Nation Building

History

The challenges nation building presents to traditional understandings of state sovereignty and legal equality are significant and are detailed below. First, however, it is important to discuss some of the historical antecedents of contemporary nation building, why the concept has developed in the manner in which it has, and the sources of its various components.

In one sense, nation building as a functional enterprise is as old as regime expansion itself. In ancient Western civilizations, one can see elements of it in the development of the ancient Greek colonies, the building activities of Alexander the Great, and the Romanization of the Mediterranean world and western and central Europe. Similarly, the great Islamic empires undertook to implement a way of life in the areas they controlled. From Al-Andalus to Baghdad, [Page 1051]Sarajevo to Damascus, Istanbul to Egypt, the Islamic empires developed and imposed a culture that continues to influence every region they touched.

The European colonizers also undertook such activities, since one of colonization's avowed goals was to bring civilization to the most distant parts of the earth. This was an explicit assumption in the mandates given to the allied powers following World War I. The mandatories were obliged to ensure the wellbeing and development of their mandates and to prepare them for self-governance. Although their success was mixed, the examples that followed World War II were much less ambiguous.

Although few acknowledge it, one model of successful nation building is the reconstruction of Germany and Japan following World War II. In these instances, following complete and total military defeat of a country, the imposition of democratic governmental structures and processes—enforced by military might and accompanied by funding to rebuild the economic infrastructure—was successful. While many might argue that the conditions existing in those countries differed dramatically from any possible contemporary or future instances, they disprove claims that democracy cannot be imposed by force. Clearly, democracy might prosper.

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