By: Risto Karajkov, European Voice, Brussels, Belgium, May 8, 2008
What follows is a true story.
A European Union consultancy wins a contract in the western Balkans. It is stipulated that a specialized engineer with at least 15 years’ experience must be one of the key senior experts for the entire duration of the project, of around 80 days.
The consultancy receives for this expert’s services around 800 euros ($1,235) per day, lump. “Lump” means all expenses (accommodation, food, etc.) are included. It is administratively convenient, but also widely (ab)used to maximize profits—flying low-cost and budgeting full-fare and so on.
Since the consultancy cannot itself identify this key expert, such people being in short supply, it subcontracts another consultancy, from the same European Union country, to provide the person—for 300 euros ($463) a day.
But the second contractor is also unable to find the required expert, and hires a consultancy from a Balkan capital to hire the person—this time for 100 euros ($154) a day. The local firm does so, and the project is successfully implemented.
Here’s a bonus question: How much was the engineer actually paid?
In actuality, that matters only to him or her. The entire amount will be put down as European Union aid to the Balkan country in question, however little it sees of it.
There is nothing illicit or corrupt here. Everything has gone perfectly by the book and any bitter taste such everyday practices leave behind are rarely discussed; it is not smart to bite the hand that feeds you.
A couple of months ago the European Court of Auditors presented its evaluation of CARDS (Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development, and Stabilization), the European Union’s aid package for the Balkans, worth more than 5 billion euros ($7.7 billion) in 2000-06.
The report echoed the “good in parts” language of the 2004 midterm evaluation of CARDS conducted by a consortium of consultancies. There was the routine criticism of bureaucracy, delays, over-centralization, lack of strategic guidance, all no doubt fair.
But the court also showed a degree of acerbity, pinpointing examples of money being spent in ways that had little or nothing to do with the supposed objectives. In 2003, for example, 2.8 million euros ($4.3 million) was allocated to strengthening border protection in Macedonia. It was supposed to pay for training of officials, improving recruitment, and buying sophisticated equipment for checking documents. All of it, in fact, was spent on buying vehicles.
Yet the report is silent about the elephants in the room, the overpriced Western consultancies that can eat up a few million euros quite quickly.
The system’s defenders say that only a small proportion of foreign assistance is spent in this way. But anyone involved knows there are good reasons why there has not been the—plainly overdue—thorough chicken count. They know too why there is resistance to making the whole aid business fairer and more transparent.
Hotshot international experts cost a lot. But should they be permitted to charge more in Sarajevo than they can reasonably charge in London?
And should a Harvard-educated local get so much less than an expatriate, including one who is not Harvard-educated?
The rules tend to reflect income disparities between the Balkans and the West. But the disparity between Skopje and Brussels is not 12-15 times, which can easily be the difference between local and expatriate consultant fees.
And while we are on the subject of hotshot consultants, is there really a need for quite so many of them at all? Such work, like any other type of aid delivery, should be driven by demand not supply. Some donor countries have acted on this in recent times and reduced drastically the amounts of aid spent in this way.
That consultants enrich themselves from the generosity of donor nations undermines the whole point of foreign aid. It spreads cynicism among those in the field providing aid and among donor nations.
Perhaps worst of all is the corrosive effect on citizens of the failed states that are the subject of so much generosity.
With its expansion ever since the end of the cold war, the European Union has been increasingly projecting itself as a moral force in global affairs. It has called itself a community of values and has been tirelessly repeating to would-be members that full embrace of democracy and human and minority rights is the only way into the club.
No one has learned this refrain better than eager candidates from the Western Balkans. There, the idea of joining the European Union has been put on a pedestal. Europe symbolizes everything that is good, as opposed to the wicked backwardness of Balkan imperfection. Countries there need to constantly strive to democratize and reform in hope that they can one day join.
As much as this idea is unreservedly accepted, it appears that it is not fully corroborated by facts on the ground. Some of the countries in the (geographic) Balkans that seem to have very serious issues with respect of minority rights are in fact European Union member states.
