A Colonialist Future?

I had written just over a year ago about the passing of the torch of African exploitation from the West to China, and I’m pleased to see that this topic is once again in the headlines.

This has gotten me thinking once again about many of the positive aspects of colonialism, and the possibility that we will need to return to an era which we thought was gone forever.

My first thought is this: However much a colonial power may be exploitative, they will protect their territory from exploitation by other powers. As much of Africa stands now, countries are being exploited by domestic forces, neighbours, far away countries and corporations. If there is only a single exploiting power, that power also has incentives to invest in infrastructure and education in order to make their exploitation easier. When many factions seek to exploit their incentives are much more short term. Would it not be better in places where governance is weak or non existent to simply revert to a colony, or at least a system of government with final accountability to a wealthy and stable power? If the developing world wants aid, why shouldn’t we insist on having it spent as we see fit? How many decades of failure does it take for people to start seriously considering these questions.

If we look to our current neo-colonial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the picture comes much more into focus. In Iraq, troops and money have solved a great deal of the post occupation problems, but Iraq has a history of statehood, education, and governance ability. On the other hand, Afghanistan has none of that tradition. We are having to build institutions and governance from scratch. Is it really feasible to try and put Afghans in those positions right away? Based on the corruption that seems endemic in the Afghan government, the answer seems to be a resounding no.

Unfortunately, the problem of failed states is not confined to Afghanistan. What about Somalia, or the Congo? What hope do they have of emerging as prosperous societies without strong and prolonged outside intervention? And that’s just the start. So much of the developing world is growing at low or negative rates (See Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion) of between -0.5% and 0.5% per year. With other emerging economies such as China and India growing in excess of 5% per year, the gulf between the poor and the poorest is widening at an increasing rate. How happy will the people in the low growth countries be when they see much of the rest of the world getting rich while they stay poor?

This in my mind sets the stage for something most people in the West are not prepared to think about. In the end, we may have to spend considerable resources in terms of both GDP and lives of our young people in order to build stable and prosperous societies in the poorest parts of the world. As much as I believe in self government, you can’t eat or live in freedom, and malaria doesn’t seem to discriminate between democracies and tyrannies.
What is even more mind blowing is that most of the worse off countries are tyrannies, and I think it’s walking a pretty morally dubious line to say that a native dictator is acceptable, while a foreign power acting in its enlightened self interest is not.