Decolonization
Between 1945 – 1975 the Western World has abandoned the colonies. There are some who state that the withdrawal, decolonization, has happened because of the Second World War. That war has shown to the colored people of the world that the westerners are not invincible. The fast advance of the Japanese in 1941 – 1942 has proven that point. There are other commentators who place the acts of decolonization in the context of the Cold War between the West and the Communist Block, as an effort to prevent the inherent conflicts of the colonization to be exploited by the communists. There were still other, even more esoteric, explanations, but this book thinks otherwise. Its opinion is that the causes, listed above, might have been influential, but they were excuses rather than direct causes. This book claims that the cause of the decolonization was a simple fact, that the colonies were never profitable enterprises, they threatened the colonial countries with such a heavy financial burden that the colonial powers had to escape from them. This chapter analyses the real causes of the abandonment of the colonies.
Of course, in the western countries that still had colonies after the Second World War, there never was a complete agreement as for their abandonment. There were too many jingoist memories, of France of 100 millions, or of the British Empire on which the sun never sets, and they were strong incentives. The early part of the decolonization process was full of local conflicts that were doomed from the beginning. There were many such conflicts and they all failed because of a few simple reasons. The central governments in the home countries realized from the beginning that the fight against the natives in the colonies to get rid of their colonial masters, would be a fight on behalf of vested interests, mainly the members of the colonial administration and the settler community.
There were very few real interests at stake, as the results of the decolonization have so amply shown. The fight of the Dutch to regain Indonesia after the Second World War, the struggle of the French in Indo-China and North Africa, and that of the British in Malaya and Kenya, were fights on behalf of the local white community, that included the local administration as well. They were not about real interests of the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom. Still, withdrawing without fight is always seen as a national disgrace, so there had to be a fight. Luckily, not everybody was influenced by jingoistic feelings, least of all governments who were better informed about the facts on the ground, and also about the national balance sheet. The results were that the wars to retain or regain the colonies have withered on the stalk, because of lack of public support and lack of funds.
There is a very simple test to check whether those who were fighting for a continuing rule in the colonies were right or not. If they were right then the effects of the decolonization should be evident on the national balance of those countries that abandoned their colonies. In addition, those countries that had colonies should be richer than those countries that had not. Even without accurate checking, one can see that the above hypothesis is utterly incorrect.
Portugal was the oldest colonial power in Europe. Its colonies, Angola and Mozambique, were the first western colonies in Africa, and Goa and Macao, the first western colonies in Asia. Portugal was also the last of the European countries that freed her colonies. If colonies were a source of wealth and it was worth while to fight to retain that source of wealth, then Portugal should be one of the richest countries in Europe, and Switzerland and Sweden, who never had colonial possessions, should be among the poor countries in Europe, as they never had colonial wealth streaming to them. It is obviously not the case as despite their lack of colonies, Switzerland and Sweden are among the richest countries of Europe and Portugal is probably one of the poorest. Germany has lost her colonies after the First World War, she is certainly not poorer than France or the United Kingdom, who kept some of their colonies to the very end of the process of decolonization.
One can ask a simple question that if the abandonment of the colonies was not a loss, but the exact opposite, why was the need for the colonies in the beginning? In order to explain the needs and also the relative failure of the colonization, one should return to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution itself was one of the results of the demographic explosion that started in Europe in the 18th century. The demographic explosion and the Industrial Revolution created a number of needs that had to be satisfied.
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There was an urgent need to find additional living space for the excess population of Europe. That population was directed chiefly to areas of the temperate zone that were already settled by Europeans, but those territories were insufficient, or they were unable to receive large number of European immigrants in a short time. In addition to those territories there was a secondary direction of European emigrants to newly conquered territories, like French North Africa and the East African highlands. It should be noted that the most violent conflicts in the process of decolonization occurred where large number of Europeans was settled, like in Algeria and Kenya. The only place where the white settlers succeeded to postpone the decolonization by a number of years, was in Rhodesia where NCO's of the British Army were settled after the Second World War. The Republic of South Africa also belongs to that category.