Both Greece and Bulgaria adamantly refuse to recognize their Macedonian minority. Both countries have lost cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They continue to stubbornly refuse to comply with the court’s decisions to allow the registration of the political parties of their Macedonian minorities. At the same time they do not have a problem using their leverage as members of the European Union to impose unprincipled conditions on Macedonia. Greece has already made a name for itself doing just that. Bulgaria shows signs it might take the same road.
Last month Greece vetoed Macedonia’s entry into NATO over the name dispute. Athens opposes the use of the name “Macedonia” by Skopje, as Greece claims it is exclusive part of its cultural heritage. Greece threatened it would also block Macedonia in the European Union unless a solution to the name dispute is found that is to its liking. Greece’s move pushed Macedonia into political crisis. The government called early elections.
Europe has been continuously labeling Turkey (non-European Union state) as a rogue with regards to human rights standards, but (the few) Armenians in Turkey have their churches and schools. Greece’s denial goes so far that it does not even allow the free self-determination of the Macedonian minority, let alone start to discuss standards in education, use of mother tongue, or political participation. Last month the European Free Alliance, a European political party, staged an event in the European Parliament to protest this discrimination in Greece and called the Macedonian minority there one of the “last unrecognized minorities in Europe.”
In Albania (non-European Union state), often described as the most backward country in Europe, the small Macedonian minority freely votes their own and has a mayor in the region of Mala Prespa. In Bulgaria, a novel member of the European community of values, around a hundred members of the unrecognized political party of the Macedonian minority O.M.O. Ilinden Pirin were called by the police for “talks” last week, because they engaged in organizing a small historic commemoration. A classical tactic of police intimidation.
Trying to play an honest broker and stabilize the Balkans, the United States pushed hard to get Macedonia into NATO but could not fight the Greek veto. In the process even Washington got entangled in the primitive Balkan nationalisms that simply refuse to accept that people are free to declare as they wish.
State Department official Daniel Fried during his recent visit to Athens had to argue with the Greeks over this purportedly basic human entitlement. His counterparts reportedly told him there was no such thing as Macedonians. His answer, rephrased, involved something like “Oh, but I was there last week. I saw them.”
State Department spokespeople get into semantic discussions on a regular basis with a legendary Greek journalist at press briefings over whether there is a Macedonian identity, nation, or language.
For Greeks, Macedonians are “Slavs” who are stealing Greece’s history by calling themselves Macedonians. For the Bulgarians, they are Bulgarian kin who have been brainwashed during Tito’s Yugoslavia, and think they are Macedonian, but are actually Bulgarian.
The European Union has been way too condoning of Greek discriminatory demands pointed against Macedonia. Back in 1992 it adopted an infamous Lisbon document that said the new country could not use the name “Macedonia” and it postponed its recognition. It softened over time in view of reality. Macedonia was recognized by the United Nations in 1993, under the provisional name of “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (FYROM). Over the years the European Union has not showed a sign of willingness to deal constructively with the issue. Only last week one of its committees had to change in a document all reference to “Macedonian language” or “Macedonian culture” to “the language of FYROM” and so forth, in face of Greek pressure.
The bottom line is that one should be free to declare as she or he feels. That is the substance of the right to free expression of identity. Restrictions to this end, whatever the pretext or ideology, are limitations of freedom and serious infringement of democratic standards. If on top of that the people subject to such restrictions are made to fear to speak their language in public, or have no schools for their kids in their mother tongue, or even fear persecution, for them the society they live in is not democratic.
One must be free to declare as he or she wants. The same way the European Union promotes democracy abroad, it needs to do it in its own yard. If judicial action is not enough and it obviously isn’t, Brussels must take more-decisive political action and demand that its members recognize minorities.
The United States is one of the last remaining land empires. That it is made the butt of opprobrium and odium is hardly surprising, or unprecedented. Empires - Rome, the British, the Ottomans - were always targeted by the disgruntled, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed and by their self-appointed delegates, the intelligentsia.
Yet, even by historical standards, America seems to be provoking blanket repulsion.
The Pew Research Center published in December 2002 a report titled “What the World Thinks in 2002″. “The World”, was reduced by the pollsters to 44 countries and 38,000 interviewees. Two other surveys published last year - by the German Marshall Fund and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations - largely supported Pew’s findings.
