Turning around failing nations

After genocidal Darfur in northeast Africa, Iraq is now the second most unstable country in the world, according to the third annual “failed state” index, released this week by analysts for Foreign Policy magazine and the not-for-profit Fund for Peace. Afghanistan ranked eighth.

The other nations found most vulnerable to violent internal conflict and worsening conditions were all African: Somalia, Zimbabwe, the Ivory Coast, Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The consistent factors? Long-standing dictators and no strong and independent local institutions dedicated to the defense of law and property rights.

Another African country, Liberia, was credited as the most improved, partly because an election in 2005 brought stability after more than a decade of civil war. Liberia’s economy is now growing at a rate of 7 percent per year.

Of course, while war and disorder are to be avoided wh ere possible, making order one’s highest objective can present problems of its own. Few countries looked as secure against internal dissension as the Soviet Union of the ’60s — yet 30 years later the whole tightly coiled police state had come unwound, with its mighty nuclear fleet rusting at the pier.

America would doubtless have been judged “highly vulnerable to internal conflict” in 1774 — yet most Americans figure that one turned out OK.

Conversely, this year’s study found “a lull in violence in Chechnya helped … Russia … move out of the category of the 60 worst states,” in the Fund for Peace report, The Associated Press reports.

There’s recurrent violence in Chechnya because that small Caucasian nation has been trying to throw off the yoke of conquest by Russia — a people with whom they share neither language nor religion — for a century and a half. If the boot of Russian oppression is once again settled firmly enough on the indigenous Chechen population that they’re not currently squawking very loudly, that may be a victory for “order,” but it doesn’t say much about freedom and self-determination.

Neither is democracy — by itself — a panacea. Of course a government where citizens are involved and invested because they feel empowered to choose their own leaders will be more responsive to changing conditions — more likely to expose and correct abuses — than a top-down dictatorship. But what really count toward peace and prosperity are enduring institutions — laws and courts supported and honored by the populace through multiple election cycles — that can defend property rights.

A “democratic election” (as recently witnessed in Iraq as well as among the Palestinaian Arabs) in which each faction votes essentially for its own armed gang, hoping their own killers will gain official sanction to promptly murder their opponents and install their own brand of oppressive factional theocracy, is hardly a recipe for widespread happiness.

Governments can only administer — they can never impose on a people who don’t “get it” in the first place — a system that honors our neighbors’ rights, as we would like to see our own rights respected.