Africa and Europe at the crossroads
Contents, summary, introduction. National capitalism and the world crisis today.
Summary
I drafted a book, Africa 1800–2100: A History of the Future. A French friend asked me what it was about. I told her it was about Africa moving up in the global charts and Europe moving down. Her face hardened, so I made a conciliatory gesture. “JKH: Of course, Africa is a mess. FF: Yes, it’s a mess! JKH: Have you ever been there? FF: No.” I did not do any better with Anglophone publishers. Citizens of the leading western nations, especially the former imperial powers, know at some level that their societies are now in decline and losing the world they once made. European surveys of depression are headed by France and Britain. They can accept the rise of China, which was on a par with them in the eighteenth century. But Africa is something else. The Blacks must be forever consigned to the bottom rung of the racial ladder. The Whites’ slide into the dustbin of history is almost acceptable if the Blacks are eternally condemned to being worse off (Hart 2022: 271-2).
Neoliberal globalization is increasingly challenged by nationalist ‘strong men’. Both sides are market fundamentalists, but with opposed priorities. Africa and Europe are treated here as complementary actors in a three-act play: the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. In 1900, Africa had only 7.5% of the world’s population; Europeans were 25%—including the temperate zone lands of new settlement, 36%. The forecast for 2100 is that Africa will have two-fifths of the world’s population, Europe 6%. Europe’s inability to resolve its monetary, economic, and political problems points to irreversible decline. The UN’s middle forecast is that half the world’s children 18 and under will be African in 2100.
The global economic crisis is due to the collapse of the system of national capitalism that was typical in the last century. The European Union was one response to this development. I examine its institutional defects, especially the euro itself and the dire consequences of the Lehman crash. The result is a Greek tragedy in both the ancient and modern senses.
I focus here on the potential of Africa’s urban revolution in the last century. Its population explosion will be the leading factor in reshaping world society. I draw on the history of early modern liberal revolutions for analogies to the continent’s political prospects. A movement away from fragmented nation-states towards more effective regional trade federations, with support from Asian exporters of manufactures, could make room for Africa to join the expanding world market for digital cultural services.
Introduction
We have lived for several decades through an unregulated explosion of money, markets and communications, and are now experiencing the consequences. This hectic period of globalization represents a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the last century’s norm, when society was identified with the nation-state. If humanity is to live in the world together, we must devise new ways of organizing world trade and movement, rather than to retreat into deglobalization. In 2000, the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre abandoned the left’s anti-globalization in favor of ‘alter-globalization’, different principles of world society (Pleyers 2010). That is my position too.
Many, including me, believed that the financial crisis of 2007-9 would weaken the economists’ prestige, undermine the grip of corporate creditors on national and international politics and speed up a return to responsible public management of the economy. After vast amounts of taxpayers’ money made good the balance sheets of the principal debtors, the neoliberal consensus survived unscathed (Mirowski 2013). Austerity programs made working people pay for the excesses of the rich (Rakopoulos 2018). The economic crisis was seen by the classes that caused the crisis as an opportunity to bring the working and middle classes permanently to heel.
Who are the sides in this new turbulence? The left has been decimated since 2000; and even radical old men—Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn come to mind—did not run to restore state controls. The recent challenge posed to neoliberal globalization by nationalists—usually referred to as “populists”—is new. This has been roaring ahead since the Cold War ended and the internet went public.
A breed of ‘strong men’ has emerged—Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdogan, Modi etc. Some of them explicitly embrace protection while combining market fundamentalism with autocratic nationalism (Hart 2018). In this they break, at least partially, with the prevailing neoliberal version of “free trade,” which would be more accurately described as the freedom of global capital to go anywhere without hindrance. Both sides are market fundamentalists, but one embraces globalization and the other rejects the transnational corporations’ version.[1] The revival of protectionism comes as a shock, since we are inured to the dogma that capital must flow unimpeded around the world. Free trade and protection have never been alternatives, however; they are complementary aspects of all economies (Steuart 1767).
As Karl Polanyi (1944) pointed out in The Great Transformation, there is a permanent tension between an economy’s internal and external dimensions. This could engulf our societies in conflicts at every level from the local to the global. The British Empire once imposed the gold standard and free international trade on the world and the American Empire has until recently supervised neoliberal globalization today. The euro has a similar effect on its member nation-states (see below). Above all, the previous global dispensation for relations between businesses and governments is at stake. The world economy is entering new territory.
