The Political Economy of China―US Relations: Digital Futures and African Agency (International Political Economy Series) 303086409X, 9783030864095

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
Abbreviations
Part I Imperfections of the International Liberal Order and Africa’s Plight
1 The Liberal Internationalist Order and Its Discontents
The Character of the Liberal Internationalist Order and US Normative Dissonance
Realism in International Relations
The Balance Sheet of US Leadership Since Bretton Woods
China’s Challenge to the Liberal Internationalism?
Hegemony and Global Stability in History
Developing Countries and the Leadership of Multilateral Institutions
Developing Countries at the Bretton Woods Conference
Concluding Reflections
References
2 Africa and Defective Multilateralism
Multilateralism and Its Defects
Development Weaknesses in the International Monetary System
Failure to Address Developmental Concerns of Developing Countries
Counter-Movement by Developing and African Countries
Failures of Postcolonial Elites and External Dependence
Concluding Reflections
References
3 Africa in the Multilateral Trading System
The Evolution of the Multilateral Trading System
The Uses and Abuses of Multilateral Trade by Advanced Economies
Africa on the Margins of Global Trade
Imbalances at the Uruguay Round and Agriculture Liberalization
African Countries and Power Asymmetries in the Multilateral Trading System
Concluding Reflections
References
Part II Africa as a Theatre for Major Power Rivalries
4 Implications of China–US Rivalry on Africa
China’s Quest for Global Supremacy
Africa’s Geopolitical Positioning and Economic Diplomacy
From Hegemonic Incorporation to Strategic Rivalry
Instruments of Hegemonic Incorporation: The Strategic Economic Dialogue
China–Africa’s Relations and Its Discontents
The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation
The Future of China’s Engagement in Africa
Concluding Reflections
References
5 The Evolution of US–Africa Relations: From Idealism to Realpolitik
Growing US Interest in Africa During the Cold War
Race Relations in Historical Perspective and Influence on US Foreign Policy
The Shift in America’s Tone and Early Signs of US–Africa Engagement
US Foreign Policy Engagement Under Nixon
US Foreign Policy and Political Tensions in Southern Africa Beyond Nixon
Concluding Reflections
References
6 US–Africa’s Engagement from Clinton to Trump
Clinton and the Era of US Commercial Diplomacy
Clinton and the Changing Character of US–Africa Policy
The Political Uses of Trade
US–South Africa Tensions Over Poultry and AGOA
US Foreign Policy Priorities in Africa Under Bush
Obama’s Tentative Foray in Africa
Trump and Africa: An Absent Foreign Policy
Concluding Reflections
References
Part III Digital Futures and African Agency
7 Paradigms, Inclusive Institutions, and Structural Transformation
Paradigms of Development
Looking Beyond Structural Transformation
Is Africa Rising or Varied Development Paths?
Possibilities That Lie in Structural Diversification
Africa’s Structural Transformation and Global Value Chains
The Role of Institutions in Africa’s Development
Toward Variable Geometry in Development Paths
Nigeria
Kenya
Ethiopia
Mozambique
Rwanda
Concluding Reflections
References
8 Africa’s Digital Futures
The Outlines of a Digital Economy in Africa
Digital Economy as a Catalyst for Africa’s Development
The New Era of Africa’s Tech Entrepreneurs
Digital Transformation and Regional Integration Efforts
Constraints to Africa’s Digital Transformation
Concluding Reflections
References
9 US–China Tech Wars: Shaping Africa’s Agency
The Character of the Tech Wars
Tensions in Commercial and Regulatory Systems
Chinese Measures Against the United States
Competition Over 5G
5G and Africa
Cybersecurity and Regulation in the Era of AI
Cybersecurity Implications for Africa
Concluding Reflections
References
Epilogue
Leadership, Institutions, and Africa’s Future
The Future of International Relations
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Political Economy of China–US Relations Digital Futures and African Agency Mzukisi Qobo

International Political Economy Series

Series Editor Timothy M. Shaw , University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, USA; Emeritus Professor, University of London, London, UK

The global political economy is in flux as a series of cumulative crises impacts its organization and governance. The IPE series has tracked its development in both analysis and structure over the last three decades. It has always had a concentration on the global South. Now the South increasingly challenges the North as the centre of development, also reflected in a growing number of submissions and publications on indebted Eurozone economies in Southern Europe. An indispensable resource for scholars and researchers, the series examines a variety of capitalisms and connections by focusing on emerging economies, companies and sectors, debates and policies. It informs diverse policy communities as the established trans-Atlantic North declines and ‘the rest’, especially the BRICS, rise. NOW INDEXED ON SCOPUS!

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/13996

Mzukisi Qobo

The Political Economy of China–US Relations Digital Futures and African Agency

Mzukisi Qobo Wits School of Governance University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

ISSN 2662-2483 ISSN 2662-2491 (electronic) International Political Economy Series ISBN 978-3-030-86409-5 ISBN 978-3-030-86410-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Rob Friedman/Stockphoto.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

I dedicate this work to Philip Nel, a mentor, a teacher and scholar of International Relations.

Preface

This book is a product of years of reflection on the African continent’s place in a changing global environment. In the early years of my academic career, I often found myself torn between studying the African continent from an area studies perspective or to view the continent through the lens of critical political economy, which would afford me intellectual latitude to look at power relations, ideas, and a broad array of contending actors. I have always found the politics of the continent fluid and complex and constantly evolving. Because of this, in my early academic career I tried to avoid any study of the specific challenges of the African continent, for example conflicts or political traditions, but instead set myself a task to grapple with broader questions pertaining to the structure of power in international relations, and drawn to themes such as international trade, finance, and production. In the last decade, my interest shifted considerably. I became more curious about the continent’s political, social, and economic struggles through the lens of history and the present, and to think about what Africa’s futures look like. Importantly, I am interested in the interrelationship between global power structures and dominant ideas, on the one hand, and Africa’s development on the other. While I consider critical International Political Economy perspective as offering a solid conceptual lens to study interplays of power, I place Africa at the center of my analysis of power dynamics. In this book I take a historical perspective of Africa’s changing place in the global order, assess the geopolitical tensions that

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have been occasioned by China’s rise, and offer perspectives on the future pathways for reinforcing Africa’s agency. This book draws heavily from Pan African ideas and critical International Political Economy perspectives. I have deliberately avoided applying these conceptual frames in a formulaic manner in order to give myself more room to think outside of the disciplinary and ideological strictures, and to allow my voice a free flow. I use these ideas as a map to help me understand the broader terrain of Africa’s development in a changing global environment rather than as a True North that I behold I unflinchingly. The African continent is an integral part of the global system, and must realize its own agency in a world in which the economic interests of major powers are still preponderant. This book is about the making of the postwar order and its deficiencies, and the emerging geopolitical tensions between China and the United States and how these may likely impact the African continent. Importantly, this work is about Africa’s future. It is dim in its assessment of the liberal internationalist order and hopeful about Africa’s agency and the continent’s future. In this book, I grapple with, among other themes, the role that transnational race politics played in undermining America’s expression of positive hegemony and how realpolitik became the dominant practice in America’s foreign policy. I also discuss ways in which the African continent has been on the margins of the global economic system because of the actions of major powers and Africa’s own leaders. This book places the African story both in history and against the backdrop of the present geopolitical tensions, and it privileges Africa’s agency and the need for the continent to chart alternative development pathways. In this respect, it diverges from perspectives that only blame outsiders for all Africa’s woes; it is not in search of scapegoats in the West. Western powers should bear responsibility for these problems, no doubt. However, Africa’s elites have as much responsibility, if not more, for Africa’s underdevelopment, and even greater burden to shape Africa’s destiny on better terms. Even though Africa suffered neglect under America’s hegemony— with America at various points actively destabilizing African countries and influencing political developments in the continent—African leaders and citizens must define better development pathways for the continent through insisting on ethical and transformation leadership as well as building credible institutions that are inclusive. Further, the book makes

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a strong case for structural transformation that is innovation-led and rides the wave of digital changes that are occurring in the world while also adopting smart geo-economic strategies that leverage the tensions between the United States and China for Africa’s own development interests. The first part of the book looks at the evolution of the liberal internationalist order, and here I critique what I refer to as the normative dissonance of the United States as a hegemon in the postwar years. This conflictual quality of America’s identity abroad is, in part, a product of the failure of various US administrations to resolve race tensions domestically and government’s inability to reconcile this normative failure with a claim to global leadership based on values of freedom and international cooperation. America’s lack of congruence between its professed values and realist practices abroad reflects the fluid and complex nature of the Cold War that lasted over four decades since the end of the Second World War. In this section, I also examine themes related to hegemonic stability theory, the role of developing countries, and how major powers failed the African continent. This discussion lays the context for later sections that explore new directions toward promoting Africa’s economic development and the continent’s beneficial integration into the global economy. In the second part, I look at how the African continent became a theater of contestation between great powers and why African countries should avoid the same pitfall in the ongoing US–China geopolitical rivalries. Importantly, this section wrestles with questions about the precise strategies Africans should adopt to realize positive agency in a world that is increasingly becoming uncertain, fluid, and fractious. The tensions between the United States and China come under close examination in this section. I mainly focus on how these major powers shape Africa’s development patterns in a self-serving way and in ways that deliver limited gains for the continent. In discussing the relationship between the United States and China, I draw on both history and the present. I place Africa’s agency at the center and explore different modes of thinking about Africa’s agency. This section sets the stage for the final section, where I consider Africa’s development prospects. I explore some of the approaches that have been proposed by various scholars regarding the need for structural diversification or simply accelerated industrialization in Africa. I critique the linearity of some of these views and present a different perspective

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through which we should understand structural diversification. Building on this, I consider various options for Africa’s participation in the digital economy. Finally, I discuss the role of political leadership and institutions in shaping a more progressive trajectory for the continent. Johannesburg, South Africa

Mzukisi Qobo

Acknowledgements

In writing this book I incurred many debts along the way. While I started this project in the middle of 2019, the bulk of my writing happened in the course of 2020 during the tough conditions of lockdown occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic. This also coincided with my transition to an administrative role at the Wits School of Governance where I was to assume a new role as head of school. What gave me great ease and confidence in continuing the journey of writing this book was having a supportive Dean, Imraan Valodia. He ensured that I had a soft landing in my new role. Without his support I would have postponed the writing process indefinitely. This book drew heavily from the analytic training I received from my earlier mentors on critical International Political Economy. I owe a debt of gratitude to Philip Nel, Shaun Breslin, and Timothy (Tim) Shaw for helping to set my conceptual foundations as a scholar of International Political Economy. At the tail end of my doctoral research in 2005, Shaun pressed me to think of myself not as an area-study specialist but a scholar who constantly improves his analytic craft using the lens of critical International Political Economy whatever the subject matter I choose to examine at a particular point in time. I’ve always kept this counsel. Tim, who is International Political Economy Series editor at Palgrave Macmillan, encouraged me to persevere when I wanted to throw in the towel and exit the writing process half-way through. He was the first to

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encourage me to tackle the topic of US–China relations and its implications for Africa. He pushed me to analyze the new technology trends and their implications for international relations. I value his support and counsel during the writing process. My general editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Anca Pusca patiently answered all my queries and guided me through the technical processes required to turn stand-alone chapters into a complete and coherent manuscript. Norman Mailer was very helpful in editing the earlier draft of this manuscript. He kept me alert on developments in US politics at the twilight of Trump years. There are many other individuals who contributed their valuable time to read this manuscript carefully and offered thoughtful suggestions. I would like to thank Nomfundo Ngwenya, Faizel Ismail, Halfdan Lynge-Mangueira, George Kararach, Yenkong Hangjoh-Hodu, Rendani Mamphiswana, Prince Mashele, and Mills Soko for their honest views and suggestions on various aspects of the manuscript. Nomfundo highlighted some weaknesses in the discussion on the international monetary system and suggested important updates. George commented on the presentation of arguments, especially on industrialization. Yenkong helped to push me to reflect on the more recent developments such as the AfCFA and other continental processes. Faizel gave very detailed comments on improving the structure, flow and argument, especially emphasizing the importance of maintaining a consistent thread of the argument. Apart from the editorial suggestions on Chapter 8, Halfdan raised important points about data markets and pushed me to think about the association between digital transformation and GDP growth in a more critical way rather than assume it as a given. Rendani generously shared some of his work on innovation and digital transformation, and pointed to some conceptual errors on understanding innovation on the African context. He also provided useful inputs on innovation as something that is also about learning and interacting than a big bang shift. Prince Mashele has an eye for detail. He gave me extensive comments on each chapter of the manuscript and challenged me to rethink the flow and the structure of the work. He convinced me to discard superfluous text on some of the chapters, especially the abstruse discussion on multilateral trade, and to do more reading on China’s historical ties in Africa. Mills Soko offered extensive written comments and took additional time to discuss with me the structure of the work and the presentation of the argument. He also provided very helpful suggestions on language and

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style. Mills and I spent many hours exchanging views on the evolution of the US foreign policy historically, the meaning of Obama, Xi–Trump relationship, and the likely foreign posture of the Biden administration. Wandile Sihlobo kept me accountable on meeting my writing commitments. I’ve always enjoyed my exchanges with Wandile on the craft of writing. John Stremalu at the Carter Center and Ambassador Michelle Gavin at the US Council on Foreign Relations were kind enough to participate as discussants at a webinar we hosted at the Wits School of Governance where I was presenting some of the ideas in this book. John and Michelle generously shared insights on their understanding of US foreign policy broadly, its bipartisan thrust, and reflected on the challenges that lie ahead for US–China relations. I would later benefit enormously from another webinar discussion with Ambassador Gavin, hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, on her paper on Major Power Rivalry for which I was a discussant. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Matlala Setlhalogile for his research support. Matlala is very dependable and with a mind that frames the bigger picture. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees who reviewed the manuscript and offered critical but useful comments. I wrote the bulk of this work in the late hours of the night and early hours of the morning, which ate into precious family time. My family has been a great source of inspiration and pillar of support throughout this journey. Without a loving and caring home environment, I doubt I would have had the emotional capacity and mental strength to pull through this work. For that I would like to thank my wife, Khanyisa. I am happy that my children Nqobile, Okuhle, and Lumko afforded me the space to see this manuscript to completion. I will always treasure their support and encouragement.

Contents

Part I Imperfections of the International Liberal Order and Africa’s Plight 1

2

The Liberal Internationalist Order and Its Discontents The Character of the Liberal Internationalist Order and US Normative Dissonance Realism in International Relations The Balance Sheet of US Leadership Since Bretton Woods China’s Challenge to the Liberal Internationalism? Hegemony and Global Stability in History Developing Countries and the Leadership of Multilateral Institutions Developing Countries at the Bretton Woods Conference Concluding Reflections References Africa and Defective Multilateralism Multilateralism and Its Defects Development Weaknesses in the International Monetary System Failure to Address Developmental Concerns of Developing Countries Counter-Movement by Developing and African Countries Failures of Postcolonial Elites and External Dependence

3 6 10 14 15 16 18 20 25 26 29 31 33 37 38 41 xv

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3

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Concluding Reflections References

45 47

Africa in the Multilateral Trading System The Evolution of the Multilateral Trading System The Uses and Abuses of Multilateral Trade by Advanced Economies Africa on the Margins of Global Trade Imbalances at the Uruguay Round and Agriculture Liberalization African Countries and Power Asymmetries in the Multilateral Trading System Concluding Reflections References

49 53 54 58 60 62 63 65

Part II Africa as a Theatre for Major Power Rivalries 4

5

Implications of China–US Rivalry on Africa China’s Quest for Global Supremacy Africa’s Geopolitical Positioning and Economic Diplomacy From Hegemonic Incorporation to Strategic Rivalry Instruments of Hegemonic Incorporation: The Strategic Economic Dialogue China–Africa’s Relations and Its Discontents The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation The Future of China’s Engagement in Africa Concluding Reflections References The Evolution of US–Africa Relations: From Idealism to Realpolitik Growing US Interest in Africa During the Cold War Race Relations in Historical Perspective and Influence on US Foreign Policy The Shift in America’s Tone and Early Signs of US–Africa Engagement US Foreign Policy Engagement Under Nixon US Foreign Policy and Political Tensions in Southern Africa Beyond Nixon

69 71 73 76 78 80 85 87 89 90 93 96 100 103 105 109

CONTENTS

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Concluding Reflections References

110 110

US–Africa’s Engagement from Clinton to Trump Clinton and the Era of US Commercial Diplomacy Clinton and the Changing Character of US–Africa Policy The Political Uses of Trade US–South Africa Tensions Over Poultry and AGOA US Foreign Policy Priorities in Africa Under Bush Obama’s Tentative Foray in Africa Trump and Africa: An Absent Foreign Policy Concluding Reflections References

113 115 118 120 122 123 127 131 132 133

Part III Digital Futures and African Agency 7

8

Paradigms, Inclusive Institutions, and Structural Transformation Paradigms of Development Looking Beyond Structural Transformation Is Africa Rising or Varied Development Paths? Possibilities That Lie in Structural Diversification Africa’s Structural Transformation and Global Value Chains The Role of Institutions in Africa’s Development Toward Variable Geometry in Development Paths Nigeria Kenya Ethiopia Mozambique Rwanda Concluding Reflections References Africa’s Digital Futures The Outlines of a Digital Economy in Africa Digital Economy as a Catalyst for Africa’s Development The New Era of Africa’s Tech Entrepreneurs Digital Transformation and Regional Integration Efforts Constraints to Africa’s Digital Transformation

137 138 142 143 145 146 148 150 151 153 154 155 157 158 159 163 165 166 169 174 176

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Concluding Reflections References

180 181

US–China Tech Wars: Shaping Africa’s Agency The Character of the Tech Wars Tensions in Commercial and Regulatory Systems Chinese Measures Against the United States Competition Over 5G 5G and Africa Cybersecurity and Regulation in the Era of AI Cybersecurity Implications for Africa Concluding Reflections References

183 184 186 188 189 189 192 196 200 202

Epilogue

205

Bibliography

209

Index

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About the Author

Mzukisi Qobo is Head of Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand. He serves on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Economic Advisory Council. He has in the past served in a senior role in government as chief director responsible for trade policy at the Department of Trade and Industry, South Africa. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom.

