SOUFRE, IVORY COAST: In recent years the question of Africa has shifted from a moral and humanitarian challenge to a strategic one. Since the end of the Cold war in the early 1990s Africa has relied mostly on the free-market system for its economic development. But the continent has slipped backwards, and the UN estimates that between now and 2015 the number of those workers living with their families on less than US$1 a day will actually increase by 20 percent.
While the causes are multiple, alternatives to the Western democratic model are beginning to push their way through. Economically powerful, yet authoritarian China offers its own definition of human dignity which, it maintains, should be measured not by holding elections but by dragging people out of poverty. And extreme Islam spreads an inspirational anti-Western doctrine designed specifically to draw in the poor...