On July 9, the world welcomed the independence of South Sudan
and marked one of the more significant events in international
geopolitics -- the creation of a new country. If, as expected,
the new state is admitted for U.N. membership this week, it will
become the body's 193rd member. South Sudan's independence has
caused some excited announcements that we are witnessing a "wave
of self-determination" in the world, as Parag Khanna put it on
this website in January. With entities like Palestine, South
Ossetia, Somaliland, and Darfur pushing for sovereignty, Khanna
writes, "Within a few decades, we could easily have 300 states
in the world." Writing at the Atlantic, journalist G. Pascal
Zachary sees South Sudanese independence as evidence that "the
process of Africans inventing and discovering their own
political boundaries has finally begun, after some 50 years of
waiting." But the fact is, rather than an age of "cartographic
stress," as Khanna has put it, the current era is a relatively
stable one in terms of