I’ve just embarked on Keith Suter’s 50 Things You Wanted to Know About World Issues (but were too afraid to ask). It’s a highly recommended text for those who wish to ease their way into world politics minus the jargon and technical gobbledygook.

His list of “50 things” start from the simple but important question, ‘How many countries are there in the world and how are they created?’ to bigger topics, such as ‘Is China the next super power? Can the West win the war on terrorism? Is the world running out of oil? Is Microsoft more powerful than a nation like Australia? Why did the United States invade Iraq? Will there ever be peace in Israel and Palestine?’

I ruminate on the first chapter this week.

On the top of Keith Suter’s list is the question ‘How many countries are there in the world and how are they created?’ It was a question I have never thought to ask, as you would when my first brush with geography saw me learning to place the names of countries and their capitals on the world map.

There are currently around 200 countries in the world, 191 of which belong to the United Nations and are known as nation-states.

As Suter would remind us, the creation of nation-states was a deliberate process that began some centuries ago in Europe as rulers sought to consolidate their power against domestic and foreign forces, creating what we now know as the early monarchies.

Europe began colonising parts of the world as early as AD1500, as traders set forth in search of gold, silver, spices and other commodities.

These included

• Africa – colonisers set up a triangle of trade where European-manufactured goods were used to buy African slaves from Arab slave traders. The slaves, numbering more than 11 million, were shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas where they worked on sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations. The produce was then shipped back to Europe.
• the Americas – people wishing to escape persecution in Europe fled to Americas where they took over parts of the land.
• and Australia – which became a dumping ground for British convicts.

The overall effect, Suter explains, was that thriving indigenous civilisations were destroyed and European citizens and values were imposed on the land. The victims of colonialism were also drawn into struggles they knew nothing about, such as Indian forces fighting for the UK in WWI and WWII.

The critical voices against colonialism asserted that it was wrong for one country to dominate another. Competing colonial ambitions between Germany and other dominant powers, they argued, had been a catalyst for the First World War. Allied countries agreed after the war that countries who were defeated in the war would be held in a mandate and put on the road to independence, overseen by the League of Nations.

The same agreement was reached after the Second World War, under the protection of the United Nations, which had by that point replaced the League of Nations. The Allied countries were also to grant independence to their extensive colonies.

It is my guess that us folk who belong to gen-y and beyond would hardly be conscious of the impact that colonialisation has had on the world as we know it. As Suter puts it, the world has been permanently transformed by 500 years of Europeanisation. European cultures now dominate the world. That the English language is the “universal” tool for communication – in areas such as commerce, trade and politics – is proof. The colonialists have left their mark on our ideologies, paradigms and culture in this post-colonial era.  

Interestingly, Suter also mentions the role of Japan in putting an end to the European imperialism in the Second World War. The Japanese occupation may have been brutish and the atrocities of war repugnant, but the capture of Singapore in 1942 sent a powerful message to the west, that Europeans were not invincible.