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Abbreviations

ACFTA ACRI AFCFTA AGOA AI AIIB BOP BRI CAP DDoS FOCAC GATS GATT GDPR GSP ICRC ICT ILO IOS IT LDC MFN NATO NCPF NFIDC NIEO

African Continental Free Trade Agreement African Crisis Response Initiative African Continental Free Trade Area African Growth and Opportunity Act Artificial Intelligence Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank Balance of Payments Belt and Road Initiative Common Agricultural Policy Distributed Denial of Service Forum on China-Africa Cooperation General Agreement on Trade in Services General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs General Data Protection Regulation Generalised System of Preferences International Committee of the Red Cross Information and Communications Technologies International Labour Organisation IPhone Operating System Information Technology Least-Developed Country Most-Favoured Nation North American Treaty Organisation National Cybersecurity Policy Framework Net Food Importing Developing Countries New International Economic Order xxi

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ABBREVIATIONS

OPIC PEPFAR R&D SEZ TPRM TRIMS TRIPS UNCTAD WIPO WTO

Overseas Private Investment Corporation President’s Emergency Programme for Aids Relief Research and Development Special Economic Zone Trade Policy Review Mechanism Trade Related Investment Measures Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property United Nations Conference on Trade and Development World Intellectual Property Organisation World Trade Organisation

PART I

Imperfections of the International Liberal Order and Africa’s Plight

CHAPTER 1

The Liberal Internationalist Order and Its Discontents

It is often taken for granted that the liberal internationalist order represents the best of America’s postwar legacy. This order has never been perfect, and its ideals remain elusive. I characterize it as truncated as it goes half-way—rich in idealistic pronouncements and deficient in effecting concrete actions to shape the world in alignment with its ideals. Since the creation of the key multilateral institutions in the 1940s, the United States has been an inconsistent hegemon. The institutional mechanism that was created under its leadership excluded the bulk of the developing countries and Africa from meaningful participation. Although many developing countries were present at the Bretton Woods conference in Hampshire, 1944, they were largely confined to the margins to marvel at a show that was largely run by John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, representing the British and American interests, respectively. Eduardo Suarez, the Mexican finance minister who chaired one of the working group did not have much of an effect on the overall shape of the Bretton Woods agenda. The assignment of his working group, “other means of international cooperation,” was vague to have any meaningful impact on the substance of the global order that emerged in the wake of this conference. The creation of the international order reflected the interests of the victors from World War Two. It was an affair driven largely by America, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Qobo, The Political Economy of China–US Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1_1

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Britain, European countries such as France and Italy, and Japan. In the case of Japan, it had suffered defeat, but the United States was keen on ensuring its rapid socialization into the liberal order, in part to infuse it with pacifist character and in part to make it a key ally in Asia Pacific. Latin America had historically enjoyed a close relationship with the United States, and these bonds were deepened through President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy (Helleiner 2014; Anderson 2015). Africa, however, remained marginalized, and the continent’s subordinated position was a function of a racialized global hierarchy of power, which was also mirrored in the race hierarchy within the United States. At the end of the Second World War, many African countries were still under colonial rule. The relationship between Africa and Europe was that of subjugation and was marked by conquest and plunder. America was happy to turn a blind eye to these excesses and overlook this racialized hierarchy of power even if it went against the ideals it professed. By privileging the realpolitik of alliances above principles, America was complicit to the colonial enterprise, which was by all accounts illiberal. As I show in Chapters 4 and 5, the United States has also actively destabilized African countries and taken sides with the white minority regimes that had European heritage. Thus, America’s moral claim to hegemony, and that somehow it championed the liberal internationalist order, is questionable. When the multilateral order was created in Bretton Woods, its architects did not have in mind the future role of those regions or parts of the world that were conquered, subjugated, and plundered by Europe. As a putative hegemon, America had not moral unction to rebuke its European allies for holding onto colonies until much later when the Atlantic Charter transpired. The United States too had multitude of sins of commission along the same lines: it had a history of colonialism in the Philippines and also experienced deep-seated racial tensions domestically. As such, the United States could not fully play a hegemonic role that shone positive values, except in name only. Further, during the Wilson era, America directly intervened in the Mexican revolution in 1914 and 1916, and occupied Haiti in 1915—actions that lent the United States the character of an imperial power in the making. As a priest of high ideals of liberal internationalism, its underbelly was exposed. In this compromised position, America had no mettle to take up the cudgels of decolonization authentically. In the postwar order, America would continue to walk gingerly on the colonial question.

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In his work, The Cold War and the Colour, the historian Borstelmann points out that the sluggish economic revival in Western Europe and anxieties about the spread of communism in 1946 and 1947 softened Truman’s moral qualms about decolonization. Instead, the United States preferred to embrace colonial regimes in London, Paris, Brussels, and Lisbon (Borstelmann 2003). The Marshall Plan and NATO, as Borstelmann argues, “aimed to bolster the economies and military forces of the metropolitan governments but also served to strengthen them in their quest to retain control of valuable colonies abroad” (Borstelmann 2003, Kindle Location 990). The United States actively promoted Europe’s recovery after the Second World War. Yet it had all but ignored Africa at the end of colonialism. Africa’s heavy dependence on commodities and reliance on the European market stunted its development (Rodney, p. 192). This heavy reliance on commodities, which was further reinforced by neocolonial relations with the West—and later China—accentuated Africa’s economic vulnerabilities and dependence on external powers. As Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 43) have pointed out, “The geographical and racial lines of oppression and exploitation that were established during the era of colonialism and imperialism have in many respects not declined but instead increased exponentially.” For developing countries and Africa, the postwar era represents a long period of marginalization and structural injustice. The liberal internationalist order is an order that not only benefitted Western Europe, Japan, and a handful of other countries that were America’s client states but also actively excluded African countries from meaningful participation in various multilateral institutions, including those that established the norms for international monetary stability and reinforced the multilateral trading system. It was no accident that by the 1970s, the triad power that shaped global decision-making, for example on the international monetary system or the multilateral trade agenda, was constituted by America, Europe (West Germany), and Japan. In this book, I argue that this postwar order was never faithfully lived out; thus, we should not lament its demise. The Marshall Plan in the 1950s represented a high watermark in the projection of US hegemony, as it allowed it to shape the future of Europe, and through the Dodge Plan, the United States was able to coax Japan into the liberal internationalist order. Both Europe and Japan would for

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many decades enjoy preferential market access for their goods in a departure from the normal order of trade relations where reciprocity was the norm. Japan would use this leg up to accelerate market integration internally. Trade, strategic aid support, and other forms of technical assistance were key to catapulting these US allies to play a meaningful role in the international economic system. Both Japan and the European countries that found favor with the United States used America’s largesse to drive their industrial development and create prosperity for their citizens. Thus, many European countries that were economically backward, buffeted by the Great Depression of the interwar years, and suffered war scars, could take a leap forward in their industrial development. African countries, on the other hand, suffered neglect. Even the aid that was extended to them was tied to conditions that were not supportive of Africa’s industrialization or the continent’s meaningful integration into the global economic system. By the time African countries attained their independence, the patterns of resource extraction and political influence of colonial powers were deeply entrenched. The foundations of the postwar order were not kind to African countries as they affirmed the stratification of the world along core countries, semi-periphery, and periphery. At the top of this hierarchy was the alliance of countries that furthered ideas of white supremacy, and countries with darker skin inhabitants were at the base. Three quarters of a century since the Bretton Woods conference, the global hierarchy of power has not changed much, except for the rise of China and the emergence of mid-ranking countries, sometimes referred to as emerging economies in Asia and Latin America. The major challenge for African countries is still that of realizing positive agency to shift the coordinates of global power in their favor.

The Character of the Liberal Internationalist Order and US Normative Dissonance The liberal internationalist order refers to the substance and functioning of global institutional mechanisms and the values that defined the postwar era. This order was created and led by America. Achieving peace, promoting commerce, and facilitating the recovery of war-torn countries of Europe and Japan were critical normative outlines of the multilateral institutions. The values and norms of the institutions created at the end of the Second World War, and the structure of the inter-state system,

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primarily anchored on the alliance patterns between the United States and Europe (and later Japan), were cast on the ideals of freedom, democracy, and market economies. I argue that the United States and major powers failed to effectuate these values faithfully. Such values had Wilsonian imprints, and these were articulated by the United States and its allies at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 that brought the First World War to an end. The Treaty of Versailles was an unfinished business, but it had laid seeds for institutionalist thinking in inter-state relations. That first attempt at Versailles had many defects: it did not obtain full support within the United States, the victors (especially the United Kingdom and France) insisted on onerous terms for Germany thereby creating a fertile ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the growing popularity of Nazism in Germany, dismissal of Japan’s proposal on affirming the equality of races, and Wilson’s failure to address China’s legitimate territorial claim with respect to Shandong (Keynes 1919; Cooper 2009; Bickers 2018). Learning from some of these failures, the victors would strive to promote institutionalism as a means to foster international cooperation and achieve stability in the post-World War Two. Still, the institutional innovation that emerged at the war’s end did not go far to integrate African countries on equal terms with Western powers in multilateral institutions. America made no effort to accelerate decolonization on the African continent. Borstelmann (2003, Kindle Location 1003) argues that: “The centrality of race in U.S. policy toward that continent was due partly to the European tendency to contrast “black” Africa with “white” Europe, which mirrored the bipolar racial thinking typical in the United States, and partly to Africa’s status as the last major area of European overseas control.” Even after decolonization in parts of the African continent, the US remained impervious to development concerns of African countries. Africa played a vital role in the economies of Western Europe, and America would extract strategic benefits in Uranium in Congo and South Africa. (Borstelmann 2003)

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The efforts led by the developing countries in the 1970s, who agitated for a new international economic order, bore testimony to the uneven power relations in the international system and the marginal position Africa occupied in the global power hierarchy. This double movement by developing countries was aimed at improving their terms of trade and to amplify their voice in multilateral institutions. The postwar international system and its values reflected the US’s preferences and priorities and the domestic political choices and constraints. It was not as universalist as earlier American leaders such as Wilson and Roosevelt liked to claim. As high-minded as the values articulated by American leaders were, the United States has never been entirely faithful to them. America’s unquestioned position as a bearer of shared values was undermined by its dissonance, which reflected the unfinished business of race relations domestically, the Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union abroad, and intricate decision-making processes domestically. When the US government was championing Wilsonian ideals abroad, it had to countenance pressure from within to extend civil liberties to black Americans, following a long period of the reversals of the gains of the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877) that were achieved at the end of slavery and aimed at overcoming the social and political legacy of slavery while laying foundations for a democratic and interracial political order (Du Bois 1935). “The elemental problem for America’s first Cold Warriors in dealing with race,” observes Borstelmann, “was their inability to wall off white American racial attitudes and practices from the rest of the world and its nonwhite majority” (Borstelmann 2003, Kindle Location 1061). The history of this development is covered extensively in Gates (2020), Myrdal (1944) and Foner (2014). The United States used the Cold War as a deflection from questions about the treatment of African Americans, and America’s passive attitude toward Europe’s colonial occupation of Africa. It was only much later in the mid-1960s that political liberalization deepened in the United States when Lyndon Johnson extended civil rights to African Americans. Yet, the United States continued to stumble on race questions in its domestic politics. Since foreign policies are an extension of domestic politics and values, these internal contradictions became an integral part of US external engagements. Maintaining an illiberal approach toward its black minority at home, while hoisting the banner of freedom and human rights abroad rendered the US claim to

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liberal internationalism dubious. That it got away with this charade for many years is credit to US astute public diplomacy. Thus, the substance of multilateralism, underwritten by the US postwar, was defective from the outset. It is worth noting that earlier US leaders were not immune to white supremacist thinking, and a few of them hailed from slave-owning families. Even those that came across enlightened such as Woodrow Wilson could not entirely shake off their racial lenses. As Westad (2017, p. 22) has pointed out, Woodrow Wilson saw the world through the prism of race. Further, his administration was characterized by segregation in various departments and agencies of government (Gates 2020). Wilson was accommodative to white supremacist views, and showed no discomfort in segregation in the civil service. Borstelmann (2003) points out that “as renewed racial hierarchy set in at home, it weakened the perception of the United States as a model of liberty.” Foreign policy leading lights in President Harry Truman’s administration, such as George Kennan and Dean Acheson, were steeped in the paradigm of white supremacy. As unabashed cheerleader of white minority rule in South Africa, Acheson’s thinking was stacked against anticolonial struggles (Borstelamann 2003). Acheson was a significant figure in US foreign policy from the end of the First World War to the late 1960s, had also occupied a powerful position as secretary of state to Harry Truman between 1949 and 1953. On various occasions, Acheson evinced a low opinion of Africans and Asians, and this trait was not unique to him but a character of the US political establishment. According to his biographer: “If unspoken, a sense of class and racial superiority affected how low on the totem pole he placed powerless people of colour” (Beisner 2009, p. 211). Acheson viewed Third World leaders with disdain, as incompetent and without capacity to create a system of governance. In 1949, Acheson urged the administration to protect its European allies’ interests and strengthen the colonial powers, rather than to build new friendships with people in the developing world (Beisner 2009, p. 211). With these views pervasive in the United States, it should therefore come as no surprise that African countries were afforded little room in multilateral institutions and were not taken seriously as sovereign equals. It was only in name that America was the champion of freedom abroad. The United States used multilateralism as a cloak that masked the pursuit of its interests. America’s leading role in global affairs was undermined by racial discrimination and half-hearted commitment to civil liberties at

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home. In later chapters I show how the threads of US domestic politics around race were interlocking with those of its foreign policy especially on questions related to self-determination, racial equality, and Africa’s place in the international economic system.

Realism in International Relations The basic structure of the international politics was always characterized by a state of anarchy, exhibiting lack of overarching sovereign authority to settle international conflicts. It was only in the postwar era that some level of order was created and a slew of multilateral institutions were established under the US leadership. In later years, the international order encapsulated both idealistic commitments linked to the multilateral system created at the end of the Second World War, and the realpolitik expressed in the bipolar tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. To the extent that America shouldered the cost of establishing various multilateral bodies, it created a zone of peace and prosperity in Europe and offered itself as an effective counterweight to countries that were perceived as a threat to peace. When Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin agreed at the end of the Second World War to carve out Europe into East and West and codetermine the fate of parts of East Asia, this was effectively a reversal by the United States of its professed commitment to liberty and human rights. This act was not the first time the United States had betrayed the ideals of freedom under the banner of liberal internationalism. At the 1919 Paris Conference to develop the Treaty of Versailles, President Wilson denied the Chinese their legitimate claim on Shandong, the birthplace of Confucius and territory under German occupation before 1914, and instead confirmed Japan’s counter-claim claim. This Versailles’ decision generated resentment among the Chinese. Wilson had calculated that he would rather have Japan on the American side in the push for the creation of the League of Nations than to concede to the Chinese legitimate moral claim. Wilson would also turn down the Japanese proposed clause on racial equality in the Treaty of Versailles, preferring a more watered-down version so as not to offend European allies that occupied Africa. There is no evidence that on matters concerning colonies the United States pressed firmly for self-determination even at the end of the Second World War, until there was much restiveness in the colonies in the late 1940s

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and early 1950s, culminating into the collapse of foreign rule in the late 1950s and much of the 1960s. Throughout the postwar years, the United States walked a tightrope between its idealism of promoting a free world and the kind of militarism it practiced that represented a breach of its professed principles. Scholars, such as Perry Anderson, view the liberal internationalist ideology as concealing a reality of international power plays, and that there have been weak attempts on the part of the United States to achieve democracy and equity in international institutions in ways that would draw in African countries as equal participants with the same respect offered to Western countries (Anderson 2015). The idea that the United States underwrote a liberal internationalist order that, in the words of Rose (2017) the editor of Foreign Affairs journal, flourished and yielded seven decades of progress, great power peace, and economic growth, is not entirely accurate, which is why we should not lament the collapse of this order but rather search for a better mechanism whose starting point is global equity and justice. Ikenberry (1996) showed a skewed judgment in referring to this liberal order as “an innovative and durable order that has been hugely successful and largely unheralded.” The benefits that are highlighted by Ikenberry of an open world economy and its multilateral management, and the stabilization of economic welfare, accrued in the main to Western liberal democracies, and therefore such a system cannot be said to have been a success for the majority of the world citizens. For Kissinger (2014, p. 277): The sense of responsibility for world order and of the indispensability of American power, buttressed by a consensus that based the moral universalism of the leaders on the American people’s dedication to freedom and democracy, led to the extraordinary achievement of the Cold War period and beyond.

