There is a well-known tendency for the people of a country to overemphasize the wrongs inflicted on them by other countries and to underemphasize the wrongs they have inflicted on other people. Without any self-examination and introspection such gaps feed narratives that prevent nations from coming to some sort of mutual understanding and reconciliation. This also applies on a broader sense in the way the modern West looks at its relationships to the rest of the world.
Why do I say that? Because in the on-going war of Russia against Ukraine, the West found, to its chagrin, there is not much love, or rather solidarity, left between it and most of the other countries. I checked the numbers and found that only about a sixth of the U.N. member countries support the West’s sanctions on Russia. And then we have Saudi Arabia, a country heavily dependent on US military protection, which had no problem to side with Russia in agreeing to limit oil production and thus keep oil prices higher than otherwise.
How should westerners react to this reality? Well, I would suggest, with a good dose of introspection. We can do so, as I did, by recalling the troubled history of the relationship of the West to the Global South (Latin America, Africa, South Asia). I got some help in this exercise from being in the middle of reading Thomas Piketty’s book A Brief History of Equality, a book I cited in my last blogpost. It is useful to recall that history so we can understand what explains the reluctance even opposition of many countries to the idea of siding with the West against its modern adversaries.
Of course, it all starts with the great explorations of the fourteen and fifteen centuries. Native people were subjugated, their cultures and religions were eviscerated, and their treasures were taken to the royal courts of European emperors and kings. It is a painful irony that after inflicting this civilizational annihilation, Europeans brought the artifacts of those nations to be stored in European museums for safekeeping on behalf of humanity. All that destruction was justified on the European belief that Western government, culture and religion were superior and thus imposing them over other people was a gift to humanity’s advancement. It is sad how many crimes are the offspring of such beliefs of a superior calling.
A few centuries later, colonialism turbocharged by capitalism intensified the exploitation of the Global South by the West many times over. The noble version of the rise of capitalism finds its birth in the legal protection of property rights in England, the protestant ethic, the technological advances that raised the productivity of labor, and the magic of market economics. However, the success of capitalism, at least in its opening stages, was due to the large-scale extraction of raw materials from colonies, to large scale deforestation and burning of coal, and the exploitation of cheap labor either through slavery or very low wages, most of them found in the conquered lands.
Using their military superiority, European colonial powers coerced their colonies to accept onerous trade terms and economic conditions that further sapped their self-sufficiency and economic well-being. For example, India’s and China’s combined share of the global cotton industry was 53% in 1800; that had dropped to just 5% by 1900! It was, after all, the unfavorable trade terms imposed by England on its American colonies that gave the impetus for the birth of the United States. Thus, the economic dominance of the colonial European powers was not exactly the outcome of market economics but rather the result of a coercive capturing of markets by eliminating competition – a paradigm we now see repeated by big multinational corporations.
All along, the West has played the same game in its goal to capture and maintain economic dominance. First, it develops its competitive advantages through restrictive trade practices and then it enshrines liberal and open-border commercial and financial policies through international treaties like, GATT and its successor the WTO (World Trade Organization). But we also see the reverse strategy when Western industries fear losing business to powerful rivals, like China. Thus, the West has taken steps to practically close its markets to next generation Chinese digital technologies and the US has even resorted to legislating an industrial policy to promote innovation and investments in semiconductors and other advanced technologies.
Beyond trade, in what Piketty describes as neocolonialism, the West has found additional ways to keep its influence on the global economy. The important development in this regard was the successful infusion of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with the neoliberal principles of the Washington Consensus in the mid-1980s. Thus, the prescriptions to needy nations have been fiscal restraint, opening up their economies to foreign trade, deregulating their industries, and accepting the free flow of capital.
Piketty’s data show the negative consequences of these prescriptions. First, capital outflows from developing countries to the West have outpaced the incoming economic aid. Second, the developing world continues to be a source of cheap labor as in the good old days. Ironically, this has also undermined the interests of the working classes in Western countries, and, hence, their political and social instability. Third, the demand for fiscal restraint has kept tax revenues low, thus, hindering the developing countries’ ability to provide social services to stimulate human development. Contrary-wise Western countries continue to rely on large enough tax revenues, which, besides securing strong military capabilities, support an extensive safety net and human development effort.
This record has more than historical significance. First, this record should impart some modesty in the West’s boast about the superiority of its political and economic institutions, when both have a record that is found wanting in their treatment of fellow humans. Second, it illuminates the current problems the West faces in multiple fronts, including migration and climate change. Very low incomes and insecurity continue to put masses of people from developing countries on the road to migration to the West. Africa’s population is expected to double by 2100. Think of the waves of migration if economic inequalities across the planet are not successfully addressed. Developing countries are also left with little help from the West, despite promises, to fend off for themselves the disasters inflicted on them by extreme weather phenomena.
In short, exporting democratic institutions and promoting world collaboration to fight the dangers from climate change, poverty, and pandemics will remain crucial challenges for the West unless and until the rest of the world comes to see the West as an honest and supportive partner.
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