Is it time to seriously consider Colonialism again?

Great Debates
1

I’m sure most of you are at least peripherally aware of the chaos engulfing the tiny nation of East Timor, and the fact that Australia, NZ, Malaysia, and Portugal have had to deploy military or police units to the country to try and restore order.

The Solomon Islands have similarly been a hotbed of problems in recent years, and Papua New Guinea has pretty well been considered a write-off since Australia left in the 1975- although they’ve managed to avoid an all-out civil war, for now.

Much of Africa has been in perpetual civil war or unrest since the mid-60s (or so it seems), and the more I read the newspaper and listen to the news, the more I think there is a place for Colonialism in the modern world, if we can get past the “OMG COLONIES IS T3H BAD!1!!1!” aspect, so to speak.

I’m well aware that the geopolitical situations surrounding the end of the colonial period in the mid-60s are varied and complicated, and that the Colonies weren’t always well treated by the motherland.

But let’s say it’s decided to have another go at it- say, Australia decides that East Timor and the Solomon Islands can’t be trusted to look after their own countries, and send in the troops, annexing them and making them Territories of Australia.

Sounds bad, right? Doesn’t sound like a particularly nice thing to do, for a lot of people.

However, let’s say that once they’re incorporated as part of Australia, all citizens there get Australian citizenship (and the rights and responsibilities thereof), and Australia basically treats East Timor and the Solomon Islands as any other part of Australia with regards to Federal funding, representation in Parliament, etc etc.

Would this really be a bad thing? I say no, it wouldn’t. I can only see benefits for everyone- I mean, we’ve got to spend a fortune stationing troops in these places, so we may as well say “Congratulations, you just became part of the Commonwealth of Australia” in the process.

I realise a lot of people will disagree with me (as is their right!), and obviously it won’t work for all failed states (I really can’t see the Italians or the British deciding to re-colonise Somalia, for example), but I honestly think the general idea has merit.

And it’s not just because I’d like to go Big Game Hunting in Rhodesia, either. :smiley:

2

The Dutch still have a colony, the Dutch Antilles. They conform to the picture you ketch, Martini Enfield. The Dutch Antilles is in fact a Third World country under the rule of The Netherlands, a Western country.

On the whole, I’d say that the Antilles are a constant headache for us. It’s also a money-pit. The money comes from the Dutch government, as well as from Antillians in the Netherlands supporting their relatives overseas.

In return, the Antilles provide us with a steady trickle of mal-adjusted Antillan kids flying in with a Dutch passport, smuggling drugs into the Netherlands and adding to the already troublesome group of Antillian youth criminals.

OTOH, I’m not sure how the Antillians would look if the Dutch tossed them their independence. We occasionally threaten to do so. :slight_smile: I guess they’d become just like any other Caribbean island in the regio. A well-meaning but slightly incompetent government, prone to corruption, I guess.

The best islands probably are run by big hotel-resorts. They won’t stand for any unrest, corruption, as that would be bad for business; they’ll keep nature at least visibly intact; and they provide jobs.

3

I have no idea why this keeps popping up, but no, it would not be a good idea. People resent being told what to do by outsiders (ref. Iraq), and what you’re proposing isn’t colonisation, it’s territorial annexation.
There are several problems with it, but a couple straight off the bat, using you Aussie-East Timor example:
How are you going to enforce compliance? You’ll have to kill those E-Timorians who see Aussie troops as invaders rather than strew flowers in your path (again, see Iraq). How well is that going to go down with other, initally more peaceful, E-Ts?
How are you going to get people at home to go along with it? What’s the real benefit for Australians? Seems to me the new territories will be a drain on resources for a while, as opposition will have to be fought, and new infrastucture built so those new Aussie citizens can enjoy all the benefits of their helpful brethren.

Look, this is a bad idea. Colonization was a bad idea to start off, and repeating a mistake isn’t any better.

The best thing for all concerned, is for all outside involvement to end, and for people to work things out for themselves. If no-one bought blood diamonds, bribed govt. officals to get their “public works” pork projects built, or ran parts of Africa as their own little fiefdoms(Shell Oil in Nigeria, for instance), there’d be a lot less civil war. If foreign govts stopped supplying tinpot dictators with weapons and aid that can be used as a weapon, those civil wars would end a lot sooner, with a lot less dragging-out. While the favourite weapon of the civil wars here seem to be the machete, I can guarantee that less guns, tanks, helis etc, would help too.

