Various countries but also marked by bloody civil wars

The Tunisian revolution and this immense aspiration of peoples to shake off the yoke of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world, in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, or even to the Yemen, almost had forgotten, but a new nation, and not least, is on the rise after years of bloody civil war which was more than 2.5 million deaths.

On 9 January by referendum, southern Sudan, instead, animist and Christian, spoke for her divorce from the North of the country, Muslim-majority. What constitutes a first questioning of the borders left after the independence of the countries in Africa by the colonizers. But this is not the only temptation of separation in this region of the world. Tomorrow, Côte d'Ivoire may also split in two after the presidential election and the proclamation of two Presidents, one recognized by the international community, Alassane Ouattara, and the another step, Laurent Gbagbo. A country where, there also exist complex religious and ethnic divisions.

After Sudan, can also consider the consequences of this division in what are referred to by the Africa Great Lakes - Burundi, Dr Congo, Uganda, Rwanda. Various countries, but also marked by bloody civil wars.

And elsewhere, to the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs in Paris, Ephraim Halevy, former boss of the Mossad, the intelligence services Israeli, recently emphasized the importance, beyond Africa, the division of Sudan, in his eyes, creating in the Middle East a "precedent." A region where the borders have been inherited from the disintegration of the ottoman Empire and the end of the "mandates" of "colonial" French and British.

It is certain that the first candidate to the formation of a State is Palestine, which has been recognized by over 100 countries, including recently by the Brazil and the Argentina. The partition plan, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, to ancient Palestine agent in two States, one Jewish and the other Arab, is not of 1947 But what would the borders today As if Israel is resigned to the divorce of the Palestinians, the Israeli State wants to retain a portion of its conquests of after-1967 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And this is not the only question mark for a Palestinian nation divided into two parts, Gaza and the West Bank, without territorial continuity and marked by the antagonism of two dominant movements, Fatah and Hamas, close to the civil war. Despite these difficulties, it is not conceivable that the status quo current can last so that a large part of the Palestinian population is trapped in the Gaza Strip and still has a high population growth.

Eight years after the American and British invasion, the Iraq is also still threatened with a rupture between the more and more autonomous province of Kurdistan and the rest of the country. With all the consequences this could have in Turkish Kurdistan, and for the sharing of oil wealth.

Beyond, in Central Asia, the Afghanistan war is far from over. And who knows if this conflict will not tomorrow create a Pashtunistan This spectrum that since the establishment of the "Durand line" at the end of the 19th century between the Afghanistan of the Empire of the Indies, plane always between the Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Certainly, it is not there and the area on the Pakistan side is now a sanctuary for the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani fundamentalists. But that will be after the starting 2014, and will create a dangerous vacuum

Similarly, the trends in Kashmir to the separation of the India are strong. And, tomorrow, what would be the fate of Tibet or other Chinese regions if a democratic power was installed in Beijing

Since the implosion of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the world saw the multiplication of States or at least claims to autonomy, and not to the grouping, as might the be expected German unification. In 1950, there were 82 sovereign States. Today, the UN has 192 members. A figure that does not include the self-proclaimed States or not recognized by the entire international community, such as Kosovo or two ancient enclaves of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

And the list of States in becoming and temptations to regional autonomy is long. Because Europe is not spared by this tendency to divorce. As the Spain, where Catalonia has already obtained a degree of autonomy from Madrid and sees itself as a "nation". Even the Italy, in a very different register, where the separatist temptations of the leaders of the "Padania" (the plain of the Po to the North) are expressed in broad daylight. There are various reasons for divorce other entity of a country, from one region to another: they range from violent region domination, as was the case in the Sudan, to the pure tax claim - as is the case in Italy where rich Northern taxpayers refusing to pay for the Mezzogiorno-, passing through the defence of the rights of a minority or Community claims on natural resources. But this fragmentation, which grows to redraw borders, helping to create instability. Even if the claim to independence is fully justified as in southern Sudan and the status quo of the second half of the 20th century is necessarily more tenable than the yoke of dictators of the past.