Their roots lie deep in Europe's imperial past.
Efforts are afoot to redeem that past.
Portugal, an imperial power in Asia for 500 years, is working to midwife the independence of former colony East Timor after 25 years of occupation by Indonesia. Britain is belatedly offering full citizenship to the inhabitants of its remaining colonies, scattered around the world's oceans. It did, brutally, in Uganda where marauding Hutu extremists from neighboring Rwanda recently killed eight English-speaking tourists in a gorilla park but spared the French members of their tour group. They had apparently not forgotten that in the early 1990s, before Hutu murderers went on a genocidal rampage in Rwanda, Paris had supported the Francophone Hutu government there with guns and money against the minority Tutsi, who spoke English and enjoyed backing from the Anglophone Ugandan authorities. Then-President Francois Mitterrand of France saw his policy simply as a continuation of the old colonial rivalry that his country had maintained with the British since the 19th century.