List the impact of colonialism on Europe
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Colonization is often considered as a concept or action of the far distant past that has little to do with the modern world today. However, this could not be further from the truth. Colonization, more specifically European colonization, has had and still has a great deal of impact on nations, more specifically those of the global south, even though quite a bit of time has passed since Columbus set sails. Because of the still lingering effects of colonization, nations have had to undergo domestic and international challenges to overcome the power relationships with former colonizers.
Before examining the remaining impacts of colonization in the current nation-state system, it is important to understand how colonization initially affected the nations of the global south. Europeans began colonizing these nations to obtain resources that directly boosted their own economies at the extent of the indigenous peoples. Colonialism proved to be very cruel towards the indigenous peoples, bringing about slavery, brutality, and death (Campbell, MacKinnon, & Stevens, 2010, p. 36). There is no mistaking that colonialism was unfavorable to the nations affected and severely limited any room for economic or culture growth. Campbell et al. (2010) further expands on the direct confrontations of colonialism by stating, “[T]he impacts of colonialism were similar, regardless of the specific colonizer: disease; destruction of indigenous social, political, and economic structures; repression; exploitation; land displacement; and land degradation” (p. 37). Needless to say, the atrocious effects of colonization on the colonized nations would not have been easily wiped clean even after the colonizer left or stepped out of the boundary lines of the nation. Colonialism has had lasting domestic and international consequences.
Once the nation gained independence it was then required to knit itself back together with a limited amount of string, so to speak, because of the state in which the colonizer left it. Colonialism, in addition to creating unstable “artificial states,” normally led to the nation’s entire infrastructure — roads, rail lines, and lines of communication — to be dedicated to the extraction of resources from the nation into the hands of the colonizer which then limited the formerly colonized nation’s ability to stabilize their own economy and feed their own population (Campbell, et al., 2010, p. 37). In addition to the direct physical effects of colonialism on the independent nations, there was a great deal of domestic political conflict that arose with the independence. During the stages of colonization, the native people of the nation had little to no influence on the way their own country was ran. The outcome of this was that the people of the newly independent nation had very inadequate knowledge on how to keep the nation-state going (Campbell et al, 2010, p. 37). This, of course, would be unfortunate for the struggling nations.
Even after the nation became independent, colonization still affected the nation’s correspondence and position with and within the international world. Ultimately, colonialism left the independent nation unprepared to function in the modern global nation-state system and vulnerable to outside influence and pressure. This in part can be attributed to neo-colonialism. According to Campbell et al. (2010), “Neo-colonialism refers to the involvement of more powerful states in the domestic affairs of less powerful ones” (p. 38). In the article “The Neo-Colonization of Central America” (2016), Jeff Abbott argues that neo-colonialism is in itself another form of colonization (p. 41). This concept suggests that the effects of colonization is still very present but just in a different way. To explain, as insinuated by Abbott (2016), “the force of neo-colonization is strengthened by free-trade agreements and development plans that guarantee a company’s right to investment above the rights of the citizenry. Meanwhile, the indigenous populations face renewed dispossession and eviction to make way for global capital’s conquest (p. 41). What this means is that the nation state is still abused because of outside meddling disguised as international policy.
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