THE FUTURE OF QUASI-STATES

Will quasi-states continue to be a major feature of the international landscape in the decades to come as they have been in the past thirty years? Speculation about what might be is a hazardous enterprise and often avoided by scholars who perhaps like myself find it hard enough to grasp what is and what has been. There nevertheless can be value in contemplating the future of quasi-states if only to draw some conclusions from the foregoing analysis. Such an exercise might even be timely at the start of the last decade of the twentieth century when significant and perhaps momentous changes affecting East–West relations are underway.

The prospects for quasi-states hinge generally on two things: whether they develop to the point of no longer depending on the negative sovereignty game, and if they do not whether it will continue to be possible to play that game in the future. The development outlook for quasi-states is of course extremely difficult to establish owing to the particular circumstances of each country which vary enormously. The twentieth century already has witnessed profound international changes and not least the independence of the Third World and so we ought not to rule out the possibility of further change. We should expect some Third World countries to achieve significant developmental breakthroughs as the NICs recently have. Democratization is also a possibility.