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The New Colonialism

It is fashionable today to rake the colonialism of fifty-years ago over the coals. But doing so ignores the undeniable advantages it brought to local populations. The colonial power, be it French, English, Belgian, Dutch, etc…, aimed at promoting the colonies. It invested considerably in the infrastructure of those countries: in the towns, the railroads, the highways, the ports, the electric power plants, the administrative, educational and cultural facilities, etc. The local colonists were not slave drivers but entrepreneurs who created jobs, paid income tax and, de facto, supported the prosperity of the country. To be sure, modest salaries came with those jobs, but they would certainly have been even less with local employers. On the whole, that situation was rather stable because the colonial power brought a lot of investments.

The colonial powers also prospected and mined in these countries, both of which these countries still profit from today. Above all, the colonial power brought peace. The exception to this is the two world wars in which our colonies were implicated along with us and our allies (for what reason would would they have been sheltered from them ? )

Now that colonial powers have left, what do we find? In many places, local kings have seized power, grabbed the wealth and fight to preserve them. Domestic peace is not guaranteed except in a few countries. For these countries, independence has only been for self-gratification whereas from the economic standpoint, it has been purely and simply a catastrophy. In this somber landscape, there are, fortunately, a few wise and enlightened chiefs of state who have found the right path, but one must admit that these are rare exceptions.

Having turned this page, can one say colonialism has disappeared ? Not at all! It has taken a different and much worse form. Now, it is truly a one-way street. The new colonizers are the multinational corporations which exploit the Third World under the cover of the convenient alibi of the sacred principles of globalization. These corporations set up foreign subsidiaries in order to reap profit from low salaries. The so-called technology transfers are intentionally reduced to a minimum and are carefully monitored and compartmentalized. The sale prices back to the parent corporation are calculated to minimize payment of local income tax; thanks to the suppression of custom duties, the multinationals reap the benefits, not the host countries. For the multinationals, globalization is a gold mine.