"The current collapse has its roots in the vast proliferation of nation-states, especially in Africa and Asia, since the end of World War II. When the United Nations Charter was signed in 1945, it had 50 signatories. Since that time, membership has more than tripled, reflecting the momentous transformation of the pre-war colonial world to a globe composed of independent states. During that period, now nearing its conclusion following the independence of Namibia in 1990, the U.N. and its member states made the "self-determination of peoples" — a right enshrined in the U.N. Charter — a primary goal.
Self-determination, in fact, was given more attention than long-term survivability. All agreed that the new states needed economic assistance, and the U.N. encouraged institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to help them. But fundamental to the notion of decolonization was the idea that peoples could best govern themselves when free from the shackles, or even the influences, of foreigners. The idea, then, that states could fail — that they could be simply unable to function as independent entities — was anathema to the raison d’être of decolonization and offensive to the notion of self-determination. New states might be poor, it was thought, but they would hold their own by virtue of being independent."
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FLASHBACK
Saving Failed States
How the United Nations let countries fall apart -- and how it needs to adapt if it wants to put them back together. (Originally published in the Winter 1992-1993 issue of Foreign Policy.)
" It was my first massacre site. Today the skulls are all neatly stacked on shelves, but when I first encountered them, they definitely were not. They were attached to bodies—mostly skeletal remains—in a massive mess of rotting human corpses in a small brick church in Rwanda. As the director of the tiny United Nations “Special Investigations Unit” in Rwanda immediately following the genocide in 1994, I was given a list of 100 mass graves and massacre sites across an impoverished, mountainous country where nearly a million people had been slaughtered—mostly by machete—in a span of about 10 weeks."
http://www.thelocusteffect.com/Preview.pdf
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