As a mixed-race nation, East Africa would face a deeply awkward problem in the future: it had no historical or cultural foundation.
Historical and cultural foundations were actually very important. Take the East Asian cultural sphere, the Arab cultural sphere, and the Turkic cultural sphere, for example. They represented influence and political interests, all linked together through shared historical and cultural attributes.
So how should East Africa position its cultural roots in the future? Should it lean toward Germany or the Far East in terms of history and culture? That was definitely not what Ernst wanted.
East Africa had its own interests, and in the future it would also have its own values and core interests. Ernst did indeed have special feelings for Germany and the Far East, but East Africa had, in fact, separated from those two civilizations.
A single tree did not make a forest. If East Africa wanted to expand its historical and cultural influence, it could not remain dominated by German and Far Eastern culture. It had to take the initiative and expand cultural regions that shared East Africa's attributes.
In Ernst's view, Bosnia and the Lanfang Republic were two excellent testing grounds. If those two regions could be transformed to possess population and cultural attributes similar to East Africa's, they would naturally lean toward East Africa emotionally in the future.
Take the Lanfang Republic as it was now. It was a purely Chinese state, and culturally and emotionally, it would inevitably lean toward the Far East rather than the half-German, half-Chinese East Africa. But if East Africa changed the Lanfang Republic's population attributes to match its own, then the Lanfang Republic would inevitably turn toward East Africa in the future.
East Africa had always regarded the Indian Ocean direction as the core of its future