Kissinger (2014) highlights these achievements as the rebuilding of European economies that were devastated by war, the creation of the Atlantic Alliance, and the establishment of the global network of security and economic partnership. It is not clear how such achievements benefitted the majority of global citizens in Africa and elsewhere. For Emmott (2018, p. 15), the United States has since the Second World War presided over seven decades of “flowering of democracy, transforming the open society from being the world’s exception to being almost, though not

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quite, the rule. This flowering has brought with it an extraordinary period of prosperity.” We should view such profession of achievement with deep skepticism. The liberal order was indeed successful for the Western world and its allies during the Cold War, and it helped to sustain US global dominance. The same US-led liberal order condemned the Third World to the margins of the world economic system. It is thus important that we recognize multilateralism for what it is—an incomplete project that was, to a considerable extent, was instrumentalized by dominant powers to further their interests. Besides, the United States has on many occasions betrayed its own ideals by propping up military Juntas in Latin America, supporting morally questionable leaders in Africa, and undermined efforts to consolidating democracy in newly independent states. Woodward (1987) offers a comprehensive account of US government’s covert actions, from 1981 to 1987, through the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East, Central America, and Africa. For many decades, the United States presided over a world trading system in which the Third World had to endure unfavorable terms of trade and suffer the effects of both colonial and neocolonial relations that perpetuated structural inequalities in production and trade patterns. Indeed, the system generated positive outcomes for the United States and its European allies. For Europe, the financing support from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Marshall Plan, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and for Japan the Dodge Plan and enhanced market access in the United States for its merchandise goods, are all evidence of the selective benefits of US largesse. As Strange (1988, p. 104) point out, in a stretch of just over a decade from 1946 to 1988, “US aid and government loans to Europe amounted net to $25bn,” and this had a “pump-priming effect on infrastructural and industrial investment in Africa,” with positive psychological effects on business decisions. This largesse pushed Europe to move faster in the direction of intra-regional trade liberalization, ironically maintaining high import tariffs against the United States. International cooperation through multilateral bodies such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) had mixed results, and these institutions were mainly in the service of the interests of major powers. The areas of international cooperation that showed a greater degree of success were, according to Anne-Marie Slaughter, those to do with regulatory processes, including

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share of information around anti-trust policy, environmental policy, criminal law enforcement, and banking supervision (Slaughter 1997). Other areas related to international tax treaties, accounting and reporting standards, other standard-setting processes in the domains of international communications technologies, counter-terrorist financing, and anti-money laundering would also prove to be more concrete areas that fostered a degree of normative convergence in ways that diffused benefits across the world. But these produced limited gains that did not go far in altering the global power imbalances. The liberal internationalist order was never created with developing countries in mind and less so African countries. The peace and prosperity dividends that flowed out of open trade did not benefit the African continent as much. Africa was on the margins of the GATT processes until the Uruguay Round that lasted between 1986 and 1994, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 3. African countries have remained weakly integrated into production and trade structures, even as advanced industrial economies warded off developing countries’ attempts to bring their development concerns to the agenda of multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The old contentions about terms of trade are still the rallying point for many African countries in their quest to participate more meaningfully in the global economy. As such, the participation of developing countries in the US-led international order has always been at the mercy of powerful countries. Even in the twenty-first century, many developing countries and emerging economies are still contesting the right to shape global institutions and enhance their representation around the table as equals. For a long time, they have been pushing for reforms in multilateral institutions such as the United Nations Security Council and broadening representation in global economic governance institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The contemporary challenge with multilateralism is to build a new order that acknowledges that the West is no longer the center that it once was at the end of the Second World War. Such a new order should affirm each country’s right to use policy instruments that improve its economic base and to explore alternative pathways of economic development. It should also reinforce multipolarity and actively seek to include developing countries’ voice in shaping a global system that builds bridges between diverse countries and genuinely cultivates values of cooperation, peace, and equitable development.

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For African countries, as I argue in later chapters, the critical success factor to participating meaningfully in shaping the global system is to reduce reliance on major powers and to realize their agency through building sound domestic institutions, improving governance, building human capital and state capabilities, having the right kind of leaders in place, implementing strategies for economic diversification, and making a leap into the digital economy. There are examples of success stories from within the continent that offer insights, and I survey them in Chapter 8.

The Balance Sheet of US Leadership Since Bretton Woods Developing countries that were not part of the initial structuring of the global governance architecture in the postwar era had hoped that in future these institutions would pay closer attention to issues of development, correcting historical imbalances, and creating more room for developing countries to assert their voice in decision-making processes. As Ocampo (2013, p. 319) contends, even though development issues were part of the agenda of the Bretton Woods institutions, the evolution of cooperation post-1945 kept an “original sin.” What he means by original sin is that the liberal world order “inherited major features of the colonial structures that preceded it in terms of voice and decision-making power given to different nations” (Ocampo 2013, p. 319). It is also Hardt and Negri’s contention that nearly “all of humanity is to some degree absorbed within or subordinated to the networks of capitalist exploitation” (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 43). Africa is at the base of this exploitative hierarchy which international institutions have also served to reinforce. Major colonial powers such as France, which dominated parts of North Africa, Britain in East, West, and Southern Africa, and Belgium in parts of Central Africa, projected themselves as protecting the interests of their colonies, and they did not come under the sharp spotlight for their behavior until much later. The United States turned a blind eye to these excesses despite professing liberal values. By the time colonialism collapsed, the basic ideological and power structures of the global system and its institutions were firmly cast. Thus, the fundamental coordinates of the international order legitimated power asymmetries that were a residue of colonialism. Therefore, it would be fair to characterize postwar liberal internationalism as a truncated form of liberalism: it was rich in rhetoric and conveniently weak in application.

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China’s Challenge to the Liberal Internationalism? Like the United States, China is also driven fundamentally by its national interests and may act similarly to the United States in relation to the rest of the world. However, unlike the United States, China has been careful not to explicitly project its global leadership ambitions, except to develop its capabilities. As Zakaria (2012) points out, China has a wide range of power capabilities such as economic, political and military, but wants to be seen as non-threatening by the rest of the world. The Chinese leader Xi Jinping has placed great weight on themes such as China’s renewal as a great nation, which some observers have read as signifying a return to Maoist cult-like leadership (see Bougon 2018). Substantively, China’s rise does not pose a great threat to liberal internationalism for several reasons. The order created under the US hegemony was never quite fully formed in the sense of a system that had fixed outlines. It was also intermediated by Cold War realities. Illiberal acts committed by the United States such as the support of anti-Soviet guerillas in Afghanistan, illegal support of counterrevolutionaries against an elected government in Nicaragua, and the propping up of dictators and support of white minority regimes in parts of the African continent, existed side by side with the US profession of democracy and freedom. Hence, I characterize the US’s liberalism as truncated. The change of power—or the long-term hegemonic tensions between the United States and China—may not lead to a better framework than what we have seen in the past. The geopolitical tussles and associated power shifts have rendered the United States less vocal about its commitment to liberal internationalist norms, especially during the administration of Donald Trump, and revealed its urges toward more parochial forms of economic and security nationalism, which are realist themes that the United States has since the end of the Second World War embraced in its policy practice. While these qualities of parochialism in US foreign policy seem to be receding under the Joe Biden administration, there are no signs that multilateralism is strengthening or that the United States will place at the center of global governance African countries’ development concerns. For its part, China does not seek to replace liberal internationalist norms and existing global institutions with its version. Instead, it adopts a pragmatic view and will use existing institutions to pursue its national

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interests in ways that are not dissimilar to what we have witnessed under the US hegemony. As Economy (2018, p. 17) frames it, “China is an illiberal state seeking leadership in a liberal world order.” China cannot export values it does not have: the Chinese government has evinced an aggressive behavior toward its neighbors in the South and the East China Sea, has acted in an authoritarian manner toward Hong Kong and Taiwan, and has presided over the persecution of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. Martin Jacques (Jacques 2009, p. 14) argues that in China, “race is rarely paid the attention it deserves in political and cultural writings…The Chinese attitude towards difference will be a powerful factor in determining how China behaves as a global power.” Essentially, China’s approach to the external environment will largely be driven by calculations that are informed by its domestic economic, social, and political realities. In short, whether it is China or the United States in the lead, political economy interests will always have primacy. China and other rising powers have witnessed the Janus-faced practice of US foreign policy, blending rhetoric of norms and hard-edged pursuit of its commercial interests abroad under cover of promoting values. In entering the Western order, countries like China will do so on their terms and gradually adjust it both from within and through creating parallel structures to project both soft power and hard economic power.

Hegemony and Global Stability in History The tussle between China and the United States is unlikely to yield a clear, undisputed leader, like what we witnessed in much of the post-1945 era in the bipolar tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The US–China rivalry may not necessarily yield a sense of long peace anchored on the realist assumptions about balance of power and deterrence. This could be so in specific areas such as, for example, cyberwarfare; but in the main, the world will exist in a state of anarchy with limited buffers against trade and technology friction. The decline of the United States and the rise of a new challenger may change our assumptions about concepts such as hegemony on a global scale since a clear victor or singular hegemon is not evident. It may also recast our conception of global leadership, which we have often understood through the Westphalian lenses of state power. Some thinkers have suggested that the world is shaping up to become a GZero, where there will be no clear hegemon and little anchorage in the

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form of a system leader that shapes the rules of the game. As a result, this could multiply uncertainties and risks (Bremmer 2013). Draper (2020, p. 8) has characterized this era as that of interregnum and marked by “a period when an embedded political-economic regime is breaking down, but no replacement regime yet exists to take its place.” In this interregnum, African countries could find themselves caught in the crossfire in ways that are not dissimilar to the Cold War era. Other scholars have suggested an era of “End of Power” as we know it, with the ordering of power in future no longer packaged vertically but horizontally diffused and involving an array of powerful state actors that exert influence on important issues (Naim 2013). Even in the growing area of cyber warfare, power is no longer only in the hands of state elites but also of a host of non-state organizations and individuals who have access to this tool. There are also fluid and complex relationships between non-state actors and state entities of large private firms over domains that were once the monopoly of the state. One of the justifications the Bush administration used to initiate the war on Iraq was that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that could fall into the hands of non-state entities or insurgency groups. The slew of global regulatory norms around anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist finance was aimed mainly at individuals and organized non-state groups. In this era of fluid power, a hegemon’s role is a complex one and contested by various other actors beyond its control. The role of a hegemon in anchoring the international system has been a subject of intense debate among international relations scholars. The Hegemonic Stability Theory, associated with international relations scholars such as Charles Kindleberger (1973) and Robert Keohane (1984) posited that the stability of the international system is contingent upon an active role played by a leading global power—a role that the United States played, albeit inconsistently, since the end of the Second World War—to secure collective public goods while also creating inducements for acquiescence to the norms through incentives such as development aid or market access. Mastanduno (2011, p. 144) contends that “preponderant power creates international obligations. Great powers have ‘system maintenance’ responsibilities, whether the system is an international political order or the world economy.” For John Ikenberry, the US role in international affairs fits the imagery of a hub that supplies certain services that are in demand. He argues, for

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example, that, first, the United States was a preeminent hub of the global system in three dimensions: that it provided goods and services for other states that affiliated with it, including building alliances and partnerships and organizing regional and global security cooperation; second that it provided rules and normative principles for the organization of international relations. Rules and standard-setting are part of this function; and finally, it provided a political-institutional venue for the conduct of interstate relations (Ikenberry 2014, pp. 223–225). As I have already argued, these benefits were mostly conferred to Western countries or those that were part of the US sphere of influence. Thus, the benefits of the liberal world order were unevenly distributed, a reality that remains a source of strain on global economic issues between developed and developing countries today. As Charles Kupchan puts it, many countries acquiesced to the US dominance not only because of the United States’s power of attraction but largely due to its “overweening economic and military strength” (Kupchan 2012, p. 66). The structural power of dominant and leading actors is demonstrated more emphatically in how they gain consent from other countries for the ideas and norms that underpin global institutions, and how these institutions conform to the preference of the dominant actors while they are, in appearance, self-propelling. Today, the United States, and indeed the Western world, reel from two powerful forces of decline: relative power decline, reflected in the declining weight of material power; and internal institutional decay, with the rise in populism and economic nationalism in the United States, Brexit in Britain, and rightwing populism in Europe, as features of this institutional decay.

Developing Countries and the Leadership of Multilateral Institutions As the hitherto hegemonic power, the United States prefers a hierarchical international order, where it is primary among the equals, and does not have to fully abide by the same rules it wants the rest of the world to follow. The subordinate position of developing countries in the global hierarchy of power reflects the fact that in their origins, these institutions were designed to meet the interests of Western liberal democracies. Even though the values of openness, trade, cooperation, freedom, and peace spawned under the US leadership post-1945 were sound and progressive,

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they suffered from two fundamental defects. The first was that the institutional arrangements that were to embody these values excluded much of the developing world from decision-making. Secondly, the United States was ambivalent to the role of multilateral institutions in affecting the domestic legal architecture and did not fully live by the same multilateral rules. Regarding the first point, some of these countries, including many on the African continent, were part of the British colonial system and had no agency of their own over international affairs. In any case, and as I have already pointed, there was little attempt at the end of the colonial era to integrate these countries as equals into the multilateral arrangements. In the years following the establishment of multilateral institutions, the United States was focused on containing communism, and the agenda of enriching multilateralism assumed a secondary place. The realist notions such as the balance of power and traditional alliance formation seizing the center-ground in US foreign policy calculus (Ruggie 1996, p. 40). In the early years of the Cold War, the heart of this alliance formation with Europe had a knot that proved hard to resolve by the United States: the anti-colonial struggle targeted at European colonizers, creating a dilemma for the United States on how to position itself in relation to struggles for self-determination in Africa (Borstelmann 2003). Second, although the United States forged the template of the liberal world order and its institutional expression through multilateralism based on agreed-upon rules, this order was less than complete and remains truncated. Even though over time, especially in the late 1970s to the 1980s, developing countries increased their participation in multilateral institutions, theirs has always been an inferior position; they were the norm- and policy-takers with no substantive voice in setting the agenda or shaping decisions. These asymmetries of power remain glaring. They render the seeming idealism of the liberal order substantively weaker in the absence of meaningful representation of emerging economies and developing countries. If the global society is to salvage liberal internationalism, dominant actors will need to promote substantive participation of emerging economies and developing countries in decision-making processes and to prioritize these countries’ developmental concerns. Further, major powers will need to lead by example in embracing the rules and implementing decisions taken in multilateral institutions.

