Conflict After the Cold War by Richard K. Betts

Author:Richard K. Betts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

FOMENTING CONFLICT

How successful have these partitions been at reducing conflict and permitting outside powers to end their involvement? It is not clear that the partitions of Ireland and Cyprus can be said to have worked, even in the lesser-evil sense. Although the former was a move to divide and quit—in which all sides accepted division as the price of self-determination—the British are embroiled in a military operation in Northern Ireland that continues 70 years later. The troop presence curtailed the toll that communal conflict might otherwise have taken; indeed, it could be argued that it contained the Irish conflict and kept deaths to a minimum. But it also brought the conflict to the heart of Britain as the IRA mounted terrorist attacks in London to increase pressure for a British withdrawal, and it could just as well be argued that from the British point of view independence would have been a more effective way to contain the conflict because it would have thrown the onus of peace onto the Irish; moreover, it might have encouraged regional compromises rather than a prolonged stalemate.

The partition of Cyprus can only be described as a partition by default that the U.N. presence inadvertently aided. The conflict following independence in 1960 was compounded by the fact that Turkey, Greece, and Britain were appointed protecting powers by the constitution. The formal structure this gave to a wider engagement in the conflict drew both the Greek and Turkish armies in and permitted international acceptance of Turkey’s invasion in 1974 and what was until then a de facto partition. While casualties have been restricted since then, the division of Cyprus is little more than a long standoff that remains volatile and continues to require the presence of U.N. troops. Nor can the conflict be confined to Cyprus. Over the 20 years since partition, its short fuse is evident. A violent demonstration by Cypriots in August 1996 resulted in Greece and Turkey threatening war. The costs of containment, therefore, include permanent vigilance on the part of NATO and the Atlantic allies.

In many ways, despite the violence and displacements it produced, India’s was the most successful ethnic partition, both because it allowed the British to quit and because the conflicts that ensued were by and large contained. But this had less to do with the wisdom of ethnic separation than with other factors, among them the subcontinent’s distance from Europe. Unlike Ireland, Cyprus, and Bosnia, the Indian subcontinent is so large that a dozen or more new states could have been created. The deployment of the ethnic two-nation theory, however, which holds that Hindus and Muslims could not live together, had a paradoxical effect—the new state created, Pakistan, was divided into two parts by roughly 2,000 miles of Indian territory. The subsequent separation of those parts points up the inadequacy of the principle of ethnic separation for effecting stable territories. In the late 1960s, resentment at West Pakistani political and economic dominance led to a regional Bengali movement for independence,

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