East and West use world order against Global South
Iwas in Liberia for a month more than a decade ago carrying out fieldwork for the UN peacebuilding mission. On my second night in Monrovia I threw out the tediously filled-in health and safety protocols my university research committee had mandated, asked the hotel clerk to call me a taxi and went to a party one of my contacts had told me about.
I arrived outside the high walls of an exclusive expat apartment complex by the sea. The street was lined with Toyota Land Cruisers, all embossed with the names of different aid organisations, with local drivers chatting.
Once inside I was met with a magnificent view of the sun setting over the Atlantic Ocean, with a throng of revelling Western aid workers having a pool party. This image from my graduate researcher days of the contrast between the white aid workers drinking Heineken inside and black drivers waiting outside has stuck with me.
Obviously, the sight of young Western revellers and waiting black drivers is not an unusual one in Africa.
Perhaps the image reminds me of the anxieties of my youth, growing up in SA. Whatever it is, it continues to inform my thoughts on Africa’s international relations today.
Better thought through and contrarian opinions are now beginning to emerge in Africa and in China on where Africa should stand on the issue of the emerging new cold war on the one hand, and on China’s alliance with Russia on the other.
Tim Murithi, head of peacebuilding interventions at the Institute for Justice & Reconciliation and professor of African Studies at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University, points out in a Foreign Affairs article published last week that “more and more countries in Africa and elsewhere in the global South are refusing to align with either the West or the East, declining to defend the so-called liberal order, but also refusing to seek and upend it as Russia and China have done”.
Murithi points out that the current international system suits the West and East, and is used by all of the big five UN Security Council permanent members to preserve their dominance over the global South. For example, when the AU was pursuing a diplomatic strategy to resolve the crisis in Libya in 2011, Nato intervened with a military solution and ensured that Muammar Gaddafi was ousted. The AU preferred a diplomatic solution and did not want violent regime change for fear of long-term instability. The
West’s insistence on expedience and extracting revenge on Gaddafi ensured that Libya remains unstable a decade later.
Chinese academics have also been busy. Feng Yujun, director of the Centre for Russian & Central Asian studies at Fudan University, writes that on each of the three previous occasions where China and Russia formed an alliance, it had disastrous consequences for China.
These were the SinoRussian Secret Treaty signed in 1896; the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance & Mutual Assistance signed in 1950; and
Mao’s alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1950s. Feng argues that China lost sovereignty each time, became isolated from the West, and decoupled from the global system, to its detriment. Feng also criticises the Chinese leadership for being in awe of Russia when China has long outgrown the Soviet model.
From an African perspective, it is a myth that there is a functioning rules-based international system.
The aid regime in Africa has done more for Western aid workers having an adventure than for the people of Africa. For the global South, the war in Europe is a symptom of a dysfunctional international system; when any of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council are involved invariably stalemate ensues. For China’s international relations, as history has shown, direct confrontation with the West does not serve its interests.
The world is at an impasse. We need a new international system.