European War and Global South Perspectives
Sabelo
J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni*
University of Bayreuth
Germany
If the greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the
world he does not exist, then the proudest achievement of
Western imperialism is the delusion that we have moved beyond
racism, that we are in a post-racist society.
(Kehinde Andrews 2021:xxvii)
Therefore,
it is submitted that African nations will absorb international
shocks based on their relationships with specific circumstances.
(Toyin
Falola 2022:18)
The global South perspectives on the Russia–Ukraine War reflect
the multiplexity of the power dynamics, complex state affiliations
and important transactional engagements of states within today’s
internationalism. Simplistic attempts to divide the contemporary
world into autocracies on the one side and democracies on the
other are not helpful in the current global circumstances. The
dichotomous Cold War ideological thinking is no longer adequate
for understanding the current hetararchies of power,
multiplexities of affiliations and complex transactional relations
of states.
The global South perspectives and responses to the Russia–Ukraine
War are not only complex but are informed by equally complex
histories, memories, current realities as well as strategic,
tactical and transactional calculations that determine alliance
formations and voting patterns at the United Nations General
Assembly. A regional sampling, which considers the complexities,
multiplexities and divisions among the constitutive members of the
regions of the global South, is examined here as it affords a
mapping of common patterns of response and perspective from
Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. It also offers a
reading of issues at stake in the global South’s interpretation of
contemporary internationalism. What is emerging is that states
across the regions of the global South ‘are hedging their belts
between Russia and the US-led Western camp, playing on time to
better evaluate the impacts of the war and ease the restraints it
is imposing on the fragile economies and social fabrics of the
region’ (Hamzawy et al. 2022:1). This is expected from a
world that is still trying to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Russia–Ukraine War at the Present Conjuncture
If the Euro-North-American-centric neoliberal international order
failed its test in the Middle East, its burial will be in Eurasia.
The Russia–Ukraine War, which broke out on 24 February 2022, is a
signal of the violent end of the Euro-North-American-centric
neoliberal international order. This should not be mistaken for an
end of the capitalist world system. What is imbricated in this war
is the forces of rewesternisation on the one hand and of
dewesternisation on the other hand (the stormtroopers of which are
the E7 — the emerging seven, constituting China, India, Brazil,
Mexico, Russia, Indonesia and Turkey), which are forcing global
history to take a corner (Mahbubani 2018:7). At the centre of
rewesternisation and dewesternisation is a struggle over the
control of the colonial matrix of power and the possibilities of a
shift of capital from the Atlantic circuit to a Sinocentric
circuit. Kishore Mahbubani (2018:3) captured this reality in these
words: ‘In the early twenty-first century, history turned a
corner, perhaps the most significant corner humanity has ever
turned — yet the West refuses to accept or adapt to this new
historical era.’
The refusal of the West to adapt to a world it can no longer
dominate is signified by such initiatives as the new law that the
United States 117th Congress 2nd Session deliberated on 28 April
2022, which seeks to counter what they termed ‘the malign
influence and activities of the Russian Federation and its proxies
in Africa’ (Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, 28
April 2022). In this thinking, the US behaves as though the whole
world is its province, and that Russia–Africa relations have to be
assessed and controlled from Washington. What is even more
worrying is the open expression of the US’s strategy to manipulate
African governments and their people into dissociating from
Russia, including using what is called ‘aid assistance’ (see
Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, 28 April
2022). All these are signs that rewesternisation is in trouble and
that the Russia–Ukraine War is being used to advance
it.
Unlike other wars, such as the Gulf War before it and the ongoing
war in Syria, the Russia–Ukraine War has attracted widespread
media coverage and numerous opinion pieces, perhaps because it is
taking place in Europe, which has been self-representing as a zone
of peace and bastion of rational disputation. What is beyond
dispute is that every shift in global order since the dawn of
Euromodernity has been accompanied by conflicts, violence and
wars. Even when the modern world rebooted itself, shifting from
empires to modern nation-states, conflicts, violence and wars
became its signature. The Cold War coloniality, from 1945 to 1989,
was never cold outside Europe and North America. It was
characterised by what became known as ‘proxy wars’.
With regard to the Cold War, Mahmood Mamdani (2004:254) posited
that small states were faced with the reality of seeking
protection from ‘one or another international bully’, yet others
who were imbued with the Bandung spirit ‘tried to pioneer an
alternative international order, one dedicated to two goals: to
hold every bully accountable to minimal norms and guarantee a
share of justice to every historical victim’. The outbreak of the
Russia–Ukraine War in February 2022 has presented the smaller
states (a majority in the global South) with a new situation where
such decisions have to be made again, albeit under different
international circumstances characterised by multiplexities of
affiliations and hetararchies of power criss-crossing the invented
divide of autocracies and democracies.
