I don’t expect from Andrew Harding and the BBC’s international editor to add a bit of historical context, mainly the working of political economy of the 200 years that emerged in Western Europe then imposed on the rest of the world. “ After all, Western nations have, for decades, devoted significant energy and cash towards supporting health services, businesses and governments across the continent.” Putting aside the difference between nation and state and who really did what they did in particular contexts and conjunctures, the obvious is that why then Africa is still in a dire situation. The explanation, people like Harding would like us to put forward, is the same we have heard hundreds of times before: ‘It is their fault, those Africans’, ‘it is in their culture’, ‘they don’t know how to implement the right capitalism’… Harding would be more satisfied if he added NGOs, ‘aid’, ‘free market’, ‘human rights’, etc. Note also how in the title both China and Russia already have one uni
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51