The most startling and unambiguous revelation was the extent of anti-American groundswell everywhere: among America’s NATO allies, in developing countries, Muslim nations and even in eastern Europe where Americans, only a decade ago, were lionized as much-adulated liberators.
Four years later, things have gotten even worse.
Between March and May 2006, Pew surveyed 16,710 people in Britain, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the United States.
Only 23% of Spaniards had a positive opinion of the USA, down from 41% the year before. A similar drop was evinced in India (from 71% to 56%), Russia (from 52% o 43%), Indonesia (from 38% to 30%), and Turkey (from 23% to 12%). In Britain, America’s putative ally, support was down by one third from 2002, to 50% or so. Declines were noted in France, Germany, and Jordan, somewhat offset by marginal rises in China and Pakistan.
Two thirds of Russians and overwhelming majorities in 13 out of 15 countries regarded the conduct of the USA in Iraq as a greater threat to world peace that Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The distinction formerly made between the American people and the Bush administration is also eroding. Majorities in only 7 of 14 countries had favorable views of Americans.
“People around the world embrace things American and, at the same time, decry U.S. influence on their societies. Similarly, pluralities in most of the nations surveyed complain about American unilateralism.”- expounded the year 2002 Pew report.
Yet, even this “embrace of things American” is ambiguous.
Violently “independent”, inanely litigious and quarrelsome, solipsistically provincial, and fatuously ignorant - this nation of video clips and sound bites, the United States, is often perceived as trying to impose its narcissistic pseudo-culture upon a world exhausted by wars hot and cold and corrupted by vacuous materialism.
Recent accounting scandals, crumbling markets, political scams, human rights violations, technological setbacks, and rising social tensions have revealed how rotten and inherently contradictory the US edifice is and how concerned are Americans with appearances rather than substance.
To religious fundamentalists, America is the Great Satan, a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, a cesspool of immorality and spiritual decay. To many European liberals, the United states is a throwback to darker ages of religious zealotry, pernicious bigotry, virulent nationalism, and the capricious misrule of the mighty.
According to most recent surveys by Gallup, MORI, the Council for Secular Humanism, the US Census Bureau, and others - the vast majority of Americans are chauvinistic, moralizing, bible-thumping, cantankerous, and trigger-happy. About half of them believe that Satan exists - not as a metaphor, but as a real physical entity.
America has a record defense spending per head, a vertiginous rate of incarceration, among the highest numbers of legal executions and gun-related deaths. It is still engaged in atavistic debates about abortion, the role of religion, and whether to teach the theory of evolution.
According to a series of special feature articles in The Economist, America is generally well-liked in Europe, but less so than before. It is utterly detested by the Muslim street, even in “progressive” Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan. Everyone - Europeans and Arabs, Asians and Africans - think that “the spread of American ideas and customs is a bad thing.”
Admittedly, we typically devalue most that which we have formerly idealized and idolized.
To the liberal-minded, the United States of America reified the most noble, lofty, and worthy values, ideals, and causes. It was a dream in the throes of becoming, a vision of liberty, peace, justice, prosperity, and progress. Its system, though far from flawless, was considered superior - both morally and functionally - to anything ever conceived by Man.
Such unrealistic expectations inevitably and invariably lead to disenchantment, disillusionment, bitter disappointment, seething anger, and a sense of humiliation for having been thus deluded, or, rather, self-deceived. This backlash is further exacerbated by the haughty hectoring of the ubiquitous American missionaries of the “free-market-cum-democracy” church.
Americans everywhere aggressively preach the superior virtues of their homeland. Edward K. Thompson, managing editor of “Life” (1949-1961) warned against this propensity to feign omniscience and omnipotence: “Life (the magazine) must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all, or a Peeping Tom.”
Thus, America’s foreign policy - i.e., its presence and actions abroad - is, by far, its foremost vulnerability.
According to the Pew study, the image of the Unites States as a benign world power slipped dramatically in the space of two years in Slovakia (down 14 percent), in Poland (-7), in the Czech Republic (-6) and even in fervently pro-Western Bulgaria (-4 percent). It rose exponentially in Ukraine (up 10 percent) and, most astoundingly, in Russia (+24 percent) - but from a very low base.