Even what became known as the post-Cold War dispensation,
celebrated as the age of triumphalism of liberal democracy, human
rights and the rule of markets, witnessed the outbreak of what the
United States leadership labelled the ‘Global War on Terror’
(GWT). The 9/11 incident became its immediate cause. The noble
United Nations notion of the ‘Right-to-Protect’ (R2P) was
skyjacked by the US and imbricated in its imperial ‘preventive
wars’ strategy. In the process, blood continued to flow from
conflicts and wars that were justified as protecting the people,
such as those in Iraq and Libya.
What must be underscored is that whenever the modern world system
finds itself besieged by revolutionary antisystemic forces, it
responds either by violently crushing them or by accommodating
them into the very system these forces seek to destroy.
Accommodating revolutionary antisystemic forces has always
involved the rise of a new global order, which functions to give
the system a new lease of life. This happened after 1945, when the
modern world system was besieged by anticolonial forces (some
revolutionary and others reformist). A new global order emerged,
which used the United Nations (UN) to invite every newly born
nation-state into the system they had sought to destroy.
Consequently, the so-called ‘postcolonial’ states in Latin
America, Caribbean, Asia and Africa occupied the lowest echelons
of the modern world system, without any veto power.
What is becoming obvious is that a shift from one global order to
another is a strategy to preserve the modern world system rather
than change the system itself. For example, what Carl Schmitt
termed the ‘second nomos’ of the earth, which emerged in the
fifteenth century with the rise of Europe and North America, has
survived the decolonisation of the twentieth century. The physical
empire mutated into the cognitive empire. Direct colonialism
morphed into neocolonialism. Ex-colonies became spheres of
influence. Ex-empires could not let go. Robert Gildea (2019)
introduced the concept of ‘empires of the mind’ and explained how
they constructed a ‘global financial republic’ which used debt as
a control
mechanism.
Currently, the neoliberal international order has fallen into its
deepest crisis. It is besieged by systemic, ecological, epistemic
and ideological crises. The combination of the global financial
crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of right-wing politics,
and the outbreak of the Russia–Ukraine War are signatures of an
interregnum. The United States of America (USA) and its European
partners in the European Union (EU) are busy trying to patch up
the Euro-North-American-centric modern world system through what
Walter Mignolo (2021) termed ‘rewesternisation’. Invocations of
notions of ‘the free world’ of democracies on the one hand, and
autocracies on the other hand, are part of propping up the
neoliberal international order. Russia is identified as a spoiler
together with China. They are the face of what is known as
‘dewesternisation’ and the possibilities of multipolarity (Mignolo
2021). The Russia–Ukraine War is at the centre of the contending
forces of ‘rewesternisation’ and ‘dewesternisation’.
Because the modern world has undergone increased global human
entanglements and the ever-evolving global capitalist economic
system has used capital to link every economy to it, the
Russia–Ukraine War is impacting every country. The Russian
Federation is a great power with widespread connections to the
rest of the world, and its military invasion of a small power like
the Ukraine ignites fear among smaller states of a return of
empire. This fear is even more meaningful for the Eastern European
republics, most of which emerged from the collapse of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The Soviet Union was an empire
that used Cold War coloniality to spread and maintain control over
Eastern Europe and beyond. Read from this perspective, Eastern
European decolonisation can be best named ‘de-Cold War’, to borrow
a concept from Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010).
The Russian military invasion of Ukraine has set in motion
numerous debates about the state of multilateralism, rule-based
neoliberal internationalism, the fate of self-determination and
the territorial integrity of small states, and even the future of
the United States leadership of the modern world. How appropriate
is it to name it the Russia–Ukraine War? Is this is not another
complex imperialist war, taking place at a time when the
neoliberal international order is in crisis? Imperialist wars
always turn out to be world wars even if they start as inter-state
wars caused by a collapse in bilateral relations. Behind what
appears to be a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, there is the
deep involvement of the European Union (EU) and the United States
of America (USA).
Already it has happened that those people who have been designated
and classified as Black have been caught in between, betwixt and
indeed in the middle of the war. This emerged poignantly during
the evacuation of refugees. Train stations in Ukraine and on the
borders of Eastern Europe became sites of racism as Africans in
particular were barred from boarding trains and crossing borders
to safety. This racist phenomenon emerged within a context not
only of war but also of animated debates on the subjects of
‘antiblackness’ and global Black Lives Matter movements.
