This reminds me of how much I dislike the term "nation-building", and why.

[rant]

You can't build a nation, any more than you can build a tree. These are not things that are built, these are things that grow. It's a semantic distinction, but semantic distinctions do influence perception, discourse, and eventually policy. The idea that a nation can be built is what leads us to the absurdity of nominally rational adults talking about "installing" a democracy, as if it were a light bulb or spare tire, and we have a warehouse full of neatly stacked crates labeled "democracy, functioning, one" just waiting to be screwed into place.

Treating nations and states as growing entities that need to be cultivated rather than engineering challenges awaiting the correct blueprint is not going to solve the problems, but it might provide a more effective foundation for developing solutions.

We have to accept that the growth of nations is an inherently disorderly process and that conflict is usually going to be part of it. Our own nation undertook one of history's great genocides and fought one of history's great civil wars before defining itself as a nation. Western Europeans see themselves at the pinnacle of human civilization, but the warring tribes of western Europe went through many centuries of gory and destructive conflict before they could even figure out where one nation ended and others began. When we look with horror on the wars and abuses of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East we would do well to reflect that all they are doing is settling their business in exactly the same way we once settled ours. Colonial powers may have suspended the process by imposing order at the expense of stability, but when they left the process continued.

None of this means we have to simply sit back and accept whatever happens. It means we have to accept that we can only manage situations to the greatest extent possible (which may at times be a very minimal extent), not control them. We have to accept that the needed process of growth may not always be compatible with our perceived self-interest. We have to accept that borders left behind by retreating colonists do not necessarily constitute "nations", and that at a certain point people may have to work out for themselves what "nations" actually make sense, and that this process will involve a certain amount of disorder. We have to accept that creating or recognizing a government does not necessarily endow it with the capacity to govern.

We cannot build nations, or states. We may be able to help cultivate them, if we recognize that an organic growth process is involved and start working with it instead of trying to control it to achieve our own immediate goals.

[/rant]