There’s a pair of interesting posts that I think are worth considering. The first is from from Ali of the Iraqi blog Iraq the Model. In his post Removing the Caliphate he writes:
At least most religions were incorporated in one way or another to power and authority at a certain time, and in most case if not all, such power was abused by clerics and it took wars or strong conflicts to separate ‘church’ from the state each time. The difference with Islam is that it didn’t acquire power later as with Christianity for example. From the first beginning the state was founded on a religious base. The ruler was the leader regarding politics, daily life issues and spiritual affairs. The power was concentrated in one hand; the caliphate. Some Muslim thinkers tend to believe now that this was not only unnecessary, but it was wrong. Those are still minority of course.
As he sees it what we’re seeing worldwide is at least in part due to the dissolution of the caliphate attendant to the creation of the modern state of Turkey.
Wretchard of Belmont Club, for my money simply the best thinker and writer in the blogosphere, adding fuel to the fire in a post about a Robert Kaplan article, sees the results of the collapse of colonialism :
And the dark is everywhere; in the vast, decayed structure of the Third World where the shambolic post-colonial architecture has rotted away, leaving areas of chaos the size of continents.
Indian Country has been expanding in recent years because of the security vacuum created by the collapse of traditional dictatorships and the emergence of new democracies — whose short-term institutional weaknesses provide whole new oxygen systems for terrorists. Iraq is but a microcosm of the earth in this regard. To wit, the upsurge of terrorism in the vast archipelago of Indonesia, the southern Philippines and parts of Malaysia is a direct result of the anarchy unleashed by the passing of military regimes. Likewise, though many do not realize it, a more liberalized Middle East will initially see greater rather than lesser opportunities for terrorists. As the British diplomatist Harold Nicolson understood, public opinion is not necessarily enlightened merely because it has been suppressed.
May I suggest that what Wretchard, Kaplan, and Ali are examining is the vacuum left by the collapse of empire? The Ottoman Empire was well-known for ruthless suppression of uprisings within its boundaries whether by Greeks, Armenians, or Arabs. And the unrest throughout the Caucasus which we’ve recently seen reflected in the horror at Beslan School #1 is at least in part an artifact of the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Natura abhorret vacuum (nature abhors a vacuum) has been held since antiquity and it’s certainly true in matters of politics and power. The challenge for America in the coming years may be how we can produce the stability that these now-faded empires produced without becoming ourselves what we abhor: an empire.
UPDATE: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.
