this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@kbin.social 23 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (19 children)

There's a lot but it mainly comes down to how Europeans were more developed than the rest of the world due to their frequent wars, so when they went to colonize the world nobody stood a chance. And since colonialism and the subsequent horrible decolonization messed up those countries, we get the state of the world today.

To be more specific, colonialism basically turned affected countries into oversized plantations run by foreigners. Any political development that was already there went out the window, and of course no more could be made. Then you got decolonization, where you had countries either being fought off (like France) or packing their bags and leaving (like the British). This created massive power vacuums, and when you have power vacuums you get power struggles and dictatorships and from there we see the world's current state. On the other hand you have Botswana, where they actually had a native ruler class who could rule when the British left. They were an occupied country, not an oversized plantation, so they're virtually one of the best places to be in Africa. Also specifically in Africa colonies would have their borders drawn with no care for the relationship between the people living there, and occasionally they'd actively set them up for failure by putting rival ethnic groups together.

And of course you have neo-colonialism and shit that even now continue to hold back African development.

TL;DR: Europeans came, turned everything into a plantation, then when they left the plantation collapsed and either a dictator came or things returned to survival for the fittest which then produced war-torn dictatorships. These countries should be able to become decent countries with time, and there are many examples of that happening, but the West is still preventing it in many places. See: France in Africa, cold war-era US in Latin America.

Of course we can get into infrastructure and education and all that, but all these things have their roots in the simple fact that these countries had a horrible start (whether a civil war or a dictatorship) and in many cases had to build states from scratch, and in politics a bad start can cost you decades.

[–] Delphia@lemmy.world 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Also its created a cyclical problem. (And Im going to do a terrible job of explaining this but I hope people can grasp what I'm on about.)

Getting any kind of significant change going in a "developing" nation requires MASSIVE investment that they cant afford, which requires investment from mega-multinationals or foreign nations, who then (either rightly or not) have to tread super carefully because it looks like they are trying to buy the country by proxy, which means they dont want to make the super-mega investments because one little leadership change and a little nationalisation makes their investment worthless.

Basically you need either a super benevolent form of colonialism or super ethical capitalism to get the ball rolling without just repeating the mistakes of the past.

[–] Arxir@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] Delphia@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

Ethical in the sense of developing a functional economy you can bleed in the long term as opposed to short term cut-throat exploitation.

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