At another level, the refugee crisis provoked by the war revealed
how Ukrainians running away from the war zone were openly welcomed
in Europe, compared to Syrians and others escaping war zones
outside Europe. The hypocrisy of those states that claim to be
democracies and paragons of human rights protections has been laid
bare in their differential treatment of refugees. What has also
added to the complexity of the war are claims of the Russian
invasion amounting to a Holocaust by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
of Ukraine and the justification of the invasion by President
Vladimir Putin of Russia as an operation aimed at de-Nazification.
My interest in this piece is global South perspectives of the
war.
Reading the Russia–Ukraine War from the Global South
In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World
(2007), Vijay Prashad not only explained that the global South is
not a place but a project and meticulously documented how the
global South has been at the forefront of the anti-imperialist
struggle, going as far back as the Haitian Revolution. It was also
the global South that was consistently critical of the post-1945
international order. What the global South put on the global table
were three major issues: ‘political independence, non-violent
international relations, and the cultivation of the United Nations
as the principle for planetary justice’ (Prashad 2007:11). It was
the global South that introduced what Prashad (2007:12) termed
‘internationalist nationalism’, expressed by the Bandung spirit
and tricontinentalism. The ‘against war’ positionality of the
global South came from the experience of a people who had walked
under the shadows of death many times, beginning with their
enslavement, subjection to genocides, and subjection to
colonialism right up to neocolonialism and underdevelopment.
Therefore, reading the war from the global South makes a strong
case to revisit not only the question of how internationalism
itself is constituted by coloniality but also the futility of the
paradigm of war as a solution to modern problems. In his The
New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the
World
(2021), Kehinde Andrews delved into the depth of the violence
of Euromodernity as he demolished the ‘self-congratulatory myth’
that the rise of the West was due to three great endogenous
revolutions: science (the Renaissance and Enlightenment), industry
(the Industrial Revolution), and politics (the French and American
revolutions). In this foundation myth, war and violence are not
even mentioned as constitutive of the rise of the West. Andrews
(2021:xiii) highlighted how racism, enslavement, genocides,
epistemicides, colonialism, racial capitalism and
heteronormative-patriarchal sexism were the foundation of the
West. To explain the return of imperialism and imperialist wars,
Andrews introduced the concept of ‘colonial nostalgia’ and ‘empire
2.0’ as informing Trumpism (‘Make America Great Again’) and
Putinism (Make Russia Great Again) (Andrews 2021:xviii).
The Russia–Ukraine War has provoked a number of questions about
global, regional and national politics in a world characterised by
increased global human entanglements on the one side, and, on the
other side, an internationalism constituted by multiplexities and
heterarchies of power that defy binary thinking. The question of
how to make sense of the global South’s perspectives on the
Russia–Ukraine War lies at the centre of rethinking
internationalism itself, because it was from the global South that
calls for a new egalitarian and racism-free internationalism were
made. Adom Getachew, in Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and
Fall of Self-Determination (2019), revealed that African,
African-American and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were
concerned not only about nation-building but also responded to the
experience of racialised sovereign inequality by directly
challenging international racial hierarchies of power while making
a strong case for alternative visions of the world. The
Russia–Ukraine War has ignited complex questions of hierarchies of
power, anti-imperialism, neutrality and non-alignment, arising not
only from the way the states of the global South have responded to
the apportionment of blame for the war but also how great powers
treat smaller states.
These questions of caution, non-alignment, neutrality and
anti-imperialism are reflected in the voting patterns of states
from the global South in the United Nations General Assembly
vis-à-vis punishments to be imposed on Russia. The USA and the EU
have openly singled out Russia as the aggressor that has to be
isolated, sanctioned and punished. However, so far, the USA and
the EU have not yet managed to pull the rest of the world onto
their side. The phenomenon of abstentions on resolutions aimed at
punishing Russia as an aggressor has characterised the voting
patterns of a majority of the states from the global South. For
example, the voting patterns on the resolution to suspend Russia
from the United Nations Council on Human Rights delivered
fifty-eight abstentions (mainly from the global South),
ninety-three votes in favour (mainly from Europe), and twenty-four
against.
What does this mean? At one level, does this reflect the
incoherence of the current neoliberal internationalism against all
efforts of the USA to rally behind it what it considers to be
democracies? In his speech delivered on 26 March 2022 at the Royal
Castle in Warsaw in Poland, US President Joe Biden defined the
Russia–Ukraine War as ‘a battle between democracy and autocracy,
between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and
one governed by brute force’. In terms of the resolution of the
Russia–Ukraine War, Biden revealed the broader US imperial design
of initiating regime change in Moscow. ‘For God’s sake, this man
cannot remain in power,’ he urged, in reference to Russia’s
President Vladimir Putin.
Currently, the US is actively trying to rally behind it what it
conceives as democracies, but there are also stark signs and
realities of a deeper and complex fragmentation of the existing
internationalism. It is not easy to simply draw a line between the
allies of the US and its foes aligned with Russia. Complexity and
entanglement are the signatures of the current internationalism.
