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A recent news dispatch mentions the Democratic Republic of Congo recalling its ambassador to Congo's former colonial master Belgium in protest over Brussel's Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht having urged, on the very eve of Congo's first full general elections since achieving independence from Belgium forty years ago, that the nation "come under international 'trusteeship' so outsiders can run it."
This diplomatic contretemps is starkly emblematic of the past thirteen years' international developments and the pattern that ineluctably emerges from them, one of the intensified re-establishment of relationships between former colonial metropolises and their ex-colonies that are more reminiscent of the 19th than of the 20th Century.
That Belgium of all nations is advocating an 'international trusteeship' for Congo after the 1877 model that placed Brussels in nominal control of a joint Western European colonization of Central Africa, occurs against the backdrop of a French and German led European Union troop deployment in Congo beginning last year.
Britain is now back in control of its former West African colony of Sierra Leone, with troops and all, as well as returning its military to Afghanistan after having been driven out following the successive British invasions of 1838-42, 1878 and 1919.
Some 9,000 British military personnel are also back in Iraq after the departure of the last United Kingdom troops to occupy that country in 1932.
And of course London continues to maintain colonial suzerainty over Diego Garcia, Northern Ireland, the Malvinas [British designation: Falkland Islands], assorted Caribbean and other possessions.
Similarly, French troops are back in Haiti, Cote d'Ivoire and Djibouti, the latter shared with NATO ally troops from the US and Germany, with an ever expanding German global military expansion, Berlin currently having more forces deployed overseas than any nation other than the United States, creeping down the East African coast towards its former colony of Tanganyika.
As recent developments in the United Nations Security Council demonstrate, Paris's eye is also once again set on Lebanon.
Like Britain and other NATO allies, France too continues subjugation of centuries-old colonies, in Paris's case the Italian-speaking island of Corsica, Martinique, Guadalupe, Saint Martin, La Reunion, Mayotte in the Indian Ocean and French Polynesia .
The United States, never officially acknowledged as a colonial master, is back in control of its quasi-colony of Liberia and US Marines are back in Haiti, with the former's sanguinary antecedents during the American occupation of that nation from 1915-1934 still fresh in Haitians' memories.
Denmark remains in colonial possession of majority Inuit/Eskimo Greenland, which is maintained as a joint Danish-US military base, soon to be home to 'Son of Star Wars' missile shield facilities, as well as the Faro Islands, where polls regularly show most residents want independence from Copenhagen.
The Netherlands still occupies the Dutch Antilles, from where it aids its NATO allies the US and Britain with surveillance and other assistance for the counterinsurgency war in Colombia.
Spain is poised to regain control of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea when the next coup attempt succeeds and was until recently commanding former Central American and Caribbean colonies' forces in Iraq.
Not to be left out of NATO's revived colonial alliance, Portugal is eagerly planning a return to Sao Tome and Principe, with their newly-discovered oil riches, and Guinea Bissau when the next, successful, coup occurs there.
Additionally, over the past four years Portugal has led annual joint military exercises with its former colonies Brazil, Angola, East Timor, Sao Tome and Principe, Capo Verde, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique.
Closer to the capitals of classical European colonialism, Turkish and German troops have returned to the Balkans as Serbia and Macedonia are 'decentralized,' fragmented and rendered effective colonies in their own right, with the same masters as before, the same as are recolonizing the world from North to South, East to West.
Would that another Mark Twain or Joseph Conrad were alive to identify this new international colonial scramble as what it is.
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