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Developing Countries at the Bretton Woods Conference While many developing countries, especially from Latin America, participated in the Bretton Woods conference, their ability to shape the agenda of multilateral institutions was circumscribed initially by their colonial condition and later by the preponderance of major Western powers’ interests in these institutions. They may have had the numbers, but countries that had economic and military preponderance determined the agenda. A significant number of developing countries, especially in Asia and Africa, were under colonial rule when the multilateral institutions were formed. At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, countries that were present included all Latin American countries, except for Argentina. There were also four African countries—Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, South Africa, and five Asian and Middle Eastern countries, including China, India, Iran, Iraq and the Philippines, and four Eastern European countries— Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland and Yugoslavia. Latin American countries made up nearly half of the participants at Bretton Woods. At the time, the United States had never enjoyed close relations with the African continent in the same way it did with Latin American countries. Before the two world wars, America’s regional power profile made it easier for it to relate to the Latin American countries. As I argue in later chapters, the United States had a low estimation of the African continent due to ingrained racial supremacist thinking. America’s fixation with the Cold War tensions would condition its approach to international relations, and racial filters played a more decisive role in US foreign policy approach to Africa and its position in the global system. Nonetheless, there was a broad representation of the developing countries in the technical commissions established to navigate the work of the Fund and the Bank. As pointed out earlier, the leading lights were from the United States and Great Britain, and they shaped the structure of policy preferences. Agenda-setting, as Strange (1985) would argue was a function of structural power, which the United States possessed, giving it the authority to define other countries’ preferences. Britain was also half-hearted in its approach to international development. John Maynard Keynes, Britain’s leading negotiator at Bretton Woods, had a narrower view of development. In contrast, the US officials such as Harry Dexter White drew upon the US experience in Good Neighborhood policy, in particular the US

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engagement with Latin American countries over the creation of the InterAmerican Bank. Boosting living standards in colonies and setting these free was not something the British were willing to countenance. At the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in 1944, only four African countries participated. These are countries that had received selfdetermination by Britain: Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and the Union of South Africa. South Africa’s government suffered a legitimacy deficit as it was an all-white government that excluded the majority of its citizens. The chief representative of the Union of South Africa, General Jan Smuts, was accepted as a legitimate statesman, despite that he was from a country that had not given political freedom to its black majority. He was in good company with US Franklin Roosevelt and Britain’s Winston Churchill in the war cabinet in the 1940s, as he was with Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George at the end of the First World War, and these global leaders shared a common outlook on the brotherhood of race. Lack of consensus between the United States and Britain on a developmental approach weakened Bretton Woods institutions’ ability to play a pivotal role in poverty reduction and in raising standards of living in developing countries, and Africa in particular. Ideas about industrialization through the promotion of infant industry, technical assistance, stabilization of commodity prices, and special treatment for developing countries remained on the margins. In part, Britain’s reluctance to adopt an expansive developmental role was due to its financial constraints since it ran massive war debts and the war had severely battered its economy. Britain was also prickly about any initiative that sought to undermine its leverage on colonies. An encounter narrated by Borstelmann (2003) captures the British state of mind about its colonies in the postwar years. Randolph Churchill quizzed the visiting American journalist Walter Lipman over lunch: “Why are do you always worry about our niggers? We don’t worry about yours.” The subject of decolonization was not one the United States would push firmly, especially as it needed to solidify its alliances with Britain and other European countries at a time when Europe was suffering postwar economic catastrophe. Thus, the liberal order was limping in its inability to clearly articulate the idea of freedom in a substantive and pointed sense to incorporate colonies as equals in the new international order. In the context of the Bretton Woods negotiations, there were divergences in the levels of ambition between Britain and the United States over what these institutions needed to do for poor countries. Keynes

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would stress vacuous universalism that sought to de-emphasize concerns of poor countries. In contrast, American officials such as White and Morgenthau underlined the need to respond to poverty and raise living standards in poor countries. Keynes was also unhappy that 21 countries from the developing world were invited to Bretton Woods (Helleiner 2014, pp. 222–223). Keynes was hostile to some of the members of the drafting committee for the charter of the International Monetary Fund, such as Russia, China, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba, and considered them to be ignorant of international finance (Helleiner 2014, p. 223). Even though the United States appeared progressive in its approach, this did not go beyond rhetoric, especially in its failure to actively champion decolonization and envision a postcolonial reality where developing countries could be incorporated into the liberal order as equals. In his account of the evolution of the postwar order, Helleiner (2014) argues that US activism in championing the development content of the Bretton Woods institutions, and the involvement of southern countries in creating these institutions, are the forgotten foundations of the postwar order. That may well be so, but the reality is that the Bretton Woods institutions’ focus was immediately Europe. The development plank over which the United States had more direct control, the Marshall Plan, was also geared toward Europe and was never extended to other poor regions. There was also no expectation of the need to offer such largesse on similar terms to Africa in the future. The Marshall Plan had an immediate impact on Europe’s development. The region’s industrial production rose 39% from 1948 to 1952 (Solomon 1977, p. 18). Lake and Reynolds (2008, Kindle Location 97) attribute Africa’s neglect by the United States to what they refer to as “the imagined community of white men” which was “transnational in its reach, but nationalist in its outcomes.” Further, they point to the “significance of racial identifications to the constitution of modern political subjectivities and ways of being in the world,” something that has “shaped white men’s sense of collective belonging to a larger community, joined together by what Theodore Roosevelt always liked to call fellow feeling” (Lake and Reynolds 2008; Kindle Location 115). Roosevelt had also expressed his affinity to this idea of global sense of community draws on the work of Benedict Anderson who developed the idea of imagined communities that were based on a sense of shared

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values and myths (Anderson 2006). As Borstelmann (2003, Kindle Location 211) remind us, “Henry Morton Stanley and Theodore Roosevelt each understood race relations in international terms, tying the story of black and native Americans to that of Africans.” Roosevelt believed the British Empire to be a civilizing and progressive force. Borstelmann (2003, Kindle Location 178) further points out that: The reestablishment of white dominion in the American South and its final assertion in the American West came in precisely the same years that Europeans at last brought the interior of Africa under their subjugation. American immigration policies in those years reflected the broader trend of white settler states, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa to define citizenship in racial terms, with non-Europeans ineligible for naturalization.

White supremacist views in the United States were deeply ingrained as were its imperialist inclinations. So, America would be entirely uneasy with Europe’s colonial enterprises in Africa. The racial bonds between America and European colonialists were more enduring than the ideals of establishing freedom in previously colonized lands in Africa. This brotherhood extended to the South African white community. In South Africa, for example, the white race was referred to as European after the formation of the Union of South Africa, irrespective of whether one was born in South Africa or Europe—their skin color qualified them to be a member of this imagined European community—whereas black South Africans would be referred to as non-European, and in line with the social Darwinist thought prevalent at the time, they were placed at the bottom of the global hierarchy of race in the estimation of Americans and Europeans. In the early twentieth century, America took a keen interest on South Africa. When Woodrow Wilson’s government was mulling over the prospects of entering the First World War, a major commercial enterprise was in the making. Herbert Hoover, who would later become the President of the United States, and a financier at the time, gave Anglo-American Corporation’s founder, Ernest Oppenheimer, a shot in the arm when he agreed to take an interest in the mining company to be formed (Wheatcroft 1985). This venture creation was to be through Hoover’s Newmont Mining Corporation of New Year whose bankers were J. Pierpont Morgan and Company. This transaction, and the subsequent formation of Anglo-American Corporation in 1917

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cemented a transnational ruling class triangle of European commercial interests, American capital markets, and an opportunity in extractives in South Africa. This was the second phase of massive capital injection from foreign players, with the first having been initiated by Cecil John Rhodes, and underwritten by the Rothschilds Bank in the late nineteenth century, leading to the consolidation of diamond fields in Kimberly and the merger of De Beers and Compagnie Francaise, and later the fusion with Kimberly Central Company (Ferguson 2003, pp. 222–223). The initial name that Oppenheimer proposed for the mining giant was the African American Corporation, but the Americans objected to the reference to “African” on the account that this would signal positively to African Americans in the United States (Hocking 1973, p. 80). Oppenheimer did not put up a protest as he was happy that “American” would remain in the final name “Anglo-American Company.” According to J.P. Morgan’s biographer, Oppenheimer was insistent on the word “American” in order “to consolidate his new Wall Street ties” (Chernow 1990, p. 350). The brotherhood of race was not just limited to politics, but was extended to commerce, and was at its most violent in facilitating the extraction of Africa’s natural resources to give life to London as the financial center of the world and to build Europe’s economy. This became a pattern for the exploitation of Africa’s resources, a reality that continues to mark Africa’s relations with external powers in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This structural reality is what hindered Africa’s meaningful participation in the international economic system after decolonization. When African countries eventually attained their independence, they had to play catch-up on economic development. Although they were given foreign aid by the West, this was packaged in ways that did not bolster African countries’ economic capabilities, a subject I discuss in Chapters 2 and 3. The promise of peace, equality, and prosperity—all values that were the foundations of liberal internationalism—turned into an illusion for Africans. From the late 1960s through to the 1970s, a period that was marked by a deep recession, and into the 1980s, which saw the rise of neo-liberal thinking, many African countries were caught up in an elusive pursuit of building their statehood and experimenting with various economic development programs. These countries had limited capacity to shape the substance of the agenda of multilateral institutions. These institutions produced outcomes that were more in line with the preferences of Western powers.

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The calls for the new international economic order (NIEO) that came to surface at the UN General Assembly in 1974 were a most explicit demonstration of the failure of the Bretton Woods institutions and, by implication, America’s leadership in spearheading development efforts that extended beyond Europe and parts of Asia. The proposals that emerged from the NIEO still resonate in multilateral bargains today: financial and technical support to poor countries; improvements in terms of trade; special and differential treatment for developing countries; and greater involvement of developing countries in multilateral processes. The African continent’s neglect by great powers explains the intensity of Third World nationalism and Pan-Africanism on the African continent from the 1960s onwards.

Concluding Reflections The liberal internationalist order was created with America and Europe in mind. These were to be the center pivots of international politics and commerce. Many African countries were still under colonial rule at the time the various multilateral institutions were established. Despite its profession of norms such as peace, democracy, and human rights, America did not take burden itself with decolonization and put pressure on its European allies. The subjugation of Africans by Europeans was an established convention, and the American political system was also harsh on its African American population. America’s behavior internationally on questions of race was consistent with practices at home. This expressed congruence with the values that it claimed to stand for. As such, this undermined the seriousness of its claim to global leadership based on liberal values. By its silence, America abetted the marginalization and exploitation of the African continent by Europe. Besides, America had its own history of colonial occupation in the Philippines and Haiti at the height of its profession of liberal values such as people and democracy. In later years, America’s military would have a corpulent presence in various continents of the world, and its government would support the installation of despots against the will of the people. Many African countries’ economic structures have remained unchanged, and the old concerns regarding terms of trade still mark the relationship between Africa and former colonial powers. Breaking out of this condition will require domestic political and institutional reforms

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and undertaking measures that could enable African countries to overcome their structural limits while also making significant advances toward participating meaningfully in the digital economy. There is a need for a new global order that accommodates and is responsive to the needs of developing countries, especially African countries. But such an order is no panacea for Africa’s development problems. African countries will need to do more to address domestic governance problems. Importantly, the ideas about Africa’s inferior position in the global system are prevalent. These need to be challenged and changed. As long as African countries are heavily dependent on outsiders for their development, it will be difficult to alter these ideas and do away with the paternalism that still characterizes the relationship between the West and Africa. In later chapters, I outline building blocks of an agenda toward a better development path. The next chapter examines the marginalization of African countries in the international monetary system, the emergence of counterforce to Western preponderance in global institution-making, and the role of Africa’s elites in undermining the continent’s development prospects and integration on better terms into the global economy.

References Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Munities. London: Verso. Anderson, Perry. 2015. America’s Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. London: Verso. Beisner, Robert L. 2009. Acheson: A Life in the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bickers, Robert. 2018. Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination. London: Penguin. Bortelsmann, Thomas. 2003. The Cold War and the Colour Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bougon, Francois. 2018. Xi Jinping. New York: Hurst & Company. Bremmer, Ian. 2013. Every Nation for Itself: What Happens When No One Leads the World. New York: Portfolio Publications. Chernow, Ron. 1990. The House of Morgan. New York, NY: Gove Press. Cooper, John Milton, Jr. 2009. Woodrow Wilson. New York, NY: Random House. Draper, Peter. 2020. “Global Trade Cooperation After COVID-19: What Is the WTO’s Future?” Global Trends Analysis. 02/2020. Bonn: Development and Peace Foundation. https://www.sef-bonn.org/en/publications/globaltrends-analysis/022020.html. Accessed 17 October 2020.

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Du Bois, W.E.B. 1935/1998. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Free Press. Economy, Elizabeth. 2018. The Third Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emmott, Bill. 2018. The Fate of the West. London: Profile Books. Ferguson, Niall. 2003. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. New York: Penguin. Foner, Eric. 2014. Reconstruction Updated Edition: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 . New York: HarperCollins. Gates, Robert. 2020. Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World. New York: Knopf. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Helleiner, Eric. 2014. The Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Hocking, Anthony. 1973. Oppenheimer and Son. Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill. Ikenberry, John G. 1996. “The Myth of Post-Cold War Chaos”. Foreign Affairs, May/June. Ikenberry, John G. 2014. “The Liberal Sources of American Unipolarity”. In John G. Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C. Wohlforth (eds). International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacques, Martin 2009: When China Rules the World. London: Allen Lane. Keohane, Robert O. 1984. After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keynes, John Maynard. 1919. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. London: Macmillan. Kindleberger, Charles. 1973. The World in Depression. CA: University of California Press. Kissinger, Henry. 2014. The World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History. New York: Penguin. Kupchan, Charles A. 2012. No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds. 2008. Drawing the Global Colour Line. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mastanduno, Michael. 2011. “System Maker and Privilege Taker: US Power and the International Political Economy”. In G. John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C. Wohlforth (eds). International Relations Theory and Consequences of Unipolarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Naim, Moses. 2013. The End of Power. New York: Basic Books.

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Ocampo, Jose Antonio. 2013. “Rethinking Global Economic and Social Governance”. In Stiglitz, E. Joseph and Mary Kaldor (eds). The Quest for Security: Protection Without Protectionism and the Challenge of Global Governance. New York: Columbia University Press. Rose, Gideon. 2017. “Introduction”. Foreign Affairs, March. Ruggie, John G. 1996. Winning the Peace: America and World Order in the New Era. New York: Columbia University Press. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 1997. “The Real New World Order”. Foreign Affairs, September/October. Solomon, Robert. 1977. The International Monetary System 1945–1976. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Strange, Susan. 1985 (2nd ed). States and Markets. London: Pinter. Strange, Susan. 1988. States and Markets. London: Pinter. Westad, Odd Arne. 2017. The Cold War: A World History. New York, NY: Penguin. Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. 1985. The Randlords. New York: Simon & Schuster. Woodward, Bob. 1987. Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 . New York: Simon and Schuster. Zakaria, Fareed. 2012. The Post-American World. New York: W. W. Norton.

CHAPTER 2

Africa and Defective Multilateralism

The multilateral order that is hoisted as the best innovation of the postwar era is defective in many ways. In this chapter and the next two chapters, I show its fundamental weaknesses especially in marginalizing the interests of developing countries and throttling their participation in decisionmaking processes. In the previous chapter I discussed how the era marking the emergence of US hegemony, the interwar years and post-World War 2, was not kind to many developing countries, especially African countries. When the postwar multilateral institutions were created, many countries on the African continent were still under colonial administrations; Africans had no self-determination over their political and economic affairs. At the end of the war, the victors did not consider it important to join hands in breaking the back of colonialism. Despite presenting itself as a standard bearer for democracy and liberty, America failed to call out its European allies, and put its values to work in Africa. It also failed dismally to overcome the disenfranchisement of its African American community until the 1960s. Even so, various US administrations sought to delegitimize both the civil rights movement in America and nationalist struggles in Africa, framing them as a cover for communism. Those agitating for civil rights in the United States were simply dismissed by government as communist lackeys. Yet, African Americans still girded their loins to show their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Qobo, The Political Economy of China–US Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1_2

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patriotism by taking part in the First World War, with about half a million African Americans responding to Woodrow Wilson’s call, in 2016, to fight a war that, presumably, would make the world safe for democracy, despite having their rights denied at home (Grant 2008). There was hope among some of the leading lights of Pan Africanism such as W.E.B. Du Bois that this commitment was a form of “deposit in the bank towards full citizenship” which would be cashed at war’s end (Grant 2008, p. 97). Such hopes were forlorn. Some such as Marcus Garvey questioned the wisdom of going to war, and asked “Why go over to Europe and fight for the whites and lose an arm of leg when you can fight for a just cause” (Grant 2008, p. 98). When America eventually pressed for self-determination of areas under colonialism at the signing of the Atlantic Charter in the late 1940s, the United States was not fully committed to the cause; its half-hearted effort had a force of a gentle nudge than a push driven by deep conviction for universal liberty. Keeping its European allies in the battle against communism closer was more important for the United States than pursuing idealism. In the previous chapter, I discussed how Western powers failed to support newly independent states in Africa with the means to upgrade their economic capabilities, and how African countries’ pleas with multilateral institutions to prioritize development fell on deaf ears. In this chapter I set out to show how developing countries were marginalized in decision-making on international monetary stability. The various counter-movements, including the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the New International Economic Order (NIEO) that pressed the case for recognition of developing countries interests in the 1960s and 1970s were a response to the structural exclusion of developing countries in agenda-setting of multilateral institutions. This exclusion took the form of foreclosing substantive discussions on the relationship between monetary institutions and development concerns of developing countries. The outlines of this structural exclusion have persisted to the present. Developing countries have since the formation of these institutions suffered weak representation because of their lower quota, which meant that their small economic size became a source of disadvantage. Yet there were no credible efforts by allied powers who emerged victorious at the end of the Second World War to support Africa’s development cause, even after decolonization. The development and reconstruction template that worked so well for Europe and Japan was not adapted for the conditions

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in Africa, even though Europe decisively shaped Africa’s underdevelopment through mineral extraction and decimation of social and cultural systems. Further, African countries’ voices in multilateral institutions were constrained, and these countries were not afforded an opportunity to lead these institutions. Historically, the World Bank has been led by an American, while a European has headed the International Monetary Fund. This divvying of leadership roles between these two powers is a function of a “gentlemen’s agreement” forged by Western powers in the postwar period (Keating 2011). It is an agreement that has prevented candidates from other regions from gaining more influence in these institutions, thereby keeping these multilateral institutions under the grip of Western powers. These institutions have enormous influence on the economic policies adopted by creditor nations. America’s and Europe’s control over these institutions is an exercise of ideational power, which essentially means they can generate and assert a body of ideas that are closely aligned with their own economic interests and worldview. This arrangement has made it difficult for developing countries to feel a sense of ownership of these institutions, to have their own ideas recognized, and to subscribe fully to the values these institutions embody. Instead, these institutions have helped to legitimate dominant political power. It took the US Congress five years to ratify a 2010 decision by IMF members to effect quota and governance reforms that would allocate more weight to emerging economies and developing countries in a way that reflects power shifts in the global economy. The IMF had in 2010 decided to reduce the number of European seats on the Board of Governors of the institution and allocate more seats to emerging economies to reflect the new global reality of the economic weight of rising powers such as China and India. This IMF decision was not a significant reform measure but a marginal adjustment since the position of the African continent was left largely unchanged. If anything, this development, though progressive, demonstrates the long path Africa must travel to alter the global balance of power and gain recognition in global institutions.

