Has anyone seen any good analysis on Africa and the problems it has coming from trying to emulate western nation-states?
Sorry to hijack slightly, but I've had a small unsubstantiated theory for a while I'd like people's thoughts on (related to Africa):
African nations have civil wars and unrest due to sudden injection of advanced tech like weapons which they have no cultural training towards. It's like giving a remote control to any piece of technology to a whole class of kindergartners. They'd wreak havoc if this sudden amazing thing is given to them.
Please blow my theory to smithereens. I am very ignorant on the topic of Africa, as JJ has shown in the past.
Now, back on topic, there is a good thread on here where JJ links to ways in which Somalia has prospered without a state/without a strong state.
Well I think that might play a part in it, but I think it has a lot to do with constant meddling by organizations such as the U.N. and the resentment that builds up from that. Not to mention the fact that the meddling often involves fomenting unrest and war through destabilizing the political structures already in existence there. That's my own theory I guess.
There's a whole ton of stuff going on. Virtually nothing the west is doing is helping.
The topic has been covered before: http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/15071.aspx
Sorry to hijack slightly, but I've had a small unsubstantiated theory for a while I'd like people's thoughts on (related to Africa): African nations have civil wars and unrest due to sudden injection of advanced tech like weapons which they have no cultural training towards. It's like giving a remote control to any piece of technology to a whole class of kindergartners. They'd wreak havoc if this sudden amazing thing is given to them. Please blow my theory to smithereens. I am very ignorant on the topic of Africa, as JJ has shown in the past.
Since it is unsubstantiated it doesn't actually need to be blown away. It is not a theory, it is a brain fart.
What sort of 'cultural training' does one need to be trusted with guns? Whatever training it is, when you consider the clusterf**k of a century that Europe just had, I can only assume that Europeans failed their finals. Two world wars anyone?
Guns are bad m'kay?
Consumariat- It's your flock that constantly argues for the relativity of cultures, norms, and values, so that "cultural training" would certainly fit into that schema.
I wasn't asking about why Africa is poor. I was asking a more specific question about the attempt to create a state and the problems, systemic and otherwise, that result from that.
What sort of 'cultural training' does one need to be trusted with guns
Guns = immediate killing without an emotional attachment to the murder.
A society needs to learn that guns being used on other people are bad. Some people don't realize this.
Just as people need to realize that taxation is aggression. It's obvious once you break it down, but people aren't used to this ideology.
Porco Rosso:Has anyone seen any good analysis on Africa and the problems it has coming from trying to emulate western nation-states?
When the US won WWII, we told the Asian nations to start import/exporting. The result is obvious today.
With Africa, the socialist economists held sway and told them to produce everything they would need in-house and not trade with the outside world. The result is as you see today, though there are signs of recovery from that foolish advice.
Beyond that, Africa has a huge cultural problem that Asia did not have. Asians generally live by buddhism and its related religious philosophies that valued hard work, learning, and adherence to law and order. Africans generally had no such cultural tradition. Asians understood property and cultivation.
I once read a fascinating article explaining in part the Asian culture's focus on hard work and long hours in terms of how hard it is to cultivate rice. Rice is so hard to raise, so sensitive to conditions, that it could never be feudally owned such as the wheat-fields of Europe. The rice farmer is a bio-chemist by comparison.
In Africa, by contrast, it's very difficult to accumulate property because of theft, by all report. The people are so poor they tear apart things to sell as scrap. When you cannot reasonably protect anything you own that's outside your immediate view, it makes it very difficult to accumulate capital and very hard to invest it.
On top of all this, we have do-gooder liberals propping up dictatorships both politically and economically, giving food to troops, which has the secondary effect of flooding the market for food and preventing agriculture from flourishing there. It's a huge mess, but I expect Africa will bloom within the next 100 years. India, Africa, and China coming into their own will make for an interesting next century :)
"Consumariat- It's your flock that constantly argues for the relativity of cultures, norms, and values, so that "cultural training" would certainly fit into that schema."
What on God's good earth are you babbling on about? Calm down dear.
"I wasn't asking about why Africa is poor."
I didn't say you were
"I was asking a more specific question about the attempt to create a state and the problems, systemic and otherwise, that result from that."
I didn't say you weren't
African history and culture bieng a hobby interest of mine - here is a quick and dirty answer as I see it, in no particular order of importance...