The last century’s dominant economic form, national capitalism, is in disarray for this and other more fundamental reasons. By 2100, four out of five people alive are forecast to live in Asia and Africa. China, India and Brazil are becoming formidable capitalist powers. The unipolar world around 1900 is multipolar now; and western xenophobia reflects this historical trend, as it did a century ago. According to the middle UN projection, Africa will be home to 25% of all the people alive in 2050 (now 15%) and 40% in 2100, when Asia (now 60%) will contribute 42% and the rest 18%; Europe’s share will be 6%.
No wonder France’s President Macron frets about all those babies being produced by African women. Africa’s annual population growth rate is 2.5%, while the rest of the world’s is ageing and in decline. Previous dystopian projections of “runaway” population growth are now being revised downwards. The Asian exporting manufacturers already recognize that Africa will contribute whatever buoyancy global market demand will experience in the century to come.
This demographic explosion is comparable to the one experienced by Europeans in the 1830s-1930s, when they took over the planet. The Asian population expanded significantly in the second half of the last century, but this did not alter its long-established primacy in the world league table. The shape of world politics, production and trade will be transformed in unimaginable ways. In 1900 Europe housed a quarter of the world’s population, a third or more globally. Africa was then the least densely populated and urbanized continent, and inhabitable land almost double its population share. Today urban growth approaches the global average of roughly a half; Europe’s population is dwindling into obscurity.
There is nothing certain in this scenario, but both regions will have to develop 6political strategies for managing the momentous outcomes that lie ahead. At stake is an end to the racist world society that the West made over the last 500 years. I develop here a comparison between Europe and Africa, paying attention to some aspects of political economy that I consider significant. My essay’s title reflects the future rank order of continental populations, whereas the order of sections follows the historical sequence of their explosive growth and, in Europe’s case, its calamitous decline after being the first battleground for two world wars and now possibly a third.
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PART ONE: THE WORLD CRISIS TODAY
The collapse of national capitalism
The current crisis of world economy should be seen as the collapse of the money system that the world lived by in the twentieth century (Hart 2023). Politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. World society has been unraveling since the US dollar went off gold in 1971; a new regime of floating currencies soon emerged; and money derivatives were invented in Chicago a year later. The need for international cooperation grows inexorably, but the dissonance between world economy and national political institutions undermines effective political and legal solutions. The financial crisis was not addressed effectively because the regime inaugurated by the neoliberal counter-revolution of 1979-80 remained largely untouched. We are living through an economic disaster that will persist as long as “the markets” rule. The euro is not the only symptom of this crisis, but its demise could still wreck the world economy.
We should step back and ask not what is beginning, but what is ending. National capitalism, the synthesis of nation-states and industrial capitalism, is ending (Hart 2024). Its main symbol has been national monopoly currency—legal tender policed by a central bank. It was not the only active principle in the modern world’s political economy: cities, provinces, regional federations, empires, and globalization have been contesting forms of government. The rise and fall of single currencies offer one way of mapping national capitalism’s historical trajectory. Our challenge is to conceive of society once more as something plural not singular—as a federal network rather than a centralized hierarchy, the nation-state. It took the United States half a century to secure an uncontested monopoly for its “greenbacks”; and national currency monopolies have been breaking up since the US dollar was taken off gold (Dembinski and Peritaz 2000).
Momentous changes have overtaken money in the last few decades (Hart 2000). In Switzerland today, shops accept euros alongside Swiss francs. If you pay with a card, you can choose the unit of account—franc, euro, sterling, dollars. Only francs are acceptable for payment of local and national taxes. The notion that a national currency is at once a medium of exchange, unit of account, means of payment and store of value is no longer valid. Are these currencies a store of wealth? Hardly. They have all een long radically depreciated and may soon be replaced—hence the flight to gold. But gold could turn out to be the biggest asset bubble of them all.
As for real estate, the collapse of subprime mortgages got us into the present mess (Reinhart and Rogoff 2011). Do not ask what “credit default swaps” and “collateral debt obligations" measure or who issues them (Tett 2009). The shadow banking system—hedge funds, money market funds, and structured investment vehicles that lie beyond state regulation—is out of control. This process of social extension beyond national boundaries is fraught with danger. We need to extend systems of social rights to the global level before the contradictions of the market system collapse into world war. But national politics resists such a move. This dialectic of globalization is very ancient. Ours is a world whose plurality of associations and convergent income distribution between major regions resemble the Middle Ages more than anything since.
