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African developments were even less fruitful than those in Asia and
Latin America. Asians and Latin Americans generally had reached the
level of self-identification necessary for statehood and national
self-determination. Large parts of Africa living at pre-national levels
of tribal identification, devoted their energies to the realization of
nationhood. Their constitutions announced their frontiers and proclaimed
their sovereignty, but inter-tribal rivalries and personal ambitions
turned each new nation into a battle field for prestige and authority,
with the military often making the final decisions.
Asians and Africans had won telling victories in their struggle to drive
out their former imperial masters. When it came to the affirmative task
of organizing responsible regional federations, their failure was
dismal. Asia and Africa were regionally disunited. Former colonial
people, still monitored by alien representatives of monopoly capitalism,
were fragmented by the self-determination struggle into theoretically
sovereign nations many of which lacked the experience and the local
expertise which are the indispensible prerequisites of self-determination
and of fruitful regional federation.
Another aspect of the world revolution produced more tangible results.
The latter half of the nineteenth century brought into being a
grass-roots movement of peoples demanding everything from petty reforms
of administrative machinery to planned revolutionary transformations of
the established monopoly capitalist structure.
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