Transcript
JAMES DOBBINS: What do we mean by nation building? This is a term that's entered American parlance, the Europeans tend to call it state building, the U.N. calls it peace building, the current administration calls it stabilization and reconstruction. What we mean by the term is the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to forestall a return to hostilities and promote a transition to democracy. So all of the cases that we look at have a military component. That doesn't mean we're saying you always have to have a military component, we're simply saying those are the only cases we studied. That's the universe that these studies are designed to address. Not all military interventions are nation building interventions, but since 1989 if you look at the military interventions that have taken place, nearly all of them fit this paradigm. Whatever the reason that led to the intervention in the first place, they all end up fitting this paradigm which is very much a post-Cold War phenomenon.
There has been a major growth in these kinds of missions since 1989. For instance, during the Cold War the United States intervened in a new country on an average of something like once every 10 years where you had Granada, Panama, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic. In the Clinton Administration, that went from once every 10 years to once every 2 years, so you had Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, in just a little more than 8 years. The current President Bush came into office saying he wasn't going to do this anymore, and he invaded three new countries in his first 3 years in office. He went into Afghanistan, Iraq, and we went back into Haiti in 2004. The point here is that there's been an acceleration in these kinds of missions.
This is also evident in the U.N.'s record which has accelerated even more quickly. During the Cold War the U.N. mounted a new peacekeeping operation an average of once every 4 years. Since 1989 it mounts a new operation on the average of once every 6 months. These operations are cumulative. In the 1990s they were lasting 6 to 8 years, more recently they're lasting 8 to 10 years. So if you're doing one every 2 years like the United States, pretty soon you're doing four or five at once as the U.S. was in 2004 when it had troops in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq. If you're the U.N. and you're mounting one every 6 months, pretty soon you're up to about 20 which is where the U.N. is at the moment.
This phenomenon was largely a domain for the U.N. on the one hand or U.S.-led coalitions including NATO on the other. But more recently a third alternative if you will has emerged which is European-led efforts including European Union-led efforts. It's still a rather tentative phenomenon, but it's one that we're studying and so that's what this study is designed to look at.
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