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The demographic explosion caused a crisis of food supply. Agricultural output in Europe lagged behind the needs. The potato famine of Ireland in the middle of the 19th century was an eloquent illustration to the catastrophe of a crop failure crossed with a demographic explosion. There were no films at that time, otherwise they could be compared to contemporary pictures from Africa. The fact that in the year of 1900, Argentine was the 5th wealthiest country, shows how much the local food supply of Europe lagged behind the needs. Argentine was a supplier of agricultural products and its wealth was created by high prices. A century later, in 20000, Argentine sled back to the 55th position among the nations |
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People needed food but they needed work too. In order to maintain industrial jobs, there was a need for raw materials and for markets to the finished products. Both needs were powerful incentives for further colonization. |
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Last but not least, there was a question of national pride and the feeling of keeping up 'with the Joneses'. It is worth while to note that in the late thirties of the 20th century, when it was clear to everyone that colonies were not a source of profits but were rather like millstones hanging around the countries' necks, the Germans were rattling their sabers and demanding the colonies they lost after the First World War, and the Italians demanded Tunis from the French.
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Indeed, at the beginning of the process of decolonization, all the western governments were aware that it is to their advantage to leave the colonies as soon as possible. The colonies became a burden, instead of a source of profits. There was a time when the western countries placed great hopes in the colonies but very soon disenchantment and disappointment set in. They soon found out that the main problem of the colonies was labor, which was a problem of cultural gap. In order to extract raw material from the colonies, and turn them into customers for industrial products, they had to introduce their colonial subjects to money economy. It was beyond their capacity.
There were two main methods that was applied by the colonial powers. One was of the French that wanted to turn the natives into Frenchmen. That was the school of 'France of 100 millions'. It was a failure in all the French colonies, although there were some who enthusiastically became Frenchmen and left the colonies to settle in Paris. There were not many of them .In 1936 there were altogether 2000 Africans who received full French citizenship. The French hoped that at least in North Africa they will be more successful, but the cultural gap there was especially wide. The North Africans could have chosen to assimilate to the French culture but they had no inclination of doing so. In 1940, there were only 3 % of the Moroccans who went to French schools, and even in 1958 there were only 1500 Moroccans who had at least a secondary education. Of course, one could not receive a university degree without at least a certificate from a secondary school, so in 1952 in Morocco there were 25 Moroccan doctors, 11 of them Jewish.
The second method was that of the British. They saw themselves as custodians for the colonies and intended to prepare them for eventual independence. They had partial success, certainly much better than the French. One of the examples of their success is India. There the British transferred a great percentage of the economic activities into Indian hands. At the time of the independence, 83 % of banking and over 60 % of export-import and other commercial activities were in Indian hands. There was also a considerable Indian industry too. The British convinced J. N. Tata, a Parsee magnate to set up a steel industry that soon supplied the local needs. They were also successful in Ghana, not in the fields of industry and commerce, but in matters of self-government. Already in 1925 there were local elections, and since 1946 there was an African majority in the Legislative Council. Full independence was accorded in 1957.
Whatever theory they subscribed to, Africa was a dismal failure. The cultural gap was too wide; people were refused to be drawn into money economy. It was estimated that in 1950, out of 170 million people in working age in sub-Sahara Africa, only 8 millions worked for wages. The majority probably was working in the mines of South Africa, Rhodesia and the Copperbelt. They paid better wages than most and they received better productivity too.
As for agriculture, all the colonies had identical problems. African lands could be made productive, and the change from subsistence agriculture to plantation methods could be achieved, only if adequate labor, working European-style regular hours, was made available. In pre-colonial Africa the answer was slavery. The cash crops of pre-colonial Africa were produced by slave labor, supplied and exploited by African chiefs.
Slavery was not a solution for European colonies, although the forced labor system adopted by the colonies of the Belgians, and for a lesser degree by the colonies of the Portuguese and the French, was near to it. However, it did not solve the problem. It seems that no European supervisor, cruel he may be, could match the methods of African chiefs. The eventual solution for agricultural productivity was the system of the agricultural latifundia of the white settlers in the highlands of Central and Eastern Africa, and the establishment of huge commercial plantations worked by imported labor. That was the British solution.