The imperial US strategy of regime change has not been successful
in other parts of the world — it has left political turmoil and
humanitarian disasters in its trail. One can refer to Afghanistan,
Iraq and Libya. One can also aver that if implemented in Eurasia,
chaos will reign in that region. The other baffling tendency is
how the USA and the EU seem to prefer arming Ukraine to seeking
peaceful means of resolving war. The voices urging mediation seem
to be coming from the global South. South Africa offered to
mediate and refused to take sides. The Arab League also offered to
mediate. Turkey has hosted one of the meetings. Israel has also
indicated its availability to mediate. Below is a broad overview
of complex global South perspectives and responses to the
Russia–Ukraine War.
The Middle East Region
Since the end of the Cold War, the Middle East region has been a
theatre of wars, in which the great powers have been and are
heavily embroiled. The long-standing and ongoing Israel–Palestine
conflict reflects clearly the question of Zionist coloniality,
which is sanitised by a neoliberal internationalism that is itself
not decoupled from coloniality. Russia and the US have been
heavily involved in the Syrian crisis. In Iraq, the site of the
Gulf War in which regime change was implemented, hell was let
loose and more violence and wars ensued after the Anglo-American
military invasion and the killing of Sadam Hussein. At the same
time the Middle East is not yet free from what Edward Said (1978)
named as Orientalism, which has mutated into what is known as
Islamophobia. Samuel P. Huntington (1996)’s thesis of ‘the clash
of civilisations’ was conceived in relation to Islamic
civilisation clashing with the West. Mahmood Mamdani (2004)’s
notion of ‘good Muslim, bad Muslim’ emerged within a context in
which he was making sense of Islamophobia and what the USA
declared the ‘war on terror’, following the 9/11 attacks.
The Middle East is a very complex region with equally complex
politics of affiliations and difference. What seems to be
determining the perspectives from the Middle East are history,
memory, interests and considerations of the preservation of
sovereignty. History and memory relate the legacies and realities
of great power interventions as well as the treatment of refugees
from the Middle East in Europe. Neither the Israel–Palestinine
conflict nor the war in Syria have attracted as much attention
from the world as the Russia–Ukraine War, nor have their refugees
received the same welcome compared to the Ukrainian refugees. This
raises the question of the hypocrisy of the so-called free world
and its racial profiling of people from the Middle East. However,
the rich Arab countries themselves have not expressed any
enthusiasm to welcome Syrian refugees either, an indication the
failure of the strong pan-Arabism that the Arab League has been
trying to forge.
All these factors have shaped perspectives of the Middle East on
the Russia–Ukraine War. While there is a view that the war is a
European one, there is also a realisation that it is a European
crisis with implications for the Middle East. The Middle East,
like other regions of the world, is entangled in particular ways
with both Russia and the USA in many domains. Russia is a major
exporter of food to the Middle East, particularly wheat. For the
Middle East to quickly sign or vote for the sanctioning of Russia
will definitely affect food imports from Russia to the region.
Thus, just like Europe, which is dependent on oil and natural gas
from Russia, the Middle East is cautious not to harm its imports
from Russia.
While the dominant position of most Arab States at the United
Nations General Assembly was to condemn the Russian invasion
(thirteen voted in favour, one against, four abstained and one did
not vote during the first UN resolution on Russia immediately
after its invasion of the Ukraine), there is a cautionary tone
that cuts across the region. There are also mixed reactions
informed by such observations as why the Israeli occupation of and
war on Palestine has not elicited the same international
condemnation. Abstention can be interpreted as a preference for
neutrality or non-alignment in a region where war has had
long-lasting negative effects. Pinar Tank (2022:1) has described
the regional perspectives and responses from the Middle East as
‘instrumental, fluid, and fleeting’. The Middle East is a major
source of oil and there is a possibility that if Russia is
successfully sanctioned, Europe and the USA will turn to it for
alternative supplies.
For illustrations of complexity in affiliations and alliances in
the Middle East region, it is important to reflect on a few
countries. Syria, for example, voted in support of Russia because
Russia has been the key supporter and protector of the Assad
regime since 2015. For Russia, Syria is a strategic partner that
enables it to maintain its base in Tartus, giving it access to the
Mediterranean. This is even more important now that, under
pressure from NATO and the EU (Tank 2022), Turkey has closed the
Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to the passage of Russian
warships. Turkey is a member of NATO but it has offered itself as
mediator in the Russia–Ukraine War — for example, the 10 March
2022 meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and
his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, took place in Turkey.
