Following World War I, anti-British sentiment began to grow in the colonies. Desire for self-rule and the frustration of having served a country while incurring massive casualties without thanks led colonies to rally for independence.

Europeans described the European way of doing things to Africans as the Western Way. The idea was that Europe was the Western world and it was the superior region of the world. Therefore the people of Africa should adopt this Western way of doing things.

Of all these empires the Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians were most threatened by the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whilst all of these nations controlled empires which included foreign people, the empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans contained empires in Europe and the Middle East where nationalism was more prominent.

The outgoing colonial administrations of Britain and France wanted to ensure continued European domination on the Middle East; therefore they wanted the region to be weak comparable to Britain and France.

The British and French were wary of the hundreds of millions of Arabic speakers and others who comprise the Middle East's population; they wanted to ensure the region remained divided and weak, rather than united and strong.

The British and French injected systemic weakness into the region by severing economic relationships between port cities such as Beirut, and large, workshop based cities such as Damascus.

Although the French and British created certain countries, such as Lebanon, with a democratic government, others, such as Iraq and Jordan, were created to be hereditary monarchies; democratic governance was therefore not an all important prerequisite.

The British and French wanted the Middle East to be as weak and poor as possible, expansion into other regions of the world that shared certain Middle Eastern cultural traits, such as religion or language, was absolutely the last thing they desired as it would increase their power versus the French and British.

Major ports had existed along the coastline of Africa since well before European colonization. Similarly, in the interior of Africa, where Europeans had never gone before, the primary form of transportation over long distances were animals.

Equatorial Guinea was a colony of Spain. It was Spain's only colony on the African continent.

In 1963 the Organisation of African Unity was created to protect African sovereignty. It was succeeded in 2002 by the African Union.

Britain forced people in their colonies to adapt to British Culture in every way. They were told to live like British, talk like British, eat like British, dress like British, etc. The Europeans in general felt that their way was superior to the way of the Africans, and therefore the Africans should act like Europeans.

When the British and French governments decolonized the Arab world, they left behind countries designed to be dependent upon Britain and France.

They did not want Arab independence, so they ensured no country would be powerful.

The modern problems in the Arab world all stem from this original systemic weakness, which is the cause of most other geopolitical problems in the modern Middle East.

The British and French did consult with certain local leaders, but made sure to hamper these leaders with linguistically and geographically disparate populations against the wishes of both the leaders and the populations.

The British and French colonial administrations were scared of the prospect of hundreds of millions of Arabic speakers coalescing into a single country, so they ensured that when they decolonized the region they left behind nothing formidable or powerful.

The Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) led to the emergence of Japan as an imperial power. But, it was Japan’s victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) that announced to the world Japan’s status as a growing imperial power. For one thing it was the first time an Asian military had defeated a European power in war since the age of European colonialism had begun a few centuries earlier.