In June 1772, in Narragansett Bay (now Rhode Island, USA), a small group of smugglers attacked a government military ship, wounded the captain, disarmed the crew, robbed the ship, and burned it. Thus began the war of the American colonies for independence from Britain, with Colonel George Washington becoming a hero and later becoming their first president. Nearly two and a half centuries later, in March 2014, several thousand people stormed the Donetsk Regional Administration building and raised the Russian flag over it, marking the beginning of the war in Donbass, now known to us as the war with Russia (according to Poroshenko’s version) or the struggle for independence (according to Zakharchenko’s version). What do these two events have in common?
There have been, are, and will be many wars and military conflicts on the planet. They differ in scale (62 participating states and over 60 million deaths in World War II versus, for example, the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which lasted 38 minutes and claimed the lives of about 570 people), content (for example, a war can be liberating, civil, religious, or have the nature of a rebellion, uprising, or revolution), duration, intensity, and who knows what else. However, according to the opinion of Massimo Morelli, a professor of political science and economics at Columbia University, most conflicts arise from problems of unfulfilled obligations.
When it comes to wars for independence, this unfulfilled obligation seems to be an unwritten but obvious commitment not to come “into someone else’s garden with your own regulations”. Thus, the uprisings of Roman provinces in Gaul, Macedonia, or Italy hundreds of years ago were not much different in nature from the struggles of Native Americans with Americans in the 18th century or the Chechens with the Russian Federation in the 20th century. In all cases, the owners of the “garden” were dissatisfied with the foreign “regulations”.
Apparently, this is human nature: we do not like to be governed from outside, even if it is done well. We are willing to endure as long as there is obvious benefit (for example, states in the USA), or as long as we are kept by force (for example, republics in the USSR).
In favor of the statement that in most cases, once on the path of separatism, a territory inevitably goes out of control of the “oppressors,” the simple fact that in 1900 there were slightly over fifty countries on the planet speaks volumes. For example, India, Canada, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, or Australia did not exist at all, they were all part of other states or were their colonies. A little over a hundred years have passed, and at the moment the UN includes 193 states.
It is absolutely obvious that in order to quadruple the number of states, it was necessary to go through the path of many dozens of separatist operations, with or without military involvement.
Thus, no matter how we feel about it, separatism can be called a stable tendency of modern times in changing the world map. There are objectively no reasons for its decline. The recent events in Great Britain and California are bright confirmations of this.
And now let’s ask ourselves: in which group of territories will Donbass ultimately end up? Will Ukraine retain it by force in its composition and will it face the fate of Chechnya or Palestine, or will a new state like Kosovo finally form, boundaries will be established, and weapons will be laid down?
Translated by ChatGPT gpt-3.5-turbo/42 on 2024-04-20 at 17:35