The British were running a worldwide empire where labor or goods could travel freely. They induced Indians to work in Burma, Malaya, Fiji, South, Central and East Africa, the Caribbean and even in South America. The beautiful style of V. S. Naipul, who descended from Indians transplanted to Trinidad, and the Prime Minister of Malaysia, are all memories from that period. They were also instrumental in great internal movements in Africa, just as the Dutch in Indonesia induced the Javanese to work in other islands. They might have solved the problem of labor, but implanted the seeds of many intractable ethnic problems that are troubling the world ever since. The Javanese imperialism that rules Indonesia ever since is one of the outcomes of the internal movement of labor.
Still, that policy has solved the immediate problem of productivity. Huge commercial plantations were set up in the tropical colonies, which supplied coffee, tea, cocoa, fats and nuts, and all kinds of tropical products to the western markets from Indonesia, India and Africa. Indonesia grew cocoa and spices, Malaya supplied tin and rubber, India tea, Kenya coffee, Tanganyika sisal, Zanzibar cloves and other spices, and the white highlands supplied the whole empire with grain. In West Africa alone, Lever Brothers had a plantation of 350,000 acres that employed in 1950 about 60,000 people; and they were only one among the many.
By the end of the 19th century it was obvious to all that the colonies could be made productive but at a high price. If the aim of the colonial powers was to prepare the colonies for eventual independence, as the United Kingdom has declared, or that the colonies will be parts of a 100 million French Empire, as the French used to say, then the way of turning the colonies into productive economic units was not the way to achieve the declared aims. But then, both aims were fantasies, unsupported by any signs on the ground. The French gave full French citizenship to the 'evolues' meaning those colonial subjects who became French in language and in culture. They reached by 1936 the astrological number of 2000 colonial subjects with full French citizenship but all those 2000 citizens preferred sitting in the coffeehouses of the Left Bank to spreading French culture in Africa.
The colonial question was the favorite subject of theoreticians who produced endless books and treatises on the subject; usually without having any practical value. Classical economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo saw the colonies as an excuse to exercise monopoly. Others, like Wakefield, who wrote in his book the "View of the Art of Colonization" from 1849 that the sole aim of colonization should be to provide living space for the overcrowded European populations. This was the view of Cecil Rhodes too, accidentally of Alexander the Great too, but at least Cecil Rhodes was practical man on the spot and he had the highlands in mind. Wakefield has never left England, so he had no opportunity to check personally the suitability of the malarial swamps of Nigeria or the dry savannas of the Sudan, to fit the overcrowded Europeans.
The socialists tried to incorporate the colonies into Marxist ideology. There were many of that school who supported the view that colonization was the result of surplus capital. The summary of that theory is that industry produced too much, the poor had no means to buy and the rich could not consume it all, so the only possibility remained was to invest the money in the colonies. It was the capital export theory, made popular by J.A. Hobson in his book 'Imperialism' from 1902. According to his ideas, it was the use of government machinery by private interests, mainly capitalists, Jewish capitalists at that, to secure for them economic gains outside the country.
The idea of the conspiracy of finance capital to exploit the colonies by the assistance of the central government was attractive to the Marxists, who by then were in a deep crisis. Marx and Engels have predicted that the capitalist system must collapse because the lot of the proletariat will worsen all the time and eventually it must lead to a revolution. Marx and Engels created their thesis in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and as their writings turned into the Holy Writ of the movement, nobody dared to amend them. The German socialist, Bernstein, who dared to attempt to reform the movement, found that one does not tamper with the Holy Books without punishment. Still, even the faithful Marxists could not deny that the European proletariat was better fed, housed, clad and educated than ever before, and they were interested in many things, but a revolution was not among them. Even after the horrors of the First World War, the proletariat of the losing side was not really interested in revolutions and if there were revolutions, like in Hungary and in Bavaria, they were weak and anemic affairs, easily put down by the States.
There was an uncomfortable present as far as Marxist theories were concerned and it had to be resolved. That is what Lenin did in his pamphlet from 1916: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. According to this pamphlet, the high standard of life of Europe was achieved by transferring the European poverty to the colonies. This pamphlet has finished the ideological quandary. Colonialism was evil on at least two counts. First, they exploited the poor people of the colonies and second, that exploitation postponed the revolution of the European proletariat.
