Imperialism. y/n?

So 2 crazy tribes are at war constantly, then one empire bashes their armies, unites the lands and brings them better technology. The efforts of the empire to unite everything results in the basis of a strong future nation state when they finally leave.

Compare India to Africa, India's only major political troubles were border disputes with China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

All of these countries maintained a semblance of democracy despite being as poor as Africa for many years, while China went through Totalitarianism and Africa suffered from a patchwork of military dictatorships (except in South Africa).

Empires have problems though when they have to compete with other empires, as we have seen in Africa, or when they cannot maintain security.

I'm going with "yes". Where empires failed, if the empire never interfered I do not believe countries would always end up like Thailand or Japan, I believe the same factors that led to the fail of empire would also lead to their failure as traditional societies trying to advance to modernity. They would end up like Ethiopia during the 70s and 80s or China after ww2.

>>5
If global domination is bad then well researched logical ethical reasoning will likely not justify global domination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

If the cost of waiting for the warring tribes to reach a stalemate is less than the cost of an empire conquering them, then waiting it out is justified.

As it stands, global domination would not be a good thing, though global domination by capitalism, rather than a political entity, would be a good thing. Whether it is justified for an empire to intervene depends on the differences in technology, which affects both how quickly and painlessly the war ends and how quickly the land is developed afterwards.

If you're worried that this line of thought might justify the propaganda efforts of imperialists, you should equally be worried about the propaganda efforts of smaller tyrannical regimes trying to maintain their own power. Both would seek global domination if they had the opportunity. Logical ethical reasoning is separate from this propaganda and does not allow prejudices like this to interfere.