Partly this is because, in the Syrian war, Turkey needs Russian
support in keeping Syrian Kurds in check (Tank 2022). But at the
same time, Turkey is under pressure from the USA to take sides and
even send missiles to Ukraine.
Israel is another country that reveals the complexities of
multiple affiliations. It has taken a very cautious position on
the Russia–Ukraine War. There is a Jewish population in both
Russia and Ukraine. The President of Ukraine is a Jew. Zelenskyy
has already tried to bring Israel to the side of Ukraine by
likening the Russian invasion to the Holocaust. But it is hard for
Israel to climb the high moral ground and condemn the Russian
annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine when it is also
advocating for the annexation of the occupied West Bank. At the
same time, Israel is a strong partner of the USA in the Middle
East. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has enjoyed the
protection of the USA, which has not been forceful in condemning
Zionist coloniality and its violent responses to the Palestinian
struggle for self-determination.
Then there are the Gulf States, comprising Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates (UAE). The strategy of the Gulf States has
been to diversify their partners and affiliations, and as a result
they have close relations with Russia and have chosen to be
neutral vis-à-vis the Russia–Ukraine War. This position puts the
US and EU plans to seek oil from suppliers other than Russia in
question, as the Gulf States seem not to be persuaded and have
stuck with previous OPEC+ agreements that entail lifting oil
prices. Saudi Arabia has very strong ties with Russia including
agreements on military cooperation. A plus for Moscow is that
through its support for Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad, it has gained
favour for standing by and protecting its partners — unlike the
USA, which always pushes its former allies under the bus if
circumstances change.
Then there is the Russia–Iran relationship. Russia had been
serving as a key intermediary between Washington and Tehran
regarding Iran’s nuclear deal. But now that it is the most
sanctioned nation after its invasion of Ukraine, this might have
consequences for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA)
that it was mediating. A possibility is that Europe and the USA
will lift the embargo against Iran’s oil as they seek new supplies
of this resource. Under the embargo, Iran has been dependent on
Russia for technology. Sanctions against Russia might bring the
two countries even closer and make them more dependent on each
other. Russia does not fear a nuclear armed Iran as much as the
USA does.
The African Region
Africa was the last part of the world to experience late
colonialism. Consequently, its decolonisation became a
twentieth-century phenomenon. The two superpowers — the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the USA — were deeply
involved in the decolonisation and postcolonial dynamics in Africa
for their various imperial designs. Geographically, the African
region is distant from the theatre of the Russia–Ukraine War.
Organisationally, it is still seen as divided into North Africa
and Sub-Saharan Africa. Black consciousness and Pan-Africanism
have not yet succeeded in uniting the continent. Africa remains a
divided region in many ways and the African Union (AU) has not
been successful in rallying a common African position on the
Russia–Ukraine War. At the same time, African leaders have been
consistent in their defence of territorial sovereignty to the
extent that they maintain inherited colonial boundaries and insist
on their inviolability.
It was the Congo Crisis of 1960, which resulted in the
assassination of Patrice Lumumba, that revealed in stark terms the
consequences of great power machinations in postcolonial Africa.
Lumumba was a committed nationalist who in his independence speech
promised to take the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on an
independent national and pan-African trajectory. However, Belgium,
the exiting colonial power, was not committed to letting go of the
resource-rich DRC. The same was true of the other great powers.
Consequently, the DRC became the site of the first neocolonial war
involving the great powers in Africa. Lumumba was a friend of
Kwame Nkrumah. What happened to Lumumba and the DRC prompted
Nkrumah to research and explain neocolonialism and its dangers.
The result was the book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of
Imperialism (1965). Barely a year after this publication,
Nkrumah suffered a CIA-sponsored military coup in 1966. It was
such experiences that combined to reinforce a general
anti-imperialist position in Africa and sustain the rhetoric of
Pan-Africanism.
On 28 February 2022, the African Union issued a statement
condemning the reported ill-treatment of Africans trying to leave
Ukraine. However, when it came to the United Nations General
Assembly resolutions on Russia, African states voted as sovereign
individual states rather than as a collective. The continental and
regional institutions have been rendered useless by the diverging
views among African leaders on the Russia–Ukraine War. A further
complication is that African countries such as Egypt, Libya,
Tunisia and Algeria have strong links with the Middle East.
Just like other regions of the global South, history, memory,
realist calculations and other factors determine African
perspectives on the Russia–Ukraine War. During the first General
Assembly Resolution on Russia, this is how Africa voted:
twenty-eight in favour, twenty-six abstained, and one voted with
Russia. Debates followed on why Africa voted the way it did so as
to arrive at an understanding of the African perspective on the
Russia–Ukraine War. The explanations ranged from the historical
legacies of solidarity between the Soviet Union and African
countries during their anti-colonial/anti-imperialist struggles,
to Russia’s current influence on Africa and an Africa that chooses
to stick to its tradition of non-alignment. Russia has prominent
influence in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Guinea
and Mali, where it seems a more preferable partner than France.
