We were recently interviewed by Ratio Magazine, an online journal which specialises in providing business analyses related to East Africa.

The subject was an interesting one - the use of branding consultants for the promotion of emerging countries to the West. The Editor was interested in our rather tough view that such activities, if they are to be taken seriously, required a certain level of administrative capability in order to be successful.

The article speaks for itself and, in fact, there was no intention to criticise those who take on such contracts in good faith - they do their best and it is generally not their fault if the client (the sovereign country) has not invested in the systems that would make external communications a success.

This raises for us another interesting question that is often overlooked - the strategic imbalance of bureaucratic resources between the G20 and the rest of the world.

Many years ago, we worked on the campaign for a major pitch by one country's candidate to become Director General of a UN organisation on an independent reform platform. Our experience then and since was that small countries were the playthings of their donors.

Progressives in the West have tried to help by offering administrative expertise but this often fails to take hold because the donations are clearly linked to the strategic and security interests of the donors (otherwise they would be not get approval from legislatures).

Take the anti-corruption expertise where policemen are brought in to bring Western standards to 'assist' local elites and then come head-to-head with political systems that rely on clientage and patronage to function and where 'corruption' is, in fact, not always what it seems.

The other route to assisting the emerging world is by giving them the first benefits of aid and assistance to the developing world through the United Nations but here we face three problems, apart from a general backlash against aid that is laundered through local elites.

The UN is already overstretched, the West has undertaken a programme of recapturing control of what it pays for so that it reproduces the same model as its national administrative aid programmes and, of course, 'fairness' means that 'corruption' and clientage is re-imported into the UN by the back door.

So, when it comes to major multilateral negotiations, the emerging countries as sovereign nations have less capable, less well trained, underpaid and confused administrators who have little independence from the political class and can be treated as cannon fodder in the disputes of the big players.

What can be done? Certainly the West has less free capital to play with now and so national aid is likely to have more rather than less strings tied to it and be more directed at aid to the subjects of the sovereign rather than support for the administrators of the subjects of the sovereign.

There is, of course, growing pressure to reform the United Nations. This must come eventually but any reform is likely to focus on a reshuffle within its economic elite to take account of global shifts of power since 1945 and this may well reduce emerging country bargaining power through 'liberal 'reforms'.

In the end, emerging country ability to negotiate from strength is likely to have to rely on one of three methods ...

• a country effectively sells itself into the orbit of a greater power and trades what it can provide to the big power for the big power's patronage when serious discussions start - this is, of course, tantamount to a form of international feudalism;
• a country diverts its scarce resources to introducing the sort of administrative reforms that underpinned the British Empire and the US Federal State and puts its brightest and its best into a position of power over and against its political class - possible but expensive and not easy;
• a country begins to pool sovereignty with similar size powers and deals (much as the EU is trying to do with minimal success at the moment) with the international community as a bloc.

We have been somewhat of a 'bear' on the European Union precisely because the levels of development between its members is so different. This is the Germany-Greece problem that might yet break the Euro this autumn.

The European Union has not been bound together, unlike the US as Federal State, on war. There has been no War of Independence, its last major Civil War (1914-1945) took place before it was formed and there have been none of the low-level social wars that have been endemic to the United States.

If emerging countries are to build administrative capability without being client-states or drawing in on themselves as administrative party dictatorships, then regional blocs work for them as much and probably far more than they work for the members of the G20.

Such blocs might have come to be bound together through the free play of war but the West refuses to countenance this option. The UN exists, in any case, as permanent block to petty imperial expansionism so the alternative is negotiation.

The most honourable (not that honour counts for much in international affairs) approach for the West to take would be to encourage blocs of continguous and similarly sized countries to come together and create the sort of administrative capability beyond tribe and locality that it is promoting for itself.

Take Ratio's own country base - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and the de facto statelet emerging in Southern Sudan. This is a natural bloc that may compete within itself but which has interests in dealing with the West that might be better served through collaboration than competition.

Of course, collaboration does take place on issues of shared interest but the further formalisation of this process here and elsewhere as a positive policy aim might help focus dialogue over aid and security, assist in regional stabilisation and provide the basis for a consensus on reforms.

The United Kingdom should be a natural bloc of 'these islands' and is only stopped from being so by the idiotic legacy of its past imperialist approach to the Irish people. The Nordic countries adopt their own similar 'common interests' approach.

More of this in the developing world might be central to its continuing independence of action.

Be in no doubt that imperialism is back. Indeed, it has been back for some time but as a form of informal power struggle based on trade and aid with multiple players seeking to acquire spheres of influence without the costs of stationing troops - except where necessary to protect trade routes.

Small developing countries are like mice before cats and they may need to think increasingly collaboratively if they are not to find that they are simply out-stations for low cost transfer of natural resources to the industrial zones of the developed world.