Commentary: The nation-building concept is now cool!

By Jean H. Charles

I have made the concept of nation-building the central core of my inquiry and of my scholarship. I believe its application constitutes the central nerve of a true process towards democracy and development. The notion of nation-building is not limited to, or is only, a concern about brick and mortar. It rests above all on the principle that the various social groups of a designated country agree to share the nostalgia of a common past and strive to build a future together. Using the word of Jerry Z. Muller in his essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, the various ethnic groups agree to live cheek by jowl in relative peace.

I am a proponent of those who believe that, at the root of all the national conflicts, or underdevelopment within a country, you will find that the concept of nation building is either convalescent or is already dead. The examples are many: Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, (I have mentioned recently) Guyana and Haiti. In the case of Iraq, the Shiites, the Kurds and the Sunnis see themselves not members of a common nation: the Mesopotamia, but as citizens loyal to or concerned only about their separate clans or religious groups. In Afghanistan, large portions of the country are (as in the Middle Ages) under the separate loyalty of local sheiks.

I was in pain, at the beginning of the Bush Administration, when the Secretary of State told the world that "we do not do nation building.’ The United States Army is not geared towards peace-keeping. Yet the vista of a full geared US marine holding the hand of a small child to cross a street in one of those war-torn countries would be the best photo-op that the United States could project. The United States is, after all, the only superpower in the world. Akin to God, who barely uses his mighty strength to impose his dominion unto the human mind, America is at its best when it uses its strength the least.

I have enough correspondence with officials of the Administration to prove that I have, in the past eight years, tried to promote the concept that the United States is the best experimential model of nation building. My advocacy was intensified around the time of the State of the Union presentation, hoping some version of the concept of nation building would find its way into the language of the Presidential address.

The United States story is unique and impressive. We were created on July 4, 1776, a nation divided where a portion of the population (the black people) did not enjoy full rights to citizenship. We agreed to go to war against the South to impose the concept of a more perfect Union. On January 1, 1864, we proclaimed the Slave Emancipation. Abraham Lincoln authorized an army where some 400.000 white men die to impose the concept of nation-building on the United States. After Lincoln's assassination we went into a revisionism period that lasted one hundred years. Black people were lynched and denied the basic rights promised at emancipation. It took the advocacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and the leadership of President Lyndon Johnson to come back to the spirit of nation-building with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. We are not perfect, but we have tried to maintain that spirit of integration in the last forty years. We do have today, a serious black contender to the presidency of the United States. Only South Africa can pretend to have such an epic story also.

I have been pleased to read in the last issue of Foreign Affairs magazine that Secretary Rice mentioned that " we are prepared to make significant changes in our policy…." we now recognize that democratic state building is now an urgent component of our national interest." Democratic development is not only an effective path to wealth and power, it is also the best way to ensure that these benefits are shared justly across entire societies without exclusion, repression or violence. Secretary Rice has amplified the Renan definition of nation-building. It is too late for this administration to project the results of this new development. The black book transmitted to the next American President will now include the concept of using foreign aid to promote the concept of nation building. The Millennium Challenge Account initiative will be utilized to insure that groups within a nation work together to forge a common future.

President Bush, in his farewell tour to Europe, stopped by Northern Ireland to support the triumph of the principle of nation-building that prevails over the past self destruction between the Catholics and the Irish Protestants. He talked about creating a national corps which will go abroad to promote that concept. America already does have a school discipline trained to do just that. The graduates of the School of Social Work in community organization have all the skills to help groups see themselves as part of the same family, empowering the powerless and engaging those with power and influence to develop a social conscience that will glue the formation of nation building.

The Minerva project, a US50 million dollar initiative to engage the nation’s sociologists in security research should allocate some of that funding into the Schools of Social Work for the recruitment and the formation of graduate students in community organization in particular. They will render the job of the U.S. soldier simpler and less lethal, because the ethnic belligerents will see it is in their best interest to construct their own country instead of engaging in the self- destructive process of killing each other over some illusory concepts of ethnic or religious difference.

Is nation-building cool? You bet it is! The US Secretary of State said in her article: In 2000, I decried the role of the United States, in particular the US military, in nation-building. In 2008, it is absolutely clear that we will be involved in nation-building for years to come.

We may be going into rough waters these days. I have seen the sun at the horizon. Good sailing is within reach.