1 00:00:03,690 --> 00:00:05,370 Hi, welcome back.

Last time we talked about a Great Convergence in which globalization was actually making a lot of opportunities available to people around the world. But there are some outliers from those trends. The next two presentations are going to look at those outliers. First, in this one, I want to talk about, The Bottom Billion. I'm borrowing this phrase from a book by this title, by an economist, a student of Africa, sometime employee of the World Bank, named Paul Collier. And what Collier's trying to get at with this term is not that there are just a billion people who are poor. In fact, there are just a lot of poor people in China, and in India, but the basic prospects of those societies are positive, at the moment, anyway. Collier is focusing on a class of countries, let's say 50, 60 countries out of the 200 or so countries that make up the modern world, where these countries and their societies seem stuck. They're stuck because of complex problems of predatory rulers, who simply find whatever source of wealth there is in society, extorts as much of it as they can for themselves, doesn't do anything to help their people. Chronic civil violence. Other kinds of problems. And so the people in those societies are simply not tracking the general patterns of world economic growth. Their progress just stays flat or worse. That's what he thinks of as, The Bottom Billion. A fraction of the world population that at the moment, seems trapped. Here's another way of identifying a list of countries that are in gravest trouble. This is from the National Intelligence Council Global Trends 2030. They actually have a kind of a hit parade, here, of the countries, 15 countries, at highest

risk of state failure. There are two columns. They say here's who we thought, five years ago, 2008, were the countries at highest risk. See the 15 countries listed. And, as we look forward now in 2012, 2015, 2030, here's who we think will be the countries at highest risk. See, there are some slight changes. You do not want to be living in a country on this list. Or else you're worried a lot about how to get off this list. There are some obvious countries here, countries of interest. Countries like Somalia, which you've heard of. Afghanistan is getting marginally better. But the countries I want to call your attention to, these are not just a bunch of really tiny, poor countries that are tragic but not terribly significant to the rest of the world. I mean, take a look, for example, at a countries like Bangladesh. That's a big country. Now, by going from 11 to 15, that means they think the situation is getting slightly better, but it's still not terribly encouraging. But if you're worried about Bangladesh, you should be even more worried about a country like Nigeria, one of the most populous and important countries in all of Africa. [BLANK_AUDIO] And you want to be worried about a country like Pakistan. Not only 150 million people, but large numbers of nuclear weapons, and, in fact, they're expanding their nuclear arsenal as fast as possible. You do not want to see a country with hundreds of nuclear weapons on a list like this, in serious danger of state failure or implosion of some kind. You can begin to ask yourself, well, what are the options if something has happened to those nuclear weapons. Believe me, if you look at those options, none of them look very appealing. Here's another way of capturing Collier's concept. You see, the concept that Collier's introducing about the bottom billion is not just an economic

idea. He's saying, actually what these countries are suffering from is a complex problem, it's maybe mainly political. It shows itself economically in poverty rates, but the core problem is bad governance, weak security, chronic violence. This is a World Bank chart, so percentage of the population suffering in extreme poverty, 1981 to 2005. So nearly 25 years. If you've got red that means you're afflicted by major violence. Minor violence. Not very much violence. So you see. If your country doesn't have too much violence, extreme poverty rates of 58%. Going down down down in those countries, so that that's going down to 40% by 2005. Still tough, but steady progress in countries with little violence. With minor violence, also going down 58 to about 50, but not so much. In countries with major violence, the extreme poverty rate, 58 to 62, it's not going down at all. And you see the trend line across these years, 25 years. That's what Collier means by the bottom billion, the people who are trapped. One illustration of a country where the people feel trapped is the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is a huge country in Central Africa, rich in mineral resources, but with a tragic history and chronic problems of governance. Here's the Democratic Republic of Congo in an ethno-linguistic map, really showing you the tribal identifications in a country like the Congo. Why does it have these borders? Because, fundamentally, these were the borders drawn at the Berlin West Africa Conference in the 1880s. They became the borders of the Belgian Congo. And then they were simply the borders inherited by the new state when it became independent in 1960. But you can see all the tribal groupings inside this world denominated by these

