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Furthermore, no one seriously questions the right of peoples to become nations, or suggests that they lapse into colonialism. Ever since Woodrow Wilson, self-determination has been the dominant political philosophy of the 20th century. The problem is, though, that right does not necessarily make might. In order to progress beyond mere survival, the new nations need a measure of economic heft and political substance, a chance to make sense in the long run by maturing into nations worthy of the name. Far too many of them raise their flags with little but a flagpole to go on. Considering only their economic demerits, World Bank President George Woods has estimated that 30 of the world's underdeveloped nations are at least "generations" away from anything resembling self-sustenance.
If today's world map looks like a conglomerate glob of silly putty, smashed by a hammer and stuck together again, it is because the new nations are in large part literally and lineally the heirs of their colonial history. Physically, they are artifacts of 19th century imperialism's division of the spoils, confined within arbitrary frontiers contrived by colonial mapmakers. Psychologically, they are the heirs of Europe's own fierce nationalism, which fueled the race for empire. As 19th century British Philosopher Walter Bagehot observed, political man is a highly imitative animal. The subjugated peoples of the empires resented and rejected colonialism, but they assimilated and accepted much of its trappings, casting about for the same status symbols that their masters had. This deep psychological need to cut the figure of nationhood for all to see is responsible for the imposing government palaces, the parliamentary maces, the conspicuous Rolls-Royces, the Western-run "national" airlines and the gleaming chancelleries that exist in many young nations that can hardly afford to print money on their own.
An Exhausting Task
The new nations are created so quickly and usually with such a lack of rational preparation that they spawn problems never faced by most of the older countries, which evolved their own nationhoods over centuries. The empire builders, for example, never were lashed by the obligation to improve the standard of living of those they ruled. Today the leaders of a new nation are soon in trouble if they do not do so—visibly and dramatically. They confront not one but several revolutions at once—political, economic, social, technological—and are thereby called on to make choices that Western statesmen never had to make. The evidence of how difficult those choices are, and of how unprepared the new nations are to make them, is everywhere at hand.