Sadly, the world is full of broken countries. At the risk of generalizing, I would
characterize most of Africa, Central and South America, and a good portion of
the Middle East as seriously broken. Some
of these countries are broken because of war and terrorism. Some are broken due to natural disasters and
limited natural resources. Some are
broken because of tribal and ethnic hostility.
Almost all are broken by political corruption and plundered by
oligarchies, plutocracies and military elites.
The wealthy, developed nations have contributed
substantially to this brokenness. The
long history of colonization and imperialism by Europe and the United States
has tragically altered the evolution of much of the developing world. It is of course impossible to say how these
areas would have fared had they been able to develop independently of the
imperialist nations, but it seems clear that there are significant burdens that
are a legacy of this earlier exploitation.
There is also a legacy of war and turmoil. The Middle East and North Africa have been
strategic battlegrounds for hundreds of years.
European powers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and more recently, the U.S.,
have all contributed heavily to the morass that is the present Middle
East.
Africa and Latin America (not to mention Southeast Asia)
were all proxy hot war sites for the cold war.
Every left-wing movement within these countries was met with strong
opposition by the U.S., and we often supported incredibly ruthless
authoritarian regimes, both politically and militarily, in our frantic efforts
to stop the expected domino effect of world communism. Ironically and sadly, this was a fear that
proved to be entirely unwarranted, but it had a dramatically negative effect on
many countries.
And then there is the drug war. The U.S. and, to some extent, the European
thirst for drugs has fueled criminal and political anarchy throughout Latin
America, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser degree, other parts of Asia. Central America is currently a dystopian
nightmare as a result of five decades of U.S. drug demand and the unending
debacle of our related military, law enforcement, immigration and judicial
policies.
Central and South America were for the most part
dysfunctional long before the drug wars.
The legacy of Spanish colonial oppression and the long and shameful
history of U.S. economic imperialism and gunboat diplomacy doomed Latin America
to an almost continuous trauma of coups, counter-revolts, military juntas,
puppet governments and U.S. military or CIA intervention.
All of these countries have similar characteristics: a weak middle class, incredible extremes of
wealth and poverty, massive political, economic and judicial corruption, an
interventionist military elite, and fragile economies that are heavily natural
resource-based and/or internationally manipulated. They may also be torn by racial, ethnic,
religious or tribal strife.
They also have the common attribute that many of their
citizens are fleeing them in the hope of reaching a less broken country. Some are refugees from war or other types of
conflict – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Myanmar are examples. Some are fleeing crime and gangs – Guatemala,
El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua come to mind. And many are leaving because of a desperate
economic situation.
When broken countries show no sign of improvement and no
logical scenario for relief is on the horizon, is it any wonder that mass
emigration occurs? In an age where
information about other worlds and opportunities is readily available, and
travel is no longer quite as daunting, the decision to leave must be much
easier to make. In many cases, there is
no option – war and desperation force one’s hand.
In the last ten years we have witnessed a worldwide wave of
immigration from broken nations to advanced economies – mainly Europe and North
America – that has unleashed a xenophobic counter reaction and resulted in
dramatic shifts away from liberal democracy and globalization such as the
Brexit movement, the Trump ascendancy, and the rise of neo-fascist and nationalistic
organizations.
Large scale immigration has often been met with
hostility. The United States touts its
unique status as a country that welcomes and thrives on immigrants, yet it has
had wave after wave of anti-immigrant fever and has often legislated
aggressively against various aspects of immigration.
The fact is that most people will ultimately shed their
humanitarian inclinations when they sense their own good fortune threatened in
any way. Jesus said welcome the
stranger, but Christians throughout the western world have found it convenient to ignore or water down this exhortation.
Not only are developed nations severely limiting the
immigration of desperate people from broken nations, but they are also skimming
off the cream of the crop of those nations by offering educational or employment opportunities that later turn into permanent relocations of the best and
brightest from the broken lands.
It is capitalism 101 to compete for the best talent in the
world to strengthen one’s technical and industrial might, but this only
contributes to the shocking further decline of the broken countries. In some things there is indeed a zero-sum
game, and the world may be careening recklessly toward unintended consequences
of a very apocalyptic nature.
Is there hope for these broken countries? Some have called for a Marshall Plan for
Central America. But the Marshall Plan’s
biggest beneficiaries (the U.K., France and Germany) were countries that had a
long history of industrial and middle-class success as well as political and
judicial institutions that were conducive to a positive recovery. Any aid sent to broken countries is likely to
be squandered in great part and end up lining the pockets of the corrupt
leaders and oligarchies. When there is
no institutional stability, it is almost certain that aid will fail, as it has
so often in the past throughout the developing world.
Fixing broken countries would seem to require a more
complete intervention by the world community, which of course smacks of paternalism
and would be anathema to those countries. Furthermore, the United Nations and other global organizations have tepid support from the most powerful nations, who are increasingly seeing their future in terms of aggressive and bellicose unilateralism, the United States under Trump being a prime example.
And so we once again find ourselves impotent in the face of global
problems, and immigration joins global warming, war and revolution, and
genocide as cataclysmic issues that the world needs to solve jointly, but has
neither the will nor the wisdom to do so.
Happy Easter!