Multilateralism and Its Defects At the time when multilateral organizations were formed, many African countries were still part of the British colonial system in the immediate postwar aftermath and had no agency in international affairs. Britain was

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staunchly committed to defending its colonial empire as this had been its source of international prestige since the mid-seventeenth century when Britain first acquired Jamaica. As Ferguson (2003, p. 240) points out, in 1860 Britain was sprawling over territorial extent of 9.5 million, which increased to 12.7 million by 1909, covering 25% of the world’s land surface and possessing about 444 million subjects. By the time World War Two started, Britain was as an imperial power in decline. The long imperial era that began in the late Victorian period, underlined by financial power and military strength, was reaching its exhaustion point, with Britain’s inability to break the back of the Afrikaners in the Anglo-Boer War (or the South African war) from 1899 to 1901 signalling its hegemonic decline. “What Vietnam was to the United States, the Boer War very nearly was to the British Empire”, Ferguson avers, in two respects: “its huge cost in both lives and money – 45 000 men dead [mostly from typhoid, dysentery and other diseases] and a quarter of a billion pounds spent – and the divisions it opened up back home [in Britain]” (Ferguson 2003, p. 276). The thought of losing its colonies, however costly these were, rattled Britain as it would denude it of the last vestiges of its glory. The winds of change that blew in the late 1950s when many countries were unshackling themselves from colonialism, spreading to the 1960s and 1970s, brought a shift to the global balance of power: European powers were losing their prestige and the Soviet Union was expanding its influence in some of the former colonies. Newly independent African countries suffered neglect from former colonists, who had left these countries in a chaotic state and with distortions in social structures. The United States did not take much interest in supporting nation-building efforts, except to act as a stumbling block to democratization in Southern Africa in the 1970s to the 1980s, a theme that I pick up in Chapter 5. Western countries showed no interest at the end of the colonial era to integrate African countries into the multilateral arrangements or to accelerate Africa’s development on similar terms as Europe and Japan post-World War Two. In the years following the establishment of multilateral institutions, America’s attention was drawn toward containing communism; the goal of promoting multilateralism assumed a secondary place, with realist notions such as the balance of power and traditional alliance formation seizing the center-ground in US foreign policy calculus (Ruggie 1996, p. 40). This is nowhere as clearer as in the international

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monetary system and multilateral trade arena. I discuss the latter extensively in the next chapter. The section below looks at how developing countries, and Africa in particular, fared in the efforts to innovate the international monetary system.

Development Weaknesses in the International Monetary System Advanced industrial economies positioned themselves advantageously in the international monetary system and constituted themselves as a block to shape the IMF’s core agenda. This influence gained further ground with the formation of the Group of Ten as an informal group of a selected few industrialized countries in 1961 to shape developments in the international monetary system. This was a group of 10 deputies (“Group of Ten”) made up of the United States and European countries. As Solomon (1977) pointed out, the officials who made up the Group of Ten met regularly at the French Finance Ministry. The Americans supplied the chairman; both the Americans and British lent the deliberations the English language until much later when the French insisted on speaking in their own language. In practice the Group of Ten meetings comprised of 20 deputies, with a senior treasury and central bank official drawn from the members of the Group of Ten, with observers from the Swiss National Bank, the IMF, the OECD, and the Bank of International Settlement (Solomon 1977). These structures have remained influential for four decades since they first made their mark on international affairs. The Group of Ten was an arrangement of Western countries who regarded the international monetary system as their exclusive preserve. For much of its existence, the group was preoccupied mainly with issues related disproportionate composition between currencies and gold reserves, and balance of payments issues. Countries like Egypt objected to the Group of Ten’s undue influence in the deliberations of the IMF’s Executive Directors (De Vries 1985, p. 143). Executive directors who were elected by developing countries felt excluded in the Group of Ten deliberations that were increasingly taking place outside of the Fund’s purview. The Group of Ten would influence decision-making within the Fund. In response, developing country members of the Fund constituted their Group of 24 in 1971 (De Vries 1985, p. 145). While the Group of Ten was at its formation influenced by

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US perspective, increasingly the Group became dominated by the European Community to the US’s chagrin. Nonetheless, it broadly reflected Western industrial powers’ views on global monetary affairs. Developing countries were kept on the margins. With growing misgivings about this small informal Group that had enormous power over the shape of the IMF reforms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new group was conceived, and this would have the façade of broad representation. At its April 1972 meeting in London, the Group of Ten proposed a more acceptable structure in the form of a committee of the Board of Governors of the IMF, which would be constituted based on the constituencies that made up the IMF’s Executive Board. This group became known as the Committee of Twenty, drawn from finance officials and central bankers from 20 countries. The establishment of this mechanism was a stroke of hegemonic incorporation of developing countries by the United States as a dominant power. Establishing the Committee of Twenty gave an appearance of broad representation. This group was to work outside of the IMF and drive the reform of the international monetary system, discuss trade issues, development assistance, strengthen the IMF’s decision-making system, and deliberate on a range of other international economic issues (De Vries 1985, pp. 155– 163). One of the notable positions this committee championed was the linkage between the creation of the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) and development aid for the least developed countries (Bird 1982, p. 2). The SDRs were an instrument created in 1969 to supplement member countries’ foreign exchange reserves so that countries do not rely on domestic or external debt for building their reserves. This was a restricted instrument as it was a unit of accounting for IMF members that could only be used in transaction with the IMF or between governments. SDRs were pegged to the US dollar at 1 XDR—1 US$, equivalent to 0.888671 g of fine gold. However, at the end of the Bretton Woods System of fixed exchange rates in 1973, these were made up of a basket of currencies which was to be reviewed every five years. Hegemonic currencies such as the US dollar, Deutchmark, Franc, Japanese Yen and Pound Sterling dominated the basket of currencies for many years. The basket of currencies was consolidated again in the late 1990s, with the US dollars, Euro, Japanese Yen, and Pound Sterling making up the basket of currencies. An important shift took place in 2015 with the addition of the Chinese RMB in 2015.

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Historically, SDRs could only be issued upon concurrence by members holding 85% of voting power in the IMF (Eichengreen 2011). There was at the time the fear of excessive liquidity in the system, hence the stringent condition of 85% support, a position that was championed by France. Developing countries lost the argument that SDRs should be allocated to those with the most need; instead, they were allocated in proportion with the existing rights and quotas that members had in the IMF, with developed countries entitled to a larger share of SDRs on account of their quota. Issues related to development would remain contentious in the IMF since the organisation was founded on the proposition that it was to be a stabilizing agency. While developing countries enjoyed numerical preponderance in the Fund, their voting weight was insignificant. Their issues and interests were not central to the Fund’s agenda, which in the 1970s was preoccupied with US concerns about global imbalances, especially the current account deficit it was running against European countries and Japan, as well as consumed in the tensions over floating versus fixed exchange rates. Adjusting the balance of payments disequilibria through exchange rates adjustments in Germany and Japan had more primacy to the United States than working to promote the interests of developing countries. The Articles of Agreement of the IMF restricted the body’s scope to that of a stabilizing agency than the one concerned with development issues (Bird 1982). The significant points of discussion in the Committee of Twenty a year before the abandonment of the gold standard were structured based on the following agenda items: balance of payments adjustment; the settlement of payment imbalances; the volume and composition of reserve assets, including the position of gold, the dollar, and the Special Drawing Rights in the system; disequilibrating flows of capital; and the unique problems of developing countries (De Vries 1985, p. 165). This Committee of Twenty did not advance further. A particularly tricky challenge of the Bretton Woods System that advanced industrial economies had to deal with in the 1960s was what was referred to as the “Triffin Dilemma.” This dilemma was in the shape of the balance between the dollar reserves held by foreigners against the gold reserves available in the system, and whether these could be converted without destabilizing the international monetary system; in other words, there was always a lingering question over whether the United States would honor the IOUs

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(Strange 1988, p. 105). The credibility of the system was under question when the foreign dollar reserves exceeded the available stock of gold, so much so that a surge in the demand for gold could bring the Bretton Woods system to its knees (Eichengreen 2008, p. 114). And it did in 1971. This was the time when President Richard Nixon called for the temporary suspension of the gold standard, with a final death knell in 1973. The risks were magnified by the fact that at the end of 1961 the amount of gold the United States held in reserve declined to $17bn while its liabilities to foreigners had risen to $23bn (Volcker 2018, p. 48). As Greenspan and Wooldridge observed (2018, p. 307), “By the late 1960s, foreign holdings of dollars (nearly $50bn) far outstripped US gold reserves (about $10bn).” This discrepancy would grow to the chagrin of countries like France who were resentful of America’s “exorbitant privilege,” which was expressed in America’s ability to finance its balance of payments deficits on the back of its partners’ willingness to hold dollars (Volcker 2018; Eichengreen 2008). America’s economic woes would soon deepen with the onset of the oil crisis in 1973, and the subsequent world economic recession. This was America’s own moment of hegemonic decline against the backdrop of an all-consuming Vietnam War. Even before the 1973 crisis, there were doubts about the credibility of the United States to honor claims on the gold reserves. During these times, Africa’s interests were on the back burner. After the collapse of the gold standard in 1973, the United States was no longer prepared to play the hegemonic role it once performed when it underwrote the Bretton Woods institutions. It now had to bargain with other liberal democratic countries such as those that formed the G7 in codetermining the outlines of an evolving, post-crisis global order. Further, America would gradually yield industrial leadership to Europe and Japan as emergent economic powers. Sustaining intense competitive pressure from a resurgent Europe and Japan, the United States no longer saw the dollar as playing a preeminent role in anchoring the international monetary structure nor was it prepared to continue to underwrite the stability of the system (De Vries 1985, p. 167). The interests of the developing countries did not feature in America’s calculations, especially after Richard Nixon’s administration turned its back on the Bretton Woods exchange rate mechanism in 1973, an event that magnified risks to the international monetary stability and threw many African countries off-balance especially toward the end of that decade.

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The collapse of the Bretton Woods arrangement precipitated what Volcker (2018, p. 82) referred to as a temporary arrangement that lasted for over 50 years with varying degrees of “floating” and “fixing”, with the dollar still the global reserve currency. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were strong calls to issue new SDRs to help developing countries who bore the brunt of the pandemic. The proposed $650bn in new SDRs could potentially help poor countries to shore up their reserves at no cost but can also trade them for cash at a cost, but that depends on developed countries reallocating a significant portion of their shares. This issuance would be allocated in accordance with countries’ quotas, which means that African countries will receive a small allocation, but this would help in cushioning the blow of the pandemic-induced fiscal crisis (IMF 2021). The last time the IMF issued significant SDRs was during the global financial crisis in 2009, when $161.2bn SDRs worth about $250bn were issued to stabilize the global economy. Given their quota allocation, richer countries take the lion share of SDR distribution and pleas for solidarity with the poor often go unheeded.

Failure to Address Developmental Concerns of Developing Countries Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rate in 1973, a failure that could be traced to President Lyndon Johnson’s policies in the mid to the end of the 1960s, including financing of the Vietnam war, increase in inflation, and deterioration in US international trade position, the international monetary system continued to be buffeted by storms. These included the oil crisis in 1971 when Opec dramatically increased the price of oil, the second oil crisis in 1979, the unexpected appreciation of the US dollar between 1980 and 1985, and the depreciation of the US dollar against the Japanese yen and German deutsche mark between 1985 and 1987, the woes experienced by the European Monetary System in 1992, and the Asian financial crisis in 1997 (Hill 2021, pp. 328–329). Much of the responses to financial crises from the 1980s to the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis was formulated by a coterie of central bankers and finance ministers from 5 to 7 countries that started meeting informally as the Library Group in the late 1970s, then constituted themselves into a formidable group at the Plaza Hotel in New York where the Plaza Accords were signed in 1985 to manage exchange rate imbalances

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between the US dollar and other advanced industrial economies, as well as to pledge intervention in the foreign exchange markets to facilitate the appreciation of major currencies against the dollar. Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany, and the United States were the key drivers of decisions about the international monetary system. Other countries such as Canada and Italy would be added to this rarefied group to complete the G7. Apart from structural adjustment that were administered to African countries that suffered debt crisis in the 1980s and the 1990s, the development interests of these countries were ignored. As such, the international monetary system, like other components of the liberal internationalist order, was not in the service of the interests of developing countries. Although the liberal world order and its institutional expression through multilateralism were forged based on agreed-upon rules, this order was less than complete; the United States and its allies never practiced the norms that undergirded it faithfully. The liberal internationalist order was not quite a universal and equitable system but a hierarchically ordered arrangement shaped by contingencies of the Cold War. As Stiglitz and Kaldor (2013, p. 11) point out, the system of global governance “is an imperfect system, one which imperfectly addresses many of the key areas where there is a need for global collective action.” The hierarchical structuring of the international order, particularly its centeredness on a single hegemon, and representational deficit explain the weakness of global institutions and their inability to show consistency in expressing the norms they profess. These asymmetries of power remain glaring even in the twenty-first century. They expose the liberal order to be more of a façade than a genuine article that expresses substantive equality of states in shaping the structures of global governance.

Counter-Movement by Developing and African Countries Developing countries formulated their responses to marginalization and sought to improve their standing in the global system. Decolonization gathered pace in the 1950s and 1960s against the backdrop of the Cold War. Soon after decolonization, many developing countries looked toward the Soviet Union for inspiration. These countries were grappling with problems of underdevelopment and were in search of economic prosperity (Gaddis 1998, p. 154). The very fact that developing countries

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explored various options such as the non-aligned movement, the G77 and later the new international economic order signified a counter-movement to a global order that placed them on the margins. Developing countries may have participated fully at the Bretton Woods conference (except for African countries that were under colonial rule), but they had no power to shape the structure of preferences and outcomes of the deliberations. One counter-movement that developing countries formulated, and that African countries played an active role in shaping was the non-aligned movement (NAM). At the launch of the NAM at Belgrade in 1961, a 10-point declaration was adopted by participants unanimously: (a) Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations; (b) Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations; (c) Recognition of the movements for national independence; (d) Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations, large and small; (e) Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country; (f) Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations; (g) Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country; (h) Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations; (i) Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation; and (j) Respect for justice and international obligations. The agenda of the NAM continued to evolve after its formal establishment in 1961. At the Lusaka conference, member states augmented the objectives of the movement to include peaceful resolution of disputes, opposition to the stationing of military bases in foreign countries, and abstention from the big power military alliances and pacts. Further, at the end of the Lusaka Conference, a declaration was drawn up that condemned racism, apartheid, colonialism, and imperialism. While bringing together actors that shared a common perspective in their opposition to colonialism and “imperialist” ideologies, the NAM was

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not without rifts of its own. It struggled to keep basic cohesiveness and organizational solidarity since its founding idea was one of nonconformity to major powers and systems. While the non-aligned countries had lofty principles vis-à-vis major political powers, their own moral legitimacy was in question. Many countries in Africa, for example, did not adhere to the basic framework of democratic norms with respect to free and fair elections. Democratic expression and citizen participation in public policy were restricted. In this sense, African countries undermined their own development, a theme I tackle in the next section. Apart from the NAM, another major South-South bloc took shape in the form of the G77, which was established on June 15, 1964, by 77 developing countries. These countries signed the Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Countries, which was issued at the end of the first session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva. The Group became known as G77—and later morphed into G77 Plus China. This Group also pledged to promote equality in the international economic and social order and to promote the interests of the developing world. Through this platform, developing countries sought to reconstruct, albeit unsuccessfully, international trade relations and challenge the preponderance of the West in the global system. As part of the struggle to right the inequities of the global economic system, in 1967 the G77 convened in Algiers and formulated the Algiers Charter. This charter made a call for fair prices for raw materials and more equitable world markets; further, it lamented the slowdown of growth in the developing world and growing disparities between developing and advanced industrial economies in the North (Westad 2017, pp. 391–392). The new international economic order would later be voted by the majority of the UN General Assembly in 1974 as a platform for challenging global inequities. It set out objectives such as limiting resource extraction by state-managed cartels, regulation of transnational corporations, technology transfer from North to South, trade preferences, development assistance, and debt forgiveness—these are still areas on which poor African countries mobilize, but with little success. One notable outcome of the NIEO calls was the promulgation of the Lomé Convention. This allowed for duty-free imports into the European Economic Community (later the European Union) from African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) nations, and also promoted development aid from Europe into these countries.

