Leo Tolstoy, opens his novel, Anna Karenina, with cold realism: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. He could have been thinking about nations and their pathologies in this age of uncertainty.
Whichever country or region of the world you look at, you are greeted by a palpable sense of a leadership void and pessimism.
The ratcheting up of hostilities between Russia and the West in the face of intensifying sanctions have induced supply shocks with the attendant inflationary pressure that, in turn, have led to precipitous rise in interest rates. Wars always leave scars. The ones that tend to endure are economic scars. Poorer regions of the world, including Africa, already countenance a real threat of food insecurity, with some facing the precipice of debt crisis.
The world has been on similar terrain — in the 20thcentury during the depression of the inter-war years and the oil crises of the early and late 1970s that culminated in the world economic recession and the advent of Africa’s lost decade of the 1980s. What offered small solace back then was that multilateral institutions offered buffers to preserve and reinforce the international trading and monetary systems, and African countries were given the crumbs of aid.
A coterie of Western powers, including the United States, France, West Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan, helped to maintain an international economic order that was anchored on the US’s leadership. Later they would add Canada to complete the G7. These countries worked together to coordinate their responses to global crises.
However much this concert of countries may still pretend to be powerful, they are today the shadow of their former selves, especially since the emergence of China and other rising powers. The G7 countries can no longer command others to dance to their tune. They have to manage their tone, compromise, build bridges and use the power of persuasion to gain traction on global issues.
When the world is on the brink, as it is today, and with no clear path out of the current stand-off between Russia and Ukraine, a new consensus is required. There are limits to what Western powers can achieve on their own in quelling major conflicts and in creating global economic stability. This is clear in the face of the Russia-Ukraine war where sanctions on Russia and additional military support to Ukraine are not producing the desired effect.
There is instead the danger of widening hostilities as tensions between the US and China flare up over what China perceives to be US meddling in China’s backyard in Asia, and the US’s counter-accusation that China has become more aggressive in intercepting US military aircraft in the region.
The West may find itself overstretched in countering both China and Russia, two major economic and military powers that have sprawling diplomatic and commercial footprints in other developing regions of the world. US President Joe Biden has taken to discussing the “China threat” in the same vein as Russia whenever he meets other global leaders either bilaterally or in the context of the G7, a tactical miscalculation that draws Russia and China in close embrace.
The actions of Western leaders have not helped to douse the flames of war. Instead they have fuelled them. Europe has not become stronger as a block in response to the Russia-Ukraine war. Whatever appearance of unity there is, it is tenuous and masks fundamental differences over tactical approaches.
Germany, for example, would have preferred a less painful route, to explore diplomatic solutions, than for it to endure an energy crunch and possible recession as a result of a throttled supply of gas from Russia.
Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor lacks the gravitas of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, and is seen as more comfortable in obscurity than projecting himself as a powerful figure in Europe and the world. He is presiding over a country that is unhappy with energy shortages and will soon enter a winter of discontent — Russia has announced it will slash gas supply to Europe through its largest gas pipeline in Germany to 20% of capacity. If decline in Germany’s industrial growth and export competitiveness persists, and business confidence slumps further, that could render Scholz unpopular.
Elsewhere in Europe, we are seeing unpopular leaders falling. Mario Draghi, Italy’s technocratic prime minister, tendered his resignation as his reform proposals lacked support from his coalition partners amid the energy crunch and harsh prospects of a recession.
Before him, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, though felled by his own duplicitous and sleazy character, was no longer seen as the kind of a leader his country needed to help redefine its vision post-Brexit and lead it to economic prosperity. In Europe there is much political uncertainty because inflation, and the hawkish monetary policy in tow, are creating a fertile ground for populism.
European countries face another risk that is hard for them to express publicly: the unreliability of US leadership given the fickle nature of that country’s politics and the seeming transience of Biden’s administration.
Biden’s approval has plummeted. He is increasingly unpopular with his party and the public is turning its back on him. According to an Ipsos/Reuters Poll, Biden’s approval fell to 36% during the second week of July this year, and is not expected to improve. Some have suggested that his inability to get through congress signature bills such as the climate change Bill signalled the beginning of the end of his political authority. No doubt, this also weakens his moral authority on the global stage to push for higher emission targets by other countries when he has no congruent base to stand on.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin will be watching Europe and the US’s political tides closely and find ways of exploiting the emerging fissures. The state of hostility among major powers makes it harder to revive confidence in the global economy and for international trade and monetary systems to normalise.
There are both downsides and potential upsides in the current state of global politics. The biggest menace is the rise of populism with its atavistic rhetoric on immigrants, trade protectionism and other illiberal predilections. Populism always finds a fertile ground in desperate economic times. Populist leaders tend to be inward-looking rather than searching for international cooperation.
On the upside, the current situation opens up a space to rethink the terms of global order and the broken multilateral institutions. For many years these institutions have been presided over by a few countries that have largely used them in the service of their own interests.
Since attaining independence in the late 1950s, African countries have been on the margins of multilateral institutions. They have struggled to shape the multilateral trade agenda to address their development problems.
For African countries, the critical success factors to participating meaningfully in shaping the global system is to reduce reliance on major powers and to realise their agency through building sound domestic institutions, improving governance, building human capital and state capabilities, deepening regional economic integration and cooperation, and honing their capabilities for participating in economic diplomacy with the outside world from the perspective of Africa’s interests.
Mzukisi Qobo is head of the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand.
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