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Comment by redgrange | Hacker News Reader

European countries created African country borders without an understanding (or care) of the culture and relationships/feuds between a whole continent of people. They put these people together in countries and flipped all of that long history upside down.

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I don’t want to diminish the impact of European colonialism, but that’s not really actionable in 2020. Bangladesh, where I’m from, was stripped of capital by the British Empire. Okay, now what? How does that fix the weak rule of law, the political patronage, etc? And it’s not like European countries don’t have a long history of sectarian and ethnic warfare.

It is actionable, the powers that be are simply averse to acting on it. I will never understand the drive to preserve nation constructs that are barely a century old in many cases at all costs.

Because in many cases, that independence was won at a terrible cost. To dissolve the result for convenience seems a tragedy in some cases.

Sunk cost fallacy writ large.

Easy for you to say. It's the people at the margins that suffer from the chaos changing these borders wouls cause.

Why do people like to argue that changing the status quo would cause suffering as though the status quo is not itself causing plenty of suffering? Especially when the chaos "caused" by change is most often actually caused by violent opposition from those desperate to preserve the current state of things?

The disruption is usually not worth it once generations have built their lives and have built their homes based on an existing border regime.

Read about the India Pakistan partition. How would you feel if you have to leave behind everything you have and move to another country because someone decided it is so.

Again, in many cases this is an arrangement that's only about a hundred years old (with about six or seven decades of sovereignty) _and_ is clearly not working out for the people involved. Why do people talk as though they are immutable institutions from prehistoric times?

Plenty of people built their lives on the US being a British colony. Plenty of people built their lives on Austria and Germany being a single country. Plenty of people built their lives on the USSR being a single entity. I could go on and on listing examples. Why is everyone else allowed to naturally form their own national identities but recent (particularly African) colonies are supposed to suck it up and endure the empty ones forced on them?

It's easier to leave the borders alone and allow free movement of people and trade. Borders will eventually become irrelevant. Like the EU

It took over 1000 years and hundreds of millions dead in continent spanning wars before Europe even entertained the idea of free movement and trade.

If the borders don't really matter, then redrawing them does no harm.

Perhaps. But what is your actual proposal that will actually make things better? Move the borders? Dissolve countries and go back to being tribes or something? What would that actually fix?

And if that won't fix much, then your talk about sunk cost is pointless.

It's fascinating to me that people talk about a peoples' desire to exercise their right to self-determination (whether autonomist or secessionist) as absurd, especially people whose forebears have already exercised that right to set up the stable societies they benefit from today.

People understand/respect separatism when it's Kosovo, Scotland, Catalunya, Hong Kong, etc, but all of a sudden want to be led by the hand when it involves African nations.

OK, but rayiner's comment was about fixing societies and economies. If you want independence for independence, fine, I've got no problem with that. I merely hope that you either succeed or fail as peacefully as possible.

But the context was about economics, so I presumed that you were saying that it would be economically helpful to change the boundaries.

"Economics" is not a somehow pure and distinct topic from nation building - economies thrive (and vice versa) on the stability of nations. You cannot force economic prosperity out of instability and disunity, so it is very strange to ask how creating more stable/unified nations or autonomous regions is economically helpful.

This obviously does not apply to all sub-Saharan countries - there are many that already had or have managed to forge national identities of their own. I am speaking for those of us who are unevenly yoked and know it.

Fair point. Important point, too. I would merely say that independence gives you the opportunity to create stability. But you still have to make it happen, and it's not as easy as it seems.

I’m not so sure.

European borders went through many, many bloody revisions as well, yet Europe is still quite prosperous.

borders: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hvJdc7hJTR0

You are comparing borders that have mostly had the chance to settle into consenting national identities over the past two thousand years to borders that were forcibly drawn in the late 19th/early 20th centuries (in some places disrupting existing nationalisation processes), as if Europe did not also go through periods of unrest and instability in the wake of dissolving empires.

That is besides the fact that (for example) there are far more extant ethnic groups in my country alone than in all of [Western, if not the entirety of] Europe - the considerations when it comes to building a nation are simply not the same. There's nothing that irks me more in these discussions than "Why haven't you already done what took us centuries to do naturally in the space of a few decades under artificial tension?"

> borders that were forcibly drawn in the late 19th/early 20th

European borders were most certainly forcibly drawn.

> "Why haven't you already done what took us centuries to do naturally in the space of a few decades under artificial tension?"

All I'm saying is that the border argument seems weak.

The conflicts in Africa had already existed before the Europeans. I argue that the preexisting conflict is the fundamental cause of the lack of prosperity in Africa, not colonization. Colonialism in Africa only contributed to the problem.

Before America was colonized, there were also political divisions and multiple distinct cultures. Then, a new culture showed up and eliminated all of it. Rightfully or not, it was the establishment of unified central authority that gave America its prosperity. Go look at a map of North America and notice there's only three big countries. In Africa, the situation is essentially a stalemate because there are so many competing factions.

A group of small nations is always going to be more inefficient than one big nation. Just imagine what would happen if you abolished the federal government of the United States.

But isn't diversity the key to success?

Long standing aggressions between these groups sort of stops that.

You could say the same thing about the whites/blacks in the USA. But even there they've figured out how to make diversity into the "secret sauce" behind prosperity.

Diversity and immigration of talent keeps USA prosperous today. However, the path to prosperity was built on the backs of captured slaves followed by two world wars which left the rest of the world damaged but USA emerged out with a massive industrial infrastructure.

That's a simplistic view. That might be true in dynamic urban environments where people compete for intangible resources and success is predicated upon individual merit. That's not so much the case when people fight over collective ownership of land, waterways or mines.

The earth isn't just a bigger New York.

If African countries were prospering before they wouldn't have been colonized in the first place.

And Rome could never be sacked by barbarians.

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