From Elsewhere: Video. How countries come apart.

I’ve found a really interesting video by a man called Michael Button who is someone who has studied history. I don’t know much about this man or his other views but I find this video and its conclusions interesting.

Mr Button has examined academic reports into how societies slide into civil wars. He said that the reports show that it’s not always ethnic tension or poverty or oppression by a central government that kicks off civil wars. What does start the movement towards open conflict is what he calls ‘anocracy’ a period where one system is mutating into another governmental system. This is a period where everything looks fine on the surface, there’s elections, trade, civil disputes settled by political means but underneath there’s an increasing sense that the systems are not as fair as they might be or there’s a massive drop in confidence and trust in civic institutions among the population.

Mr Button uses Yugoslavia as an example of this. During the years of Josef Tito the strongman who ruled Yugoslavia for many years, there was very little ethnic tension. There was a lot of intermarriage between the different ethnic and religious groups during the Tito years and people lived peaceably and happily together. After Tito died and the strong central force that held things together had gone whilst things looked OK on the surface underneath conflict started to bubble up until it eventually burst with the Yugoslavian Civil War in the 1990’s. Now there’s much less intermarriage and Yugoslavia split along religious and ethnic lines into a few new nations.

This is a really really thought provoking video. I watched it and found myself looking at my own and other countries and am starting to see that there’s more than a few countries, including my own, where things look and feel solid,but could quite easily suddenly be not.

Here’s the video. Have a watch and tell me what you think.