not necessarily an indicator of behavior. For instance you're making a presumption that a poor country can only survive via Order. This is not the case. Indeed in many Third World countries there is a distinct lack of order.

I do not count failed states that only exist on paper such as Somalia or those tethering on the brink of collapse into anarchy as surviving. I count them as being terminally ill or dead. (if you permit the metaphor)

Wealth is really more a way of segmenting the population into the various sub-societies within a nation. Again, it needs to be recognized - contrary to a lot of Anglo-Saxon presumptions - that a nation consists of multiple societies; and you cannot presume for instance that all Vietnamese are of the same society because they are of the same nationality. In many cases wealth is in fact one of the defining factors of this sub-society - which is why the values of America's 1%ers are often very much at odds with the rest of the country.

Wealth in this context is not the relative size of the countries budget but the relative wealth of the totality of its population. As in living standards. A country where living standards are high is said to be wealthy where as a country where they are low is said to be poor. It all boils down to the proverbial bread and circuses really. A country capable and willing to provide those will find it self always stable. And a country unwilling or unable will forever struggle against the people who wish nothing but to be fed and entertained. And in this struggle it can turn to violence and order or to unity through religion, nationalism or some other factor. Usually both at the same time in different degrees.

[Zinegata]

I do not count failed states that only exist on paper such as Somalia or those tethering on the brink of collapse into anarchy as surviving. I count them as being terminally ill or dead. (if you permit the metaphor)

Failed states however nonetheless have their own functioning societies; otherwise people should have died out in them long ago. To ignore them is to ignore situations that do in fact happen.

Wealth in this context is not the relative size of the countries budget but the relative wealth of the totality of its population. As in living standards. A country where living standards are high is said to be wealthy where as a country where they are low is said to be poor. It all boils down to the proverbial bread and circuses really. A country capable and willing to provide those will find it self always stable. And a country unwilling or unable will forever struggle against the people who wish nothing but to be fed and entertained. And in this struggle it can turn to violence and order or to unity through religion, nationalism or some other factor. Usually both at the same time in different degrees.

The problem here is that you're ignoring that wealth is not distributed evenly within a nation itself. Even a "poor" country can in fact be way more stable than a "rich" one.

Going back to the Arab Spring examples, note that Tunisia has a per-capita income of only $4000. Egypt has about the same. Yet Tunisia is the country that's still on the road to democracy and remains relatively stable, while Egypt keeps facing unrest.

[Zinegata]

Ok, so is Northern Ireland not part of the UK anymore?

Nope, you lost this argument and now you're lying to cover it up.

I just said Northern Ireland is part of the UK, and that it's the one where you have a 40% share of Catholics as opposed to the rest of the country which only has 10% Catholics.

Why again do you think it is the source of Catholic discontent? Why were the bombings you mentioned instigated mainly by the IRA?

Maybe it's because pricks like you keep pretending that England is so lovely and diverse when in reality it had in fact been ignoring and oppressing the Catholic minority.

I don't need to address anything further. That you then accuse my friend of being a fascist based on your own profound misunderstandings only further demonstrates how your arguments are rooted in blind rage and emotion. In reality, you got humiliated because you stupidly equate diversity with your own personal values instead of the simple demographic realities.

[Zinegata]

To be fair, that's not why I'm opposing it. I dislike it because it doesn't seem to have explanatory or predictive power, and I strongly suspect it's not truly falsifiable in any meaningful sense because the axes seem rather nebulous. (Some of the examples given are also pretty silly, e.g. contrasting Belgium with the United States for political deadlock.)

Diversity, for example, means having multiple groups within your society, unless one of them is a majority. It could be religious divisions, unless it involves the Irish, apparently, in which case it doesn't count. The UK was apparently never diverse, not even in 1714. Subnational divisions like you have in the US or UK today don't count, even if there are marked cultural distinctions between the regions. Political diversity counts, but only if the dominant party tries to execute the losers, because otherwise every multi-party democracy would qualify. Or maybe diverse just means expansionist, since it apparently includes the Romans and Nazis (and I'd guess the Austrians and Spanish as well).

Really, this theory just seems like an unnecessarily convoluted way of getting to a much more modest claim about diversity leading to conflict in the absence of a homogenizing factor. It certainly doesn't appear to describe anything.

The danger of being not truly falsifiable is a totally valid one - but it works both ways and is pretty much par on course with any debate about society. It's very easy to start with a conclusion and to find anecdotes to prove or disprove something based on personal whim. This is particularly true since there is no universal set of data that is not open to interpretation.

