They fail with Western-style democracies, which have grown from very, very different roots and very different traditions. That's part of the problem about so many different kinds of third world countries. If one looks at Africa -- the West really only started impinging on Africa in the middle of the 19th century -- you had had small tribal societies which had their own way of self-governing, laws and hierarchies. All that is destroyed by modernization and colonization. But colonization was not wicked. It was something almost inevitable. If it was not going to be done by governments, it was going to be done by businessmen. But it did destroy traditional structures of society and created a confusion which was very hostile to the building up of any kind of Western society.

You had to first have radical changes and development -- the development of the bourgeoisie, the development of adjudication, the development of concepts of law and, above all, the development of an uncorrupt bureaucracy. That is the real foundation of Western democracies. Without an uncorrupt bureaucracy, democracy is simply going to fall into the hands of people who buy the government.

Do people need the process of fighting for their own rights in order to learn to pull together as a nation?

If one is looking at nation formation, or nation building, it has to be said that one of the most powerful elements in nation building has always been people fighting for their independence, not least in the United States. I wouldn't go as far as to say that you can never get nations built when they don't fight for their independence. I always cite the example of Norway, but I think it was fairly obvious to the Swedes that if they didn't give the Norwegians independence in 1905, the Norwegians would probably fight for it. Britain gave the Irish independence in 1922 because they fought for it. Britain gave the Indians and the Pakistanis independence in 1946 and 1947 because, quite obviously, unless we did do that, we were going to be stuck with an absolutely endless war which we were unlikely to be able to win. After that, Britain said that the moment anybody starts saying they want independence, we will preempt them and give it to them.

But that did mean that the Nigerians and the Tanzanians and others found themselves with an independent government in their hands which did not command the kind of massive support it would have commanded if they had fought for their independence and recruited their country to do so. That did make it more difficult for them to impose their will and to create the consensus necessary for real nation building.

Generally, how do you feel about international tribunals -- the League of Nations, the United Nations -- as peacekeeping initiatives?

This concerns the concept of an international community. There is an international community defined by democracy, the rule of law, a liberal economic policy and, above all, a sense of mutual identity of peoples who, give or take the problem of national pride, are conscious of common values. Within that kind of community, the creation and functioning of international tribunals and international courts do make sense. But it has got to be accepted that this international community is a very limited one. There are a large number of states that do not belong to it, that have different ideas about how the world should be run and whose internal systems are radically different from ours. To try to impose on them our values, however desirable they may be, is really pointless.

Let's take the case of Yugoslavia. Under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavia was a state that simply did not accept these Western values. It was run in a totally different, totalitarian, disagreeable way which was not unpopular -- there are still a large number of Serbs who intensely resent the overthrow of Milosevic. But once you do get a change of regime, and people emerge on top who do share our Western values, then they become part of the international community. But they can drop out again. Look what happened in Germany. Between 1919 and 1929, the Germans were part of the international community, the Concert of Europe. Then there was an internal change -- the good guys are overthrown and the bad guys are on top. Then, an international community, rule of law and international tribunals are a pie in the sky.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"