Before a static ideal type, the state is a global project and therefore a permanent problem in historical construction, similar to democracy and liberal capitalism.
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The historical pendulum of state failure
The weakness and failure of the State nation as a model partnership are not new phenomena. They were not in the beginning, when the national state had to compete with "empires teachers of taxes" and diagrams of "fragmented sovereignty" (city-state and urban federations) to be imposed as a system of human organization prevalent in the world. Nor let to be after the signing in 1648 of the Peace of Westphalia, which is considered the historical cairn that marked the consolidation of the modern state and the beginning of the European interstate system based on the concept of national sovereignty. Both wars ("engine of state formation and transformation," according to Charles Tilly) and invasions, annexations, secessions followed implosions and producing and multiplying the number of states.
In 1914, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, there were 55 states. In 1919, the end of World War I left a toll of 59. In 1950, increased the number to 69. In 1970, the independence of most of Africa, there were 90 states. With the independence of other territories in Africa, Asia and ocean and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the number rose to 191. Today, after the independence of East Timor in 2002, there are 192 States.
In 2006, Chomsky published a book ( Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy ) bold enough he argued that America had a number of characteristics of a failed state, including the inability or unwillingness of government to protect its citizens from violence, danger even to promote its foreign policy with its destruction, the tendency to act in disregard of international law, believing themselves free to attack other countries without legitimate justification and delicate democratic deficit resulting from the foregoing that deprived their institutions, formally democratic, real substance. In Latin America, the latest victim of this versatile stigma was Mexico because of the escalation of violence generated by drug trafficking in northern Iraq, a situation for which he traversed the region in Argentina in 2002 due to economic crisis and, as Failed States Index Global , Colombia and the Dominican Republic in 2005 (in the Caribbean region, Haiti is considered a State structurally flawed from this measurement is made).
Europe, the laboratory building, consolidating and then export the rest of the modern state of the world, has not remained oblivious to the vagaries of state weakness. France was a collapsed state during the Vichy regime, unable to guarantee the control of territory from the occupying Nazi Italy in the 1970's, when gangs of Calabria and Sicily filled with drugs, car bombs, kidnappings and death in the streets of Naples and Palermo, Spain, during Franco's government, like any state plunged into a dictatorship, was unsuccessful from the point of view of respect for individual freedoms.
Even today the problems are solved for the first world. A thorough analysis of the current economic situation in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and, in general, the viability of the medium-term euro as the common currency of the European Union, and perhaps of herself as long-term partnership project most ambitious supranational recorded history, does not yield results very encouraging. A look at U.S. health care system (I recommend to actually see the Michael Moore documentary that came out in 2007, Sicko ) before structural reform driven by Obama, who now want to undo the Republicans, would place on the podium in socially States failures.
Colombia, a country that spent half of the nineteenth century one hundred and sixty years of the twentieth immersed in some kind of war, has certainly experienced many periods of state failure. Paul Oquist documented the "partial collapse" suffered by the Colombian state for the bleeding man and the institutional collapse that was the era of "La Violencia" (1948-1958). The same thing happened during the "double war" waged by the Colombian State in the eighties against narco-terrorism of the Medellín Cartel and fleeting union of all guerrilla groups in the Simon Bolivar Guerrilla Coordinator .
Before settlement, the major problems are history. The State, like any great human project, inbred carries the risk of failure. Hence, Jeffrey Herbst (2004) rightly hold that states "tend to fail." circulation States for the continuing strength-weakness is temporally dynamic. Any State, budding or established, it remains an unrealized program that runs the risk of permanently strengthened or weakened.
The ideal state is not static and unchanging rate, but a global project and therefore a permanent problem in historical construction, similar to democracy and liberal capitalism. Undoubtedly, the situation in Somalia is not the same in Sweden, but both have different strengths and weaknesses: despite having the best human development indicators, the Nordic countries have the highest suicide rate in the world, should we then create the new category of "suicide states"? After WikiLeaks Cablegate unleashed in November, the U.S. is not a state "failed diplomatically"?
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