Through its Wagner Group, Russia has extended its influence to
Mozambique, which is battling Islamist insurgents. In the Sahel
region, the military leaders who have come to power in recent
military coups seem to be inviting Russia to help them tackle
jihadists.
The twenty-eight African countries that voted in favour of
sanctions against Russia included mainly those that have close
ties with the United States of America: Botswana, Benin, Cape
Verde, Comoros, DRC, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia,
Malawi, Mauritius, Niger, Nigeria, Sao Tomé and Principe,
Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tunisia and Zambia. Botswana hosts a US
military base. The criteria of democracies on the one hand and
autocracies on the other hand cannot easily explain the voting
pattern, even if some analysts attempted to argue that those
African countries that abstained could be categorised as
authoritarian or hybrid regimes. Namibia, South Africa and Senegal
abstained but they do not qualify as authoritarian regimes by
African standards. They have a functioning democracy — albeit with
its own problems, like all other democracies across the world.
Nigeria and South Africa voted differently — Nigeria in favour,
South Africa abstaining. These are two powerful African states.
Nigeria had 5,000 students studying in the Ukraine and has strong
economic relations with that country. Nigeria therefore voted
against Russia but explained its position as being in accordance
with the United Nations Charter and in defence of international
law. Some analysts pointed out that Nigeria could have taken a
position of neutrality because it also imports a lot from Russia
and its position could backfire.
South Africa, since the time of the Nelson Mandela presidency, has
maintained a position that no one can choose its allies and
enemies, except itself. This emerged when Mandela was put under
pressure by the United States of America to cut ties with Cuba and
Libya. Mandela’s response was emphatic — South Africa knew its
friends, particularly those that had supported its anti-apartheid
struggle wholeheartedly.
While circumstances have changed, South Africa has abstained three
times since 2 March 2022 from resolutions in the United National
General Assembly that were critical of Russia. The Minister of
International Relations, Naledi Pandor, and the President of South
Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, explained that their position was not an
endorsement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rather, they
preferred to give diplomacy a chance and not take positions that
would contribute to the escalation of the war. For example,
Minister Pandor argued that the suspension of Russia from the
United Nations Council on Human Rights would place it outside
international bodies, which would give it an opportunity to escape
accountability.
There are also very complex histories and realities behind South
Africa’s perspective on the Russia–Ukraine War. South Africa,
Namibia, Zimbabwe and many other African countries, like Angola
and Mozambique, were supported ideologically and materially by the
Soviet Union during their wars of liberation. At that time,
Ukraine was a republic under the Soviet system and also
contributed to the anticolonial and anti-apartheid struggles. This
complicates the basis for choosing a position, for South Africa in
particular. The second reality is that South Africa is a member of
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which is
the forefront of what is termed dewesternisation. But being a
regional hegemon, both Russia and the United States of America
want South Africa in their corner. Hence, Biden has been putting
pressure on South Africa to take a position against Russia.
In North Africa, Egypt’s response and perspective on the
Russia–Ukraine War is determined by two major factors. The first
is economic. Egypt is the world’s top importer of wheat (85%) from
Russia and Ukraine. Therefore, any sanctions imposed on Russia and
any disruption of wheat production in Ukraine will have direct
implications for food security in Egypt. The second factor is the
long-standing relations between Egypt and Russia, going as far
back as the 1950s (Soviet Union times). Russia supported the
construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1964. Currently, Russia is
assisting the building of a nuclear plant in El Dabaa in Egypt and
Russian companies are active as investors. A Russian Industrial
Zone in the Suez Canal Economic Zone is under construction. On top
of this, tourism in Egypt is boosted by tourists from both Russia
and Ukraine. All these considerations make Egypt very cautious in
its response to the Russia–Ukraine War. Egypt is very clear that
sanctions imposed on Russia will affect it heavily as is the
devaluation of the Russian ruble.
Despite its close ties with Russia, Egypt has also strategic
partnerships with the USA and the EU. Consequently, a few hours
after voting at the UN General Assembly in favour of condemning
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Egypt issued a statement
highlighting the need to pay attention to Russia’s legitimate
national security concerns. It also criticised the sanctioning of
Russia. Egypt’s actions demonstrate a country that it is walking a
tight rope between Russia and the West.
As with other regions of the world, Africa needs to consider
economic realities, in the form of its imports of wheat, soya
bean, barley, sunflower oil and arms from Russia and Ukraine.
