WHEN PEACE AND DEMOCRACY WILL PREVAIL
IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE BALKANS
(DON'T HOLD YOUR BREADTH)

In these regions people have lived for thousands of years under extremely authoritarian governments (Persian, Roman, "Byzantine," Ottoman Empires) interspersed with periods of anarchy. As a result they have developed social structures and attitudes to deal with such regimes and the concepts of democracy and civic responsibility are alien to them.

Are they ever going to see the light? Maybe, but slowly. Assume that in each generation (about 30 years in length) 10% of the people become enlightened. It will take at least six generations for the majority to be enlightened. So we are talking for more than a century at the earliest.

Take Greece for example. For the last 2000 years ithas been part of the Roman, "Byzantine," or Ottoman Empires. It became an independent state around 1830 but it was quite small. Most of its territory remained under Ottoman rule until the Balkan wars (1912-13). And in 1922-24 absorbed close to two million refugees from the Ottoman lands. It is no surprise that most people view the government as an enemy and tax evasion is rampant. Some modest liberalizing reforms were enacted only in the late 1980's, about 150 years after the founding of the state. These included:
* Allowing civil marriage and recognizing such marriages performed in other countries;
* Accepting the spoken Greek as official language (instead of an archaic idiom);
* Simplifying spelling by removing certain meaningless (for modern Greek) diacritic marks.
These are not big things, they could have easily been done in 1850.

See also my review of the book "The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins" by James Angelos. (I recommend the book highly for those who wish to understand the region.)

Note: I use quotes around Byzantine because that is modern name for the Eastern Roman Empire. While most of its citizens spoke Greek, they called themselves Romans (Ρωμηοι).