The economists Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski have recently published a working paper analyzing the "artificiality" of Iraq's borders. Their conlusion is sobering: Iraq is a fake state, a lingering blot of colonialism that merges different ethnicities together with little regard for how they might co-exist. The paper seems to support those politicians arguing for some kind of partition. Is Iraq the new Yugoslavia? Are our soldiers trying to hold together a country that shouldn't even exist?
Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures how artificial states are. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups into two separate adjacent countries. The other one measures how straight land borders are, under the assumption the straight land borders are more likely to be artificial. We then show that these two measures seem to be highly correlated with several measures of political and economic success.
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Most of the countries "created" in 1948 are such conglomerates of multiple tribes and cultures, divided with utterly arbitrary borders by the departing remnants of a hundred year old colonial past that had no place in FDR's post-war vision. Some have theorized that the Marshall Plan and other post-war relief efforts into Europe were done partially on the condition that the European powers end their colonial domination over the 3rd World.
the vast majority of Africa is in this same state. Some regions have managed to live peacefully, others have remained in tribal warfare for decades.
Multiethnic states are not necessarily doomed, even if their origin was an arbitrary decision of colonial powers. In the case of Iraq, the people there seemed to be quite ok with the borders of the country, and with living with other sects around (see, for instance, this column by an Iraqi scholar who works in the US). By organizing everything since the invasion along sectarian lines, and applying the "divide et impera" principle, the US created the current civil war. A case of self-fulfilled prophecy, if there ever was one.
Irrelephant:
Are you serious? The guy who wrote that article has quite the selective memory.