These factors contribute to Africa taking a neutral and
non-aligned position. Africa has multiple external partners across
the so-called free world and autocratic world. Countries like
Zimbabwe that are under EU and USA sanctions were bound not to
support those against Russia. This is another complexity. It would
seem for now that non-alignment is the best position for Africa in
a world where Cold War fault lines appear to be re-emerging on a
global scale.
The Asian Region
Asia, too, is a highly complex region with several sub-regions,
such as Southeast Africa, Central Asia, Western Asia, Asia Pacific
and Eurasia. Southeast Asia comprises Brunei, Burma (Myanmar),
Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore,
Thailand, Timor-Leste (East Timor) and Vietnam. These countries,
except East Timor, are members of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN). In Southeast Asia, nation-building
continues to be a challenge, such as in Indonesia. The construct
‘Asia Pacific’ emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed by countries
such as the United States, Japan and Australia, and tended to be
used to legitimate United States intervention in East Asian
affairs. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) of 1989 was
one attempt to concretise the construct. It is basically a
description of East Asia and the Western powers of the Pacific:
United States of America, Australia and Southeast Asia. Then there
is Northeast Asia, covering China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan,
Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Russia and Mongolia. India is
another big piece and power of Asia (McDougall 2016). These
geopolitical constructions reflect the complexity of politics and
impinge on how Asia as a region exhibits a multiplexity of
perspectives vis-à-vis the Russia–Ukraine War. At the centre of
Asia is China, which has risen to be a great power and is poised
to lead a Sinocentric international world order.
One important point about East Asia, according to Kuan-Hsing Chen
(2010: 118), is that it is not yet in a post-Cold War era. Korea
is still divided. Taiwan is a garrison state. Japan–Russia
relations are still characterised by tensions. Sino-American
relations have been improving but are not stable. Japan, South
Korea and Taiwan are allies of the USA. Sino–Russia relations have
improved compared to during the Sino-Soviet disputes. Chen
(2010:119) concluded that ‘These are undeniable markers of the
continuation and extension of the cold war.’ So far, China has not
been vocal against the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Russia and
China belong to BRICS.
Shivshankar Menon, a former diplomat who served as National
Security Adviser to Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, from
2010 to 2014, posited five arguments about Asia with regard to the
Russia–Ukraine War. The first is that ‘the future global order
will be decided not by wars in Europe but by the contest in Asia,
on which events in Ukraine have limited bearing’. The second is
that ‘Europe is a sideshow to the main theatre of geopolitical
drama: Asia’. The third is that ‘the centre of gravity of the
world economy has moved from the Atlantic to east of the Urals’.
The fourth is that ‘multiple affiliations and partnerships is the
norm in Asia, and it will complicate any Western framing of a
larger confrontation with the autocracies of China and Russia’.
The final point is that Asia’s perspective is determined by a
sense ‘of its own difference — its focus on stability, trade, and
the bottom line that has served Asian countries so well in the
last 40 years’. Menon expressed these opinions in Foreign
Affairs, 4 April 2022.
Perhaps the example of India helps in demonstrating the complexity
if not multiplexity of affiliations and how they are enmeshed in
the Russia–Ukraine War. India is a major power in Asia but has
close relations with both Russia and the United States of America.
But when India began nuclear tests, the USA criticised it and even
imposed sanctions. Russia stood by India. It was Russia and France
rather than the USA that gave India nuclear reactors. India is
also linked with Israel. Israel and the USA supply India with
armaments. In the middle of all these complex affiliations, India
pursues what has come to be known as ‘strategic autonomy’. This is
a realist position in world affairs. To the USA, India is part of
the democratic free world and a partner of choice, but at the
United Nations General Assembly on 2 March 2022, India abstained
from the resolution that demanded that Russia withdraw from
Ukraine. India is also not in favour of sanctions being imposed on
Russia. Only three Asian countries — Japan, Singapore and South
Korea — have joined the USA and EU agenda of sanctioning Russia.
There is also a clear message from the Prime Minister of Pakistan,
who has taken a clear position that Asians are not slaves of the
USA, signalling their non-alignment position.
The Latin American Region
Latin America is the region closest to the USA. Greg Gandin (2006) depicted it as the ‘empire’s workshop’ to highlight how US imperialism formulated, worked out and tested its imperialist strategies and tactics in Latin America before deploying them around the world. Indeed, the USA has since its emergence as a nation-state-cum-empire claimed Latin America as its sphere of influence. Basically, Latin America ‘has played an indispensable role in the rise of the United States to global power’, in the first instance (Grandin 2006:1). The USA is made of Latin America. In the second instance, Latin America ‘has long served as a workshop of empire, the place where the United States elaborated tactics of extraterritorial administration and acquired its conception as an empire like no other before it’ (Grandin 2006:2). In the third instance:
The region provided a school where foreign policy officials and intellectuals could learn to apply what political scientists like to call ‘soft power’ — that is, the spread of America’s authority through non-military means, through commerce, cultural exchanges, and multilateral cooperation’ (Grandin 2006:3).
