For Europe and Africa, It's a Small World, After All.

When I read and listen to the news, now, about the growing prospects for financial collapse by the major European nations, I think back to something my grandmother used to say: “Boy, it’s a small world.”

If we happened to be “downtown” and “ran into" some friends she knew back when the family lived on Union Street in "the Bottom,” and they unexpectedly offered some information on a long-lost relative, she would shake her head, on our way home, and say: “It’s a small world, boy, and don’t you forget it.”

She’d say that all the time.

In my grandmother’s mind, almost everything that happened to any of us was somehow connected to other people in unexpected ways, and those connections were greater and more direct than we realized. She hadn’t read that anywhere. Like so many other things, she just knew it.

In a very related way, over the past 20 years or so, the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation” has been postulated, i.e., that everyone on earth is no more than six steps away from any other person on earth, even though we don't realize it. In fact, the “Six Degrees" concept is now being tested scientifically with some noted success, and has been included as a premise on Internet sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and others. Curiously, it’s also been converted into a parlor game that incorporates the relationships and experiences of Philadelphia-born actor Kevin Bacon. Bacon, by the way, has turned his own connection to the phenomenon into a charitably based social network (http://www.sixdegrees.org/).

But, now, we’re finding that "Six Degrees" is much more than a parlor game. Indeed, the Europeans are being faced with dealing with, both, the concept of a “small world” and another, Biblical concept, “reaping what you sow,” even as you read this.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that one of the largest single factors in the prospective economic collapse of Europe is not simply the financial shenanigans by Goldman Sachs, or each respective country's real estate "bubble," or, even, the greed of their corporate leaders. Instead, in a "Six Degrees" kind of way, the answer lies in an event that was celebrated late last month – the 125th anniversary of the Berlin Conference. That was the event that launched the infamous “Scramble for Africa,” in which a handful of European nations, together with the United States, met in Germany and came away having allocated all of Africa’s land – except Ethiopia and U.S.-controlled Liberia – into 50 nation-states, whose boundaries still exist today.

Up to that point, Europe had grown rich and prosperous from 400 years of capturing, selling and exploiting primarily Western African people through the Trans- Atlantic slave trade. But in the late 1800’s, that despicable industry had become outmoded, no longer cost-effective and, in many places, illegal.

In addition to creating the African colonies, the Berlin Conference also served the purpose of reducing the constant small wars among competing Europeans for African wealth. Over more than a 70-year period, dating back to 1884, Europe was able to continue its growth and global influence in the post- slave-trade world economy. As a result, Europe grew richer and richer and the colonized African nations grew poorer and poorer.

Gold? Africa provided it. Diamonds and platinum? Africa provided them, too. Rubber, petroleum, copper, agricultural products, iron ore, and titanium? Africa, Africa, Africa, and, again, Africa.

In fact, Germany’s loss of its valuable African colonies, including German Southwest Africa, Cameroon and Togo, to the Allies, during World War I, contributed significantly to the tremendous economic hardship experienced by the German people in the 1920’s and 1930’s, leading to social unrest in that country and the rise of the Nazi party, there. The economic desperation in the country and the resulting German nationalistic aggression led to the instigation of World War II.

Fast-forwarding to today, we’re not only recognizing the 125th anniversary of the heinous Berlin Conference, but also the 50th anniversary of the independence of 17 of the previously colonized nations, created, drawn and named, arbitrarily, by the European colonizers, who met in Berlin.

The process of African reclamation that began with the independence movements across the continent in 1960 has led to the outright elimination of free natural resources for former European colonizers or the need for Europe, finally, to pay at least something for those assets. That began the gradual decline of Europe’s comparative global advantage.

I remember being amazed, during my first career in the commercial backing industry, to learn that our bank’s clients that wanted to do business in places such as Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana, were forced to conduct that business through financial intermediaries in London, England, rather than directly through the African countries, themselves.

As a naïve young man, back then, I thought that was peculiar and not very efficient. Now I understand why that situation existed.
Every year since that time, as more and more African nations have won their independence from Europe, the inherent strength of the European economies has continued to weaken.

How do you – if you’re England, France, Belgium or Portugal – replace the diamonds, gold, bauxite, lumber, etc., that had been so easily available through your African colonies?

The fact is that you simply don’t.

And, unless Europe can quickly devise a strategy that will help restore the unfettered access to natural resources it once enjoyed, at Africa’s expense, the short-term outlook for its economic recovery looks bleak, no matter what they report in the Times of London.

How much longer can Europe’s leaders afford to stand by and watch as their economies shrivel and their citizens call for their resignations? How much longer will they be content to see their people marching in the streets, carrying picket signs, demanding jobs, lower taxes and a return to their “old way of life?”

At the same time, while we’re on the subject of "small worlds," there’s a growing issue on the African continent about "integration." No, it’s not the kind of integration you’re thinking about – not the Civil Rights-era “white-only” drinking fountains, dogs and hoses, school busing and whites and blacks in the same classroom thing.

For growing numbers of Africans, "integration" means giving more and more serious consideration to eliminating the old boundaries between what are now 53 African nations that were drawn arbitrarily in the 1800’s by their former European colonizers.

Because not a single indigenous African was invited to participate in the Berlin Conference, those boundaries wound up “lumping together” ethnic groups that had never previously been forced to co-exist, and splitting groups, that did have strong cultural relationships, into two or three separate European-designed countries.

That being the case, New African Magazine informs us that African and African-born leaders, such as Sudanese-born telecommunications mogul Mo Ibrahim, have suggested that African countries, as defined and created for business purposes, by the Europeans 125 years ago, are too small to survive and prosper in today’s world. Like many others, Ibrahim feels that many of those countries' boundaries need to be eliminated and their people "integrated" into fewer, larger, more powerful African nations.

There are two things to watch for in all of this. First, how long can the 450 million Western Europeans, who have already slipped demographically to represent barely 8 percent of the global population, continue to suffer economically without resorting to tactics that can restore their economic stability?

And directly related to that, how long will it take the African people, 125 years after the Berlin Conference and 50 years after their first successful independence efforts, to reorganize themselves into a solid, militarily and economically viable geo-political entity?

As difficult to believe as it may seem at first glance, both issues are directly connected to each other.

It really is a "small world," isn’t it?
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