National capitalism has lost its grip on reality, since the social forces that made nation-states the obvious locus of society are now dramatically weakened. This is the principal reason for the emergence of nationalist strong men and of deluded leaps into the past such as Trump’s presidency and Brexit (Hart 2016, 2021). Neoliberal globalization is not irreversible; and similar historical conditions led to the First World War with terrible consequences for the world.
This century’s world crisis now[2]
After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and in the global economic crisis today, the prospects for world war seem closer now. The world economy is more integrated than in the last Great Depression. Central banks since 2008 have been obsessed with lowering the cost of borrowing to near zero; the American empire has made this the first truly global debt crisis in history. It has been building since the neoliberal counter-revolution against postwar social democracy and socialism around 1980, when complacent western voters handed over government to the rich.
Since 2000 there has been an inexorable move towards democratic deficits everywhere, fueled by plutocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, the replacement of equal citizenship by identity politics, the disempowerment of the working and middle classes, a lawless global money circuit, and the collapse of ethical standards in traditional and new social media. The debt crisis follows four decades of fake credit boom, when leading western central banks lost control of their national currency and turned to maintaining asset prices for the benefit of corporations and billionaires.
The political center of right and left—who managed the leading western governments plus Japan and the Southeast Asian ‘Tigers’ from the 1950s—have been squeezed between global plutocracy and the nationalist extreme right. The radical left in Europe and the United States has nothing to say any more; they dream of a world long gone. Poor old Britain is breaking up, and its post-imperial state is no longer able to project power inside or outside its territory (Hart 2016). Maybe using the label “fascist” is to focus on the wrong period, since 1914-45 was the culmination of events set in train during the 1860s (Hart 2024).[3]
We need a longer-term vision to place our moment in world history with a degree of realism. This means developing a perspective on 1800-2100 as a single period. Western progressives must do more than react to the latest news, and should reach out more for allies where most of the people live. In revolutions of the 1860s and early 70s, an alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class in revolutions of the 1860s and early 70s gave birth to national capitalism—the attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracies, allegedly in the interests of the citizen body. This launched the age of imperialism, and it became the last century's dominant social form.
According to W.A. Lewis (1978), 50 million Europeans left their home “continent” between the 1880s and 1914, three–quarters of them to the United States. The same number of “coolies” from India and China moved to the tropics in the main. These two human rivers could not be allowed to merge since European unskilled workers earned nine shillings a day and the coolies with similar aptitudes just one shilling. The division of the world into highly-paid industrial workers and low-paid agricultural workers began around 1900. The two global streams met, however, in the United States and South Africa, where segregation, apartheid, and the color bar took their modern form later than is commonly supposed.
The Whites realised that the rest outnumbered them and were catching up. This was the prime political issue in the West around 1900. Robert Vitalis (2015) shows that International Relations then was driven at first by racism and imperialism, not by power plays between states or geographical blocs, as they have been since 1945—when racism went officially underground, only to come back to the surface now once more. Foreign Affairs started out in 1910 as The Journal of Race Development. The question then was how the Whites could retain control in the face of a declining share of the world's population. This is an even more pressing issue now that capitalism has gone global with the emergence of China, India, Brazil, and other countries.
The outbreak of the First World War changed everything (Hart 2014b, 2022b). In the previous three decades, financial imperialism ruled the world, what Karl Polanyi (1944) called haute finance—the Rothschilds, J.P. Morgan and the rest; and the Russian economy grew at an average annual rate of 10% for three decades. 5The senseless slaughter in the trenches undermined ropeans' belief in their own monopoly of reason and civilization. The hit movie of 1922 was Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, showing Eskimos’ resilience in the face of appalling natural forces. In the same year, Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) launched modern anthropology with Argonauts of the Western Pacific; T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, James Joyce Ulysses, and Ludwig Wittgenstein his Tractatus. A good fraction of western intellectuals signaled the retreat from empire then, just as they are now from neoliberal globalization and the American empire.