First, it is the subsidies. they are distorting the african agricultural markets and make it doubly hard for people to get thier feet under them.
Subsidies are also good for dictators because it takes some of the pressure off of having to run thier countries well.
Second, Communism - all the popular african "freedom" movements were supported by china cuba or russia. And thier socialist mentality has carried into the present day. Socialist ideas about how to run a country are just as bad as the subsidies. I believe this to be the biggest roadblock africa has to overcome.
Third, you have essentially stone age tribal societies brought into the modern era in less than a 100 year span. combine that with low education and the cultural uphevals that result, and you have a population very poorly prepared to participate in a modern nation state.
Fourth, All black african do not get along! In combination with #3. the african nation state boundries were drawn with virtually no reguard to traditional cultural and tribal boundaries. This is to this day a tremendous source of conflict within various african nations, and is a source of almost perpetual instability in some of them.
Fifth, non western culture. the traditional african has very different outlooks on time, wealth and "human rights" than those brought up in a western european culture.
You add to that the fact that the whites weren't exactly doing the black africans any favors, and you have the perfect recipe for eventual collapse. Especially seeing as how the communist nations were actively agitating in africa to push the west out.
But not all colonial governments were equally "bad", The south African Afrikaner regime were assholes of epic proportions. The protugese and belgians slightly less so. The various British colonial regimes were far better than either, but varied by location.
I don't think they are trying to emulate western nation-states.
It depends on where in Africa you are talking about. Africa is very diverse culturally. Easily the most diverse continent.
You have Muslims in the north and east. Various cultures everywhere else. Sudan alone counts hundreds of tribes and languages within its constitution, a few years ago. You have various types of post-colonialism: French, English, Dutch, Italian, etc. depending on where you go. I think most of them resist western ideas, because of his brutal history. It was even European leftists like Sartre and Fanon which encouraged violence in order to overturn colonialism. Which exists even now in the post-colonial period. Where people murder each other trying to solve the very problem of colonialism. The leftists didn't predict what would happen in the post-colonial period... which wasn't egalitarianism or some utopia of self-sufficiency.
I think most Arabs want a government that is based on Islam. that was their demands during the colonial period. i think, too, maybe they were effected by Arab nationalism, which necessitates a type of socialism in order to maintain national independence.
John Ess: I don't think they are trying to emulate western nation-states. It depends on where in Africa you are talking about. Africa is very diverse culturally. Easily the most diverse continent. You have Muslims in the north and east. Various cultures everywhere else. Sudan alone counts hundreds of tribes and languages within its constitution, a few years ago. You have various types of post-colonialism: French, English, Dutch, Italian, etc. depending on where you go. I think most of them resist western ideas, because of his brutal history. It was even European leftists like Sartre and Fanon which encouraged violence in order to overturn colonialism.
You have Muslims in the north and east. Various cultures everywhere else. Sudan alone counts hundreds of tribes and languages within its constitution, a few years ago. You have various types of post-colonialism: French, English, Dutch, Italian, etc. depending on where you go. I think most of them resist western ideas, because of his brutal history. It was even European leftists like Sartre and Fanon which encouraged violence in order to overturn colonialism.
Well, they were idiots then, because colonization has been a much better deal for the colonized than it was for the colonizers, at least if you were colonized by the British. Former British colonies, notably America and India, did pretty damn well in the deal, receiving large amounts of investment among other things (too bad India went socialist soon afterwards tho).
Post-colonialism's worst sin, perhaps, is convincing natives that they are culturally superior to the West, thus attempting to inoculate them against the very values that would allow them to compete in the global economy as economic actors.
John Ess:Which exists even now in the post-colonial period. Where people murder each other trying to solve the very problem of colonialism. The leftists didn't predict what would happen in the post-colonial period... which wasn't egalitarianism or some utopia of self-sufficiency.
Most african regions/cultures had never attained a level of civilization such that they developed law and stopped using violence as a method of dispute resolution within society. They've got a lot of cultural advancement to do before the violence will end. It's really sad to see.
John Ess:I think most Arabs want a government that is based on Islam. that was their demands during the colonial period. i think, too, maybe they were effected by Arab nationalism, which necessitates a type of socialism in order to maintain national independence.
Yeah, islam is a political religion.