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The notion that the terms of trade were unfairly weighted in favor of advanced industrial countries dominated the discourse of this Group. For Africa, Asia and Latin America, their insertion into the structures of international production and trade was based on largely agricultural commodities whereas developed economies exported manufactured products. UNCTAD in general and the G77 became a key driver of the debates on trade and development.

Failures of Postcolonial Elites and External Dependence The Third World decoloniality movement encountered several challenges. The first had to do with institutional decay or weak governance. Many of the leaders who rose to power at the end of colonialism had not concerned themselves with institution-building. Building new institutions was not something they were accustomed to nor seriously paid attention to after assuming power. Further, in the aftermath of decolonization, the former British colonies found it difficult to use the British constitutional framework given the traditional leadership structures that had coexisted with British institutions, and neo-colonial features in the economy that remained in the wake of independence. Apart from their participation in the NAM and the Group of 77, the basis for developing a common platform to change the international economic order was weak. As discussed earlier, African countries remained heavily dependent on external actors for their exports throughout the postcolonial era. The realities of the Cold War also confounded strategies for continental unity, as African countries were enlisted as pawns in a grand chessboard of global politics. Africa thus played a marginal role in the construction of the postwar order. African countries would also miss out on the wave of prosperity that followed the creation of Bretton Woods institutions, and that would span a quarter of a century, otherwise known as the Golden Age. Many African countries shot themselves in the foot in the postcolonial aftermath. The new nationalist elite that came to power showed little commitment to economic development and institution-building. Instead, personality cults flourished. As Memmi (2004, p. 4) has noted, the level of greed of the new postcolonial elite was worse than the preceding colonial elite. Daloz and Chabal argue that the state in Sub-Saharan African has an edifice that conforms to the Western template, yet its workings derive

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from patrimonial dynamics, characterized by lack of “emancipation” of the state from clientelistic social networks, informalization of politics, and personalization of public service (Daloz and Chabal 1999, p. 8). State building and modernizing institutions to serve the needs of the population was overtaken by venality and centralization of power on the Big Men in newly independent African states. Other factors cast a dark shadow on the postcolonial period: ethnic cleavages, internecine conflicts, rampant corruption, and poor economic performance. Fanon (1963, pp. 148–149) referred to this condition as the pitfall of national consciousness. According to Fanon, this is a condition where the “nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the state.” Fanon lays much of the postcolonial problems on the spiritual, intellectual, and economic underdevelopment of the postcolonial elite and the thin base of home-grown entrepreneurial class that is engaged in production, invention, or labor-intensive activities (Fanon 1963, pp. 149–150). For Fanon (1963), the middle class that was left behind as curtains drew over colonialism was oriented toward consumption than productive activities; and was also alienated from the poor masses and workers. While for Fanon the main problems of postcolonial rule lay with production (or absence thereof), Memmi (2004) attributed it to distribution, namely the failure to allocate economic opportunities equitably. Braudel (1979) would make a nuanced point that was closer to Memmi’s perspective when he observed that that production and consumption contain the seeds of both destruction and renewal, and that markets are like watershed between the rivers, and much depends on how you experience them. For Braudel, distributive outcomes are important in the system of production and exchange. Nonetheless, for both Fanon (1963) and Memmi (2004), corruption was one of the debilitating diseases of the postcolonial settlement. The state of the African continent after independence was as underdeveloped as it was during independence: conditions to develop an indigenous capitalist class that could unleash the productive forces of the economy were limited. Capital, which greases the wheels of commerce, was in short supply as both the banking sector and the stock market were not fully developed except in a handful of countries. The condition of Big Man rule—or personality cult—took shape quickly as the new elites were keen to shore up their power bases and consolidate their positions. Democratic participation and engagement faced restrictions by politicians under the pretext of strengthening national unity. New leaders that ascended to power proved intolerant of

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the diversity of views and dissent. One-party rule and autocratic forms of government became the norm. As Hyden (2013, p. 30) has pointed out, the new nationalist leaders had no experience in exercising power and were anxious to secure their position within the one-party state political framework. Nationalist leaders were unable to respond to popular demands for development. The external environment was a perfect scapegoat for the failure of political leaders to govern and their lack of wherewithal to meet citizens’ economic needs. This bred its counterforce in the form of military coups, and for many decades African countries would go through a vicious cycle of government replacement through coups. Political instability was not conducive to developing sound and strong institutions that could form the bedrock of more effective forms of external engagement. Anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, rather than substantive engagement with the external environment, became a cloak to consolidate personal rule or party dominance. The foundational faults of their rule remain by and largely unexamined, yet these contributed to the continent’s protracted state of underdevelopment and marginal position in the global economy. The decision by the Soviet Union to shift attention away from African commitments in the late 1980s made it inevitable for African countries to accept the disciplines of the IMF and World Bank (Young 2012, p. 24). Africa’s deteriorating socioeconomic conditions triggered widespread concern among Africanist scholars. In a text that deployed a neo-Marxist perspective on Africa’s development tensions, Shaw (1985, p. 1) observed: “Africa is at an historic conjuncture as the 1980s open: the assumptions, prescriptions and projections of the first 20 years of independence are no longer valid.” These developments associated with Africa’s embrace of structural adjustment programs tested, if not undermined, the gains of political independence. They rendered economic sovereignty into an empty shell. Africa’s dependence on external actors should count alongside its underdevelopment as a major factor in undermining the continent’s economic progress and meaningful integration into the global economic system. As Shaw argued (1982, p. 240), at the beginning of the 1980s, Africa’s dependence continued to generate underdevelopment, with Africa occupying a “sub-structural” position in the world system. This would be Africa’s position throughout the decade and the following years. For Shaw (1982), it was not just the state that suffered uneven development

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or unequal relations in the international division of labor, but also the various social formations on the periphery within postcolonial states. Elites in postcolonial states, or what Shaw (1982, p. 241) refers to as “bureaucratic bourgeoisie,” were privileged in political and economic inclusion, but this was not the case for the lower classes. For postcolonial leaders challenging the inequities in the world economic system was less about the plight of citizens and more about the equality of nation-states. As Moyn (2018, p. 91) observes: “Their vision… [of social justice] … remained strikingly nationalist, with equality of states the most frequent goal, even if most understood such equality as merely an acceptable proxy for equality of individuals.” In their rhetoric, they spoke the language of equality of sovereign states. Yet, in their actions, they denied the basic rights to their citizens, and class distinctions between newly independent states sharpened instead of disappearing. “The central plank of anticolonial rhetoric,” Moyn argues, “was commitment to industrial modernity and national development, which would make it possible for equality and sufficiency both to be pursued…” (Moyn 2018, p. 100). The recession of the 1980s did not only bring a halt to Africa’s development prospects, but it also reduced the possibility of a developmental partnership between Africa and industrialized countries in ways that would follow a similar path to, for example, the Marshall Plan (Shaw 1982, p. 247). In the late 1970s Willy Brandt, the former Vice-Chancellor of Germany chaired a commission on North–South cooperation to precisely address the challenges of uneven development between developing (and poor) countries and advanced industrial economies, which Brandt characterized as “a great contradiction of our age” (Brandt Commission, p. 30). These contradictions had been ignored by the architects of the postwar order, which today is showing strain under the weight of geopolitical tensions between great powers, the Covid-19 pandemic that is accelerating protectionism, and the declining authority of the United States over global affairs. The report called for a new compact between the governments and peoples of both hemispheres. It made a link between economic prosperity and peace, which was an assumption that also underpinned the creation of the postwar order, called for the promotion of “interlocked welfare of nations” (Brandt Commission 1980, p. 18). It identified mutual interests across a range of policy issues related to energy, commodities and trade, food and agriculture, monetary solutions and inflation control, financing

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of projects and programs, technological innovations, and ground and space communications. The Brandt Commission report saw postcolonial Africa as a continent of wasted potential and sought to forge a common cause around Africa’s development. It noted Africa’s difficult position in the international division of labor that had its roots in the colonial era. Its view of development was predicated on the notion of heterogeneity and where cultures and value systems are filters for development approaches, and that the end of development should be about “creative partnership in the use of a nation’s productive forces and its full human potential” (Brandt Commission 1980, p. 23). The very establishment of the Brandt Commission, and its call for North–South dialogue, was a testimony of the failure of Bretton Woods’ institutions. Some five years before the Brandt Commission finalized its report, the NIEO emerged within UNCTAD; developing countries championed this movement to overcome global trade and development inequities. This movement was also a reaction to the recession of the early 1970s induced by oil shocks. The NIEO placed greater emphasis on equality and economic development of countries on the periphery. Its specific propositions centered on the need to increase foreign aid, forgive developing countries’ debt, and ensure technology transfer. These concerns have never been resolved both by former colonizers and by African postcolonial elites who neglected to develop productive capabilities within the continent. Global struggles for justice could not achieve much, and their failures can be explained by the fact that these were hardly linked to national economic development strategies and a shared vision of what Africa’s economies could look like; they also failed because political elites in the continent were more drawn to pursuing narrow, selfish interests. The efforts to build NIEO ran out of steam by the end of the 1970s as the debt crisis took its toll on many African countries, pushing them to the embrace of the World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes.

Concluding Reflections African countries had no share in agenda-setting multilateral institutions and had limited space around the table to influence thinking in these bodies. The collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the disappearance of the Soviet bloc would signal a significant turning point in global

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affairs. The failure to integrate all nations of the world into an equitable framework of global governance would remain a distinct weakness of international institutions. It would continue to be a fault-line for global struggles between the North and the South. The pronouncement in 1991 of new world order by the former American President George H.W. Bush would herald an era of international conflicts where Africa would remain in the shadows. Indeed, the age of the 1990s was about the assertion of new world order and a lost decade for the African continent. There is yet to emerge a global compact that takes Africa’s interests in the global system seriously. Such a global compact would be based on the centrality of resolving Africa’s development interest, greater show of solidarity between poor and rich countries, and reform of multilateral institutions to afford developing countries more space and voice to shape the global economic agenda. The malign neglect of African countries especially in the aftermath of independence ripened the conditions that made radical ideologies popular. These ideas framed the global system as part of imperialism and sought to reinforce dependency of poorer countries on the North. Some perspectives underline the growing social stratification on an international scale along the lines of core countries of the North, semi-periphery (those that were part of the USSR bloc), and the periphery (Myrdal 1956; Frank 1966). Thus, the promise of development that was heralded by the creation of the Bretton Woods system was not fulfilled by its architects; and the norms that were the lifeblood of this system were also left truncated as domestic political interests in major powers held sway. In sum, developing countries may have participated in the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions, but Northern countries dominated the agenda-setting processes on account of structural sources of power they possessed in finance, industrial capacity, and knowledge resources. Not much has changed today in the hierarchical ordering of global power: The West continues to wield its dominance over multilateral institution; the West adopts multilateral rules selectively, and in the selective adoption of norms and multilateral rules by the United States, and African countries continue to face an uphill battle in developing their economic and technical capabilities, and often hindered by multilateral rules that are not sensitive to their development concerns. In the next chapter, I look at the marginalization of the African countries in the context of the multilateral trading system.

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References Bird, Graham. 1982. The International Monetary System and the Less-Developed Countries. London: Gage Distribution Company. Brandt, Willy. 1980. “North South: A Programme for Survival—Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues”. Brandt Commission. London: Pan Books. Braudel, Fernand. 1979. The Wheels of Commerce, Volume 2. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Daloz, Patrick, and Jean-Pascal Chabal. 1999. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. London: James Currey. De Vries, Margaret Garritsen. 1985. The International Monetary Fund 1972– 1978. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Eichengreen, Barry. 2008. Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eichengreen, Barry. 2011. The Exorbitant Privilege. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Ferguson, Niall. 2003. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. New York: Penguin. Frank, A. Gunder. 1966. “The Underdevelopment of Development”. Monthly Review, 18(4): 17–31. Gaddis, John Lewis. 1998 (Revised edition). We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, Colin. 2008. Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenspan, Alan, and Adrian Wooldridge. 2018. Capitalism in America. New York: Allen Publishers. Hill, Charles W.L. 2021. International Business: Competing in the Global Market Place. New York: McGraw-Hill. Hyden, Goran. 2013. African Politics in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. International Monetary Fund. 2021. “IMF Executive Directors Discuss a New SDR Allocation of US$650 Billion to Boost Reserves, Help Global Recovery From Covid-19”. IMF Press Release No. 2177. https://www.imf.org/en/ News/Articles/2021/03/23/pr2177-imf-execdir-discuss-new-sdr-allocationus-650b-boost-reserves-help-global-recovery-covid19. Keating, Joshua. 2011. “Why Is the IMF Chief Always a European?” Foreign Policy Explainer, 18 May. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/05/18/why-isthe-imf-chief-always-a-european/. Accessed 15 February 2019. Memmi, Albert. 2004. Decolonization and the Decolonized. London: University of Minnesota Press.

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Moyn, Samuel. 2018. Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Myrdal, Gunnar. 1956. Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions. London: Methuen. Ruggie, John G. 1996. Winning the Peace: America and World Order in the New Era. New York: Columbia University Press. Shaw, Timothy. 1982. “Beyond Neocolonialism: Varieties of Corporatism in Africa”. Journal of Modern African, 20(2): 239–261. Shaw, Timothy. 1985. Towards a Political Economy for Africa: The Dialects of Dependence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Solomon, Robert. 1977. The International Monetary System 1945–1976. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Stiglitz, Joseph, and Mary Kaldor. 2013. “Introduction—The Quest for Global Security”. In Joseph E. Stiglitz and Mary Kaldor (eds). The Quest for Security: Protection Without Protectionism and the Challenge of Global Governance. New York: Columbia University Press. Strange, Susan. 1988. States and Markets. London: Pinter. Volcker, Paul. 2018. Keeping at It. New York: Public Affairs. Westad, Odd Arne. 2017. The Cold War: A World History. New York, NY: Penguin. Young, Crawford. 2012. The Postcolonial State in Africa. WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

CHAPTER 3

Africa in the Multilateral Trading System

In his valediction at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) heads of delegation meeting in Geneva, December 2020, the US Ambassador Dennis Shea opted for a cavalier tone that summed up America’s attitude toward multilateral institutions during President Donald Trump’s administration. Shea offered that the main problem that plague the WTO is not lack of trust, but a lack of adherence by other countries to market-based principles and manipulation of the rules of the multilateral trading system by China through its commitment to state-backed economic system and discriminatory practices; insistence on the exemption from the rules by developing countries; and differences over the precise role of the dispute settlement mechanism, with the United States believing that this body should assume a softer position of merely making recommendations rather than have a strong decision-making authority (Shea 2020). Successive US administrations may have differed in the broad outlines of their ideological orientation, but they have all shared the same trait of lack of self-awareness and acceptance of America’s recalcitrance in international relations. United States simultaneously wants a robust rules-based multilateral trading system with every country abiding by the rules but with the legal architecture weakened to give the United States a leeway to do as it pleases.

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Further the United States lacks self-awareness of how it has contributed to global distortions of trade through subsidies, including of Boeing, other high-tech sectors in the United States through defense contracts, and agriculture. Subsidies represent special and differential treatment for rich countries. Yet the United States presses other countries, including developing countries, to take on higher liberalization commitments and do away with exemptions—or special and differential treatment—while it continues to have a splendid authority to veto decisions it does not like and hold on to subsidies that go against the grain of free trade. In the eyes of the United States, there is one application of law to the poor, and another to the rich. The multilateral trading system is one of the institutional features of the liberal internationalist order where the tensions between the developmental interests of developing countries and preferences of advanced industrial economies have played themselves out for many years. The GATT used to be a club among developed countries with developing countries on the margins, and they only increased their participation at the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations. African countries also became active participants at the Uruguay Round. These negotiations lasted from 1986 to the end of 1993. The 23 countries that participated at the Geneva Round of multilateral trade negotiations under the GATT in 1947 were predominantly developed countries. Even though there was an increase in the number of participants from the developing world in the subsequent rounds of trade negotiations, the reciprocal exchange of tariff concessions reflected the interests and preferences of advanced industrial economies. Agendasetting as expressed in the structure of preferences, as Strange (1988) would argue, reflected the interests of powerful countries. The bulk of tariff exchanges throughout the life of GATT was in manufacturing. Agriculture was excluded from the negotiations for many years until the Agreement on Agriculture emerged at the end of the Uruguay Round, with this featuring for the first time as a negotiating issue at the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations that were launched in November 2001 in Qatar. What this meant was that the agriculture sector was exempted from multilateral trade rules, and advanced industrial economies were free to apply all forms of protective measures and subsidies to prop up political economy interests for electoral (non-market) objectives. They did not see it fit to take their own medicine of liberalization in this sector.