So, once the colonies will be freed, a historical wrong will be corrected and the long-awaited revolution in Europe will come. Since then, the intellectuals of Bloomsbury and the customers of Left Bank coffeshops, and Marxist professors all over the world took up the flag of anticolonialism as commanded by the High Priest of Socialism. The fact that Lenin's pamphlet was crude, incorrect and implausible, without the slightest connection to reality, did not affect them. Even now, when they had the opportunity to study the ex-colonies after decolonization, and could see in their own eyes that as far as the ordinary people in the colonies were concerned, the period of the colonization was the best period of their life, much better than before colonization and certainly better than since independence, the facts did not change their views. In today's Third World the colonial period was the time of 'the good old days'.
What were the worth of the colonies to the home countries? Judging from later developments, their net value was less than nil; meaning that their very existence cost money to the treasuries of the colonial powers. There was a simple reason for it. National calculations are not always made in terms of money. There are intangible values, like national prestige and security that cannot be expressed in money terms. However, in case of colonies, one cannot really talk about intangible values. It is true that French politicians loved to talk about 'France of 100 millions' as British politicians talked about the 'empire on which the empire never sets', but in reality those expressions did not mean much. Colonial troops were drafted to the World Wars, both of them, but they had questionable value. As far as the supply of raw materials and food was concerned, they were commercial transactions that could have been done with other independent countries, or even with colonies of other countries.
The real balance was between the cost of administering the colony, providing it with services of health, education, security and general administration and the income from taxes and duties. In this respect the balance of the colonies was negative. The cost was more than their income and that despite the laws that regulated the balance. There were a few exceptions but the general rule was that colonies cost more than they were worth. If so, then why it took so long before the colonial powers cut the umbilical cord?
There were two main reasons for continuing with the process of colonization, even when it was obvious to all that as far as return on investment was concerned, the colonies will never turn into profitable investments. None of the reasons could be expressed in ordinary, economic terms.
The first reason was that the western world needed the food supply and the raw materials supplied by the tropical world. It was explained that they were desperately in need of additional food supply to feed the ever increasing population and the raw materials that were used by the factories where that population worked. In a perfect world, the western countries could have gone to the Third World states and purchased what they needed by ordinary, commercial transactions. If they could have done so, they certainly would have, but they lived in an imperfect world, and so do we. The colonies that appeared on the maps, colored blue, red or any other color, were geographic expressions and nothing more. Congo, for example, was the territory from where the river Congo and its tributaries originated. It had no territory, no border and not a shape that western minds would be able to express and understand. They were geographic expressions and one cannot make commercial transactions with geographic expressions; one needs more than that. To make a commercial transaction, one needs a counterpart and agreed rules.
No one can make a commercial transaction with a chief of a village or a tribe. One can probably buy and sell some low quantity material, if one has the backing of an armed force that can ensure that the material you bought, or the payment you received, reaches a port and loaded on a ship. It is not a kind of arrangement on which national policy can be established, and here lies the root of the problem. European countries were nations with central governments and with established laws and practices. The areas that later became colonies were geographic expressions. It was true even for Asia, where the geographic expression was more developed on the direction of nation states, but even there the real picture was more similar to tangled, tribal alliances than to modern nation states.
The colonization could have been done in a different way. The western nations could have set up a common authority to colonize the tropical territories, exploit the natural resources and make commercial dealings with the member states. However, as it was said, we live in an imperfect world, and such a solution, desirable though it would have been, was unthinkable because of the intense rivalry between the European countries. Even in China, where the problems were rather simpler, as no one thought of direct colonization, each western nation had its separate dealing with the Chinese. There was one common western action and that was the suppression of the Boxer rebellion in 1900.
Thus, there was a real motive for the European countries to be involved in colonization. Still, the real winners of the colonial game were those countries who succeeded to remain outside the scrabble for the colonies. They received their needs through normal commercial channels. Switzerland, Austro-Hungary, Scandinavia and others did not participate in the colonies and were not the worst for it. Still, one always should remember that the act of colonization was a must for Europe and the countries that remained out of it, enjoyed the fruits of enterprises made by other countries.
