Political crises in the Middle East and North Africa since 2011 have either produced extreme violence or caused countries to dissolve into civil war. The territorial settlement that followed the defeat of the Ottomans in 1918 is collapsing, but there is no clear sign of what will replace it, other than conflicts which nobody knows how to end.
Bad though this is, the world has got used to instability in the Middle East and North Africa, almost as if it were a natural phenomenon like earthquakes in Japan or hurricanes in the Caribbean. Seven wars are being fought in Muslim countries between Pakistan and north-east Nigeria. In Europe, on the contrary, 70 years of almost continuous peace since 1945 have convinced its people that this is the natural order of things which will continue despite hiccups in atypical places such as Greece and Ukraine.
But peace in Europe has been very much the exception over the past 1,500 years and there is no God-given guarantee it will continue. The golden age of European integration may have ended as long ago as 2008 when the financial crash began to divide eurozone members into winners and losers. In the same year, the easy dominance of the Western powers established after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 began to look less absolute when Russia invaded Georgia. » | Patrick Cockburn | Saturday, July 25, 2015
