When he first addressed the United Nations General Assembly after the independence of Barba-dos, Prime Minister Errol Barrow indicated his recognition that the world’s powers tended to see small states as irritants.
This sentiment was indeed a hangover from the period that led to the First World War which, in a sense, was the culmination of the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, and the creation of a myriad of small states in the area known as the Balkans, of which the state of Serbia was perhaps the leading entity. The events there came to be widely seen as among the major causes of the First World War. And this created a negative sentiment on the part of the post-war founders of the League of Nations against the acceptance of small entities in the organization.
Then, spurred by US President Wilson’s strong advocacy of self-determination for the Central European and Balkan nationalities, there were established a number of relatively small, and ethnically diverse states there between 1919 and 1939. Many of these states proceeded to cleanse themselves of ethnic minorities, inspiring the predatory Germany of Hitler to use the same principle to gobble some of them up too – the casus belli of the Second World War.
All this left a certain anti-small state sentiment, reflected in Prime Minister Barrow’s remarks. It was exemplified in the extent to which, to this day, a strong sentiment still exists in India against the splitting of the Indian Empire in 1947, that created the state of Pakistan with the East and West regions separated by one thousand miles. This situation itself led to the creation of two states, this time abetted by Mrs Gandhi’s India.
It is fair to say that taking all this history into account, the imperial powers still reigning over the continent of Africa and parts of Asia, sought to resist the creation of too many small states when the pressure for decolonization was on. They created federations as substitutes. And in spite of the failure of many of them in Africa, and the short-lived nature of the Federation of Malaysia venture including Singapore, it is significant that the founders of the Organisation of African Unity decided, as a matter of principle, that the inherited colonial boundaries of the new states there should remain, taking priority over the claims of ethnicity and pre-colonial nationality. In large measure this has remained the gospel on the African continent.
In the Balkans too, after the Second World War, the lesson was taken. The Communist leader Marshall Tito sought quickly to take advantage of the war to unify the separate entities into the state of Yugoslavia; an effort supported by the Soviet Union – itself a multinational, multi-ethnic state itself created by Marshall Stalin and the Bolsheviks, and reinforced by the incorporation of the small states of Central (later called Eastern) Europe into the world socialist system after the war.
Yugoslavia, with a strong sense of its own independence, resisted the Soviets’ effort of political incorporation and centralization, and declared neutrality. With the Marxist practice of the predominance of the party over the state, Tito used the League of Communists, reinforced by the strength of the Yugoslav army, to maintain the unity of the Federal Republic.
This was not to survive his death. Communism had not defeated the forces of nationalism and ethnicity. By the end of the 1980s, the Federation was on its way to splitting up, with Serbia as the dominant entity. The power play that ensued led to a murderous domination of the majority Albanians in Kosovo, a situation only rescued by NATO intervention and the establishment of a virtual United Nations/NATO protectorate in the entity.
Today, with the declaration of independence by Kosovo, supported by the European Union inheriting the protective mantle of NATO, a strong sentiment has developed – certainly in the major powers like Russia and China (and we suspect India) that such a situation can only be a provocation to the unity of multinational states like themselves. This is reinforced by other states like Indonesia, and even by relatively small states like Ceylon fighting against regional secession.
Undoubtedly they feel that the United States and the major states of the EU, in their anxiety to maintain the strategic dominance of NATO in the new Europe, and the strategic unity of the expanding EU itself, display little understanding of the threat that ethnically and religiously- inspired nationalism and consequent secessionism can create for the large multinational states of the world.
Serbia has claimed that she has been anxious to enter the expanding European Union; that she is aware of the requirements, including norms of good governance and human rights which the EU insists upon, and that therefore once she was working towards fulfilling these requirements, there was no need to separate Kosovo from Serbia. She argues that there is no reason, in addition, to impose retribution on the present ruling generation of Serbia, as a result of the iniquitous behaviour of the past ruler Milosevic. And the President has now publicly stated before the Security Council that Serbia, “as a dedicated aspirant to membership in the European Union
