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Nation-building has a bad reputation. The phrase conjures up images of well-meaning but hapless U.S. Soldiers or United Nations (UN) peacekeepers involved in an expensive, complicated, and ultimately futile effort to fix other people's problems. Worse, nation-building is often seen as both dangerous and peripheral to anyone's vital national security interests. Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti are routinely trotted out as proof that such missions are doomed to debacle. In the post-Iraq era of softer power and tightening budgets, it seems prudent to set aside notions that the United States or UN can or should deploy force to remake countries abroad in the liberal world's image.
Unfortunately, the need to engage in nation-building is inescapable. State failure incubates serious threats to regional and international order, such as insurgent movements (West and Central Africa), organized crime and drug-trafficking networks (Southeast Europe, Central Asia), piracy (East Africa, Southeast Asia), pandemic disease (AIDS), and ecological disaster-to say nothing of the occasional global terrorist organization. Time and time again, history demonstrates that state failure, when left unaddressed, causes demonstrable harm to neighbors, whole regions, and occasionally the international order itself.
Happily, the popular image of nation-building is largely founded on a few famous examples of dramatic failure. A closer look at the history and practice of nation-building illustrates that the international community has learned key lessons and improved its ability to foster stability and democracy in states confronted with violence, illegitimacy, poverty, and institutional breakdown. The challenges that the international community faces in the 21st century provide an ideal opportunity for a timely reappraisal of nation-building, its goals, prospects, and uses. As the international community begins to work with the new state of South Sudan; plans for a post-Qadhafi Libya; continues reconstruction efforts in Haiti; oversees peace-building efforts in Côte d'Ivoire and Lebanon; faces persistent weakness and violence in Afghanistan; and monitors signs of weakness in literally dozens of other states, nation-building should remain an important and viable policy option for the UN and Western powers.
Why Build Nations?
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it quickly became received wisdom that failed states are dangers to the world. In truth, few failed states generate the kind of global menace that al Qaeda was, and some scholars, including...