Which is again why it's important to cite the actual numbers so as to have some basis, to demonstrate that a position is not mere confirmation bias but rather a recurring pattern. Outliers may be occassionally found - as is the case in Germany's political diversity prior to the rise of the Nazis - but it would be a mistake to dismiss it just because it adds complexity to the model. Human societies are complex. This is a presumption of the theory and nitpicking on the basis that my description outlined only the basics (despite the implicit complexities and nuances) is a hollow criticism.

Note that in the case of the Arab Spring the one nation that's actually on the road to democracy - Tunisia - has a population that is 99% Tunisian with no major religious or ethnic divides.

Egypt, which has elections but is also going through regression to dictatorship - has about a 20% minority which is Salafi or Christian; but has a very divided political system with no clear majority party.

Yemen, which is practically in low-intensity civil war, has about the same proportional divide as Iraq in terms of Sunni and Shia.

Libya has no clear population ethnicity statistics, but based on CIA factbook maps would have the country divided in two along ethnic lines and is also in the middle of a low intensity civil war.

If the theory has no merit then the latter of these two countries should have been in a civil war from the beginning even before the Arab Spring; unless you're going to argue that their homogenizing factor was mutual repression by a dictatorial rule.

[madd0ct0r]

Duck you sonny. Answer the examples you asked me for or concede

[Zinegata]

If your diversity rule requires that the two sides be relatively equal in number I think you'd find less objection to the theory, but that is a rare case.

It's not so rare in the Middle East. See the numbers above.

Moreover, diversity is not about having exactly two equal groups in a country. There are differing levels just as there are different proportions in each country. Having 20%of Americans speak primarily Spanish now is more diverse than in the 60s where Spanish-speakers was less than 10%; but is certainly not something that could be compared to the actual current 40-50 split in Iraq.

Again, it's about having multiple distinct and active societies within the country. Having one dominant group - e.g. the US WASPs - and have everyone else trying to be like them or follow them is not demographic diversity. It's this essential conceit of the Anglo-Saxon world that they live in "diverse" societies that make them unable to recognize that it's very different from the challenges faced by Iraq, Yemen, or Libya.

Canada is historically been about 1/3rd to 1/4th French, not 15% like you think. (has been in relative decline since the 1970s for birth rate demographic reasons but its), and the actual dominant culture of British Canadians has often been more of a plurality rather than an outright majority, relying on the regular assimilation of outsiders for growth.

Which would explain the lack of a wedge issue among French-Canadians recently.

Disregard the Kurds and the proportion of Sunni to Shia Iraqis is quite similar (Iraq being about 3/5ths Shia Arab, 1/5th Sunni Arab). The Sunni's are only comparable in numbers if you include the Kurds in their numbers, which is historically a simply laughable proposition. The population balance between Sunni and Shia Arab in Iraq isn't close to equal in the slightest.

Except that the Kurds are not exactly allied with the Shia either, which is the point. It's not about equality.

Now, if you want to make the point that in polities with weak instutions and limited history of unification, the pick 2 of 3 rule is appropriate. Its a natural part of lacking the instutional and cultural capital to restrain the tensions. I'd also quite agree that its foolish to even try to get all three in an under-developed state. In the Iraq case, if you'd want to predict that the future is either dictatorship, partioning, or a federal state so loose that the central government barely exists, I'd also agree with you.

But that isn't what you were saying with your theory, you were saying that it is impossible to have all three simulaneously, regardless of the nature of the polity in question. If you want to suggest that the three will typically be in tension with each other, that is also a viable theory, but what you are suggesting is that reconciling the three is impossible, which I don't think holds water.

I really wish people would stop listening to maddoctor's hysterical ramblings and read what I actually said in conclusion in the first post:

"Of course one may argue that the premise is wrong to begin with, and that a nation can have Order, Freedom, and Diversity without drawbacks, but I think you need to have a lot of time to develop institutions that would allow such an "ideal" nation to emerge in the first place."

Gee doesn't that sound exactly like what you just said?

[madd0ct0r]

Surely that should be in the model then? Freedom, order, no majority group, tradition: pick three.

I'm still waiting for you to stop dancing and answer the examples you asked for. The three point model is so vauge you dhould be able to do it with some help from Wikipedia

[Zinegata]

Duck you sonny. Answer the examples you asked me for or concede

Nope. You lied about my position. I never claimed Northern Ireland was not part of Britain. What I said is that it's a demographic outlier with 40% Catholics compared to 10% for the rest of the country. You ignored this because it shows how England in fact lacks diversity.