The crux may be that the USA maintains one set of sanctimonious standards at home while egregiously and nonchalantly flouting them far and wide. Hence the fervid demonstrations against its military presence in places as disparate as South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.
In January 2000, Staff Sergeant Frank J. Ronghi sexually molested, forcibly sodomized (”indecent acts with a child”) and then murdered an 11-years old girl in the basement of her drab building in Kosovo, when her father went to market to do some shopping. His is by no means the most atrocious link in a long chain of brutalities inflicted by American soldiers overseas, the latest of which are taking place in Iraq. In all these cases, the perpetrators were removed from the scene to face justice - or, more often, a travesty thereof - back home.
Americans - officials, scholars, peacemakers, non-government organizations - maintain a colonial state of mind. Backward natives come cheap, their lives dispensable, their systems of governance and economies inherently inferior. The white man’s burden must not be encumbered by the vagaries of primitive indigenous jurisprudence. Hence America’s fierce resistance to and indefatigable obstruction of the International Criminal Court.
Opportunistic multilateralism notwithstanding, the USA still owes the poorer nations of the world close to $200 million - its arrears to the UN peacekeeping operations, usually asked to mop up after an American invasion or bombing. It not only refuses to subject its soldiers to the jurisdiction of the World Criminal Court - but also its facilities to the inspectors of the Chemical Weapons Convention, its military to the sanctions of the (anti) land mines treaty and the provisions of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, and its industry to the environmental constraints of the Kyoto Protocol, the rulings of the World Trade Organization, and the rigors of global intellectual property rights.
Despite its instinctual unilateralism, the United States is never averse to exploiting multilateral institutions to its ends. It is the only shareholder with a veto power in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by now widely considered to have degenerated into a long arm of the American administration. The United Nations Security Council, raucous protestations aside, has rubber-stamped American martial exploits from Panama to Iraq.
It seems as though America uses - and thus, perforce, abuses - the international system for its own, ever changing, ends. International law is invoked by it when convenient - ignored when importune.
In short, America is a bully. It is a law unto itself and it legislates on the fly, twisting arms and breaking bones when faced with opposition and ignoring the very edicts it promulgates at its convenience. Its soldiers and peacekeepers, its bankers and businessmen, its traders and diplomats are its long arms, an embodiment of this potent and malignant mixture of supremacy and contempt.
But why is America being singled out?
In politics and even more so in geopolitics, double standards and bullying are common. Apartheid South Africa, colonial France, mainland China, post-1967 Israel - and virtually every other polity - were at one time or another characterized by both. But while these countries usually mistreated only their own subjects - the USA does so also exterritorialy.
Even as it never ceases to hector, preach, chastise, and instruct - it does not recoil from violating its own decrees and ignoring its own teachings. It is, therefore, not the USA’s intrinsic nature, nor its self-perception, or social model that I find most reprehensible - but its actions, particularly its foreign policy.
America’s manifest hypocrisy, its moral talk and often immoral walk, its persistent application of double standards, irks and grates. I firmly believe that it is better to face a forthright villain than a masquerading saint. It is easy to confront a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mao, vile and bloodied, irredeemably depraved, worthy only of annihilation. The subtleties of coping with the United States are far more demanding and far less rewarding.
This self-proclaimed champion of human rights has aided and abetted countless murderous dictatorships. This alleged sponsor of free trade is the most protectionist of rich nations. This ostensible beacon of charity contributes less than 0.1% of its GDP to foreign aid (compared to Scandinavia’s 0.6%, for instance). This upright proponent of international law (under whose aegis it bombed and invaded half a dozen countries this past decade alone) is in avowed opposition to crucial pillars of the international order.
Naturally, America’s enemies and critics are envious of its might and wealth. They would have probably acted the same as the United States, if they only could. But America’s haughtiness and obtuse refusal to engage in soul searching and house cleaning do little to ameliorate this antagonism.
To the peoples of the poor world, America is both a colonial power and a mercantilist exploiter. To further its geopolitical and economic goals from Central Asia to the Middle East, it persists in buttressing regimes with scant regard for human rights, in cahoots with venal and sometimes homicidal indigenous politicians. And it drains the developing world of its brains, its labour, and its raw materials, giving little in return.
