THEY'RE ALL KOSOVO TOO:

What about all the other Kosovos? (Philip Bowring, February 18, 2008, IHT)

Thus far there have been remarkably few post-colonial formal splits. The major one was the creation of Bangladesh out of an untenable Pakistan divided by a thousand miles and an equally large cultural gap. Singapore's separation from Malaysia was peaceful. Eritrea's from Ethiopia was not.

But African and Asian nations still worry deeply about national integrity. The end of formal Western empires (most recently the Russian one) is still far too close for successor nations to be confident that their borders will survive. So they are particularly sensitive when they find the West instinctively supporting separatist movements, even if only verbally.

Whether the issue is Darfur, West Papua, Nagaland or the Shan states, the old colonial powers are often seen on the side of difficult minorities opposed to the central governments the powers themselves created. [...]

Take Sri Lanka. Kosovo logic suggests that the Tamils in the north deserve a separate state, an eventuality that would have huge implications for an India which can only exist if its major constituent parts - be they Tamil, Sikh or Bengali - accept an overriding identity and the benefits of diversity and size.

None of this is to argue that minority rights do not matter - that China can suppress Tibet and (Turkic) Xinjiang, that Russia can brutalize Chechnya, that Thailand can submit its Malay/Muslim minority to alien laws and language, and so on.

That's actually exactly what the argument is. To use Mr. Bowring's "logic" none of these places ever should have been decolonized, if we don't care about self-determination.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 19, 2008 9:56 AM