Answering any further questions while you're off being a dishonest shit is pointless; as you are too busy poisoning the well and will only keep lying about what I actually said with people inevitably backing you up because you're part of the old timers.

Get your head together first and stop being a child.

If you aren't busy being such an idiot you'd have noticed that I am addressing actual objections from Kingmaker and others.

Surely that should be in the model then? Freedom, order, no majority group, tradition: pick three

Nope, this is still you calling a professor "fascist" even though said professor likes socialism and believes that class-based analysis is valid. He's probably in a Bernie Sanders rally right now.

All because you're too immature to accept that eating Indian curry doesn't make you less racist.

[madd0ct0r]

Zinny. One last chance before i ask a mod to judge which of us is the dishonest shit. Answer the examples you asked me for and I spelled out.


---

In the spirit of adding to the discussion I present a small experiment on the same lines:http://blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freel ... -uprising/

[Quote]
In that spirit, my colleague Peter Rudegeair and I have done a back-of- the-envelope calculation to identify countries with a high latent potential for uprisings. We considered four factors — political freedom (on the grounds that democracies don’t usually require popular rebellions to achieve regime change), corruption, vulnerability to food price shocks and Internet penetration. Our spreadsheet used publicly available measures of the four factors and came up with a list of 25 most vulnerable countries.* You can see the spreadsheet explaining the publicly available measures of the four factors we used and the top 25 countries we came up with here. Libya, Algeria and Egypt made it into the top 10. Perhaps more surprisingly, so did Russia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Venezuela.[\quote]

That was 2011 and publicly available datasets have improved since then. Testing their model is on the list for when I have time.

[Zinegata]

Zinny. One last chance before i ask a mod to judge which of us is the dishonest shit. Answer the examples you asked me for and I spelled out.

Sure go call a mod.

If the mod asks I will be happy to point out how you had to cherry-pick the demographics of London. London, with its 44% non-white population, is an extreme outlier compared to the rest of the UK (less than 15% non-white); but is a completely unremarkable city in terms of "diversity" when compared to other major "international" cities in the world such as New York which is now 60% non-white.

Gee, maybe London is "diverse" because it's an international city - meaning a center of international commerce and trade - instead of the British being inherently virtuously diverse; just as how Manila - another fairly international city - is an outlier in terms of the number of non-Tagalog foreigners residing there compared to the rest of the country.

Or yeah, sure, having 500+ days with the Belgian government hung is *totally* normal and not a sign of a breakdown in the political order. Because the hospitals kept running. You know, the hospitals don't close in the Philippines either but I don't see people calling my country a beacon of order. Heck, there are plenty of hospitals even in Iraq and Afghanistan still running despite the bombings and such. Maybe it was really stupid for you to judge order based on "hospitals are working!" as opposed to "unprecedented length of time needed to form a government" that exceeded the length of time needed to form a government in Iraq?

But yeah sure keep pretending I'm not answering because I'm afraid of debating and don't have my own statistics; instead of ignoring someone who's trying to argue by what will be an endless loop of confirmation bias .

[Thanas]

So what is your argument? That diversity is a detriment to a functioning state?

[Zinegata]

So what is your argument? That diversity is a detriment to a functioning state?

Nope. There are states that continue to function despite not being free or orderly. Whether a state functions or not - as evidenced by the hospital continuing to operate - is not necessarily an indication of whether the government is orderly or not. A dictatorship can keep the trains running on time, just as a hung government like Belgium can continue to have basic services operate.

The point is that a diverse nation will have more challenges creating an orderly and free state; and that most nations with deep diversity issues end up being one or the other. "Order" and "Freedom" however are hard to define precisely - hence my comments to Kingmaker there is a danger that the argument can devolve to being an exercise in mutual confirmation bias - but if asked to specify (just as how I defined diversity as having multiple distinct and active societies within a country) then I would say that "Order" is the ability of a government to act in a unified and consistent manner, whereas "Freedom" is the ability of individual citizens to act without being forbidden to by the government.

My specific issue with maddoctor is his continued insistence of the UK's "diversity" in comparison to the Middle East countries that are having trouble with order/freedom right now.

All of the UK's minorities combined is less than 15% of the total population. Pretending London is representative of the UK demographics is inaccurate, because London is an outlier within the UK (with 40% non-white population) and is not at all extraordinary in the context of international cities that are centers of finance and commerce (e.g. New York is at 60% non-WASP). And in any case, there is a great deal of assimilation that has occurred among the non-white population which is why the lingua franca of London is still almost entirely English

By contrast there is a real divide in Iraq, with 50% Shia and 40% Sunni (combined Sunni Arab and Kurds), and they had a crisis in 2010 in finalizing the government that lasted 200 days. Belgium, with its 60-40 split between the Dutch and French portions, had a hung parliament for 500 days. Lebanon, which is split about 50-40 between Muslims and Christians, faced the same problem in 2014 that lasted several months.

