Russell: Nobody can disagree with this. There are however never any guarantees of a positive outcome to national liberation struggle. Most to date were in fact failures. Do we therefore repudiate the whole project? Got any better ideas?
ws:] If it does not, or even if it turns back the clock of social progress and worsens the quality of life, national liberation is unworthy and reactionary.
Russell: Who makes this judgement? Unfortunately setting impossible preconditions for supporting foreign liberation struggles has often been a pretext for instead supporting - or at least tolerating - imperial adventures around the world. The argument runs: "We would support the right to national liberation but not in this case as the politics of the liberation movement are too reactionary for our tastes (they oppress women/are religious fundamentalists/aren't sufficiently socialist/whatever). Instead we're forced - more in sorrow than in anger - to go along with our own country's civilising mission in X country".
ws:] By the same token, if a foreign domination leads to social progress and better quality of life for most people - it is a worthy pursuit.
Russell: National liberation/foreign domination - it's all the same to Woj. Let's have your list of all those countries that benefited thanks to colonial domination/foreign intervention. I know of none in Africa. We do however have a bunch of disaster areas that are the direct consequence of western meddling.
[WS:] You seem to assume that uncertainty about the future outcome should be resolved in favor of national liberation projects. That is, you seem to argue that "we do not know for sure if such a project can produce better social conditions, but let's give it a chance."
This is a fair argument, but I am not so gung ho about it. I am more inclined to carefully examine the probability of a specific national project to deliver social progress. It is a very difficult intellectual and often dangerous task, as it requires questioning the political rhetoric of such projects and calls for prudence and reason in time of collective euphoria.
I experienced that once in my life - during the formation of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1979/1980. After being initially swept by a collective euphoria, I started looking critically at the undemocratic or otherwise questionable practices of the movement activist. At that point, I was told to toe-in the line or get the fuck out. I got the fuck out.
As to your second point, the benefits of foreign domination - this is an ideologically charged issue that is very difficult to argue rationally not only because of its ideological implications, but because it is very difficult to find a counterfactual. That is, to make a judgment whether foreign domination was better or worse than its absence one would have to compare a condition with foreign domination present to one with a foreign domination absent, everything else being equal. It is sometimes possible, but extremely difficult and always hypothetical, and thus easy to dismiss if the conclusions do not fit ideological expectations.
I tend to believe that the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe had generally a positive effect on that region, but the fundamental difficulty of that position is the specification of the alternative condition to which that domination could be compared. The absence of Soviet domination could mean several very different things - from the Balkanization of the region, to Nazi occupation, to a local hegemony (e.g. by Poland, given its relatively large size, or Hungary), and to falling into the Western Europe orbit. The first two alternatives would almost certainly be worse off than the Soviet domination, but the local hegemony or Western European domination could take several different forms, some of which would be better than other. And then there is the issue which of these alternatives would most likely to occur in the absence of Soviet domination.
The same reasoning can be applied to Africa. It is extremely difficult to find alternative conditions t which various and very different colonial rules (Arab, British, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese) could be compared. What makes it even more difficult is that, given the artificiality of many African states, the colonial domination mentioned above is but one form of foreign domination - the other forms being the domination of one ethnic groups over other within the boundaries of these artificially created states (e.g. Hutu vs. Tootsie in Rwanda.)
Under these circumstances, it is much easier to go with the nationalistic euphoria and summarily condemn "foreigners" for all the ills and problems facing a particular society. Every nation does that, the US leading the way, as demonstrated inter alia by the current immigration debate.
PS. I agree that elimination of some real or manufactured social ill has often been a casus belli and a pretext for an occupation, but the same can be said about national sovereignty project (cf. during the breakup of the Soviet Union). In each case, we are talking about abuses and disingenuous propagandistic appeals. Such cases are inconclusive for the argument being considered here for the reason that a corrupt application of a principle (e.g. socialism by Stalin, or freedom of speech by fascist instigators) does not reflect on the principle itself.
Wojtek