“There is no week, nor day, nor hour when tyranny may not
enter our country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.”
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
The Greek Historian Thucydides (460BC-395BC) wrote that the growth of Athens and the fear that caused in Sparta would lead inevitably to war. It did, the Peloponnesian Wars (431-404BC), which were ultimately won by Sparta. Graham Allison, Harvard professor of political science coined the term “Thucydides Trap,” otherwise known as the “security dilemma,” to describe the rise of a new power and the fear it instills in an established, dominant power – China and the United States. A clash, he argues, almost always ensues. Such phenomena are not limited to geo-politics. In physics, it would be an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. And, all of us were once recalcitrant teen-agers, pushing back against resolute parents.
In his book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap?, Professor Allison looks to history to provide lessons for managing “great power” rivalries that were resolved without full-blown war: the Spanish-Portuguese match-up in the 15th Century, the rise of the U.S. in the 19th Century against the British Empire, the more recent peaceful resolution of the Cold War, among others.
While a nuclear conflagration between great powers represents the world’s biggest risk, the desire for self-rule, for security is not limited to great powers. Its consequences can be seen in the rise of nationalism, and the desire for sovereignty and respect, throughout many parts of the world – Scotland, Catalonia and Ukraine in Europe; the Kurds in the Middle East, and secessionists in the West African nations of Cameroon and Nigeria. It is in those areas where the unwary might be ensnared.
Each part of the world is unique, as is each group’s desire for independence. Regardless of the merits of each bid for independence, it is the causes that must be addressed. We can treat symptoms, and we can play the “blame” game, but cures require an understanding of causation.
In Africa, causes relate to centuries of colonization, along with the tribal nature of their indigenous people. Two countries on that continent are now experiencing separatist movements – Cameroon and Nigeria, both which became independent in the early 1960s. Cameroon, one of the oldest continuously populated parts of the world, had been occupied from the 15th through the 19th Centuries by Portuguese and Germans. After World War I, the French and English divided the country. It is the English-speaking regions that today want to split off. Nigeria, the largest country in Africa, in terms of population (and the 7th largest in the world), was once part of the British Empire. The natives of Biafra, in the southeast of the country, want independence. Like most African nations, their borders were drawn by Europeans who cared more about mineral extraction and commodities produced, than the tribes that comprise their populations. (There are, for example, over 500 languages spoken in Nigeria.) A civil war in that region fifty years ago left a million dead. Nigerian forces have again been deployed to put down this new rebellion.
In the Middle East, the Kurds seek independence from four countries – Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria – where they comprise significant minorities. Apart from Turkey, which is what remains of the Ottoman Empire, these countries, as in Africa, had their borders drawn by European colonial powers after the First World War, with little regard for the people who had lived there for centuries.
