Talk politics.

The way that Japan reacted to the recent earthquake inspired an OP on here recently, and it's amazing and inspiring to see the way that Japanese society has reacted so swifly and effectively to a disaster of this magnitude.

Yet, when we look at many areas of the world, they are still affected by another greater disaster - The Era of Colonialism. Let me explain a little about this.

In Ghana, for instance, they grow quite a bit of cocoa, and thiis can be turned into chocolate, and that goes for a very good price on the world market. Yet the UK has a treaty with Ghana that says that Ghana cannot set up factories to turn the raw material into finished goods, but that the cocoa must be sent to Britain where the chocolate is made.

This is just one example of the ways in which the Colonial Powers still keep thing stacked in their own favour. Ok, I think this is unfair, and I want to see Fair Trade become the norm, and that means not just helping the developing countries by buying their goods at decent prices, but even changing the rules by which international trade is conducted. The rules we use today are all written by Western countries like the UK, and are designed to secure the Western counties an unfair advantage.

But trade is but one aspact of the negative fall out of Colonial influence. In short, we have given back several peoples their countries, but have not allowed them the opportunity to develop the social traditions and culture that will enable them to become viably independent.

We have heard a lot about Libya recently, and it suprises some people that Gaddafi can have a determined hard core of followers in spite of his appalling record abroad as a sponsor of international terrorism.

Yet the fact is that Libya has a system of Universal Healthcare, it has State Sponsored education to university level for all its citizens, it has social housing programmes and a high literacy rating.

It ranks at about 51 in the UN league tables, whereas places nearby like Egypt are 88, and some nearby countries are about 110 and 120.

And the reason is that Gaddafi has spent a large amount of the oil revenues his country has on Welfare. not on handouts, mind you, but on health and education programmes. oh , it has paid off and it's a shame that he is a despot, but tis guy does qualify as a ' benevolent dictator' if you want to use the term.

The difficulty is that he has not really groomed anyone to take his place - like all dictators, he does not want to share power or let anyone else fill his shoes. And this is more or less what the british Empire and other colonial powers have done to their ex subjects.

We have pulled out of India and other such places, but left a vacuum that we filled with people willing to let us rule by proxy. ok, i am falling back into bad habits here and talking to you as though you were all Brits, so let me rephrase that:
The British rulers of their Empire declared that it was now a Commonwealth. everyone was now free from British Rule - basically, the party was over, but nobody came in their own car and the hosts were not booking the cabs to get people home.

Consequently, the world is full of places where the Colonial masters pulled out and the stopgap that appeared were miltiary dictatorships like Idi Amin in Uganda and gaddafi in Libya, once run by the Italians as I recall.

Now, I may have been born long after the era of Colonialism, and I can say I never caused the problem. However if falls upon my generation to fix this awful mess, and the traditional answers have not worked out.

One of the big problems we see in the world is the lack of a 'world policeman'. Even the USA is unwilling to shoulder the burden of the £200 million a week it will take to enforce the no fly zone in Libya. If the rebels take down Gaddaffi, I hope his replacement will still allow the socialist progammes he instituted to survive. He has treated his people a lot better than Duvallier treated the people of Haiti.

But to return to my main point - the granting of independence has not fixed the evils of colonialism. What is needed now is for the affected societies to be encouraged an allowed to develope their own culture and customs that will allow free dom of speech and democratic representation.

How we can best achieve that is open to debate , and hence my OP. If you want to simply say that the British Empire has left a bitter and devisive legacy to places like Rwanda, I'm afraid you are preaching to the choir - i don't want a diagnosis, butrather some sort of remedy.

In short, we must have a more democratic world order where citizens of the developing nations can be allowed to exercise self determination and work towards becoming self sufficient in the way that Japan has done since WW2, but how can we in the Western World, where most of us are, help to developing countries to achieve this?

Ideally , i would like to see the Arab League, the African Union and bodies like this develop the same sort of potential as the EU. And maybe bodies like the EU, the AU and NATO could replace our reliance on the USA to keep the world at peace? What say you, readers of this community?