Failed States

[bcholmes]

In fact, Haiti holds, or ought to, a pre-eminent place, historically and culturally, in its part of the world, much the way Newfoundland should, compared to the rest of Canada. Haiti's victorious slave revolt, from 1791 to 1803, was one of three revolutions that ushered in the modern era. The others were in France and the United States. But both France and the U.S., ironically, made Haiti pay a heavy price in reparations that burdened it for a century. The U.S. occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. From 1957 to 1986, it propped up the brutal Duvalier regime.

I suppose some would say this amounts to blaming your problems on ancient history. But they often don't mind doing that with individual history (I was abused/deprived as a child etc.) and, in "real" history, a century or two isn't so ancient. The U.S. is still struggling with the problems of its own slave past and the venomous race relations that lingered long after the Civil War.

The legacies persist. After Haitians made Jean-Bertrand Aristide their first elected president in 1991, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew him. When the Americans brought him back in 1994, they demanded suffocating economic policies. Then, in 2004, they basically abducted him from his country and his post.

Besides, there's a good reason not to be patronizing toward "failed states." The dirty secret is that all states are failed in some respects; there are, at most, differences in degree. Take even the U.S., as Noam Chomsky has. It didn't just fail the test of Hurricane Katrina. It alone among developed nations still can't work out a basic health-care system for its people. We have our own failed relations with native peoples. Lucien Bouchard gave up on being premier of Quebec because he found it an ungovernable society.

— Rick Salutin, "We all fail the failed state test", The Globe and Mail

Wow. More than I expected of the Globe.

This language of "failed states" has dominated just about every major government paper about Haiti since 2004.