A short sharp piece from former US top diplomat Christopher Hill on the problems besetting the borders of many Arab states:

In a region where crises seem to be the norm, the Middle East’s latest cycle of violence suggests that something bigger is afoot: the beginning of the dissolution of the Arab nation-state, reflected in the growing fragmentation of Sunni Arabia.

States in the Middle East are becoming weaker than ever, as traditional authorities, whether aging monarchs or secular authoritarians, seem increasingly incapable of taking care of their restive publics. As state authority weakens, tribal and sectarian allegiances strengthen.

What does it mean today to be Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni, or Lebanese? Any meaningful identification seems to require a compound name – Sunni Iraqi, Alawite Syrian, and so forth. As such examples suggest, political identity has shifted to something less civil and more primordial…

Over in the comments one Peter Mason (British?) makes a silly noise:

This article is attempting to shift blame from the main culprit. Destroy countries and you will get chaos. If you happened to have pursued an aggressive campaign of marginalization and frustrated colonialism against the whole region for a century before, as the U.S. has, the chaos will be all the greater. There is not a conflict in the Middle East that does not have U.S. foreign policy as a MAJOR causal factor (I admit that they inherited the role from my own country).

I really dislike that sort of argument as it plays to Arab-style and wider professional victimhood. The idea that, say, Libya and Iraq and Syria are as awful as they are now mainly because for decades the US/UK have led an ‘aggressive campaign of marginalisation and frustrated colonialism’ against them is little short of insane. The problem is in fact the exact opposite: the calming cooperative influences of Western pluralism and integration have had almost no role there at all. Instead they have had weird home-grown versions of corrupt and cruel national socialism, variously supported from Moscow, leading to the deaths of countless thousands of Arabs/Muslims and oppression of millions.

These states have spent many long years building a faux ‘official’ national consciousness that has run out of road. Now religious or tribal or other allegiances are flooding in to fill the intellectual/moral space created by these regimes crashing (yes, we did did crash Saddam’s rule in Iraq, but we then invested huge sums of money to try to build a modern society). Nowhere to be seen is any serious set of principles or any general political movement upholding democracy and tolerance. Why should there be? Nothing like that has ever existed in this part of the world, or at least never put down wide meaningful roots.

In short, do some/many/most of the borders drawn up by former colonial powers now risk collapsing, with a sprawling anarchic all-v-all violence replacing them?

And, as some of the sensible other commenters on Chris Hill’s piece point out, how far is this an Arab phenomenon solely? Or is this just a sign that many international borders (and the states they define) more generally are no longer fit for purpose?