Russia's war on Ukraine and how the west lost the global south
A global rules-based system cannot be the exclusive property of rich democracies
A year on, two lessons stand out from Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. The first - that democracies must stand together against military aggression - western leaders have grasped. Vlodymyr Zelensky has been right all along. The second - that a rules-based international order cannot be the exclusive property of the west - they have been less ready to embrace.
The war, Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has observed, has underscored Europe’s habit of assuming that its problems are the world’s problems. Hence the demand the international community unites in punishing Moscow with economic sanctions. By contrast, Jaishankar adds, the trials and tribulations of the global south are assumed to be the sole responsibility of, well, the global south.
Those who struggle to understand why so many rising nations have sat on their hands in response to Russia’s war have their answer. Rich democracies can scarcely expect others to join them in upholding a supposedly universal system of rules while they seem largely indifferent to events beyond their own backyard. Global order, by definition, must be inclusive.
The Atlantic community’s cohesion in supporting Ukraine militarily and financially has been commendable. That is not to say the west has fully come to terms with the new geopolitical landscape. The conflict has crystallised the power shifts that have left behind the US-led post cold war order. The world now sits in an awkward no man’s land between the Pax Americana and a multipolar era of great power rivalry.
True, Europe has been shaken out of the mercantilist complacency that imagined that the best response to authoritarianism was to trade with it. Washington has learned - or at least some of it has - that it cannot decouple China’s challenge to US power from Russian revanchism in Europe. The really jarring effect of the war, however, has been its demonstration that agency - the capacity to determine the contours of the global landscape - no longer belongs solely to the west.
Putin has found only a handful of cheerleaders - the likes of North Korea, Belarus and Syria. What has shocked western leaders is that scores of nations have opted for neutrality. African, Latin American and many Asian governments have opted out of condemnatory votes at the United Nations. The post-colonial legacy weighs heavily.
South Africa is entirely unabashed when it fetes Putin’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. It is planning joint naval exercises with Russia and China. India, a member of the US-led Indo Pacific Quad, has decided to sit on both sides of the fence. Delhi’s burgeoning defence collaboration with Washington to counter Chinese power does not preclude buying sanctioned Russian oil.
The west and the global south look at Ukraine through different lenses. In Europe in particular, the Russian invasion is held to be an epochal threat to the architecture of international order. Were Putin to win, the world would fall to Hobbesian chaos. Nations in the south see something altogether less momentous - an ugly fight between Russia and Nato. To the extent there is a systemic threat it is to a set of arrangements designed by, and in the interests of, the west.
This stance is not without its own contradictions. Colonialism fostered a jealous attachment to national sovereignty and territorial integrity. These nations don’t want to be told what to do by their former imperial masters. But that is precisely what Putin plans for Ukraine. As France’s Emmanuel Macron has remarked, Putin’s war is nothing if not a vivid expression of his ambition to restore the Russian empire. Now that really is neo colonialism
There is a dangerous precedent here for regions of the world where national borders are frequently contested. If Russia can grab Ukraine what does that say about China’s claim on territory in India’s Himalayan north? For its part, Beijing’s long standing claim to be a champion of sovereign territorial rights scarcely fits comfortably with its present support for Putin.
For now, as Macron has acknowledged, the absence of trust in the west across much of the global south takes precedence. The charge most often heard is one of double standards. Any rules under threat were written by the west for the west. Ukraine fills the front pages and leads the nightly news bulletins. Bloody conflicts in, say, the Middle East or Africa go largely unremarked. Europeans throw open their doors to those fleeing Ukraine and bolt them against refugees from the south.
From this vantage point, international order takes on a different hue. Winning over the global south requires of the west an attentiveness to the challenges of poorer nations that has been conspicuously absent during the global upheavals of recent years. A frame of mind, say, that does not presume that in the event of worldwide pandemics, the south must wait until the west is fully inoculated against danger.
Britain’s government takes pride in its role as a lead contributor of expensive military equipment to Kyiv. Rightly so. Yet it does not escape the attention of governments in Africa that London’s generous aid for Ukraine has coincided with deep cuts in the UK’s development aid budget for the global south.
In the US, Biden can claim that the Inflation Reduction Act will at last galvanise American action to reduce carbon emissions. But where is the comprehensive programme from the west to mitigate the devastating impact on climate change on some of the world’s poorest nations? And how, incidentally, can rich nations complain about rising Chinese influence in Africa even as they show themselves largely indifferent to that continent’s debt crises?
As things stand, the west’s support for Kyiv against Russian aggression stands in defence of the post-1945 European order. Defeating Putin is no less important for that. Support for Ukraine is at once a noble and necessary cause to preserve the principle that Europe’s borders cannot be changed by force of arms. But talk of upholding a global, rules-based system will find wider resonance only when the west shows itself more attentive to prosperity and security in the south.
Interesting article, but I notice that the analysis draws a mistaken conclusion, namely that Europe and the United States should "engage" more with the so-called "Global South" in order to draw them more to "our side", since that's what these countries want in any case, that we should be more involved in their conflicts (civil and otherwise), as well as more economically involved, with aidnahd with investment (probably this last is correct). How can doing more, not less, of what the so-called "Global South" countries resent Western countries for doing be any good?
The first mistake is that these countries take seriously, in any way, the anticolonialist and anti-imperialist nonsense that has been peddled around to excess since the end of the Second World War, an ideological weapon refined and expertly wielded and by the Soviet Union and Red China (as well as the countless states that emerged from the process of decolonization allied to or friendly with the USSR, and now the Russian Federation, and Red China, such as India) for decades, and clumsily wielded by the United States and the European Union to the Ukraine situation (not unsurprisingly, without success). Even in the heyday of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism, such things were never an ideological or propagandistic impediment for the Soviet Union's foreign interventions, inside the Warsaw Pact area (such as Hungary and former Czechslovakia), or outside the Warsaw Pact, in Latin America and Afghanistan (for example). Ditto for Red China.
The second question is more substantial, and has to do with international order. An international order now populated with dozens and dozens of (relatively small) independent States, each with its own ambitions (however delusional) and limitations (however ignored). How can one get them to interact with esch other, if not in a peaceful, at lesst in an orderly, rule-like manner? What to do when some of them inevitably fail to do so? When the League of Nations was established, most of the world was covered by a handful of huge, multi-continental empires and some actual nation-states. The number of actors one had to convince, threaten, or bribe into complying with international law was comparstively much smaller than today, and it still failed to do so. There were colonial wars (there always had been), but also wars like Italy's multiple aggressive wars in Africa, or Japan's wars in China and the Pacific, which the League of Nations (and the independent action of larger, much more powerful imperial states) were unable to stop or to deal with. Now that problem has compounded, with no empires — the United States has never been an "empire" in the sense the British or the French Empire were, they never had to beg or bribe their subject populations to participate in their war efforts, like the United States has to — and many, many States, and many, many actual and potential conflicts within and between them.
I don't have a solution for this, although I do hope that a solution can be found to this, or else the 21st century is going to be very conflictive.
"I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see that they are often wrong." – Jane Austen.
A very thoughtful article. Does it lead on to the question, is the United Nations fit for purpose?