--- tfast <tfast at yorku.ca> wrote:
>
> ethnicization of Ethiopian politics today. In short
> you are conducting a
> mind experiment which has been conducted tried and
> failed.
[Ws:] Perhaps they failed because they were applied in a half-assed way, without subduing the tribal warlords the way Stalin subdued the local centers of oppostion in USSR and witjhout delivering economic goods the Soviet state did.
I think that criticism hinges on an element that is rather tangential to my argument but do not address its essence: that intra-state strife, resulting from insuffcient hegemony of African states, is a major obstacle to economic development.
As I siad time and again, I have no idea how to solve this problem. I just proposed a thought experiment to highlight the problem itself by the means of contrasting it with its hypothetical opposite. I stated clearly that this was not a realistic solution.
Perhaps such solution does not exist. Perhpas we will the current situation continue in the foreseable future. Perhpas the strife will continye, misery will increase, and "first world" countries will keep lamenting, passing lofty resolutions, and proposing symbolic band-aid measures suggested by changing policy fads until the whole region burns itself out, like Chernobyl. If I were forced to bet on the most likely development in Africa, I would probaly bet on the latter.
To reiterate, I am not saying that pan-African federalism can be implemented as a realistic solution to current problems. All that i am saying is that the anti-thesis of that federalism - artificially created states with insuffcient internal hegemony and torn apart by interanl conflicts is the problem. And it is quite possible that this problem has no solution in the foreseable future.
Wojtek
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