For most of the past decade or so the SA story has written itself. Almost every day there are tales about breakdown, marginal gains and reversals, conflict, policy failures and maladministration. And yes, death and destruction.
Globally, the story is pretty much the same. It’s really difficult to see anything new or significantly different. Technological advances may have changed things, but these changes have only made us better at doing the things we have been doing. We work, primarily, to clothe, house and feed ourselves, and at various times and in places we fight over resources or protect what we have.
A 2023 World Bank publication, “Falling Long-Term Growth Prospects: Trends, Expectations & Policies”, was greeted by Beatrice Weder di Mauro, a professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, with the following: “Based on the most comprehensive database of potential growth estimates available to date … With nearly all the forces that have driven growth and prosperity in recent decades now weakened … a prolonged period of weakness is under way.”
The World Bank’s publication contains marvellous precepts, but it is virtually impossible to get from it “the smallest of good deeds”, as Tolstoy may have said. Over days and weeks now, members of the Atlantic community and their kinfolk have been reinforcing crenellations of old fortresses in anticipation of “a new Cold War”. This week the Brics countries are meeting in SA, with expansion high on their agenda.
Multilateralism
“An expanded Brics will represent a diverse group of nations with different political systems that share a common desire to have a more balanced global order … we will not be drawn into a contest between global powers,” President Cyril Ramaphosa has said, adding (correctly) that “multilateralism is being replaced by the actions of different power blocs, all of which we trade with, invest with, and whose technology we use”.
Amid all of this, Simon Tisdall, The Guardian’s veteran foreign affairs correspondent, explained that we have reached “a rare moment of seismic transformation” marked by a weakening of, and increasing disrespect for, “the UN and the international rules-based order … Competition for pole position in the race to boss the 21st century’s fast-evolving new world order is hotting up … A deadlocked security council teeters on irrelevance [all of which is] driving an urgent rethink about how the world will work — and who will run it — in the coming decades.”
US President Joe Biden is hard at work on “a new strategic partnership” with India, and the EU has unveiled an economic security strategy “to fend off Chinese and Russian predators [while] in Beijing, Xi Jinping told America’s top US diplomat who’s in charge: China”.
Here we are then. War talk and preparation for conflict persist. As the northern summer draws to an end, European countries have stepped up arms and ammunition deliveries to Ukraine. At the same time they are under pressure to replenish their threadbare forces, depleted by three decades of “peace dividend” savings. Earlier this year Gen Alfons Mais, chief of the German army, complained that his army was “more or less depleted”.
“The paths to prosperity and shared interests have grown murkier,” the New York Times’ global economics correspondent Patricia Cohen wrote in June.
It’s all so new, yet all so familiar; a little like that SA story. In the quest to feed, clothe and house ourselves, and to protect our gains, the wealthy are protecting their “beliefs and values” and their material property, while the not-so-wealthy (the Brics countries), are striving for “a more ambitious agenda and more forceful position, including a strong push for reform of the global political, economic and financial architecture”.
It’s easy to be pessimistic. It’s exceedingly difficult to be optimistic. This is certainly true in SA, as it is about the world. On any given day there lies between us and peace and prosperity Homer’s “roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains”.
There was a period in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Giambattista Vico’s (18th century) vision of “an era of governance by providence” was out of reach. Here we are again, six or seven decades later, threatened by nuclear conflagration, by the very idea that Russia would “go nuclear”, as Lauren Thompson wrote in Forbes magazine earlier in August.
Contiguously, the World Bank found nearly all the forces that have driven growth and prosperity in recent decades are now weakened, and the world is expecting “a prolonged period of weakness”. All the while, as Ramaphosa has said, multilateralism is being replaced by the actions of different power blocs in a clumsy remake of old Cold War theatrics.
The Observer opined last weekend: “If it sounds like a new Cold War and looks like a new Cold War, then it probably is a new Cold War. For what other interpretation is to be placed on US President Joe Biden’s latest ramping up of diplomatic, economic and military pressure on China?”
Perhaps breakdowns, marginal gains and reversals, conflict, policy failures and maladministration is in our fate, and if we were to take Homer seriously, no one alive has ever escaped their fate.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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