Sun rises in East while West gets its coat
The Brits go to the polls on Thursday. With respect to Brexit, in a global historical sense it really does not matter who wins between Labour and the Conservatives.
For the poor, unemployed, underemployed and those who depend on state-provided health care, a Conservative win will be disastrous. Under Boris Johnson the Tories will probably transform Britain’s welfare state into something akin to the US, with its attendant inequality, exclusivity of access to health care and its estimated trilliondollar student loan debt.
At a global historical level, in terms of the longue durée — unhitching analyses from immediate or short-term current affairs and placing them in the long historical view — Brexit may be part of a general decline of the West.
This is reflected most prominently in the collective neurosis of the Trump administration’s quest to “Make
America Great Again”, what appears to be a sad nostalgia coupled with amnesia for what Georgetown University professor of governance EJ Dionne lamented, “the longing ... for a time when our country was less diverse — and when a less open global market created the circumstances for a large, well-paid working class”.
In some ways mainstream economists should be familiar with long cycles. One passage that stands out was written in 1957, a year before Fernand Braudel brought the concept of the longue durée to our attention: “Since we are all too much affected by the times in which we live and are too prone to generalise from transitory circumstances, we are not likely to gain a clear understanding of [current global affairs] if we simply start with existing conditions and attempt to disentangle the major factors currently at work.”
The passage was written by Robert Baldwin and Gerald Meier in their book Economic Development. I lifted it from Baldwin’s son Richard’s book The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalisation. Like Baldwin Jnr, I replaced “economic development” with “current global affairs”. Baldwin inserted “globalisation”.
Nonetheless, it is widely understood that there is a historic tilt in global and geoeconomic power from West to East. In this tilt, the “East” is led by China and India, with countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Laos pulling up the rear.
Where, we might ask, is Africa in this tilt to the East? It is almost exactly 20 years since the World Bank published the report “Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?” The evidence suggests not. Africans may insist colonisation and the proxy battles of the Cold War have left enduring scars on society and political economies that are dysfunctional, all of which may be true.
But consider the following: Vietnam, India, Singapore, Laos and Malaysia were invaded, colonised and recolonised over centuries yet have, in the past two or three decades, expanded their political economies and lifted millions of people out of poverty. As for the Cold War’s proxy wars, Vietnam was probably ground zero, yet it is now considered to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. The data shows that in 2017 Vietnam had 6.8% growth, 3.5% inflation and 2.2% unemployment.
Most African states, with the notable exceptions of Ethiopia and Liberia, were also invaded, colonised and recolonised. Africa also played host to the Cold War’s proxy battles. It is probably politically insensitive to ask why most African countries have been unable to emulate the political economic expansion of most Asian countries, some of which were almost completely destroyed during the Cold War. At the height of the Cold War, Laos was pummelled by more than 2-million tons of US cluster bombs. That was more than all the bombs dropped on Europe during World War 2.
Notwithstanding colonisation and recolonisation since at least the second century until its independence from France in 1954, and the fact that it was bombed flat (between 1964 and 1973), the Laotian economy grew between 6% and 9% between 2016 and 2019, and in the past 10 years Laos has lifted at least half a million people out of poverty. The government has improved skills, improved knowledge production and dissemination, increased access to land and created thousands of nonagricultural jobs.
But back to Brexit. It may arguably be placed in the context of the decline of the West, the retreat of Western liberalism and of the European world’s decision (according to the Financial Times, writing in defence of liberalism in June 2019) to collapse barriers to entry and exchange. In the meantime, countries in Asia are embracing the open society approach. Brexit represents a closing down.
● Lagardien, a visiting professor at the Wits University School of Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank, as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
COUNTRIES IN ASIA ARE EMBRACING THE OPEN SOCIETY APPROACH. BREXIT REPRESENTS A CLOSING DOWN