GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - View Single Post - Is RECOLONIZATION the solution to Third World Poverty?

$5 submissions · 06-17-2010, 01:14 AM

Before you can let out a bellylaugh to the title, check the quote below first and reconsider.

Quote:

Halfway through the 12th century, and a long time before economists began pondering how to turn poor places into rich ones, the Germanic prince Henry the Lion set out to create a merchant?s mecca on the lawless Baltic coast. It was an ambitious project, a bit like trying to build a new Chicago in modern Congo or Iraq. Northern Germany was plagued by what today?s development gurus might delicately call a ?bad-governance equilibrium,? its townships frequently sacked by Slavic marauders such as the formidable pirate Niclot the Obotrite. But Henry was not a mouse. He seized control of a fledgling town called Lübeck, had Niclot beheaded on the battlefield, and arranged for Lübeck to become the seat of a diocese. A grand rectangular market was laid out at the center of the town; all that was missing was the merchants.

To attract that missing ingredient to his city, Henry hit on an idea that has enjoyed a sort of comeback lately. He devised a charter for Lübeck, a set of ?most honorable civic rights,? calculating that a city with light regulation and fair laws would attract investment easily. The stultifying feudal hierarchy was cast aside; an autonomous council of local burgesses would govern Lübeck. Onerous taxes and trade restrictions were ruled out; merchants who settled in Lübeck would be exempt from duties and customs throughout Henry the Lion?s lands, which stretched south as far as Bavaria. The residents of Lübeck were promised fair treatment before the law and an independent mint that would shelter them from confiscatory inflation. With this bill of rights in place, Henry dispatched messengers to Russia, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Merchants who liked the sound of his charter were invited to migrate to Lübeck.

The plan worked. Immigrants soon began arriving in force, and Lübeck became the leading entrepôt for the budding Baltic Sea trade route, which eventually extended as far west as London and Bruges and as far east as Novgorod, in Russia. Hundreds of oaken cogs?ships powered by a single square sail?entered Lübeck?s harbor every year, their hulls bursting with Flemish cloth, Russian fur, and German salt. In less than a century, Lübeck went from a backwater to the most populous and prosperous town in northern Europe. ?In medieval urban history there is hardly another example of a success so sudden and so brilliant,? writes the historian Philippe Dollinger.

Quote:

Romer is peddling a radical vision: that dysfunctional nations can kick-start their own development by creating new cities with new rules?Lübeck-style centers of progress that Romer calls ?charter cities.? By building urban oases of technocratic sanity, struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed. And since Henry the Lion is not on hand to establish these new cities, Romer looks to the chief source of legitimate coercion that exists today?the governments that preside over the world?s more successful countries. To launch new charter cities, he says, poor countries should lease chunks of territory to enlightened foreign powers, which would take charge as though presiding over some imperial protectorate. Romer?s prescription is not merely neo-medieval, in other words. It is also neo-colonial.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-poverty/8134/

Very interesting idea. Basically replicating HONG KONG. But will it work in a world that is rife with nationalism and sectarianism? It's not exactly rare to see how some people would rather STARVE with their PRIDE intact than to kowtow to the classic "imperialist" meanies.... Indeed, while Romer's concept is of "charter" cities that act as models, they are vulnerable to being painted as colonial outposts by critics of globalism.