Thursday, April 30, 2009

Fourth World Nations-what are they?

Until last Tuesday I have never even heard of fourth world countries-which apparently are nations unrecognized as states and are recognized as being both marginalized and impoverished-according to wikipedia which further defines fourth world nations by "the non-recognition or exclusion of often ethnically or religiously defined groups from the political and economic world system. Examples of Fourth World nations include the Roma worldwide, pre-WWI Ashkenazi in the region of the Pale of Settlement, Palestinians and Kurds in the Middle East, many Native American/First Nations groups throughout the Americas and many indigenous Africans and Asians."

Here is an article from http://www.tiraspoltimes.com/node/826 which I'll also include here as well.

The Fourth World: Invisible countries
The world has more than 200 countries. But, as John Moynihan points out in this guest opinion, not all of them are recognized: Half a dozen or so are left out in the cold. They are the fourth world. The invisible countries.By John Moynihan, 11/May/2007
A hundred years ago, Poland - one of the largest countries in Europe - did not exist. At the time, Poland had not existed for more than a century. Its borders had been removed from the maps in 1795, when it was partitioned among Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Poland only reappeared in 1918, thanks to postwar agreements between the Great Powers. And yet, to the Poles, Poland had always been entirely real.
Today, the United Nations has 192 countries as full-fledged member states. Among them are countries that have lasted for centuries, and there are countries recognized as recently as two years ago. And one, Montenegro, isn't even a year old.
Poland, which didn't exist a hundred years ago, is actually a veteran among UN members. The vast majority are even younger than Poland: More than two-thirds of all countries in the United Nations are less than fifty years old.
What's not on the list are the states that are waiting to be born. Scots, Palestinians, Transnistrians, Abkhazians, and many more, are all patiently (and not so patiently, sometimes) anticipating the day when their nations will become fully recognized states. Some of them, like Transnistria, already have their countries - officially called the Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublica, or PMR for short, Transnistria was founded in 1990 and has governed itself independently ever since. Transnistria has the general qualifications required for statehood (a permanent population, defined territory, government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states). For political reasons, the rest of the world prefers to think of it - incorrectly, at least for the past 17 years - as a part of Moldova.
Others, like the Palestinians or the Kosovars, are not so far ahead on the road to statehood. But what they all have in common is a burning desire for independence. They are peoples with common cultures, or histories, or languages, who seek to rule themselves entirely, to govern and legislate and tax and trade independently, to define their own borders and exercise power over who may cross those lines. This is the Fourth World: the stateless and the unrecognized.
The final arbiter of these notions, of course, is power. There is little complexity, in the end, to the question of how a state is made: the powerful's interests trump the powerless's sovereignty. There are conceptual arguments about what a state really is, but for most of the stateless, the proof is in the lines on the ground. In Georgia, along the Black Sea, the ancient Abkhaz nation currently fighting for independence dates the original sketching of its own lines to tribes back almost as far as the sixth century BC.
“Amazing Abkhazia!” as the Russian writer Isaac Babel called it, and later, “the fertile and enchanted garden,” was sovereign by the eighth century and saw its independence live, die, and be reborn over and over until the 20th century, when it became subject to Soviet Georgia. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Abkhazia declared its independence again. “But will Georgia give up Abkhazia?” asked the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski at the time. “There are four million Georgians and only 100,000 Abkhazians. It is easy to predict the chances.”
Neither Georgia nor the United Nations has agreed to recognize the Abkhazian notion as a thing. War between the Abkhazians and the Georgians began in 1992 and lasted through 1993, with sporadic violence following; in August 2004, the Georgian coast guard fired on a vessel heading for Abkhazia, and hardline President Mikhail Saakashvili - a militant hawk, and a darling of Washington - announced that Georgia would sink all unauthorized ships headed for the breakaway nation's shores. Abkhazia, unsurprisingly, broke off peace talks that were being overseen by the UN.
Georgian historians deny Abkhazia's history; Abkhazians counter by pointing out the historical Soviet and Georgian efforts to erase it from the earth. Indeed, Abkhazians possess a history, a culture, an ethnicity, and a language (one with 68 consonants, many of which can communicate whole concepts, and sounds including a trill and a buzz); they also have a land that they know belongs to them. Fifteen years ago, Abkhazia established its own government, with the force of more than a thousand years of history behind it. But who will recognize it? And does it even matter if no one ever does? Fact is, the actual physical existence of a nation requires little besides the nation's belief in its own existence.
There is little agreement on how to treat the invisible. So it is hardly any wonder, then, that the invisible feel that to be seen, they must make a noise.


So apparently not only are these nations extremely poor and practically indigenous and ancient-they are also invisible and unrecognized as states.

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