It's really easy to dump on colonialism from our vantage in 2014, and not really fair either. Americans in particular like to imagine themselves as an anti colonial power, not without quite a bit of justification, but we had our moments as well, and of course the entire westward expansion of the country was a type of internal colonialism, which we tend to forget. So, I don't intend this to be one of those snotty "oh, how bad the Europeans were" type of posts.
Iraqi army officers gathered to celebrate Iraq's entry into the League of Nations in 1932.
And, on that, I frankly don't know that it's possible to envision a world history that doesn't feature colonialism, and European colonialism in particular. Consider the Scramble for Africa, the last great era of colonialism. Is it really possible to imagine all the European powers sitting that one out? And if even one was in it, didn't all the other activity make it inevitable? So, in short, I don't want to be excessively critical.
I also don't want to be excessively sanctimonious about it either. Most western nations that have colonial legacies have entered the "oh, how horrible we were" state of mind, but that isn't really a very useful or accurate record. On the ground, in a lot of former colonial areas the influence of the colonial power is often mixed, and sometimes not really all that badly recalled. In some very stable areas of the globe areas that were once colonies are now incredibly heavily influenced by lessons learned from the former colonial power and are in some instances better carriers of western values than countries in the west now are. And in some areas, to our surprise, the former colonial period is looked back as a golden age. A friend of mine with experience in Morocco once related to me how high in the Atlas mountains he was enthusiastically greeted by villagers who thought he was the advanced guard of a French colonial administration, decades after the French had left, and the French were hoping for their return. And, as horrific as the early administration of King Leopold was early on, at least one National Geographic expedition in that country found villagers rushing out enthusiastically yelling "The Belgians are back!" Things can get confusing out there.
What brings this up, however, is the mess sometimes created when former colonial powers tried population transfers (such as the Chinese are still doing now) or drew boundaries very badly.
In recent weeks we've seen the struggle in Ukraine over territory, as Russian ethnics attempt to take parts of that country out of Ukraine and back into Russia. This is all a legacy of the Russians populating some areas of their empire with ethnic Russians and also redrawing the maps after World War Two. This left a demographic mess that can't get sorted out well. Ukraine has to try to keep what it has, and Russia, never having gotten over its having been an imperial nation, supports its fellow ethnic Russians in their efforts to get out, if indeed it doesn't hope for domination of Ukraine. The Tartars, in Crimea, find themselves outnumbered by everyone in their native lands. This can't be sorted out well by any means, other than perhaps telling the ethnic Russians they'll just have to get used to it. An interesting aspect of this, however, is that there's current combat between two distinct peoples based upon lines drawn in colonial times by one, and by cultural differences that might appear to be slight from the casual observer, but in fact which are very deep.*
Ukranian girl in a former concentration camp, in Austria, May, 1945.
A worse situation is brewing in Iraq, which in the past several days has slipped into a religious and ethnic civil war. Making the situation all the worse, Iraq isn't a real nation to start with, but British creation. In some ways, Iraq was what was left over of the Ottoman Empire after you ran it out to the East. The deserty part in the west of the country was thinly populated (and still is) and was Sunni, falling into the Bedouin cultural region. The agricultural part to the East was Shiite, indeed it's critical to the Shiia world view for historical reasons, but still Arab (i.e., not Persian). The north is Kurdish.
Youthful Iraqi fascists gather, in 1932, so celebrate Iraq's entry into the League of Nations. An unfortunate aspect of Middle Eastern history is that secular movements, which have occasionally have been very strong, have also been anti democratic. Communist and Baathist have both been strong at various points in Iraq's history, making up about the only non religious sectarian political parties in the country, a common feature of politics in the region.
The gulf between the Sunnis and the Shiias is vast, and in terms of religious differences it doesn't do them justice, really, to lump them all in as Moslems. Their views are considerably different on some critical matters, and it's nearly impossible for them to regard each other charitably. The northern part of the country isn't culturally Arab at all, a the Kurds are a separate people who really deserve their own country.
Iraq, of course, is disintegrating before our eyes. As we fought a war to depose a strongman who kept the country together, by suppressing Islam in general and any individual national impulses as well, it's now our responsibility to some degree. But the country really isn't. In an ideal world, letting the Kurds set up their own nation, and separating the two competing branches of Islam into separate states, would occur, but that probably can't without dire implications. Of course, the implications of whatever occurs, at this point, are dire.
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*.Ukraine is a Slavic nation that's traditionally looked west, like Poland to which it has a close ethnic connection. More European that Russians, they are also grouped into two separate Eastern churches in terms of religion, one being the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the other being the Ukrainian Catholic Church, neither of which, of course, is the Russian Orthodox Church. World War One presented them with an opportunity to leave Russia, which they did, but resulting strife with Poland and Russian resulted into its reincorporation and a subsequent heavy handed Soviet repressive period which included mass starvation as a tool. A second chance at independence was seized by some Ukrainians during World War Two during which they viewed the Germans as an ally of convenience. A guerrilla war that followed the reappearance of the Red Army lasted into the late 1940s.
Iraq
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