Meanwhile, the hung parliament result in Britain in 2010 was resolved within just five days. Because Britain does not have to deal with the same deep diversity issues as Iraq, Lebanon, or Belgium.

[madd0ct0r]

My specific issue with maddoctor is his continued insistence of the UK's "diversity" in comparison to the Middle East countries that are having trouble with order/freedom right now.

All of the UK's minorities combined is less than 15% of the total population. Pretending London is representative of the UK demographics is inaccurate, because London is an outlier within the UK (with 40% non-white population) and is not at all extraordinary in the context of international cities that are centers of finance and commerce (e.g. New York is at 60% non-WASP). And in any case, there is a great deal of assimilation that has occurred among the non-white population which is why the lingua franca of London is still almost entirely English

Claiming Northern Ireland (part of the UK) is diverse and fits your model and claiming that London (part of the uk, and much larger) dosen't need to fit your model is dishonest.

My specific issue is you have not addressed the many examples you asked for and I spelled out.

[Purple]

Failed states however nonetheless have their own functioning societies; otherwise people should have died out in them long ago. To ignore them is to ignore situations that do in fact happen.

Do not conflate ad hoc societies assembled by the local population trying to survive and self organize with those established and maintained by a state and government. People are remarkably capable of survival even if their country is dead.

The problem here is that you're ignoring that wealth is not distributed evenly within a nation itself. Even a "poor" country can in fact be way more stable than a "rich" one.

Going back to the Arab Spring examples, note that Tunisia has a per-capita income of only $4000. Egypt has about the same. Yet Tunisia is the country that's still on the road to democracy and remains relatively stable, while Egypt keeps facing unrest.

Which is why I keep talking about living standards. The living standard of the common people, the unwashed masses that carry revolution is what counts and not the statistical average of wealth across the economy or what ever else banking thing you think of. It's like you can't grasp the idea that if the masses are kept fed, clothed and entertained they won't revolt as often as when they are not.

[K. A. Pital]

A professor once told me that a nation wants three things: Order, Freedom, and Diversity. The problem is that can only choose two of the three to have an actual working nation.

Applying this model, one can see that Iraq and Afghanistan were originally Order-Diversity nations, in that they emphasized authoritarian rule over a diverse population. The US tried to add freedom to the mix and that only caused order to collapse.

So now we have Free and Diverse countries like Iraq and Afghanistan where Order is weak. Minorities in these nations are moving towards union with other nations - e.g. the Shia with Iran - since this may allow them to create Order-Freedom nations that don't have to deal with internal strife due to the cultural / ethnic diversity.

Of course one may argue that the premise is wrong to begin with, and that a nation can have Order, Freedom, and Diversity without drawbacks, but I think you need to have a lot of time to develop institutions that would allow such an "ideal" nation to emerge in the first place.

I must say that I've also examined this thread in a cursory fashion, and I find the model simplistic, and its application to Nazi Germany ridiculous (especially the stretching of "diversity" to mean different political organizations, which is the feature of basically every nation with a multi-party political system). I mean, I can understand the reasons to apply such a simplistic model to real entities, but I think it does not stand the reality test for some examples. As to whether these are exceptions... I think in case of politics it is important to maintain a sample as large as possible. Microstates should be excluded (their size alone has profound impact on the governance), but larger states should not be thrown out of the picture or crammed into this model if they do not really fit.

I can write more, and will if I have the time.

[madd0ct0r]

the economist also maintains a predicitor model that covers a lot of factors, but they say their model is based off a simpler one:
http://viewswire.eiu.com/index.asp?layo ... =874361472

The final PITF model that had the greatest predictive power is a simple model that is based on only four factors: the level of development as measured by the infant mortality rate; extreme cases of economic or political discrimination against minorities (according to assessments and codings by the Minorities at Risk Project); "a bad neighbourhood" (if a country has at least four neighbours that suffered violent conflicts); and regime type (intermediate regimes that are neither consolidated democracies nor autocratic regimes combined with the existence in these regimes of intense factionalism in domestic politics, as coded by the Polity Project on democracy). Although over 80% of outbreaks of instability could be predicted (a very high "hit rate"), the model cannot predict the intensity or duration of the instability, or its exact timing.

