Empires and Imperialism was: XBOX 360 2723

Why, *we* do. Public opinion in the advanced democratic nations, particularly the English-speaking ones.

Basically, everyone on Earth ought to live in a country which is as well-governed as one of the OECD nations. To bring this about, in the first instance it will be necessary not to take seriously the claims to sovereignity of most Third World nations.

Those which are getting along peacefully will be respected and left alone, but any that have human rights violations, that engage in aggression, and so on will swiftly have their existing regimes dismissed. Then, political arrangements will be set up that will be as conducive as possible to democracy.

A simple way to ensure that a democratic government won't produce mistreatment of a minority group, without having to wait for the existing population to learn tolerance and pluralism (which took *us* simply ages to learn, so expecting these poor foreigners to learn them overnight is simply not reasonable) is to ensure that every group that has any distinctiveness or self-identification is in a separate nation.

This has *additional* advantages, in ensuring that the independent nations will not be sufficiently large economic units to be able to threaten world peace, *and* if someone minded to persecute people speaking a different language or following a different religion *were* to come to power in one of those countries, he would have to cross a national border to *find* them. This means we could deal with it without anyone yammering about interfering in other countries' internal affairs or violating the U.N. charter this time.

Basically, when Europe gave its colonies their independence, it hadn't done so properly. It left the borders in the wrong places, and, more importantly, it failed to leave a clause in the treaties by which they were granted independence that continued maintenance of liberal democracy (that's democracy with freedom of speech and the press and equality for all religious and ethnic groups) was a condition of remaining independent. The army overthrows the elected government? Boom - you're a colony again. (In the case of Latin America, this means of Portugal, in the case of Brazil, or Spain, in the case of most other countries. This would, of course, require the U.S. to abandon the Monroe Doctrine.)

Since the world's richest countries were the first to improve the way they were governed, and adopt equality and democracy, this isn't a random selection, it isn't subjective. Naturally, in the past, the Soviet Union precluded this approach, but we no longer have this type of problem. And steps should be taken, with regards to China's development of strategic missile capability, for example, to ensure it never arises again. The world should never again be at risk of falling to a nightmare like Nazism or Communism, and, ideally, not even one individual on Earth should have to live under a dictatorship.

All human beings are fundamentally equal, but most of the world's non-European peoples have the misfortune to live under governments that are anything but equal. We shouldn't have to wait thousands of years for a world in which all the world's governments will be like those found in Europe.

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