4

Besides which, your OP seems to assume that these places have managed to descend into chaos entirely on their own and need the firm hand of European civilization to get them back on track. What it ignores is that the very reason some of these places have descended into anarchy and civil war generally stems from the original colonialism.

5

I thought the problem with East Timor is that larger powers are actively trying to colonize it.

After being invaded by the Portugese and held as a colony, East Timor was invaded by Indonesia, a huge regional power, in 1975. After the UN forced Indonesia to relinquish ET, Indonesian meddling, intended to keep ET under Indonesian control, resulted in a near-civil-war level of unrest.

From Wikipedia:

It seems pretty likely that all that was deliberately stirred up by Indonesia to mainain control…and pretty silly, therefore, to use it as an argument FOR colonialism.

Sailboat

6

Be that as it may, you can’t undo the past- and yes, I do take the view that many of these places have descended into anarchy and civil war stemming from the original colonialists… because the natives told the Europeans to clear off, and they did.

I agree that a lot of these African civil wars wouldn’t last nearly as long if people stopped flogging tanks, helicopters, and machine guns to corrupt governments- but a lot of the stuff I’ve seen on TV show people armed with Soviet Russian or Chinese supplied AK-47s, or even bolt action Mausers and Lee-Enfields left over from WWI/WWII.

Ultimately, I reckon there are some countries that will never be able to stand on their own two feet, and East Timor is one of them. They’re either going to end up as part of Indonesia again, or they’re going to have to become a UN Trust Territory or a protectorate of Australia or something. There’s also a huge amount of Natural Gas and possibly Oil in Timorese territorial waters, which someone with a larger military is going to eventually want…

7

Incredible. The “OMG COLONIES IS T3H BAD!1!!1!” thing is largely in place because colonization is bad! What next, getting over the “slavery is bad” or “murdering someone to take their wallet is bad” thing?

The best approach is to let things be, by removing explicit or implicit support for undemocratic institutions. It will probably take a crazy amount of time, but as has already been said in this thread, people do not like being told what to do by external forces.

What you are suggesting would probably lead to more destability, for both the occupier country and the occupied country. I would imagine a horrible level of violence in the occupied country as many people would try fight off the new oppressors and a huge flood of displaced refugees in the occupier country, now that they are citizens and are free to travel (don’t get me wrong, I love free travel and find the idea of artificial borders preventing people from moving freely to be morally suspect, but realise that it is not practical to change this overnight).

8

“In the end we must realize that it is better to let the Arabs continue making their own mistakes than to force them to stop making mistakes.”

This was said by Anthony Nutting, former British member of Parliment, diplomat, and historian. While he focused on the Arab world, his wisdom applies to the rest of the third world as well.

We need to abandon the idea that a small ruling elite of Westerners can fix all of the problems in third-world countries. That idea was tried for the better part of a century, and it failed. The colonial powers who ruled Africa and most of Asia from the late 1800’s to the mid 1900’s did a miserable job. They failed to create modern economies, failed to construct important infrastructure. More importantly, they failed to see the big picture. They didn’t understand how local beliefs, religion, and social structure would interact with the policies of western overlords. All available evidence is that a new colonialism would merely repeat the same mistakes. I see no evidence that modern westerners understand these issues better now than fifty years ago.

9

Don’t forget that the original European colonial imperialism was driven by, among other things, the profit motive. The colonies were expected to enrich the people, or at least the ruling elite, of the metropole, and usually they did. But times and economic circumstances have changed. How is Australia supposed to make any money off East Timor?

10

We are doing that in the mid east right now. The occupation and take over of the oil in Iraq is not for the benefit of Iraqiis.We are building a series of permanent bases that run down the oil lines.
PS Iran has oil.

11

Like I said, it’s chock-full of natural gas and oil, for a start. We’re not exactly making any money by being there now stopping the natives from killing each other, either. And from the looks of it, we’re going to be there for a while.