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Agriculture has been the main comparative advantage of many developing countries and African countries. The lion’s share of the benefits in earlier liberalization episodes, pre-Uruguay Round, accrued to developed economies. During this time many African countries were still shaking off colonial cobwebs, experimenting with statist developmental approaches, and navigating entry into structures of global production and trade within the strictures of neocolonial relations with Europe. Developing countries were for a long time reluctant to participate in the multilateral trading system for fear that they would be dominated by rich countries, and that opening their economies to the vagaries of international trade before they had built domestic capabilities would accentuate their comparative advantage in the production of simple primary commodities, with their unenvious position at the bottom of the international division of labor unchanged (Irwin 2015, p. 196). Since developing countries were not extended the kind of generous benefits given to Japan and European countries post-World War Two in the form of development assistance aimed at improving capabilities, technology diffusion, foreign direct investment, and market access, it was harder for them to simply enter trading arrangements on blind faith. In his examination of the relationship between the WTO, a successor to GATT, Ismail (2005, pp. 377–378) argues that the system has failed to overcome the developmental challenges of developing countries. He frames his critique of the system using Amartya Sen’s capability approach that places premium on four unfreedoms—the denial of economic opportunities, deprivation of basic capabilities, lack of social justice and lack of democratic participation. Drawing on Sen’s perspective, Ismail argues that the multilateral trading system does not meet the development test. Hamilton (2019, p. 23) reminds us that, “the idea of choice in human life, and especially in economics and politics, lies at the heart of much that has animated the inspiring work of Amartya Sen”. Sen (1999, p. 18) articulates this idea thus: “Greater freedom enhances the ability of people to help themselves and also to influence the world, and these matters are central to the process of development.” In his work on development as freedom, Sen is concerned with the agency of individuals to participate meaningfully in social, political, and economic life. Ismail has innovatively applied this capability approach at the system level to developing countries who have been subjected to interplays of power.

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According to Ismail (2005), the lack of fairness of the multilateral trading system to developing countries is borne out in the host of obstacles that stand in the way of industrial development and international trade expansion for poor countries. Further, the system has not helped these countries to build export capacity on a diversified basis so that they are competitive in developed markets. Following, Sen’s perspective, their agency and capabilities are constrained by the structure of the system, which advanced industrial economies have shaped to serve their own interests. The costs of the trade agreements are weighed against developing countries, with decision-making at the WTO favoring advanced industrial economies. The power imbalances, and unevenness in the distribution of gains, have been particularly evident in the refusal of developed economies to accord special consideration to the developmental needs of developing countries through Special and Differential Treatment mechanism, which I discuss further below. David Shea, the US Ambassador to the WTO under the Trump administration considered this a nicety that should be shunned. Special and Differential Treatment is a concept that, as Ismail (2005, p. 379) points out, is aimed at ensuring “proportionality in the commitments undertaken between developed and developing countries, reflecting their different levels of development and gains from the trading system.” Applying the principle of proportionality in countries’ obligations is especially important since developed countries have had a longer period to work with the rules and adjusting these to suit every stage of their development. The main contention of this book is that the architects of the existing framework of multilateralism did not have developing countries, and in particular African countries, in mind when they conceived this system. The architecture of the global trading system generates severe costs for African countries and perpetuate asymmetries of gains in favor of advanced industrial economies. African countries are substantively outsiders to the system; it does not bear the imprints of their interests; and its agenda is driven largely by the interests of the United States and its allies. GATT was from the outset a club that reflected the interests of the US, Europe, and Japan. This triad would dominate the multilateral trading system for many decades to come. Over time, this has evolved into the Quad that involves Canada. From time to time, crumbs that are presented as serious concessions would be offered to leastdeveloped countries driven by a “welfarist” mindset rather than genuine

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commitment to recast the agenda and outline of the WTO to be more development-oriented. Agenda-setting is key to understanding power, influence, and interests—and African countries could not acquire this even after they had attained independence, mostly due to the refusal of great powers to reorient agenda-setting to reflect developmental needs of these countries. As such, the terms of trade that were reinforced through neocolonial relations with Europe would ensure that African countries would remain frozen at the bottom of the international division of labor as exporters of primary products. This has remained the reality of the global trading system up the present.

The Evolution of the Multilateral Trading System The multilateral trading system evolved on the back of contestations over national interests among great powers. From its inception, the GATT was a product of fundamental tensions between the United States and Britain over the most-favored-nation (MFN) rule, a principle that extended to Contracting Parties at GATT—and later the WTO—bilaterally negotiated benefits within the system; and defined the extent of provisions for exceptions or “escape clauses” to allow for import barriers to be imposed to protect domestic industries. Britain’s insistence on maintaining its system of preferential treatment of Commonwealth Countries for political reasons was one area that was a source of contention with the United States (Ostry 1997, p. 59). The United States regarded this system as injurious to its commercial interests. In the early years of constructing the pillars of multilateral trade negotiations, the inclination of the founding states was in the direction of a formal institution that was called the International Trade Organisation and contained a more balanced agenda of trade, development and employment and included a variety of issues ranging from agriculture to anti-trust to investment (Ostry 1997, p. 62). This institution failed to take off as a result of political economy interests in the United States, and the lack of consensus in Congress over what was considered by the protectionists in Congress as a mechanism that would curtail US autonomy in determining its trade policy. Such an organization would have potentially created the right balance between development, trade, and employment. In the end this was collapsed by the lack of sufficient consensus in the US political establishment. As evidenced by Ambassador Shea’s remarks at his farewell in December 2020, this tension continues to characterize the US approach to the WTO.

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The Uses and Abuses of Multilateral Trade by Advanced Economies Advanced industrial economies were never free traders in the purist sense. They have always known that free trade creates winners and losers. The idea of reciprocal exchange of tariff concessions is a bargaining process grounded in realism and differs from the idealism of unilateral reduction of tariffs because doing so is a good thing on its own. As Ostry (1997, p. 68) notes: “The essential balance of compromise embedded in the GATT—as in the Bretton Woods arrangements—concerned the balance between domestic policy objectives and international obligations, in this instance the reciprocal reduction of trade barriers.” Many African countries were under colonial rule at the time the Contracting Parties arrangement was agreed upon, so they were not a party to the framing of global trading rules. There were exceptions that were built into the GATT rules from the outset, but these were of limited use. These exceptions were not put in place to accommodate the needs of developing countries instead they were meant to allow the Contracting Parties some latitude to undertake domestic interventions to promote their economic sectors against import surges. Keck and Low (2006) recount various instances where advanced industrial economies missed their commitments at the GATT several times. The various periods at which developed countries missed their commitments are the creation of the GATT in 1948 to the beginning of the Tokyo Round in 1973; the duration of the Tokyo Round from 1973 to 1979; from the end of the Tokyo Round to the end of the Uruguay Round; and the present Doha Round. According to the 1958 report commissioned by GATT and undertaken by a panel of experts chaired by Gottfried Haberler, advanced industrial economies maintained restrictive barriers that were responsible for the failure of developing countries’ export earnings to keep pace with import demand in developing countries (Keck and Low 2006, p. 148). It was only at the end of the Uruguay Round that there were promising rhetorical outcomes in this area. The progressive rhetoric was in the form of Decision on Measures Concerning the Possible Negative Effects of the Reform Programme on Least-Developed and Net Food-Importing Developing Countries, which recognized the difficulties experienced by poor countries in financing imports of basic foodstuffs, as well as their need to use aid and

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technical assistance to improve their agricultural productivity and infrastructure (World Trade Organisation 1999, p. 392). Decades later, this decision is yet to be implemented. After the Harbeler panel issued its report, an eight-point Action Plan was drawn by developed countries in 1963 to give effect to some of the recommendations of this report; this plan was aimed at tackling some of the problems the report identified, mainly to remove barriers that harmed developing countries’ exports. This action plan was never implemented. In 1965, Part IV of the GATT was established to address issues related to trade and development. As Keck and Low (2006, p. 149) have noted, “while designed to promote development and developing countries’ interests in the trading system, Part IV was never more than a set of ‘best endeavor’ undertaking with no legal force—a fact that has been the source of dissatisfaction among developing countries to the present day.” So, there is a long list of promises that were never fulfilled in the WTO, and many of these promises are about the interests of developing countries. Hoekman and Kostecki (2001, p. 385) had earlier observed that “the Uruguay Round created an implementation ‘overhang’ that will be with the organization for some time to come.” These implementation bottlenecks have only become a feature of the multilateral trading system since developing countries, especially African countries, increased their participation during the Uruguay Round. Yet decisions and exceptions were implemented with agility at the time when GATT comprised only of the elite group of advanced industrial economies. It is as if the concerns of the developing countries in the WTO are an unwelcomed burden. In 1968 the United States had accepted the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) that was championed by UNCTAD, according to which industrialized countries would extend tariff preferences to developing countries on a non-reciprocal basis and through a process of waivers. Industrialized countries would offer such preferences voluntarily and unilaterally. They would, of course, take account of their own political economy interests in determining the extent of the preferences. It was in the early 1970s that the European Union and the United States established their GSP regimes, with Australia, Canada, Japan, and various others following. The critical feature of the GSP program is that it divides beneficiaries into two groups: developing and least-developed countries, with all eligible countries paying no tariffs on 4650 tariff lines, while leastdeveloped countries have the additional benefit of duty-free market access

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for a further 1750 lines (Ozden and Reinhardt 2006, p. 193). Those who are outside the scheme are treated on an MFN basis. Various conditions are applied to the scheme including a threshold for exclusion, especially when a country is deemed to be competitive in a tariff line, and at such a point it would be compelled to revert to the MFN status. A positive outcome of the Tokyo Round in 1979 was the institutionalization of the Enabling Clause under the Decision on Differential and More Favorable Treatment, Reciprocity, and Fuller Participation of developing countries. The Enabling Clause provided for exceptions from MFN and other GATT rules. The Enabling Clause, as Hoekman and Kostecki (2001, p. 388) observed, provided “codified principles, practices and procedures regarding the use of trade measures for BOP [Balance of Payments] purposes.” In exchange, developing countries were expected to graduate from trade arrangements that were based on nonreciprocity or where they enjoyed the cover of the Enabling Clause. The core substance of special and differential treatment within the multilateral trading system would remain elusive until the present, and this is mostly because there are no binding commitments on these measures. Advanced industrial economies can choose not to extend special and differential treatment benefits or opt for a more modest definition. In line the principle of Single Undertaking system that was introduced at the end of the Uruguay Round, developing countries were expected to assume similar obligations as developed countries, albeit phased in over time. The notion of Single Undertaking requires that agreements are not consummated in parts, but that they are signed off when parties have reached consensus on all issue on the negotiating agenda. Developing countries, like developed countries, were expected to submit schedules of concessions and commitments—so there was no allowance for opt out for them. This requirement imposed a huge implementation burden for these countries. The problem is that developing countries lack the institutional, administrative, and financial capacity to shoulder the same burden of obligations as developed countries. Since many developing countries, especially African countries, joined the negotiations at the tail-end—and they were not party to shaping the substance of the agenda—they derived little benefit from liberalization (Keck and Low 2006, pp. 150–151). Special and Differential Treatment would remain contentious through to the Doha Round until today.

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Special and differential treatment has five broad dimensions: lower levels of obligations by developing countries; more flexible implementation timetables; commitments by developed countries to take into account developing country interests; more favorable treatment for leastdeveloped countries; and promises of technical assistance and training (Hoekman and Kostecki 2001, p. 392). As pointed out earlier, all of these are based on “best endeavor” rather than legally binding commitments, thereby making it hard to precisely measure the extent to which the demands of the developing countries have been met. Further, developing countries cannot take developed countries to dispute settlement mechanism on the basis that promises for special and differential treatment were not met. These were never really commitments but charade to give developed countries a cover of progressiveness when in fact their stance in negotiations is motivated by their naked interests. Developed countries are wary of having special and differential treatment as legally binding since they view such a step as codifying lessthan-full commitment by developing countries to the multilateral trading system and, in their view, slows down full integration of these countries to the global trading system whose structure and substance already reflects the interests of developed countries. Keck and Low (2006, pp. 152–153) set out five arguments for special and differential treatment: as an acquired political right; the need for countries to enjoy privileged access to the markets of their trading partners, mainly developed countries; developing countries should have the right to restrict imports to more significant degree than developed countries; developing countries should be allowed additional freedom to subsidize exports, and developing countries should be allowed more flexibility for application of specific WTO rules or be allowed to postpone the application of the rules. These arguments reinforce the points made by Sen (1999) with respect to the importance of capabilities. And they make a compelling moral case for equity in global integration through trade, especially in the face of a system marked by trade distortions in the form of subsidy and tariff escalation by rich countries and a persisting legacy of historical injustices that has its sources in colonial and neocolonial relationships that locks developing countries in unfair terms of trade. The view held by the purists that the WTO is about improving market access for all its members overlooks the unevenness among participants, as well as in more specific terms, the limited industrial capacities in developing countries. Whatever capacities are there are undermined by tariffs,

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tariff peaks, and tariff escalation imposed by developed countries. The purists’ perspective also ignores the reality that developed countries have in the past enjoyed a long period of flexibilities under the GATT system, especially concerning the use of domestic support and subsidies for agriculture. Further, their economies adapted to competition over time, and some were given a leg up such as the European countries and other allies of the United States in East Asia that benefitted from generous market access during the Cold War era. Instead of addressing developing countries’ interests on special and differential treatment, developed countries have resorted to plurilaterals as a way to break out of their moral obligation to developing countries. Accordingly, they have preferred plurilaterals or coalitions of the willing, as Draper (2020) characterizes their approach, something that creates a two-tier trade negotiating system—one multilateral and inclusive, and the other preferred, plurilateral and exclusive. Essentially, plurilaterals are about working with small group of countries that you agree with to achieve a consensus on liberalizing a sector or activity, with benefits restricted to the signatories. Agreements such as Trade in Civil Aircraft and Government Procurement are examples of plurilaterals in the negotiations. Such agreements reveal the predilections of developed countries away from genuine multilateralism to agreements through exclusive arrangements. Plurilaterals are an escape from the Doha Development Agenda and represent a parallel track to achieve progress on issues of interest to developed countries without ever addressing inequities in the multilateral trading system. Many African countries would find it harder to implement rules and take on obligations that are configured with the interests and capabilities of rich countries in mind.

Africa on the Margins of Global Trade When African countries started participating in the multilateral trading system mostly during the Uruguay Round (1986–1993), it was harder for them to negotiate exceptions and to use trade to promote their own development. Agricultural liberalization was set in motion because of the Uruguay Round Agreement in 1994, and the Agreement on Agriculture was one of the notable products of this round and aimed at removing protective measures such as tariffs and export subsidies. Previously, these distortions were exempted under the GATT system. The GATT system did not pursue trade liberalization in its purest form, as

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shown by various exceptions and protective measures in sectors such as agriculture, clothing, and textiles. Free trade areas, customs unions and continuation of imperial preference system also constituted a derogation from the MFN principle. It was on the back of these many exceptions that in 1955 European countries could launch the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which distorted international trade in agricultural products. This system was undergirded by domestic support measures that were intended to sustain agricultural production in European countries as well as to promote exports using price and fiscal support. European farmers had political leverage built up on the back of memories of war-time food shortages, thereby strengthening the link between food and security (Eichengreen 2007, p. 182). The effect of this was to insulate Europe’s agriculture from competitive suppliers outside of the area. The CAP established the basis for a massive lobby that made it difficult for Europe to liberalize agriculture. Further, there was no expectation for European countries to reciprocate US tariff offers under the GATT system until the Kennedy Round of the 1960s. The United States offered one-sided concessions in reducing its tariffs vis-à-vis mainly Europe, Japan and Canada in ways that helped these economies to build trade advantage over time, and to develop their own economies. America’s largesse on market access was a pillar of the Marshall Plan and a geopolitical consideration in the context of Truman’s containment strategy against the Soviet Union (Ostry 1997, p. 70). As I have been arguing, multilateralism was not designed with African countries in mind. Much of the focus of the earlier rounds of trade negotiations was on cutting tariffs on manufactured goods, and with little consideration to other sectors or non-tariff barriers—the latter would feature from the Kennedy Round of negotiations of 1964. The United States placed greater premium on manufactured goods under pressure from political economy interests at home, namely, the import-competing sectors that were under intense competition from Europe and Japan. Both countries had benefitted from the postwar US largesse and had focused their efforts on building their industrial strengths to enable them to compete head-to-head with the United States on manufactured goods. African countries and other developing countries were only attachments to a system that had no interest in accommodating their development needs. The most extensive round of negotiations before the Uruguay Round was the Tokyo Round that lasted from 1973 to 1979.

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Tariff reduction covered thousands of industrial and agricultural products. Tariff and non-tariff treatment were extended to developing countries. However, tariff escalation on industrial or value-added products would hinder many of these countries from diversifying their production base and gain export competitiveness in manufactures.