somewhat artificial frontiers. So, break down the problem of the Congo. You start with a pretty bad colonial legacy. A place that was actively exploited, plundered almost to a genocidal degree, during the period of King Leopold in the late 1800s. It comes under more formal Belgian state rule in the early 20th century. But by the time of independence in 1960, the Belgians had put in some public infrastructure, but not a whole lot. A very tiny number of the people in the newly independent Congo were well educated. So you start with a pretty blighted colonial legacy. You follow that with a Cold War legacy. As soon as the Congo becomes independent in 1960, it becomes one of those fragile states that's a bit of a pawn, in real and perceived superpower rivalries. There are some West European mining companies that are vying to carve out their protectorates. The United States is interested in seeing that the Congo not fall under communist control. There is some interested meddling by the Soviet Union, though not a whole lot. The bottom line of that is, it's Cold War legacy, and therefore, the Americans and some of the Europeans and even for a while the United Nations, give their support to a national unifying leader. And the one who comes out by 1964 is a man named Joseph Mobutu. Mobutu, in turn, becomes a typical plunderer. He's a predatory ruler. He's just extorting whatever wealth he can for the enrichment of himself and his cronies. He's on the right side of the United States in the Cold War. They don't give him a lot of support, they don't like him very much, but they don't bother about him much, either. So, in the rest of the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, a predatory legacy. Congo's just not really getting off the ground. By the way, the name of the country

changed during this period under Mobutu to Zaire. Mobutu called himself Mobutu Sese Seko. They've changed now back to the Congo. As if that were not enough, a genocidal legacy. Let me go back to that map we showed a couple of minutes ago. For instance, in this area over here, this part of the map called the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, there's a profound bitter tribal conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis, who are vying for control in these two countries, Rwanda and Burundi. There is a genocidal massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda. Hundreds of thousands of people murdered. The result, then, is a counterattack by the Tutsis that take control over Rwanda, destabilizing the country of Burundi. Their conflict from the fleeing Hutus spreads into the Congo where the Rwandans chase after them with help from their allies in places like Uganda. The tribal war spreads into this whole area with legacies that continue to this day. So if you combine a bad colonial legacy, Cold War legacy, a predatory legacy, plus the recent genocides and civil strife in the Great Lakes region of Africa, the results for the Congo have been years and years of war. The Congo itself over the last 20 years has probably suffered the bloodiest combination of interstate and civil war of any place in Africa, indeed, perhaps, one of the bloodiest such wars of any region in the entire world, in the last 20 years. So, Congo, a place with a lot of natural wealth, just can't really seem to get a head start, help its people get off the ground. But just because the Congo is in Africa, and some other troubled countries are in Africa, don't assume that all of sub-Saharan Africa is in trouble. Take a look at this chart produced by the International Monetary Fund. You'll see that for every period they're looking at, over about the last ten years, 2004 to 2013, the GDP growth rates in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole are beating

the average growth rates for the whole world, all through this period. Sure, oil exporting countries are doing pretty well. Middle income countries too. But so is everybody else. Fragile countries, kind of the bottom billion, you see for half this period, the five year period from 04 to' 08, they're dramatically underperforming, say half the growth rate of, oh, South Africa. But in the last five years, even some of the fragile countries, beginning to pick up a little bit. Though still serious afflictions in places like Congo or places like Zimbabwe with its predatory dictator, Robert Mugabe. But some of the fragile countries are picking up a little bit, and in the last five years, South Africa's economic performance has become a little spottier. But overall, the picture for sub-Saharan Africa, relatively strong. The dilemma for what to do about the bottom billion is acute. On the one hand the world should not just be indifferent to it and say, well, if these billion people are trapped that's a tragedy, but there's nothing that we can really do about that. Perhaps there are things that can be done with international development programs, provision of some public goods, but should outsiders really be indifferent to the political, security, and humanitarian tragedies in these countries? But then, see the other side of the dilemma. Suppose outside countries are not indifferent to those tragedies. Suppose we want to intervene, to help countries that have extreme afflictions, to overthrow the worst dictators, to stop genocidal violence. If outsiders, if European countries get involved, is that a new form of imperialism? Of outsiders meaning well, but trying to arrange things? You can see the way to run that argument back and forth.

As a historian, my job is simply to call your attention to the revival of outside interests in these new forms, which a hundred years ago might have been called liberal imperialism or do-gooder desires to intervene now in a new form, maybe less coercive, more progressive purposes. But simply by noting the historical parallel, doesn't mean that I'm using that as a way of condemning it out of hand. You really do have to look at the situations case by case. For example, here we are in early 2013. The government of France has sent troops into the North African country of Mali. Very much at the request of a lot of people living in Mali. They want the help. A lot of African neighbors of Mali want France to come in and help them, and other African countries are supplying support, too. Over in East Africa, in fact, a league of African countries are sending forces to intervene in the broken state of Somalia. That's another kind of outside intervention, from Africans rather than from Europeans. So judging these dilemmas is a tough case, but we see that issues of outside intervention don't just go away in history with the decline of imperialism and the rise of decolonization.