'Mornin', Larry--

From what I remember from studying the history of the colonial period (which isn't much), part of the problem facing Africa today has to do with the artificial lines drawn by European colonizers in the 19th century, upon which the national boundaries of today are based. The Europeans were interested in territory and resources, not in indigenous cultures or tribal structures, so the political groups gathered under one colonial government were disparate and sometimes mutually hostile. So when the imperial power was removed, the rival groups rushed to fill the vacuum. The results have often been civil war and anarchy, or military dictatorship, when one group established primacy over its rivals and thus assumed the vacated imperial role. It's not that colonized peoples are incapable of self-government; it's that their political growth was stunted by imperial exercise of power, and their natural cultural divisions were muddled by artificial foreign administrations.

The mess in the Balkans is likewise a demonstration of the collapse of empire. The national/cultural groups of that region were dominated, stunted, and played one against the other by polyglot empires (Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman) for centuries, until 1917. The empires are gone, but the centuries of domination have done their damage. Perhaps it can be repaired before everyone who lives there is killed.

I think -- and this is not a scholarly opinion, only a personal one -- that the reason the former British colonies seem to have a better track record, overall, for political stability is that a bunch of troublemaking colonists got so annoyed at high-handed imperialism in the 1770s that they declared war, and won independence. After that, British imperialism became somewhat less autocratic than, say, Spanish imperialism, allowing the subject peoples the opportunity to learn a little self-government as long as the British got their commercial and strategic advantages. Less of a vacuum, so less catastrophe.

Regards--
Mary Anne