Artificial colonial states acquire real identity through self-interested ruling elites

Evidence

Yet these states, artificial and alien as they may have been, nevertheless ac­ quired reality. Around each one of them there grew up a ganglion of interests, careers and loyalties and, most important of all, a ruling and administering e´lite which made the state an effective unit—unwilling to surrender or share power or control and increasingly conscious of a separate identity and purpose. This was already clear in the disunity of the Arab states invading Palestine in 1948, even at the moment of danger. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 925

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: A compact paradigm for why postcolonial nations harden: not affection but the self-preserving interests of their ruling elites, who become the unintended builders of national identity. Resists one-sentence summary and applies far beyond the Middle East.
• XREF: Connects to Ernest Gellner on nationalism as a product of elites, and to the observation elsewhere that states as instruments generate the loyalties they were not designed to deserve.
• ADDENDUM: Tangent to the grafting metaphor — artificial constructs that take root and become real; states ‘grafted’ onto map lines that then grow actual roots through elite interests.

Related

• Artificially drawn Arab states acquired real solidity through entrenched elites (similarity 0.89)