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Small states are sometimes best Samuel Brittan: Financial Times 14/03/03 We do not yet know the shape of Iraq after Saddam Hussein's regime has been ended, or had its pretensions shorn away. But every attempt until now by bodies such as the US State Department and the British Foreign Office to draw maps and constitutions for the rest of the world has ended in disaster. The west has neither the right nor the knowledge to tell other people how to govern their affairs, or what their boundaries should be. Its primary object should be its own self-defence, which was achieved by Nato in its heyday. When western countries have become inextricably involved after military intervention, they should provide scope for boundaries and constitutions to emerge from the wishes of the local inhabitants. Where possible, the benefit of the doubt should be given to regimes with a less bad human rights record. For much of the 20th century, western foreign policy was governed by two principles. One was to favour federations and large areas of governments. The second was to try to preserve existing frontiers, even when they were entirely artificial. Both Iraq and Jordan were created by Winston Churchill, out of three former Ottoman provinces, when he was colonial secretary in 1921. He was talked out of creating an independent Kurdistan. When the two principles have been in conflict, the preference for size has tended to prevail. One has only to think of the misguided efforts of British governments in the 1950s to impose a central African federation or to construct a Caribbean federation. Both of these had to be dismantled. At the beginning of the 1990s, George Bush Sr made a notorious speech in Kiev when he warned Ukraine against separating itself from the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia was put together after the first world war by the victors who forced all the southern Slavs into a Serbian-led kingdom. One reason for the poor showing of the European Union in the Balkans in the 1990s was the desire of some members, including the UK, to maintain the Yugoslav Federation when its reason for existence had gone. More recently still, despite the war undertaken to save Kosovo from Slobodan Milosevic's rule, it remained a Nato aim to prevent a complete breakaway of that region from Serbia. Even now, when the Albanians predominate in all except the northern tip, the myth of its being part of Serbia remains. I am not suggesting that policymakers should go to the other extreme and begin by carving up Iraq into Shiite Arab, Sunni Arab and Kurdish states. A glance at any map shows the difficulties. But let us at least learn some negative lessons from the past: not to force the Kurds in the north who have already established a de facto independence to go back into a larger whole; nor to make the "integrity" of countries such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia into a plank of foreign policy. It is a diplomats' myth that modern technology requires very large states. Look at the size of some of the new countries lining up for admission to an enlarged EU to see that small states can be viable. Estonia has a population of 1m, Cyprus 800,000 and Malta 400,000. The greater the role of competitive markets, both internally and across borders, the less the exact size of the state matters and the easier it is for countries of all shapes and sizes to coexist. If the US were content to buy its oil on the open market it would not need to be so heavily involved in nation-building in the Middle East. To say this is not to advocate a nightwatchman state. It is precisely services such as education, health and transport that, if they are to be publicly provided, are best provided locally. The US does not try to provide all such services from Washington; and the UK is committed to doing so from Whitehall only because local authorities have become financially dependent on the centre. There are of course other services, such as military defence and aspects of security, for which even the largest countries are too small. Many liberal thinkers have advocated a minimal world government with a monopoly of weapons of destruction and some authority to formulate rules for a free trading system. Should it also provide a world currency? Is it too heretical to provide freedom of choice? Cannot there be, as in the Middle Ages, one or more international currencies for large-scale trade and finance without abolishing local currencies? This thumbnail sketch is meant only to provide a few pointers. No one has found a solution for the interpenetration of ethnic groups across the map that brought Woodrow Wilson's dream of homogenous states to grief. But if we cannot just say that "small is beautiful", we have enough evidence that big is not always best.
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