All powers are self-interested - but America is narcissistic. It is bent on exploiting and, having exploited, on discarding. It is a global Dr. Frankenstein, spawning mutated monsters in its wake. Its “drain and dump” policies consistently boomerang to haunt it.
Both Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega - two acknowledged monsters - were aided and abetted by the CIA and the US military. America had to invade Panama to depose the latter and to molest Iraq for the second time in order to force the removal of the former.
The Kosovo Liberation Army, an American anti-Milosevic pet, provoked a civil war in Macedonia tin 2001. Osama bin-Laden, another CIA golem, restored to the USA, on September 11, 2001 some of the materiel it so generously bestowed on him in his anti-Russian days.
Normally the outcomes of expedience, the Ugly American’s alliances and allegiances shift kaleidoscopically. Pakistan and Libya were transmuted from foes to allies in the fortnight prior to the Afghan campaign. Milosevic has metamorphosed from staunch ally to rabid foe in days.
This capricious inconsistency casts in grave doubt America’s sincerity - and in sharp relief its unreliability and disloyalty, its short term thinking, truncated attention span, soundbite mentality, and dangerous, “black and white”, simplism.
In its heartland, America is isolationist. Its denizens erroneously believe that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is an economically self-sufficient and self-contained continent. Yet, it is not what Americans trust or wish that matters to others. It is what they do. And what they do is meddle, often unilaterally, always ignorantly, sometimes forcefully.
Elsewhere, inevitable unilateralism is mitigated by inclusive cosmopolitanism. It is exacerbated by provincialism - and American decision-makers are mostly provincials, popularly elected by provincials. As opposed to Rome, or Great Britain, America is ill-suited and ill-equipped to micromanage the world.
It is too puerile, too abrasive, too arrogant and it has a lot to learn. Its refusal to acknowledge its shortcomings, its confusion of brain with brawn (i.e., money or bombs), its legalistic-litigious character, its culture of instant gratification and one-dimensional over-simplification, its heartless lack of empathy, and bloated sense of entitlement are detrimental to world peace and stability.
America is often called by others to intervene. Many initiate conflicts or prolong them with the express purpose of dragging America into the quagmire. It then is either castigated for not having responded to such calls - or reprimanded for having responded. It seems that it cannot win. Abstention and involvement alike garner it only ill-will.
But people call upon America to get involved because they know it rises to the challenge. America should make it unequivocally and unambiguously clear that - with the exception of the Americas - its sole interests rest in commerce. It should make it equally known that it will protect its citizens and defend its assets, if need be by force.
Indeed, America’s - and the world’s - best bet are a reversion to the Monroe and (technologically updated) Mahan doctrines. Wilson’s Fourteen Points brought the USA nothing but two World Wars and a Cold War thereafter. It is time to disengage.
Note - America the Narcissist
The majority of worldwide respondents to the last two global Pew enter surveys (in 2002 and 2006) regarded the United States as the greatest menace to world peace - far greater than the likes of Iraq or China. Thinkers and scholars as diverse as Christopher Lasch in “The Cultural Narcissist” and Theodore Millon in “Personality Disorders of Everyday Life” have singled out the United States as the quintessential narcissistic society.
The “American Dream” in itself is benign. It involves materialistic self-realization, the belief in the ideal of equal opportunities and equal access to the system, and in just rewards for hard work, merit, and natural gifts. But the Dream has been rendered nightmarish by the confluence with America’s narcissistic traits.
America’s internal ethos is universally-accepted by all Americans. It incorporates the American Dream and the conviction that America stands for everything that is good and right. Consequently, as the reification of goodness, the United States is in constant battle with evil and its ever-changing demonic emissaries - from Hitler to Saddam Hussein.
There is no national consensus about America’s external ethos. Some Americans are isolationists, others interventionists. Both groups are hypervigilant, paranoid, and self-righteous - but isolationists are introverted and schizoid. Theirs is siege mentality. Interventionists are missionary. They feel omnipotent and invincible. They are extroverted and psychopathic.
This pathology can be traced back and attributed to a confluence of historical events and processes, the equivalents of trauma and abuse in an individual’s early childhood.
The United States of America started out as a series of loosely connected, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of these settlements were former victims of religious persecution, indentured servants, lapsed nobility, and other refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin list of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain.
