RETHINKING AFRICAN STATES

This contribution sketches the paradoxical contrast between Africa and Europe. Europe is the homeland of the strong state, founded on nationalism and sustained by centuries of history. African states are weak and artificial, the result of an arbitrary colonial partition, lacking internal coherence, failing, dysfunctional, even collapsed. What accounts for this difference? Are African states resilient enough to survive the kind of challenges that saw European boundaries change? Are they living on borrowed time on the edge of an abyss that will shortly do to many of them what it has already done to Yugoslavia? Or are they simply different kinds of creatures, marching to their own drums, with the expectation that they will continue in much the same way, despite the upheavals transforming other parts of the world? Understanding what Africa's conflicts are about depends on the answers to these questions.