Essay: THE PASSIONS & PERILS OF NATIONHOOD

FOR sheer and pervasive fervor, the love of nationhood has no equal among contemporary political passions. Independence is the fetish, fad and totem of the times. Everybody who can muster a quorum in a colony wants Freedom Now—and such is the temper of the age that they can usually have it. Roughly one-third of the world, some 1 billion people, have run up their own flags in the great dismantlement of empires since World War II, creating 60 new nations over the face of the earth. In the process they have also created, for themselves and for the world, a congeries of unstable and uneasy entities that are usually kept alive only by economic aid and stand constantly on the verge of erupting into turmoil. Nationhood is not an easy art to master, as Ghana, Nigeria and Indonesia have painfully learned in recent weeks.

Their troubles are particularly instructive, for most of the world's new nations do not have anything approaching even the modest resources of Ghana, Nigeria or Indonesia. Most of them are poor, primitive and ill-equipped for so much as the basics of nationhood. Some have capital cities that are not cities at all and government ministers who have not learned to administer. Government, in fact, is usually the biggest, and sometimes the only, industry in many new countries—and corruption is a way of life. Many of the new nations do not have minimal communications and transportation, or enough educated men to fill a new country's needs. In some cases, arbitrary national boundaries cut across ethnic groups, mock the rational use of resources, and defy any foreseeable hope of achieving distinct national identity.

Because it bears the heaviest legacy of colonialism, Africa teems with more new nation afflictions than anywhere else. But the problem of nations that are really not nations by any reasonable standards is worldwide: Latin America has British Guiana, which wants to go its own way on a shoestring; the Middle East has Yemen. Asia has its Laos and its Maldive Islands, neither of which makes much sense as a nation. In a different but equally difficult category is Pakistan, bigger and more populous than the others but separated into two parts by 1,000 miles of unfriendly land.

Heritage & Revolution