A long time ago, writing in my undergraduate newspaper, I made fun of one of the proposals in my university’s strategic plan that was principally authored by the faculty. (Today, I would just say ‘mirable dictu’ to everything in such a plan due to that authorship.) The proposal was to establish an interdisciplinary program to study “Divided Societies”. What I wrote then, in more prolix fashion, was, “What, are there any undivided societies? What is excluded from such a program? Isn’t this just another name for the Department of History or the Government Department?” (One of my professors came up to me later and said, “I quite agree with your critique, but can you tell me which of my colleagues told you to write that?”)
Many years later, the thought stays with me. Are there any societies, any countries, that are stable? I am not quite here thinking stable in the sense of “end-of-history stable”, at a teleological end-point. But a society or nation that you can look at and say “There are no major outstanding issues making the future of that society or nation uncertain, prone to fundamental instability due to the unsettled issues about the nation’s territory, population, language, or institutions or vulnerable to sudden aggression from a neighbor.” That this is a place at rest.
Yes, every nation on the planet has conflicts and struggles that are a product of economic and social hierarchies (though there are some social democracies that have that handled better than anybody else does) so by some standards, there are no undivided societies.
But I do think there are countries that are in some sense resolved in most ways. I don’t think anybody’s going to restart the question of whether there should be separate South and North Vietnams. I don’t think anybody’s going to readvocate a separation of East and West Germany, even if former East Germans often feel aggrieved by inequalities resulting from their former separation. I don’t think Spain is going to look way back in history and start arguing that Portugal is a Spanish territory. I don’t think Italy is going to renounce the autonomy of Vatican City and absorb it into Rome as an undifferentiated jurisdiction with no special status. It doesn’t seem to me that Costa Rica is imminently likely to experience the same internal division as the rest of its region, or that Botswana might suddenly develop a sharply drawn conflict between Batswana and Basarwa communities even if there are long-standing issues and inequities between them.
It’s easy to be wrong in labelling a given country or place as especially stable. Western observers used to call Cote d’Ivoire especially “stable” for West Africa, when it turns out it was just as vulnerable to the same north-south cleavages that all of the Atlantic states of West Africa have experienced in varying measure. I think the sharp uptick in Catalan demands for autonomy surprised outside observers, though perhaps not so many people in Spain itself.
I’m mulling this over now because I am trying to think whether the sorts of things that policy communities, military advisors, NGOs and others tend to push out into the middle of global conversations in times of conflict have even the remotest relationship to how a place that is divided and unstable transitions into something whose basic constitutive parts and character are taken as relatively resolved or fixed. In a precious few cases, I think those kinds of suggestions and frameworks have moved a particular place from deep division and profound uncertainty to something looking more like peace. Even in those cases, I’m inclined to credit the combatants themselves with coming to the conclusion that they needed those frameworks rather than the frameworks being the thing that made those conclusions possible. Northern Ireland might be the best example: the people involved in the conflict plainly began to edge towards a weariness with it on all sides, which then made it possible for some kind of policy-driven approach to making that feeling into a formal agreement that could hold long enough for the entire bloody mess to fade away into history.
In many other cases, conflicts just go until they stop either because one side wins once and for all and imposes conditions that effectively end the ability of the other side to go on or because both sides establish new facts on the ground that supercede the desire to continue the divisions. That is often organic and messy and contradictory and in no way open to the sorts of ideal solutions that various kinds of policy communities tend to imagine or advocate. While I was in graduate school, my group of historians and anthropologists went off to meet with a group of graduate students in an institution affiliated with our university who were doing international relations, many with an eye to doing government work, and let me just say that it was as close to complete mutual incomprehension as I’ve ever witnessed. They had ten-point plans for peace in long-standing conflicts; we had no thought that our historical and ethnographic understanding of those conflicts could inform a clear kind of modular, implementable outside intervention that would end those conflicts. We understood why people were fighting and what fighting meant and who there perhaps wanted the fighting to end and might eventually leverage enough power for their desire to become real. We might even have been able to imagine what the resolved post-conflict future could be like, even if we didn’t think it was either our place or our capability to engineer it.
When conflicts do end more or less either because one side wins or both (or more than both) sides just finally decide there is no advantage to be gained, and the division fades, it’s an especially bitter thing to look back on, particularly when the conflict went on because of some intervention. It’s impossible to look at the Vietnam War now and not feel intense anger at all the deaths and suffering given that Vietnam is stable in its unity and not even remotely like the imaginary state that American planners fearfully argued could not possibly be allowed to exist. It is at rest; it never really needed to be in motion.
On the other hand, in some cases, it’s impossible to imagine an end to conflicts. Will Ethiopia ever be a ‘stable’ unitary state, or free of antagonisms with Somalia and Eritrea (or vice-versa), or any of those places without profound internal divisions, assuming that it’s even right to think that their national boundaries mark off a singular ‘inside’? Hard to think you could say “yes” to that question whether you were calling for a policy-driven intervention by the international community or watching through the lens of historical and anthropological knowledge or as a citizen or resident of any of those places.
I would guess that most of you reading know what’s really roiling me up here, and that’s the situation in Gaza and Israel. There is literally no one involved in that conflict as a principal combatant or as a major ally of a combatant that has anything like a vision of an actual resolution that would produce an end to conflict and division. Everybody says silly shit that they either know is nonsense or worse yet, actually believe in. And yet no one—whether trying to think of a framework for peace or trying to live into peace as an ordinary citizen of a Palestinian community or an Israeli one—can hope at the moment that the just and fair possibilities could become available. There are only two, really, if we are asking, “Can this ever be anything but divided and unstable?” Two states living in peace alongside each other or one democratic state where the equality, rights and prerogatives of all its people are protected in a sustained and permanent way. That’s all there could be. Fantasies of expulsion or genocide by one side or the other are just that if we are talking peace and an end to division. Diasporas made in blood and suffering do not disappear, whether or not the world pays any attention.
And yet it is also impossible to imagine that division and instability can continue there forever either. There are “divided societies” that may remain that way indefinitely, establish that as their nature. In a sense, become stable as divided, and maintain a bounds around rivalry and contestation that keeps them inside a rough and dangerous equilibrium. Israel and Palestine do not seem that way. Too many people care, too many people have stakes, and too many terrible things seem possible, even likely, that will matter not just to the people there but will affect everyone else everywhere else.
No possibilities, even the status quo. Something has to change. But I do not think the combatants and their allies have sufficient power on their own to force a change, and plainly the people in charge on all sides also do not have the imagination, courage or will to consider the only things that will work. Neither do many of the people egging those leaderships on. The astonishing ways that advocacy in all directions flows away from facing every fact of the history, every reality of the lives that people have been stuck living; the dismaying spectacle of the distortions and fantasies and insistences on unconditional and uncompromising power over others in a small territory so full of so many kinds of others.
There are situations where I have been exasperated by the inability of people with power or resources to move towards solutions that are both obvious and relatively painless to embrace. This is not one of them. The only solutions are obvious; all the possible means of achieving them are inconceivable.