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Former colonies now extract a heavy price from their erstwhile masters.

The traditional mercantilist roles of colonizer and colonies were inverted over the last few decades. For millennia, colonial empires consisted of a center which consumed raw materials and produced and sold finished goods to the periphery whose role was to extract minerals and cultivate commodities, edible and not.

In the wake of the Second World War (a failed German colonial experiment in the heartland of Europe) and as a result of escalating scarcity, caused by a variety of economic and geopolitical factors, the center of geopolitical-military gravity shifted to the producers and owners of mineral and agricultural wealth.

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Intellectruals find it hard to remain objective in the face of conflict.

Interview with Ljubomir Danailov Frckoski
 
Skopje, June 2008

Ljubomir Danailov Frcksoki (”Frcko” to his friends) is by far Macedonia’s most prominent public intellectual. The author of this struggling nation’s first constitution in 1991, he also contributed to the Ohrid Framework Agreement, which, in the wake of an armed insurgency, has defined, ten years later, the relationship between the country’s majority and its restive Albanian minority. He served as Macedonia’s Minister of Interior and Minister of Foreign Affairs until 1997.

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