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I'd offer a much easier explanation! Middle East only became a laggard when it became wholly owned by Ottoman Empire. It meant that when Europe transformed into unitary nation-states where unity of blood, religion, language, and culture defined what the state was (the only exception being Roma and Jews that lived everywhere and were kicked around at the first opportunity), nothing like that happened there because Ottoman Empire was well, an empire - it didn't care about ethnicities. As a result, once it collapsed in 1921, we got a bunch of places that had nothing intrinsic to hold them together - places randomly drawn on the map by dudes in top hats somewhere in Paris and London, populated by a multitude of peoples holding a great variety of sectarian beliefs (not just Sunni vs Shia, but also different schools of those, some of those like Druze, becoming like ethnicities of their own). Because there is no internal cohesion - people living there are well, random people speaking random languages with random faith and having nothing to do with one another - there is either a hard power that forces them into obedience (e.g. Syria under Assad the Elder), in which case there is order, but no true progress - or not even that, in which case well, there is endless bloody chaos. Only solution here is slow, gradual genocide of "others" until a semblance of an individual ethnicity defining a state, is formed. In Europe it took centuries and culminated in World Wars. Eastern Europe only became truly unblocked in its progress after the end of Communism, predated by the ethnic purges orchestrated by victorious Allies ("move all Poles to Poland, all Germans to Germany, etc") in late 1940s. Before WWII, Eastern Europe states resembled modern Middle East with ethnic strife preventing development and forcing those countries either into hard-power authoritarianism (Poland), or dysfunction (First Czechoslovak Republic). Ethnic cleansing, i believe, is deemed "bad" for the only reason: it gives a nation that executed it, a massive competitive advantage, so those who did it a long time ago, strive to prevent others from doing the same. |