Has nation-building ever actually worked? Not usually.

I happen to disagree with some of the implications of the following article and believe that nation-building can indeed be effective and needs to be given more attention by academics and practitioners, and more international (read-American) legitimacy. Furthermore, in situations like Afghanistan, I am not really sure what the alternative to nation-building is, other than leaving the nation to descend into anarchy and blooshed. Simply because it has not worked when done unilaterally and hald-heartedly does not mean that it cannot work multilaterally and with sufficient dedication and resources.

Nevertheless, the following article, "Deconstructing Nation Building" by Dr. James L. Payne, which systematically shows that nation-building tends not to work by analyzing the 51 cases of "genuine" nation-building that the author identifies (his methodology is certainly open to debate) is well worth a serious look by anyone interested in the subject.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

• "To see how nation building in general works out, I have compiled a list of all the cases since 1850 in which the United States and Great Britain employed military forces in a foreign land to cultivate democracy. I included only those cases where ground troops were deployed and clearly intervened in local politics. I have left aside the cases involving lesser types of involvement such as sending aid or military advisors or limited peacekeeping efforts or simply having military bases in the country."

...

• "The nation-building idea has a critical, generally overlooked, gap: who knows how to do it? Pundits and presidents talk about nation building as if it were a settled technology, like building bridges or removing gall bladders. Huge amounts of government and foundation money have been poured into the topic of democracy building, and academics and bureaucrats have produced reams of verbose commentary. But still there is no concrete, useable body of knowledge. "

...

• "Nation building by military force is not a coherent, defensible policy. It is based on no theory, it has no proven technique or methodology, and there are no experts who know how to do it. The record shows that it usually fails, and even when it appears to succeed, the positive result owes more to historical evolution and local political culture than anything nation builders might have done. "

For more on this important issue, I would recommend Marina Ottaway's list of some common myths about nation-building from her article in Foreign Policy. For a more practical analysis of nation-building in recent times (including a discussion on Afghanistan and Iraq), you can check out former Ambassador James Dobbins' piece from the New York Jewish Times (and no, that is not just a crude pun on the New York Times). Here is an excerpt from Dobbins' piece:

• "Nation-building has been a growth industry since the end of the Cold War. The United Nations, NATO, the United States and more recently the European Union have all become engaged in missions that employ armed force in post-conflict environments with the objective of supporting a political transformation, that is to say democratisation. Not every recent military expedition fits this description, but nation-building, peace-building or stabilisation operations, depending on one’s preferred terminology, have become the dominant paradigm for the use of armed force in the post-Cold War world.
• Since 1989, the frequency, scale, scope and duration of these nation-building missions have steadily risen. During the Cold War the United States mounted a new military intervention, on average, once a decade. The United Nations launched a new peacekeeping operation, on average, once every four years. Since 1989, the frequency of US-led interventions is approaching one every other year. New UN peacekeeping missions are being launched, on average, about once every six months.
  
• The cumulative effect of all this activity has been measurably beneficial. Over the past decade the number of civil conflicts underway around the world has been halved and the annual death toll from such conflicts reduced still further. Contrary to the popular impression, the world has become a less violent place since the end of the Cold War. Armed force has proved an essential component of multinational action to prevent societies emerging from conflict from returning to it. Peacekeeping has proved itself the most cost-effective instrument available to the international community in such circumstances, the only one with high levels of success. Economic assistance can reinforce the effects of peacekeeping in a post-conflict society, but in the absence of externally provided military stabilisation, most countries emerging from conflict will return to it within a few years, no matter how much economic aid, advice and other forms of support they receive. "