But it was also through the hard power of military interventions
and sponsorship of military coups as well as regime changes in
Latin America. The USA has never been a good neighbour, and like
all other great powers and empires, it has yet to learn good
neighbourliness. Consequently, it has committed so many crimes in
the Latin American region, ranging from sponsoring regime change
to maintaining colonialism, in countries like Puerto Rico.
Therefore, the Latin America perspective on the Russia–Ukraine War
is informed by long histories and memories going as far back as
the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors.
Latin America is also the centre of counter-hegemonic revolutions,
from the Haitian Revolution right up to the Bolivarian Revolution.
Ideationally, Latin America has offered such schools of thought as
Dependency, in the 1970s, and today the coloniality/decoloniality
theory, all of which are critical of American and European
imperialism and colonialism. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is
being used to compare Russia’s claim that a NATO-and EU-aligned
Ukraine is a threat to its security with how the USA responded to
the Soviet Union’s attempt to arm Cuba on its
border.
However, the Latin American perspective — as in other regions — is
not homogenous. There is Cuba, an active member and leader of both
the Non-Alignment Movement and the Tricontinental Conference, with
a long history of resistance to American imperialism and
colonialism. Together with countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua and
others, it is vehemently opposed to anything to do with the USA
and has maintained close ties with Russia. But there are also big
countries like Brazil and Mexico, considered to be democracies,
which have refused to participate in sanctions against Russia.
They have been joined by El Salvador in taking the route of
abstention at the United Nations General Assembly on resolutions
against Russia.
The USA strategy is to mobilise what it calls the ‘free world’
against Russia while at the same time trying to divide even those
states that have stood with Russia. In pursuit of this strategy,
the USA is trying frantically to cause a split between Russia and
China and destroy the Sino-Russia alliance symbolised by BRICS.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, has also revealed a
sub-text in that country’s strategy. to engineer regime change in
Moscow. The raft of sanctions imposed on Russia might be part of a
plan to cause shortages and suffocate the Russian economy so that
in the end the people of Russia rise against its government. The
second emerging point is that even though there is increasing talk
about the return of the Cold War or the emergence of a new Cold
War, the realities on the ground are too complex to be reduced to
any binary. Affiliations, partnerships and solidarities cut across
any fantasy of a democratic and autocratic dichotomy. While the
competition is not between Russia and the USA but between USA and
China, the revival of Russia and its attempts to move to the East
rather than to the West has to be contained in the US’s strategic
calculations. The USA calculation was that after the end of the
Cold War a pliable Russia would be invited into the EU, NATO and
other Euro-North-American-dominated multilateral institutions,
such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The question of national self-determination within
internationalism and its future if Russia emerges victorious in
the Russia–Ukraine War touches the hearts of smaller states more.
Smaller republics and occupied territories like Palestine, Tibet,
Kashmir, Taiwan, the Sahrawi Republic and others, which are
neighbours to great powers like Israel, China and India for
instance, live in fear of invasion and annexation. What is also
important is the return of such concepts as non-alignment,
neutrality and anti-imperialism and what they mean in the present
conjuncture. How adequate, for instance, is the concept of
non-alignment in a context where there is only one superpower? Do
these concepts of neutrality, non-alignment and anti-imperialism
help sufficiently in understanding the current behaviour and
response of the global South to the Russia–Ukraine War? So far
abstention is linked with non-alignment and neutrality. Does it
really indicate neutrality? Abstention is neither yes nor no.
How the countries of the global South react to the use of
sanctions and their legitimacy in international politics is
informed by the fact that this has been a strategy used by great
powers against smaller states of the global South. The fact that
it has been the smaller and weaker states of the global South that
have been victims of sanctions accounts for their ambivalence.
Then there is the reality that imposing sanctions on Russia
directly affects food security in many countries of the global
South. The sanctions even seem to be negatively affecting Europe
and the United States, which rely on Russia’s oil and gas. All
these issues indicate the complexity of the present conjuncture as
well as the crisis of internationalism exposed by the
Russia–Ukraine War. There is no doubt that if the Russia–Ukraine
War drags on, the perspectives of the global South and responses
will become even more complex. What is even more worrying is how
Europe and the United States are invested in aggravating the
Russia–Ukraine War through supplies of arms and personnel. One
wonders whether war can be used to end war?
*Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South and Vice-Dean for Research in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth, Germany
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