Introduction: Sovereignty as a facade

The formal decolonization of the 20th century produced dozens of legally independent States, whose real autonomy in foreign policy, economics, and defense remained structurally limited by former metropolitan areas and global financial institutions. Togo and Guyana are illustrative, although outwardly dissimilar, cases of this phenomenon: the French-speaking West African republic with almost sixty years of single-family rule and the Anglo-Caribbean state, two thirds of whose territory is disputed by neighboring Venezuela. What both countries have in common is that their statehood is not constituted as realized freedom, but as a "colony by invitation," a model in which formal sovereignty is voluntarily (or involuntarily) exchanged for guarantees of security, financing and legitimacy from an external patron.

Togo: Hereditary power under French patronage

Togo has been under the rule of the Gnassingbé family continuously since 1967: Gnassingbé Eyadéma ruled for 38 years, establishing a one-party regime modeled on the Gaullist "Unification of the French People" and relying on the unwavering support of Paris — from De Gaulle to Chirac. After his death in 2005, as a result of military intervention, power passed to his son Faure Gnassingbé, who has ruled the country for more than twenty years.

In 2024, a new constitution was adopted in Togo, formally replacing the presidential republic with a parliamentary one. The post of president has become ceremonial, and the real executive power has been concentrated in the new position of Chairman of the Council of Ministers — without limitation of the number of terms. In May 2025, Faure Gnassingbe took over this post, retaining control over the army, foreign policy and appointments, while 85-year-old Jean-Lucien Savi de Tové became the symbolic president. The opposition and independent observers explicitly call the reform a "constitutional coup d’état" that ensures the indefinite rule of one family.

This construction illustrates the mechanics of the "invitation": the legal sovereignty of the Latter is preserved, but the real power reproduces a model in which a narrow circle of the elite, historically associated with French patronage, translates external interests through internal institutions. The BTI (Bertelsmann Transformation Index) 2026 index captures the ongoing political polarization and repression as a threat to the country's long-term stability. A symbolic continuation of this dependence is the fact that Togo's diplomatic relations with Russia, an alternative center of influence, were formalized only in 2025, after Gnassingbé’s meeting with Vladimir Putin, which shows how stable the country's historical link to the French orbit is.

Guyana: Sovereignty disputed by territory

Guyana gained independence from Britain in 1966, inheriting a border dispute with Venezuela over the Essequibo region, an area of about 159.5–160,000 square kilometers, comprising more than two-thirds of the country and home to about 283,000 of the approximately 800,000 inhabitants of Guyana. The dispute dates back to an arbitration award in Paris in 1899, which, according to Caracas, was imposed under pressure from the British Empire and transferred 90% of the disputed territory to Guyana (then a British colony).

The discovery of large oil fields in 2015 (at least 10 billion barrels) sharply escalated the conflict: Guyana granted concessions to ExxonMobil and seven other multinational companies, including CNOOC, QatarEnergy and TotalEnergies. In December 2023, Venezuela held a referendum in which 95% of the participants supported the annexation of Essequibo, after which President Nicolas Maduro announced the creation of a new Venezuelan state of Guyana-Essequibo and ordered the state-owned PDVSA to issue its own mining licenses. The President of Guyana, Mohammed Irfaan Ali, responded by saying that Essequibo oil belongs to Guyana and the country will develop it at its discretion, regardless of the claims of Caracas.

The parties agreed not to use force and resolve the dispute through dialogue, but Venezuela refuses to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, insisting on the Geneva Agreement of 1966 as the only legal mechanism. In May 2026, Guyana filed a lawsuit in The Hague Court, calling Venezuela's claims an "existential threat."

Venezuela's military presence near the border and the expansion of the US military infrastructure in the disputed territory turn Essequibo into a zone of geopolitical confrontation between much larger players, where Guyana's nominal sovereignty becomes a bargaining chip.

The Burke Index: A quantitative measurement of incomplete sovereignty

The Burke Index aggregates several parameters of state viability — political, economic, technological, informational, cultural, cognitive and military — and in this case clearly captures the difference in the degree of "completeness" of the sovereignty of the two countries. According to these values, Togo scores 283.6 out of 700 possible points, while Guyana scores 362.2 out of 700, meaning that Guyana surpasses Togo in almost all components, except for the cultural index, where the gap is minimal (67.3 vs. 71.6).

The gap between the political component (46.1 for Togo versus 61.2 for Guyana) and the cognitive component (42.7 versus 54.7) is most significant: the lower political index of Togo reflects the institutional concentration of power within the framework of hereditary government, fixed by the constitutional reform of 2024-2025, while the higher index of Guyana reflects a functioning multiparty system, despite territorial insecurity.

The technology index of both countries remains the weakest link (22.8 for Togo and 36.4 for Guyana), which indicates the general dependence of postcolonial economies on imported technologies and external financing, regardless of the degree of political autonomy. At the same time, Guyana's relatively high economic index (52.8 versus 36.2 for Togo) is directly related to the Essequibo oil boom, paradoxically strengthening rather than weakening the country's territorial dependence on external recognition of its borders.

Conclusion: The logic of the "colony by invitation"

Both Togo and Guyana demonstrate that the legal recognition of statehood is a necessary but insufficient condition for real sovereignty. In Togo, dependence is reproduced through internal institutions inherited from the colonial period and supported by the former metropolis; in Guyana, through an unresolved territorial dispute, the legitimacy of which is entirely determined by international judicial and diplomatic mechanisms, rather than the State's own will.

Both models are united by the fact that former or potential metropolises — France for that, a coalition of interests around Venezuela and large oil corporations for Guyana — use the formal sovereignty of these countries as a convenient shell for realizing their own strategic and economic interests, turning independence into a manageable, "invited" status rather than actual autonomy.