Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
The present situation of ethnic, linguistic and religious heterogeneity in Africa/Asian countries is a product of coercive division and/or unification, in which colonialism played a major part. Relating to the first aspect, the importance of ethnolinguistic fragmentation for the explanation of post-independence economic growth rates is established by the work of Easterly and Levine (1997) using the index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization popularized by Mauro (1995). Englebert et al. (2002: 1099) measure for an African sample the suffocation by borders, or in other words “their propensity for bringing together peoples that historically lived under different, if not inimical, systems”. This measure is strongly related to group grievances and the likelihood of civil war. The forced unification is according to Ronald Oliver (1991) more formative than the division of Africa by colonial borders. It is however already included in measures of ethnolinguistic fractionalization usually used in multivariate studies. Furthermore, we use a dichotomous variable (FIRSTCEN) measuring whether a territory has been pre-colonially centralized (‘0’) or not (‘1’). We distinguish between countries which existed as precolonial political units (or parts of such) and those which did not. This relates to the years/centuries before the onset of colonialism; we did not take into account ancient or mythical kingdoms for which no detailed information is available and no factual links to later units can be observed. This means that all areas being part of the Ottoman empire are coded as precolonially centralized (‘0’) but India not, because, according to our information, none of the pre-colonial empires has covered the entire Indian peninsula up to the Himalayas as British-India did. To put it in another way – the question is: Were the inhabitants of an actual country united in a political unit before or only under the auspices of colonialism?
Our sample of African/Asian countries is in this regard almost exactly split in two halves: 40 of them did have an experience of being in (or part of a larger) political unit. This group consists of almost all Asian/North African countries (except India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines) and some countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Rwanda, Burundi, Lesotho, Swaziland). The other group comprises mainly African and Pacific countries as well as some areas on the Arab peninsula (43 cases).
Countries which were politically united for the first time as colonies were typically dominated for longer period (COLYEARS), had more bullion mining and plantations than other colonies, became economically more dependent on the metropole country (FDICON, TRADECON) and experienced more work immigration and more successful missionary activities (see 'Descriptive Statistics').
The second aspect of artificial borders, the “partition of preexisting political groupings”, is called “dismemberment” by Englebert et al. (2002: 193). It is measured as the “unweighted average proportion of groups astride a border” and “equals one half the sum of the percentages of national populations that these groups represent on both sides of border” . For a sample of 48 African countries, dismemberment is positively associated with the likelihood and intensity of boundary disputes. Alesina et al. (2006: 8) go a long way to measure the fractal dimension of borders based on the assumption that „borders which are coast lines or squiggly lines (perhaps meant to capture geographic features and/or ethnicities) are less likely to be artificial“. Among the “most artificial” states identified by these authors (2006: 13) there are countries like Chad, Mali, Niger or Sudan among others. These countries lie in the Sahara-Sahel belt of Africa and indeed have some ruler-straight borders. This is misleading, however, as these borders cut across areas thinly populated by mostly nomadic groups. A border line could be as squiggly as possible but would still cut across these groups. Furthermore, a border can be squiggly and follow a geographic feature as a river, but nevertheless divide as the same people live on both sides of the river. The examples of the Bakongo on the lower Congo river or the Lao along the Mekong show clearly that borders following a river are not automatically “natural” and less problematic than other borders. It is therefore advisable to rely on empirical observations in measuring the partition effect by borders. This is also the approach behind the second measure used by Alesina et al. (2006: 12), “the percent of the population of a country that belongs to a partitioned group”. This measure is not correlated to the fractionalization measure, but is significant for the explanation of a number of political and economic variables. As there are no consistent data for our sample available, we followed this approach and measured the partition by colonial borders as follows:
For Africa, the Atlas of precolonial societies by Mueller et al. (1999) was a useful tool for the coding. If more than 50% of the population belongs to groups partitioned by colonial borders the impact is considered strong; otherwise it is moderate unless there was no dismemberment as in the case of an island like Madagascar. In areas with strong traditions of state- and empire-building, colonial borders could not be drawn as arbitrarily as in those without. Most political units could be only dominated entirely – or not at all. Colonial partition is therefore a rather rare experience in these areas – except for the non-sedentary or semi-nomadic ethnic groups (e.g. the so-called “mountain tribes” and “sea nomads”) which successively had to accept a new type of borderline enforcement.
In 20 cases (24%) of our sample, we did not find evidence that colonial borders were especially “artificially” drawn in the interests of colonialists, cutting traditional areas of settlement or of close interaction. These cases are mainly semi-colonial countries and islands – or cases, in which the actual borders cannot be traced back to colonialism. 19 cases (23%) were coded as ‘1’, i.e. a moderate impact of colonialism regarding partition; there mainly the states in the Northern part of Africa as well as, e.g., Iran, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines. In the clear majority of cases (45; 53%), colonial borders did have a distortive impact. This concerns the Asian part of the former Ottoman empire (Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan), where – as mentioned above – the creation of new political entities entailed the creation of new national economies as well, each with its own boundaries, and each with its own centralized system of laws, taxes, and fiscal management in a formerly highly integrated economic area (Owen/Pamuk 1999: 51). In many cases, territories were arbitrarily detached, sometimes “bartered” among colonial powers, integrated into existing colonies and reconfigured (e.g. between British-Malaya and Dutch Indonesia or in French-Indochina with Cambodia and Laos). Most cases of “artifical” borders, however, are found in sub-Saharan Africa (37 cases). French colonies experienced significantly more often distortive borders than British ones, but there is no statistical significant relationship between sub-Saharan Africa / Asia, North Africa (Annex table 3.4). In areas with “artifical” borders, occupational specializations along ethno¬linguistic and/or religious lines developed more often (ETHNFUNC) and missionary activities were more successful (see 'Descriptive Statistics'). As expected, colonial borders were drawn arbitrarily in areas which were not politically united before the colonial period (FIRSTCEN).
