The Illusion of Sovereignty: Independence Never Delivered in Africa or the Carpathian. Part 1

Seventeen African countries raised new flags, established new constitutions, and sent delegates to the United Nations in 1960, the Year of Africa, according to historians. The world reacted positively to the official start of a new era of “independence.” But was that enough?

Philosopher Rana Dasgupta, in his sweeping 2025 work After Nations, tracing the rise and fall of the nation-state system, has observed that international law itself was constructed not as a neutral architecture of order but as a mechanism for legitimating and perpetuating the power relations established during the European empire. The implications for postcolonial states are severe: they inherited a global legal and financial system designed, in its bones, to keep them subordinate.

What Sovereignty Actually Means

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) was the first time that the notion of the sovereign nation-state was defined in the legal framework, which brought together two principles: bringing an end to the Thirty Years War in Europe and establishing the principle that the sovereign of a state has complete authority over their state.

This was the basis of how global politics have functioned for three centuries, but not without great amounts of strife and violence.

For the colonial world, the Westphalian system was invoked only selectively.

While European empires asserted sovereignty over their own territories, they simultaneously denied that notion to the Indigenous groups who were enslaved by said empires. Decolonisation in the mid-20th century provided new countries with formal sovereignty, yet the existing international system was and remains set up as a system primarily benefiting the West.

Real sovereignty, as distinct from its ceremonial version, requires several interlocking capacities. A genuinely sovereign state must be able to control its own monetary policy and financial system; develop its industrial base on its own terms; access and deploy technology competitively; prevent external actors from appropriating its natural resources; and make foreign and domestic policy without a veto from outside powers. By these standards, most states in the Global South are, at best, partially sovereign.

“The nation-state system has become a mechanism for transferring resources from poor regions to rich ones. International law, far from being neutral, perpetuates the power relations instituted during the European empire and actively prevents nations from rising in the economic hierarchy.” — Rana Dasgupta wrote in his book “After Nations” (2025)

“The nation-state system has become a mechanism for transferring resources from poor regions to rich ones. International law, far from being neutral, perpetuates the power relations instituted during the European empire and actively prevents nations from rising in the economic hierarchy.” — Rana Dasgupta wrote in his book “After Nations” (2025)

The Martinican-Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon understood this half a century before it became mainstream analysis. While African flags were raised all over Africa in 1961, Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth and stated clearly that gaining formal independence without transforming the economy into a new economy is not enough. The national bourgeoisie would take over the bureaucratic shell of the colonial state’s administrative structure, but the extractive nature of that structure will remain.

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot, which we must clinically detect and remove from our land and from our minds as well.” — Frantz Fanon, wrote in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961)

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot, which we must clinically detect and remove from our land and from our minds as well.” — Frantz Fanon, wrote in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961)

This warning was not merely rhetorical. It was a structural diagnosis: that political independence, without economic sovereignty, produces a class of local managers administering a foreign-designed system for foreign benefit.

Nations That Won Flags but Not Freedom

The Democratic Republic of Congo: The Richest Poor Country on Earth

The DRC has one of the largest examples of divergent amounts of theoretical sovereignty versus actual sovereignty. The DRC holds some of the greatest concentrations of natural resource wealth in the world, with an estimated $24 trillion of mineral resources, such as 70% of the available coltan in the world as well as significant quantities of cobalt used for battery production for EVs, copper, gold, diamonds, and uranium.

The fighting over the mineral wealth is currently taking place with the assistance of guns. In the early part of 2025, the M23 rebel group, supported by the Rwandan government, seized control of Goma in eastern Congo, and it is estimated that there are currently between three and four thousand Rwandan troops actively fighting alongside M23. The coltan-rich Rubaya mine (the Bibatama Mining Concession), is currently under the control of M23, and the UN estimates that the rebels smuggle approximately 150 to 200 tons of tantalum ore into Rwanda on a monthly basis for eventual export.

In January 2026, a landslide occurred at the mine, killing 200-plus people. The minerals that power the world’s smartphones are being extracted under conditions so unsafe that they kill those who are extracting them, while the profits from those assets are usually exported elsewhere.

The Trump administration brokered a peace accord in December 2025, which Congo’s President Tshisekedi almost immediately accused Rwanda of violating. According to analysts, the deal’s economic aspect was set up to guarantee that the U.S. had guaranteed access to key minerals. This raises fears that the U.S.’s primary goal is not to help bring peace for Congolese civilians but rather to ensure a continuation of the extractive relationship with the U.S.