Oh, I know it’s simple Armchair Politics on my part, but still- the way I see it, either they want our help, in which case we should stay permanently, or they don’t- in which case their country can collapse into anarchy and be taken over by someone bigger anyway. Either way it’s lose/lose, unless they get themselves sorted out, IMO.

12

Whether or not it would work would depend entirely on the level of commitment, and more importantly the goal, of the ‘protecting’ nation.

If the goal is to encourage the virulent spread of Democracy, then no, colonization isn’t the answer. A better solution would be to treat it like a forest fire: isolate the fuel, let it burn itself out and let it establish its own balance.

If the goal is to end individual suffering and attrocities, then colonization is not going to be enough. Tremendous amounts of personal freedom, what some of us consider requisite to being human, will need to be stripped from everyone in the troubled region. Really the only way to do this is to institute mandatory slavery for the entire population. Maybe all the thralls could be treated humanely and with a good deal of faux respect, but by removing their ability to hack each other to pieces with a machete you have also removed the essence of their humanity.

I’m not saying that slavery is necessarily a bad thing, but it is certainly dehumanizing.

13

I don’t get it. Colonialism is what got everyone in this mess in the first place. Off all the things that have been tried and proven “bad ideas”, Colonialism is at the top of that list.

The problem is that nothing if foreign policy has easily understood long-term effects. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy. Today’s stable nation is tomorrow’s civil war. So we can’t really do much to make the future better, because we have no idea what our actions will actually cause.

Secondly, colonialzation is war. It’s war to begin, it’s war to maintain. It’s war to end. We look at the British Empire and see it’s height, but we don’t see the literally centureies of warfare that led to that. In modern times, that means a lot of dead people, including a lot of dead Americans.

14

IMHO the main problem with any form of annexation lies in the real or percieved loss of providence and jurisdiction. The current Middle East conflicts (Iraq, Israel, in a lesser degree Afghanistan) illustrate this.

Country A is run by a despot of a leader, country B rushes in with the cavalry to remove said despot, country A provides resistance, not out of loyalty to the former regime, but simply out of concern for the risk of loss of providence and jurisdiction.

This cause is amplified when two or more historical adversaries (Muslims, Jews, Christians) are involved. For example, I do not believe that if the US were to invade Cuba to depose Castro , there would be the level of insurgency seen in Iraq. Both countries have similar western belief systems and any residual rebellion would quickly be subdued. However, if the base population were to resist any real or perceived loss of providence and jurisdiction, there would eventually be a new rebellion.

I agree with half of what **Inigo Montoya[\B] said. The best thing to do would be to control the damage and let the fires burn out, then find out from the survivors what they would want to do. I’m not sure that total annexation/slavery would accomplish much other than to further fuel rebellion.

15

Martini, you still haven’t addressed either of the problems I’ve raised.

16

Aw…properly insituted and administered any number of thralls can be successfully contained and controlled. It ain’t necessarily pretty, but the unchecked butchery stops. :wink:

17

True, unfortunately popular opinion (in both the occupied territory and host country) tends to decline at about the same rate that methods of enforcement approach levels equivalent to the methods of the previous institution. We can stab them, shoot them, smack them around a bit or burn them alive, but 5 minutes alone with a car generator and some box springs and suddenly “We’re” the bad guys. :rolleyes:

18

Here’s the biggest problem right here. If you take them over by force, you can’t give them the same rights and freedoms and funding or they’ll just use it against you. It would be like enforcing the NRA’s vision of the American Second Amendment in Iraq; “What are you doing with those insurgents, Corporal ? You know you can’t take away their guns !”

I can see only one way that annexing one of these countries might work; if there was a vote showing majority public support in the annexed country before the annexation. Of course, convince a country of people to give up their sovereignty willingly is hard, but sometimes the “hard” way is the only practical way. Conquest looks easier, but the failure of colonialism ( and Iraq, for that matter ) shows that it’s only easier from a shortsighted perspective.

19

This kind of thinking depresses me, because it makes me think people prefer familiar, failed ideas to new ones. Hundreds of years of colonialism and exploitation screwed these places and people up in a terrible way - and then, because things haven’t been fixed in the last couple of decades, we get “maybe colonialism is the answer?” :confused: I’ve heard of history repeating itself, but how the fuck can the cause of the problem be the solution to the problem?

20

Beer