The inhabitants of the colonies defended against their perceived helplessness and very real inferiority with compensatory, imagined, and feigned superiority and fantasies of omnipotence. Victims frequently internalize their abusers and themselves become bullies. Hence the rough, immutable kernel of American narcissism.
The United States was (until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s) and still is, in some important respects, a
pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and lack of social solidarity. Its religiosity is overt, aggressive, virulent and
ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized “enemies”, both political and cultural.
The Civil War was fought between 2 America’s: the South, a perverted rendition of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the North, a harbinger of modern, multicultural immigrant societies. The North and the American Dream prevailed, the slaves were freed, and the Southern way of life, that of “gentlemen with leisure”, was replaced by a workaholic society where everyone is a slave to money and leisure is an ever rarer commodity.
Americans’ religion is a manifestation of their “Chosen People Syndrome”. They are missionary, messianic, zealous, fanatical, and nauseatingly self-righteous, bigoted, and hypocritical. This is especially discernible in the double-speak and double-standard that underlies American foreign policy.
Narcissism is frequently comorbid with paranoia. Americans cultivate and nurture a siege mentality which leads to violent acting out and unbridled jingoism. Their persecutory delusions sit well with their adherence to social Darwinism (natural selection of the fittest, let the weaker fall by the wayside, might is right, etc.).
Consequently, the United States always finds itself in company with the least palatable regimes in the world: together with Nazi Germany it had a working eugenics program (the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws and the Nazi sterilization law were modeled after American anti-miscegenation and sterilization statutes), together with the likes of Saudi Arabia it executes its prisoners, it was the last developed nation to abolish slavery, alone with South Africa it had instituted official apartheid in a vast swathe of its territory.
Add to this volatile mix an ethos of malignant individualism, racism both latent and overt, a trampling, “no holds barred” ambitiousness, competitiveness, frontier violence-based morality, and proud simple-mindedness - and an ominous portrait of the United States as a deeply disturbed polity emerges.
“A scar on the conscience of the world.” This is how former British Prime Minister Tony Blair described Africa when he stood at the helm of the European Union. A week before his planned visit to Africa, US president George Bush has echoed a similar message of despair and frustration about Africa. “Africa has…witnessed some of mankind’s most shameful chapters, from the evils of the slave trade to the condescension of colonialism.” “Even the joy of independence,” continued Bush, “which arrived with such promise was undermined by corruption, conflict and disease. Just a decade ago, much of Africa seemed to be on the brink of collapse, and much of the world seemed content to let it go.”
Behind this scenario which Judson Knight summarises as “an untold tale of cruelty, corruption, mismanagement, rampant disease and poverty,” there is another untold story about Africa. This continent sits on 90% of its platinum, 50% of its gold, 98% of its chromium and 64% of its manganese. Africa is rich in diamonds, has more oil reserves than North America, and has been estimated to hold 40% of the world’s potential hydroelectric power. This is the paradox of Africa’s wealth. These are the resources that have dragged Africa into what is described today as the “oil and mineral curse.” The scramble for these resources by great powers is fast accelerating Africa’s tragedy.
Great power concern for Africa’s wealth was a driving force behind East-West confrontation after World War II. The cold war as this conflict was called was as much a struggle for African resources as it was a conflict of ideology and strategy. While China was busy shipping African minerals through the Chinese-constructed TAN-ZAM railway in Southern Africa, Washington was preoccupied with shipping arms to Joseph Désiré Mobum in Zaire, Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Samuel Doe in Liberia. The resultant “proxy wars” created the conditions necessary for the extraction of African resources. This was the Africa which president met when he entered the Oval office. “When I took office in 2000, Africa was home to six major conflicts: Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Southern Sudan,” he said on the eve of his recent visit to the continent.
The end of the Cold War radically changed the face of great power intervention in Africa. While Washington counted the blessings of its “New World Order” and celebrated over the collapse of what President Ronald Reagan called “the evil empire,” China was gradually crawling into Africa. Building on its Cold-War-era gains, China successfully outpaced the crumbling Soviet Union as the most influential eastern power in Africa. This has brought China into direct conflict with former “oil-suckers” in Africa; US, EU and Japan.