The sources of this disaster can be traced back beyond the failures of the Congolese people; rather, they arise from specific outside actions that were designed to create this disaster. King Leopold II of Belgium’s personal rule of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908 was the beginning of a program of removing Congolese citizens from their land and resources on a massive scale (10 million deaths by some estimates). The pattern of treating Congolese people as dispossessed of their lands continued during the Belgian colonial period.

Belgium had less than 30 Congolese university graduates that could run a modern country when independence came in 1960. Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo and threatened to use his country’s resources for himself and the people of Congo. Therefore, seven months after gaining independence from Belgium, he was overthrown by the Belgian and U.S. governments through the CIA and their intelligence services, tortured, and executed.

Zimbabwe: The Cost of Defiance

The pathway chosen by Zimbabwe since 1980 provides an alternative but also equally insightful example of how one postcolonial state has tried, unsuccessfully, to rectify the colonial redistribution of land and wealth. The acceleration of land reform beginning in the early part of the millennium by Mugabe’s government, which included the expropriation of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to landless Black Zimbabweans, was met with an immediate response in the form of targeted sanctions against the government, which effectively froze all government assets, excluded Zimbabwe from the international financial markets, and prohibited access to loans from the IMF and the World Bank.

Whether one approves or disapproves of the way land reform has been implemented, these sanctions were specifically intended to penalise a government for its attempt to right colonial wrongs. Hyperinflation has since occurred, with hyperinflation reaching 89.7 sextillion percent at its peak in November 2008, resulting from economic mismanagement but exacerbated by the imposition of international economic sanctions against Zimbabwe. This example demonstrates the way in which an ostensibly neutral financial system operates as a tool of political control.

South Africa: Democracy Without Economic Decolonization

The negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994 was a political triumph in South Africa. Yet the economic order of apartheid was left substantially intact. Three decades later, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies on earth. Less than 8% of South Africa’s population is Caucasian; however, they own 80% of all privately owned land and 77% of all shares traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The national unemployment rate is above 32%, while youth-related unemployment rates are nearly 60%.

In January 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act, a law allowing land seizure without compensation in limited circumstances, as a modest attempt to correct apartheid-era dispossession. The Trump administration’s response was immediate: an executive order accusing South Africa of racial discrimination against white farmers, followed by a freeze on American aid. Trump’s framing was condemned by South Africans across racial lines, including white farmers themselves, as a grotesque inversion of the actual history. It was also a live demonstration of the sovereignty question: a country attempting to legislate a remedy for its colonial past, and a foreign power threatening it with economic punishment for doing so.

Argentina: Debt as Colonial Instrument

Argentina offers a case study in sovereignty erosion through debt bondage. In April 2025, the IMF approved its 23rd loan to Argentina since 1958: a $20 billion facility for President Javier Milei’s government, accompanied by conditions requiring exchange rate liberalization and the dismantling of capital controls. By October 2025, the peso had fallen so sharply that the United States Treasury intervened directly, purchasing Argentine pesos and providing an additional $20 billion currency swap to prevent collapse. Argentina is now the IMF’s single largest debtor.

The situation is almost perfectly illustrative of the sovereignty trap. Ha-Joon Chang, responding to Milei’s earlier proposals to abolish Argentina’s central bank and adopt the US dollar outright, called the plan “insane” and warned it would turn Argentina into an American colony. Milei did not fully implement dollarization, but the practical result is scarcely distinguishable: a country whose peso trades within a band set by the IMF, whose central bank acts under Washington’s supervision, and whose lithium and soybean wealth continues to flow outward under terms that reproduce the colonial arrangements Walter Rodney described fifty years ago.

Romania: The European Periphery

Romania had a large industrial base, considerable natural resources, and an educated/technical labour force when transitioning from Communism after the fall of the regime in 1989. During the time Romania was part of a structural adjustment program through the IMF and World Bank, it privatised its remaining state enterprises at relatively low prices (often to foreign capital) and suffered substantial asset stripping by the foreign investors who purchased them, as well as loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs associated with those businesses as a result of the foreign companies closing down their operations in Romania.

Today, an estimated 4 – 5 million Romanians, roughly a quarter of the working-age population, have left the country since 1989. Romania simultaneously exports its educated young people and imports finished goods produced with their labor elsewhere. This relationship structurally resembles the extractive periphery of the Global South far more than the imagined equality of European integration, demonstrating that the mechanisms of dependency operate within the Global North’s alliances, not only across the conventional North-South divide.

These five sample cases, from the mineral-rich basin of Central Africa to the soybean plains of the Southern Cone to the Carpathian borderlands of Europe, share a single underlying condition: formal sovereignty was granted, but real sovereignty was withheld or quietly dismantled.

Continues in Part Two: “The Anatomy of Resistance: China, Russia, and the Price of Real Sovereignty”

Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher

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