Interestingly, there is very little overlap with the reuters model, but this one has at least been tested.
Of relevance to my slapfight with Zinny: extreme cases of economic or political discrimination against minorities comes from a similar field as 'diversity' (although opposite ends of the field, since it's about active oppression not passive existence) and the 4th factor of regim type seems to capture the freedom vs order axis as people in the thread understood it.
Purple correctly identified the first factor as wealth/level of development, and the 'bad neighbourhood' factor is an interesting new facet of the discussion.

[K. A. Pital]

I think "nation-building" fails because political nationalism can't thrive in nations where class formation halts somewhere before a national bourgeoisie and proletariat are created. In these cases, the "nation" in question simply doesn't matter to its inhabitants and therefore is easily done away with.

Many former colonies are like that; only the few that already were in the process of forming a national capitalist class and workers class, and which had seen this process end successfully in a national idea and the manifestation of political nationalism as a universal idea accepted by most inhabitants of a nation, can then exist as nation-states. If the process comes to a halt somewhere mid-way due to war, due to insufficient industrial capital or archaic elements holding too much sway over rural populations, not allowing the nation to experience anything like the reformation/revolution process that happened in Europe, Japan, China, Russia, etc...

Then the nation fails. It is not directly a matter of "diversity", too - many non-failing nations are diverse, at least just as diverse as the failed ones are.

I think people forget that the modern nations are often built on the graveyard of their less successful ancestors. There's a bunch of states that no longer exist. At some point they failed, too.

[madd0ct0r]

China comes to mind as a counter example stas, although you could probably argue the mandarins were the first form of middle class, and something not washed away by Mao.

Zimbabwe - well I guess you could describe the white landowners as feudal aristocrats rather than bouguisae.

And the frustrating thing is is that most of the middle east wAs on that trajectory.did Assad suppress the bourgeois leading to the death of a national ideal?

[K. A. Pital]

China had a rapidly forming proletarian class and a nascent boureoisie after the Xinhai revolution, but certainly its condition around the start of the XX century led to its collapse as a nation which then lasted - not without the help of Japan, certainly - for decades.

The Mao China was an attempt to reassemble the nation-state, and it was successful. Communist parties often played the role that the national bourgeoisie should have played, were things different.

The ME dictators, I guess, never cared to create a national idea. They borrowed some planned economy tricks from the Warsaw Pact, but this led them to completely ignore nation-building. I don't know if that can be described in terms of "sad"... Nations are artificial constructs. Killing in the name of a strong nation is no different from killing in the name of your tribe, from an ethical and not 100% sequentialist point of view.

[Thanas]

I would argue that a nation is still a preferable state of affairs than a tribal state, because on average the first provide for their citizenry better.

[K. A. Pital]

I can't really disagree with the fact that nations usually start providing better conditions after the initial consolidation period is over. Hence the explanation that I meant a non-sequentialist or at least not a purely sequentialist approach.

[Simon_Jester]

While the "diversity is bad for governments" argument has pretty well subsided, I had a thought on that subject.

The problem is that 'diversity' can mean two very different things. One is the kind of diversity seen in an ecosystem- there are many different kinds of life, many different niches that can be occupied in different ways. "There are foreigners and they dress funny" falls under this kind of diversity. Such diversity is not a problem.

The other kind of 'diversity' is when there are multiple groups with mutually incompatible visions of what the state should look like, under the rule of the same state. Say, if the state consists of half a dozen major intermingled ethnic groups, four of which harbor separatist ambitions. Or if the state consists of a rich, powerful racial minority lording over a cruelly oppressed native population. That kind of 'diversity' is a problem, because it means the government literally cannot please everybody.

Even in a democracy with a set of opposing political parties, the government can please everyone some of the time. Arresting dangerous criminals, providing for the common defense, enforcing contract law (most of the time)... these are things that everyone agrees should happen, by and large.

But when the state contains multiple groups with deeply incompatible ideas about how the state is supposed to look and function, that breaks down. If half the population of a Muslim country wants sharia courts and half the population wants a secular government on the Turkish model, anything done by a secular government is liable to displease the people who want sharia courts. Because their core objection is not what is being done, is not a matter of policy which is subject to compromise and to common-sense agreement on basic priorities. The objection is to who is doing it.

Likewise, the central government basically cannot please an ethnic separatist movement in any way, save by granting them their desire of independence. Even being quite wealthy and successful won't stop the ethnic separatists from wanting their own country. Because again, the objection isn't to what is being done, it's to who is doing it- namely, that central government.

Diversity that results in disagreement over the fundamental structure and organization of the state, either geographically or politically, tends to lead to chaos. Diversity that doesn't... won't.