http://www.canada.com/reginaleaderpost/news/viewpoints/story.html?id=b503f63 e-b46d-40a8-8750-29f00f72ab55
REGINA LEADER-POST (CANADA) Canada being sucked into vacuum left by old world's collapse George Jonas Canwest News Service Friday, February 29, 2008 Why are western coalitions (ISAF/NATO) participating in the civil wars of the Hindu Kush and the Balkans? A partial answer: Entropy. We're in Afghanistan and Kosovo because -- as they used to say in the old days -- nature abhors a vacuum. Empire wasn't the direction in which the world seemed to be heading as the 19th century turned into the 20th. On the contrary, old empires were ascending their funeral pyres, with independent nations, newly created or resurrected from history, rising phoenix-like from their ashes. The first to self-immolate was the Ottoman Empire, soon followed by the Romanov (Russian), Hohenzollern (German), and Habsburg (Austro- Hungarian) Empires. The Second World War did away with the nascent imperiums of the Japanese, the Italians, and the Third Reich. In the postwar years, the sun finally set on the British Empire, along with remnants of Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, and French imperial holdings from southeast Asia to north Africa. The last to implode was the Soviet Empire, which collapsed in 1991. The period of empires seemed to be over. Even confederations withered. Early in the 20th century the Scandinavian attempt at union ended in the divorce of Norway and Sweden. Arab experiments fared no better -- the United Arab Republic barely lasted three years, before Syria jumped ship -- nor did Slavic unions survive in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, or the former Soviet Union. Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Serbians, Bosnians, Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, etc., reverted to ethnic nationhood, while elsewhere, Tamil, Basque, Chechen, and Kurdish nations tried to bomb themselves into being. But there was also a counter-trend emerging. Many post-colonial nations had trouble with self-government. Some countries couldn't get a grip on, look after, or come to terms with themselves or their neighbours. They were engaging in bloody squabbles next door and in deadly civil wars inside their own borders. The latter sometimes amounted to genocide, as in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda. Many countries permitted themselves to be taken over by the most horrid dictators, unbalanced tyrants of the Idi Amin-class, worse than their former imperial masters. The United Nations, which was supposed to step into the breach, did not. The world body excelled only in posturing and dithering, whether under its furtive and indecisive Egyptian former secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, or his Ghanaian successor, the magisterially ineffectual Kofi Annan. If Le Corbusier's architectural marvel in New York proved anything, it was that while being set loose in general assemblies can't turn hogs into humans, herds of swine, such as Third World dictatorships, can reduce lofty buildings to pigsties. Strong and mature nations have had it with weak and immature nations, but more importantly, weak and immature nations have had it with themselves. The unforeseen situation that developed in the last 30 years saw the emergence of an inchoate yearning for big-power protection around the globe. Revealingly, while existing confederations (Belgium, Canada) teetered on the brink of secession, multicultural "Europe" emerged as a superstate. By the 1980s, emergency response became essentially America's call, aided by some NATO countries. U.S. president Ronald Reagan responded in Grenada and Panama; British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands; George Bush (the First) in Kuwait, the French on the Ivory Coast, the British in Sierra Leone. NATO intervened in Kosovo; George Bush (the Second) in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even president Bill Clinton, much as he disdained projecting America's power in theory, found himself obliged to intervene in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo and Haiti. And, arguably, one of the worst blemishes on his foreign policy was his failure to intervene in Rwanda -- a failure which resulted in an estimated hundreds of thousands dead. Today, the world is crying out for big-power intervention. Paraphilia for colonization or re-colonization is the love that dare not speak its name -- if anything, the rhetoric goes the other way -- but the desire is plain. Countries unable to feed or govern themselves are looking to be rescued. The process accelerated in the last 18 years, with invitations to interfere, spoken or unspoken, from fratricidal Bosnia, Taliban-contested Afghanistan, war-torn Liberia, ethnically cleansed Kosovo, starving Somalia, oppressed Zimbabwe, or genocidal East Timor (where Australia found it advisable to land a small contingent only a few days ago to restore order after an attempted coup.) The collapse of the old world order created a vacuum -- a black hole, really. It's a parallel universe, with all the duties of empire and none of its privileges. Riding America's coattails, Canada is being sucked into it.
