ANALYSIS:The mess in Ossetia will be repeated if global leaders fail to learn lessons from the past writes Tony Kinsella
EU LEADERS are going to have a difficult meeting in Brussels today as they try to agree on a response to the Georgian crisis. Some will be tempted to bluster and others to prevaricate as they gingerly address our new realities. The age of empires is over, and the era of inter-state war and large conscript armies is slipping into our past.
This death of empire changes both the nature and the role of the nation state. Experience warns us, however, that empires can be every bit as toxic during their death throes as they were at their zenith.
The concurrent, and oft-demonstrated, impotence of force also changes the nature of interactions between states.
We inhabit a confused and thus a confusing world. Parroting ancient formulae, whether about punishing Russia or refusing new approaches to our security, although comforting, is worse than pointless; it is dangerous.
Empires were assembled randomly through a voyage here and a skirmish there. Portuguese navigators picked their way along the coast of Africa throughout the 15th century until Vasco de Gama arrived in India in 1498. Since the Portuguese had gone south, the Spaniards went west, creating their Latin American empire in the process.
Robert Clive defeated Indian and French forces at Plassey in 1757 to capture India, the jewel in Britain's imperial crown. Plassey was really more of a skirmish than a battle, involving less than 6,000 troops, but it would alter the course of British foreign policy for nearly three centuries.
If our species bolted empires together haphazardly, we have hardly been more structured when it comes to dismantling them.
Dismantling has been a messy conflictual process, and one that has, so far, taken at least 50 years. Kosovo's independence last February probably represents the end of the bloody dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire which began with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Soviet expansion from 1945 to 1989 froze much of that mess in place. Yugoslav disintegration delivered a horrifying lesson in how not to undo imperial solutions.
The Czech and Slovak agreement to go their separate ways in 1992, and their subsequent partnership within the EU offers a more attractive example.
If it took 90 years finally to solve the Austro-Hungarian imperial legacy, then the other Versailles-agreed imperial break-up, of the Ottoman empire, remains a bloody work in progress. The British and French empires took over Ottoman lands, with the US joining in after the second World War.
Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq all testify to just how complex, and how murderous, a botched imperial dismantling can become. India achieved its independence in 1947, at the price of a rushed partition.
Tensions between India and Pakistan, not least over an increasingly radicalised Kashmir, still haunt us. Pakistan's search for strategic depth helped create the Afghan mess.
The Russian empire dissolved along internal administrative frontiers in 1991. We are less than 20 years into that process, and nobody can predict its final outcome either for the former Soviet states, or for the Russian Federation.
The Ukraine has deep-rooted historical conundrums to resolve in terms of its own identity, and the relationship between that identity and those of its neighbours. The integration of Siberia into the booming Asian economy might one day threaten Russia itself.
The independence of Kosovo, legally a part of Serbia but with an overwhelming Albanian majority, was probably the least-bad available option. Moscow, which has yet to recognise Kosovo, did point out that it set a new precedent in placing people before historical state boundaries. Like all new departures, few can be sure where it may lead, but it is clear that what is sauce for a Kosovan goose must also serve for an Osettian gander.
We are, thankfully, no longer in the business of imposing national solutions on hostile populations, in part because we are no longer capable of doing so.
The US, as the world's largest military power, is just about capable of deploying the 140,000 troops it has in Iraq and Afghanistan today. It is patently incapable of sustaining that level of deployment, and the Bush administration has now agreed to the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq by 2011.
Russia deployed some 30,000 troops into Georgia. These were drawn mainly from elite units such as 76th Air Assault Division from St Petersburg and Moscow's 96th Airborne Division. These are premier league outfits that have benefited significantly from the reform and investment programmes designed to produce a smaller professional force by 2015.
The UK can deploy around 12,000 troops, France about 10,000, Germany and Poland 7,000 each, with Spain and Italy managing 5,000 apiece. The numbers fall as one descends towards the Irish figures of under 1,000 personnel.
All the above are close to their maximum deployments levels today. This reality seems to have eluded those who still address themselves to ancient and obsolete concepts of power.
There are those around Dick Cheney who mutter darkly about "punishing" Russia, or Senator John McCain who proclaimed: "We are all Georgians".
Russia has certainly over-reacted to an impetuous and ill-considered adventure by Georgia's president Saakashvili. The reality, however, is that nobody, including Georgia's own soldiers, is willing to go to war to help fulfil Saakashvili's nationalist dreams.
Nineteenth century nationalism in Tbilisi, blended with international inattention and a lack of functioning common security structures left the Ossetian and Abkhazian conflicts to simmer for 17 years until they exploded.
Nation states are structures created to serve, not imprison, people. They now need to work together within transparent, robust and agreed transnational structures. This has nothing to do with recreating old empires and their conscript armies. It is more about equipping us to deal with today's realities - including its messy imperial legacies.
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