Congo’s fate is not its destiny

The ongoing war in the east of the Congo has its roots in the corrupt neglect of the “exploiting world” and the failure to adopt realistic social structures, which is not limited to the Congo but is prevalent across the “emerging world”.

The corrupt neglect of peoples, and their governments, in the parts of the world that industrialized first allows and encourages that chaos, because that gives them competitive advantage in access to the resources they need to feed their industrialized production systems. The failure of consuming countries to regulate the abroad activities of commercial concerns based in their territories is an abrogation of their own standards and principles. As laid out in the External Relations section of the Standards of LIFE, societies should adopt standards to govern their trade with other people, using the same principles they apply to themselves. In the Congo situation, this would mean that European companies would be required by their own domestic law to deal only with sanctioned representatives of the people of the Congo that also adhere to the Standards of LIFE.

The emerging world, sometimes called the developing world, is a group of all those people who are emerging from colonial pasts, and yet still subject to the structures of government and international relations that are cast in the old colonial mold. These structures are beneficial to the exploiting world because they provide a single point of corruption through which to access the resources they want. All this is exacerbated by the emerging world attempting to operate within geographies and boundaries that were defined to reflect colonial divisions of authority, not the natural human landscape on the ground.

If the people of the Congo, and its neighbors, were able to adopt the more natural and flexible structures of the Standards of LIFE they would create a more firmly grounded society that, in turn, would be better able to establish the rule of law, which would contain the poisonous leftovers of the Rwandan massacres of yesterday. The twin objectives of protecting people and nourishing their prosperity can be achieved through the adoption of properly representative and principled government in both the exploiting and the emerging worlds.

The Congo’s destiny is to be a propserous and peaceful region, but until the exploiting world takes responsibility for its own actions and the emerging world adopts new political structures that serve them more naturally, the Congo’s fate is the stuff of nightmares.