During the war, states mobilized and killed off vast armies, they controlled industrial production, set prices in markets and rationed supplies, monopolized propaganda. Trade, transport, and migration were much reduced. After the war, the race was on to determine which kind of state would rule the world—welfare state “democracy”, fascist or communist? The world economy, led by Woodrow Wilson—who saw that nationalism would undo the European empires, especially the British—turned inwards to national capitalism and import-substituting industrialization for sixty years. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” in the 1920s was an attempt to revive Russia’s three decades of growth before the war. The turning point in the Second World War was when Stalin’s military machine knocked out Hitler’s.[4]
The war defeated fascism, and unleashed the anti-colonial revolution and the Cold War, followed by three decades of developmental states in the western industrial countries, Soviet bloc and newly independent former colonies. For the first and only time, governments gave priority to increasing the purchasing power of working people, and investing in public infrastructure—not least its military component. This was the last world revolution; it generated the biggest boom in economic history; Reagan and Thatcher's neoliberal conservatism was the counter-revolution—assisted by Kohl and Nakasone, not to mention Deng, Pinochet, the Chicago school etc.
The British empire was in decline during the interwar period; and many commentators today think the same is true for American power today. I beg to differ. The US still has all those weapons and bases around the world, a third of the world market, the world currency—a haven in times of crisis—and generates most of the hardware, software, content and giant organizations of the digital economy, which is fast becoming the world economy. The “free market” is a fig leaf for militarism, mercantilism, financial monopoly and intellectual property rights.
China imports huge quantities of food, energy, minerals, and even semi-conductors. Like the other Asian manufacturing exporters, it still relies on global demand for its exports, without having yet established production for the home market in its stead. Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Formation of a Home Market for Large-scale Industry (1899) is still the best book on capitalist growth from behind. The impact of another world war and its inevitable disruptions would unseat the present ruling class in China and break up the country. It has happened there before.[56]
The First World War unleashed developments that disrupted the global economy so severely that the world turned to national capitalism and the world turned to import-substituting industrialization. Imagine what would happen to the internet and finance when Russian submarines attack the Atlantic cables, and the US and China knock the satellites out. Africa's future is more indeterminate than most. With two-fifths of humanity living there by the end of this century, that is worth thinking about.
There is nothing inevitable about any of this—the demography, world money and markets, war, the internet's future, the end of national capitalism, its potential replacement, the political forms emergent now, not to mention climate change that economic collapse and war will shift in the opposite direction by themselves. The most hopeful political coalitions when I was younger were the anti-war and nuclear disarmament movements. They are largely forgotten today—who wants to recall nightmares? A vigorous global anti-war movement before it happens might be one response. That is no more likely than an immediate solution to the world's money problems. Most people will have to lose a lot more of what they have gained since 1945 before they will contemplate the radical changes necessary to address these contradictions effectively.
C.L.R. James published The History of Negro Revolt in 1938, where he predicted Africans’ emancipation from colonial empire soon (Hart 1990). He had no takers from African politicians nor colonial officials then; and the European far left (he was Britain's most prominent local supporter of Leon Trostky) insisted that the revolution had to take place in Europe before they would give Africans their independence. The Second World War changed all that. The Third World War would do the same for us. Radicals must decide between trying to stop it now or—like the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the fascists afterwards—taking revolutionary advantage of the disaster.
There are some strikingly parallel aspects of our moment in history and the previous two world wars. Although the first was declared in 1914, it was followed by a ‘phony war’ while each side prepared for the serious killing which began in 1916. The same thing happened between 1939 and Hitler’s launch of his main attack on Russia in 1941. It is not far-fetched to imagine that an undeclared Third World War was launched by Putin in Ukraine and the serious killing awaits us—between the United States, with its allies in Britain, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and Australia, and the rest of the world led by China and its broken vassal Russia.[6]
[1] Concentration of economic and political power encourages criminal collusion between the two sides (Shaxson 2012).
[2] This section is taken from Hart (2022c). See also Hart (2002b).
[3] For a different view, see Hart (2003a).
[4] The German military machine was stopped by Stalin’s in 1943-45, building on pre-revolutionary industrialization (1880s-1913). The battle of Kursk in July 1943 destroyed more military material than the whole of the First World War.
[5] China’s southern and coastal regions has broken with Beijing at least three times in history. With most of the country’s advanced capitalism now being based in Shanghai and Guangdong, these regions resent the Chinese Communist Party’s diversion of its wealth to reviving the Great Silk Road, including genocide of the Uyghurs.
[6] India, having recently overtaken China in population size and economic growth, is broadly neutral, and could sit the main fighting out, along with the Indian Ocean sphere including Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East might not be so lucky.