The main impetus of the drive for colonies was the need for a supply of food and raw materials. That need was only partially satisfied. The fact that in 1900 Argentine was the 5th wealthiest country meant that the standard of living in Europe was still low and Argentine's products were directed to the wealthier stratum of society who could afford higher prices. A generation later the general picture has changed. The prices of Argentine's products went down because there was wider competition. Mutton from Australia and New Zealand, and beef from North America successfully competed with meat from the Argentine. The case of Argentine was brought here as an example to show that the pressure of the demographic explosion on the supply of food has abated and eventually was eliminated altogether.
The supply of food and raw materials from safe, western sources have overtaken the need. It continues ever since with the result that the standard of living of the West is constantly on the rise and so is the supply of agricultural and industrial products. As far as the real needs were concerned, the West could have abandoned the colonies before the Second World War.
It was not done because of the second reason. Colonies were unprofitable enterprises; there was a tremendous and unbridgeable cultural gap between the natives of the colonies and the home countries. Even the primary reason for the existence of the colonies could have been done by the introduction of large-scale plantations and the transfer of workers from one part of the colonial world to another.
There were a number of elements whose interests conflicted with the interests of the home countries, and those interests were able to postpone the process of decolonization. One of the elements was the colonial administration. They had a vested interest of keeping their jobs and perquisites. But they were the minority. Even so, in the colonies there was a bloated administrative staff who was keen on hanging on their jobs and if possible even to hereditarize them. In Morocco alone, there were 15,000 French officials, three times as many as the English had in India.
The biggest opposition came from the settler interests who were wealthy enough to mobilize politicians and journalists in their attempts to drum up public support. It was not a difficult job. 'Keep the flag flying' and 'don't give up' are powerful slogans in whatever language they were said.
Interestingly, the main objection came from the individual settlers and not from the owners of the commercial plantations. Lever Brothers continued to manage their plantations after independence; probably on easier terms than under colonial administration. The new governments were more amenable to 'under-the-table' persuasions than the colonial administrators. In addition, the owners of the commercial plantations were residing in the home countries and not in the colonies. The individual settlers had more to lose, so they made, or financed, the most objections.
In Morocco, between the wars, a French farmer enjoyed probably the same standard of living as farmers in the American mid-West. All Europeans there had real incomes at least a third above that of France, and at least eight times as much as the Moroccan Muslims. They were also exempt from the native administrations, which was corruption at its worst. The same applied to Algeria and Tunis too. And this for independent farmers or professionals in towns, and not for the owners of great estates.
In the British colonies there were the great landowners in the White Highlands, stretching from Rhodesia to Kenya, but not only there. In present day Zambia there are dozens, if not hundreds, abandoned or expropriated European estates, ranging from a paltry hundred-thousand acres, up to a million acres. It was even more so in the White Highlands, where million acre estates were common. They did not belong to commercial plantations, they were private property. Evelyn Waugh wrote in his book 'Remote People' (London, 1931) that in 1930 a rich British landowner at Lake Navaisha in the White Highlands has given a lovely American girl called Kiki, two or three miles of lakefront as a Christmas present. It is only too obvious that such a man came to see his wealth as a god-given right and it was difficult to convince him to part from it.
Eventually, the colonial powers reached the obvious conclusion that they have to cut their losses. There were a number of causes that brought them to it, although it seems that each colonial power had its own mixture of causes. As during colonization there was no cooperation between the colonizing powers, so it was during decolonization too. What were the main elements?
First, there was the constant reminder from the left that ownership of colonies was bad. It was indeed bad, but not because of the reasons listed by Lenin in his pamphlet. However, it was after the Second World War when University professors and intellectuals in general were still daily genuflecting before the Great Marx in the sky, and Lenin's pamphlet was still Holy Writ. The time to shout that the emperor had no clothes was still in the far future.
Of course, the public postures have to be separated from the real decisions. The French posturing was when General De Gaulle said to the African heads of state on the 12 December 1959: "As the Pilgrims of Emmaus said to the traveler: Abide with us; for it is towards evening, and the day is far spent". He offered them community with France, but most of the heads of state has chosen cooperation, and two choose outright independence. That was after a referendum in September 1959 that had the same result. The truth was that France has decided already in 1958 to cut its losses and abandon the colonies. By then, France has already lost its North African and Asian colonies.
