Think Again: Nation Building

Once, nations were forged through "blood and iron." Today, the world seeks to build them through conflict resolution, multilateral aid, and free elections. But this more civilized approach has not yielded many successes. For nation building to work, some harsh compromises are necessary -- including military coercion and the recognition that democracy is not always a realistic goal.

BY MARINA OTTAWAY | SEPTEMBER 1, 2002

"Nation Building Is a Quagmire"

Not necessarily. Nation building is difficult, but it need not become a quagmire as long as the effort has clear goals and sufficient resources. Compare Somalia and East Timor: The United States and the United Nations stumbled into Somalia without a plan. As a result, what began as a humanitarian mission to feed people starved by rival warlords became a misguided attempt at ad hoc nation building as U.S. troops sought to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. The United States extricated itself from that quagmire by leaving Somalia to its fate in 1994, and the United Nations later did the same.

In East Timor, by contrast, the international community followed a plan and was not dragged into a situation it could not control. Right from the start, the United Nations sought consensus for nation building by organizing an unprecedented plebiscite on independence from Indonesia. Learning from the mistakes of the Balkans and elsewhere, peacekeepers (led by Australia) were authorized to use deadly force against pro-Indonesia militias who sought to disrupt East Timor's bid for autonomy through a campaign of violence, looting, and arson. At the time of this writing, the East Timorese have democratically elected a new government, which has hired more than 11,000 civil servants and retrained former guerillas as soldiers for the country's nascent defense force. East Timor is still a construction site, but it is not a quagmire.

 

Marina Ottaway is a senior associate at the Democracy and Rule of Law Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.