In the case of Britain it was a similar road. It seems that the decision to abandon the African colonies was made in 1959 after the General Election and the public posturing was in MacMillan's Winds of Change speech in Cape Town on 3 February 1960. Similarly to France, by then England had no more colonies in Asia and the Middle East. Both former colonial powers wanted to give the impression that they give freedom to the colonies because of changed times. It is true that times were changed but the reasons were not the same as in the public postures. The real causes were the following:
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The first and the most important cause of the decolonization lies in Chart 2. The population of the Third World, a great part of which lived in the colonies, was 1789 millions in 1950, 4996 millions in the year 2000 and it is estimated to reach 7843 millions by the year 2050. The colonial powers were obliged to maintain a public service for administration, health, education and security. They were not on the level as the same services in the home countries, but it was incomparably better what the colonies had before colonization, and what they had after decolonization. The colonizing countries knew only too well that they had no means to maintain the same services to the increased population so they had to get out.
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The second cause was the success of the commercial plantations. They were confident that after decolonization the plantations will exist and prosper. They knew that the new rulers will not easily forgo the geese that lay the golden eggs. The prediction was correct, and most of the commercial plantations continued to operate as far as there was a need for their products.
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This brings to the third cause. Technologies change and many of the tropical products that were grown in the colonies had artificial replacements. A good example is the case of the sisal plantations in Tanganyika. Sisal is a plant of which heavy ropes are manufactured. That type of ropes that used in ships. During the Second World War, it was found that heavy ropes for ships could be manufactured from nylon. As a result there was no more sisal, no more sisal plantations in Tanganyika and it may be added, no more Tanganyika economy.
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There was one more major cause that brought the decolonization and it was certainly neither publicized nor included in the Wind of Change speech. One of the causes of the original colonization was the supply of raw materials to the industry and the provision of markets for the finished products. In simple words, it was a question of jobs for the people, whose number was constantly growing.
Between the early days of colonization when the textile mills of Manchester were crying out for cotton and markets for their printed cloths, to the period of decolonization, there were changes both in the needs for raw material and the needs for markets. Manchester has stopped producing printed Java cloths. It produced cars, trains, trucks and computers. Printed cloth was produced in India, where the wages remained low enough to allow large-scale manufacturing of textiles. If India, or some other ex-colony, received the tropical raw materials from the colonies and supplied the colonies with finished products, then why should Manchester foot the bill of financing the colonies. That bill was constantly growing because the demographic explosion has moved from the western world to the Third World. It was much simpler, and cheaper, to free the colonies, accept applause from leftist intellectuals and reap additional dividends.
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The needs of the colonies were limited: administration, health, education, etc. Internal and external securities were provided by the colonial powers. There was no need to purchase expensive toys. The process of decolonization has changed all that. Each new country needed a police, an army, airplanes, trains, trucks and luxury cars for the new rulers. Manchester has stopped producing textile goods, but it produced what the newly independent countries wanted. The process of decolonization has completely changed the balance. The money drain to maintain the local administration at an acceptable level has ceased, and in their place came new customers with a long shopping list. Grants and loans covered part of the cost of that shopping list. The rest was paid by the simple people, in the form of lowered standard of life. It is no wonder that in most of the ex-colonies, the colonial times were the 'good of days'.
The process of the decolonization has ended at about 1975. What has happened since then? The answer to this question belongs to the analysis of the present, so here only a skeleton of an answer is given. Judging by western standards the decolonization was a failure. None of the carefully drawn up constitutions survived, and the favorite political system in the ex-colonies is either a personal dictatorship on the model of the European dictatorships, usually of the fascist or communist types, or a military dictatorship. In both cases it is a kleptocracy, where the rulers and their coteries can have whatever they wish.
Looking at the political scene by eyes not biased by western political concepts, one can see that the decolonised countries have simply reverted to their pre-colonial selves. The distance between what is there now and what should have been if the constitutions would have worked, is the distance between cultures. The political failure of the process of decolonization only shows that one cannot bridge cultural gaps by artificial means.
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