Imbalances at the Uruguay Round and Agriculture Liberalization The initial thinking for launching the Uruguay Round developed in 1982 at a ministerial meeting that took place in Geneva that year. The actual round of negotiations was inaugurated in September 1986 at Punta del Este in Uruguay. Substantively this round was launched and led by the United States (Ostry 1997, p. 237). The United States was not motivated by a principle of multilateralism for its own sake, but to promote its own economic interests. At this time the United States was not a free trader in the mold of the idealism of Cordell Hull (Ostry 1997, p. 72); but was motivated by political economy interests at home. And development was not uppermost in its calculations, so developing countries that would accede to GATT and later as members of the WTO would be made to assume onerous obligations. The imbalances of the Uruguay outcomes lay in the fact that the North–South bargaining that was a feature of the round saw developing countries making concessions in new areas that were of economic interests to developed countries—intellectual property, TRIMS, and services—in return for what they hoped would be substantial liberalization in agriculture and textiles trade—areas that developed countries would defend fiercely especially agriculture liberalization (Finger and Nogues 2002). As Baldwin (2004) suggests, the gains made by developing countries in these two sectors were not comparable to those made by developed countries in trade in services and the TRIPs agreements. Agriculture is an area of interest for many African countries, and this has remained partially liberalized. Agriculture was protected from liberalization on account of its sensitivity. Although the Agreement on Agriculture brought agriculture into international trade negotiations, it allowed developed countries to continue subsidizing their agriculture—a form of special and differential treatment for the rich—based on a promise that there will be gradual reduction of these subsidies in the future. Developing countries, on the other hand, had no such subsidies and could

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not introduce them to shore up their agricultural sectors (Soko 2005, p. 275). Josling and Hathaway (2004, p. 2) note for example that: “The special agricultural safeguard has protected developed-country farmers from import surges but has not been widely available to developing countries.” As Jawara and Kwa (1999, p. 27) have pointed out, “The USA dumps staple crops in developing countries in large amounts, exporting corn prices 20 percent below production cost, and wheat at 46 percent below cost.” Subsidized production creates surplus that is exported (dumped) to developing countries, and the effect of this is to throttle producers in these poor countries. This also makes it hard for countries that are reforming their agricultural sector to achieve inclusiveness to successfully do so since emerging farmers will find it difficult to compete against subsidized products. Breaking into export markets for agro-processing is even harder due to high tariff rates for processed products in Europe. Rather than completely breaking the back of agricultural protectionism, the Uruguay Round merely established a framework for the gradual reform of the sector through the Agreement on Agriculture. This framework was based on the hope that the great powers that were culprits in distorting international trade would voluntarily give these up as a way of expressing fidelity to multilateralism. Such hopes have proven forlorn. In 2020, ahead of the US Presidential elections, the Trump administration announced a $14 billion farm aid package, pushing government’s share of net cash income to just under 40 percent (Weinraub 2020). No developing country can possess such fiscal muscle to subsidize the income of its farmers and artificially bolster their competitiveness. Across the Atlantic, the CAP was established in the early days of the European common market in the 1960s at the height of Europe’s reconstruction and development. It was a political move to temper the opposition of peasants to European unity which was based on the coal and steel sectors. The unintended consequences of CAP were an increase in land prices as well as in the price of farm products since one of its instruments was tariff protection. It made it difficult for other countries to compete in the European market. Further, it stifled the economic development in the developing regions that had comparative advantage in agriculture but lacked government support measures to the extent of what the EU offered its farmers. It is difficult for farmers in developing countries to compete with subsidized farmers in rich countries.

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Agriculture liberalization holds enormous prospects for developing countries. The developmental significance of liberalizing agriculture lies in the fact that this is a sector for which the majority of the population in the developing world depend for their livelihood—as a source of employment and sustenance—covering about 2.8 billion of the poor who live in rural areas. Higher agriculture prices could raise income levels of farmers, with a corresponding decline in rural poverty. Subsidies in developed countries create a surplus glut that depress prices. Despite the many exceptions that developed countries have enjoyed in the multilateral trading system in the past, such as for example the right to maintain subsidies, when it came to extending flexibilities that would promote economic development in developing countries through special and differential treatment, Americans and Europeans have acted hypocritically. Asymmetries of economic capabilities and technical capacities should make it plain to developed countries that developing countries are deserving of exceptions to the general rules of trade liberalization.

African Countries and Power Asymmetries in the Multilateral Trading System The Doha Round was billed as a development round due to its promise to deliver developmental outcomes for developing countries. It also called for significant reductions in trade-distorting support; substantial improvements in market access; and called for gradual phasing out of all forms of export subsidies. Initially, African countries and many developing countries wanted the Doha negotiating round to address implementation issues that were a residue of the Uruguay Round, especially liberalization of agriculture, clear provisions on special and differential treatment, and issues related to intellectual property and public health. These issues remain contentious in the WTO. The other areas of implementation demanded by African countries were about strengthening of trade remedies, especially anti-dumping measures to limit the arbitrary use of these by developed countries against developing countries’ imports; reopening of the subsidies agreement to broaden non-actionable subsidies for developing countries, for example, where these would be geared toward supporting industrialization, diversification, and the manufacture of high technology and value-added goods; implementation of the Marrakech ministerial Decision in favor of LDCs and net food importing-developing countries; standards (SPS and

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TBT measures) requirements, and customs valuation requirements, which developing countries had no available infrastructure or resources to build. There was, however, no shared understanding of the precise meaning of development and how this was to be realized. It became clear that when developed countries framed the Doha Round as a “developmental” round was meant as a sweetener to assuage the concerns of developing countries and to ensure that they supported the launch of the Doha Round. Still, there was an expectation for a substantial focus on development or at least to resolve those issues that were of concern to developing countries. However, by its very design, constructed on the edifice of power asymmetries, the multilateral trading system is incapable of advancing a developmental agenda. In its very foundations, the multilateral trading system never recognized the value of developing countries, especially African countries.

Concluding Reflections African countries are caught in a dilemma when it comes to multilateralism. They have always seen participation in multilateral trade negotiations as a pragmatic step that could pay off in the end. This has not happened. Developed countries have refused to make meaningful concessions on agriculture liberalizations and extending special and differential treatment to developing countries. For many African countries, multilateralism, pursued through a rulesbased WTO mechanism, offered better prospects than staying outside of the system and struggle to trade with other countries based on the most-favored nation principle. In the climate of weakening commitment to multilateralism, a legacy of the Trump administration, it is important to take a step back and question the fundamental structure of representation, voice, and the ability of developing countries to shape outcomes and achieve equity. We should acknowledge the fundamental flaws of the multilateral system, especially given its history of allowing for flexibilities for developed countries, largely Western powers, and restricting the policy space of developing countries to undertake measures that deviate from the rules to promote their economic development. Apart from the longstanding issues of implementation of the Uruguay Round commitments, African countries have raised various other concerns at the WTO.

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In 2008 the Doha trade talks collapsed due to the inability of its members to bridge their differences, especially divergent interests of developed countries and developing countries. The environment in which trade negotiations are conducted is characterized by asymmetries of power. This explains why developing countries have pushed harder for recognition of provisions related to special and differential treatment, while advanced industrial economies have emphasized market access accompanied by modest support for least-developed countries. Ismail (2006) has framed the development tensions in the WTO more substantively. He has argued that these are not just about special and differential treatment, but also encompass fair trade, capacity, balanced rules, and good governance (Ismail 2006, p. 214). In early 2021, the Doha Development Agenda was still in the doldrums. New issues had emerged at the Buenos Aires WTO Ministerial Conference in 2017 that overshadowed the original agenda. These new issues were as e-commerce, investment facilitation, and micro, small and medium enterprises. The new WTO Director General, Ngozi IwealaOkonjo sought to inject some dynamism in the work of the WTO and to find pathways to its reform. The old challenges related to development will continue to linger, while new tensions between the United States and China could further weigh the organization down, especially since the United States under President Joe Biden is preoccupied with trade and geopolitical tussle with China. The new USTR Katherine Tai has signaled that the United States will press for the re-designation of China’s status from developing to developed status, a line of attack that is part of the broader grand strategy to curtail China’s rise and influence in the global system. These tensions could overshadow critical questions about the WTO reform and the need for organization to give serious consideration to development challenges facing developing countries. There is still a long road ahead to recast power relations in global institutions. Africa is still on the margins of agenda-setting processes in the multilateral trading system—and in many other multilateral bodies for that matter. A critical part of realizing Africa’s agency is to continue to assert its voice in multilateral institutions and vigorously articulate its development interests.

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References Baldwin, Richard E. 2004. “Key Challenges Facing the WTO”. In Mike Moore (ed.). Doha and Beyond: The Future of the Multilateral Trading System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Draper, Peter. 2020. “Global Trade Cooperation After COVID-19: What Is the WTO’s Future?” Global Trends Analysis. 02/2020. Bonn: Development and Peace Foundation. https://www.sef-bonn.org/en/publications/globaltrends-analysis/022020.html. Accessed 17 October 2020. Eichengreen, Barry. 2007. The European Economy Since 1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Finger, Michael, and Julio J. Nogues. 2002. “The Unbalanced Uruguay Round Outcome: The New Areas in Future WTO Negotiations”. The World Economy, 25(3): 321–340. Hamilton, Lawrence. 2019. Amartya Sen. London: Polity. Hoekman, Bernard, and Michael Kostecki. 2001. The Political Economy of the World Trading System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irwin, Douglas A. 2015/2018. Free Trade Under Fire. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ismail, Faizel. 2005. “A Development Perspective on the WTO July 2004 General Council Decision”. Journal of International Economic Law, 8(2): 377–404. Ismail, Faizel. 2006. “Mainstreaming Economic Development in the Trading System”. In Simon J. Evenett and Bernard Hoekman (eds). Economic Development and Multilateral Trade Cooperation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, John G. 1939. Ethiopia and the Origins of Civilization. New York: Blyden Society. Josling, Tim, and Dale Hathaway. 2004. “This Far and No Farther? Nudging Agricultural Reform Forward”. Keck, Alexander, and Patrick Low. 2006. “Special and Differential Treatment in the WTO: Why, When, and How?” In Simon J. Evenett and Bernard Hoekman (eds). Economic Development and Multilateral Trade Cooperation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ozden, Caglar, and Eric Reinhardt. 2006. “Unilateral Preference Programmes: The Evidence”. In Evenett J. Simon and Bernard Hoekman (eds). Economic Development and Multilateral Trade Cooperation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ostry, Sylvia. 1997. The Post-Cold War Trading System. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shea, Dennis. 2020. US Statement by Ambassador Dennis Shea at the WTO Heads of Delegation Meeting. Geneva, 14 December. https://geneva.usmiss

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ion.gov/2020/12/14/us-statement-by-ambassador-dennis-shea-at-the-wtoheads-of-delegation-meeting/. Soko, Mills. 2005. “The Political Economy of African Trade in the TwentyFirst Century”. In Dominic Kelly and Wyn Grant (eds). The Politics of International Trade in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Strange, Susan. 1988. States and Markets. London: Pinter. Weinraub, Mark. 2020. “Trump’s Payments to Farmers Hit All-Time High Ahead of Election”. Reuters, 16 October. World Trade Organisation. 1999. The Legal Texts: The Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations. Geneva: World Trade Organisation.

PART II

Africa as a Theatre for Major Power Rivalries

CHAPTER 4

Implications of China–US Rivalry on Africa

The African continent was shortchanged by great powers who presided over the creation of multilateral institutions, and was marginalized throughout the period of the Cold War. Africa’s agency was constrained both by the actions of the major powers as well as by African leaders’ failure to work collectively and to seize important openings in the contestation between America and the USSR to advance their own development. The African continent was disadvantaged by an international system dominated by Western powers and the beneficiaries of the post-Cold War settlement, which paved the way for what Kenichi Ohmae (Ohmae 1985) referred to as “Triad Power” centered on America, Western Europe (mainly Germany) and Japan. Later, this power network would mutate into the G7 comprising the triad plus Canada, Britain, France, and Italy. Africa has been on the margins of this hegemonic power bloc, which has for many decades shaped the global structures of production, trade, security, and financial power. African countries failed to develop their agency, individually and collectively, in the evolving international system. At the height of decolonization, Africans placed too much faith on the postcolonial elites and their ability to turn ideology into practice. These elites promised a political kingdom that would create an economic nirvana, but never had to account for its failure to materialize. Africa’s potential was also hindered © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Qobo, The Political Economy of China–US Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1_4

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by the structure of the international system that was inclement and not accommodative to the continent’s development concerns. While many African countries participated in the non-aligned movement and the G77 post-independence, the continent’s distinct voice was missing from global affairs. In Chapter 2 we saw how major powers shunted Africa and developing countries to the margins of the debates on the international monetary system. I also discussed how African countries shot themselves on the foot by entrusting their destinies to unaccountable and greedy political elites that had a veneer of ideological correctness. In Chapter 3 I critically reviewed the record of the multilateral trading system and how it constrained Africa’s policy space and flexibilities to undertake industrial development. In this chapter I look at the relationship between the two major powers—the United States and China—and Africa. Africa’s image in the eyes of Western powers was that of a stepchild in the making of the new global order; it would later be viewed as a tragic humanitarian case, but never an equal in shaping the pillars of global governance. At some points major powers saw it as an open field for extraction of commercial opportunities. At the height of the Cold War, in 1962, the US President John F. Kennedy remarked: “We see Africa as probably the greatest open field of maneuver in the worldwide competition between the [communist] bloc and the non-communist” (cited in Meredith 2011, p. 143). It was not just the United States and the Soviet Union that had designs on postcolonial Africa. China too flirted with the idea of building relations with Africa back in the 1960s, with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai completing a tour of the African continent, which covered 10 African countries. This was more to shore up China’s international profile. Zhou undertook this trip between December 1963 and January 1964 to drum up support for China’s foreign policy interests among the newly independent African nations. This international activism occurred when China under Mao Zedong was coming out of Russia’s shadow and charting an independent course in foreign policy. China would later align itself with the United States to counterbalance the Soviet Union in what developed into enduring foreign policy ties between the two countries starting with the visit to China, in July 1971, by Henry Kissinger, the then President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor. This rapprochement turned out to be a decisive turning point in international relations; it paved the way for China’s economic openness, commercial resurgence and global prominence. It also reoriented US sharpened US foreign policy

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orientation toward China, and as an expression of its new commitments, America switched its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. In understanding the outlines of US–China geopolitical tensions and their implications for Africa, it is worth assessing China’s urge for international prestige.

China’s Quest for Global Supremacy Today the US–China tensions play themselves out along the four sources of structural power that Susan Strange has mapped as security, production, finance and knowledge. Structural power, as defined by Strange (1988, pp. 24–25), “is the power to shape and determine the structures of the global political economy within which other states, their political institutions, their economic enterprises and (not least) their scientists and other professional people have to operate.” As a new challenger, China has risen to become a top trading nation on the back of labor-intensive production. China’s financial resources have grown on the back of current account surpluses, which have allowed it to purchase US treasury bills as a store of value and bolster its sovereign wealth funds to extend their reach to Western and non-Western companies. China’s growth was predicated on attracting foreign capital in the form of foreign direct investment instead of borrowing from Western banks to finance its industrial development (Ferguson 2009). This growth strategy breathed life to new factories in the 1990s, many of which were built by Western multinationals, and in many instances with China insisting on joint ventures and technology transfers—practices that the United States under President Donald Trump’s administration sought to curtail. China has over time built up key resources that it would later deploy as part of its geoeconomics strategy. By the first decade of the 2000s, China controlled 90% of rare earth minerals production, which are elements used in advanced manufacturing, including as inputs in computer chips. In the past, China used these as tools of geopolitics in its tensions with Japan, a US ally, and has from time to time threatened to throttle the supply of this vital resource to global markets. In restricting the supply of rare earth, China aims to boost its advanced manufacturing and build a high-tech sector in line with its industrial policy objectives. At the beginning of 2021, China signaled that it could impose export bans on rare earth minerals to the United States, an action that would

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surely starve the United States of critical inputs into advanced manufacturing sectors. As Pitron points out, these rare earth minerals are key to managing low carbon energy transition, and are difficult to substitute, thus rendering these an inevitable point of tension between China and the United States (Pitron 2020). China has set itself an objective to be a tech power rather than be known for exporting apparel to the rest of the world. Its economy has already shifted to higher levels of knowledge intensity. China’s flagship industrial policy, “Made in China 2025” that took shape under Xi Jinping sought to shift China’s position away from just a labor-intensive and export-oriented economy, to the one that was known for innovation, and with a view to close the technological gap with the West. Kai-Fu Lee traces China’s digital enthusiasm to a speech made by Le Keqiang at the World Economic Forum in 2014, where he called for mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation (Lee 2018). AsLee observes, the state council’s major commitments followed in the wake of Le Keqiang’s speech to spawn thousands of technology incubators and tech hubs and government-backed “guiding funds.” The Chinese government identified ten key sectors for this purpose: information technology, robotics, aerospace equipment, ocean engineering equipment and high-end vessels, high-end rail transportation equipment, energy-saving cars and new-energy cars, electrical equipment, farming machines, polymer materials, and biomedicine and high-end medicine. The strategy relied on government subsidies, mobilization of state-owned enterprises, and intellectual property acquisition to power China’s digital development and make it less reliant on foreign technology (McBride and Chatzky 2019). On the knowledge front, Chinese researchers have climbed the ranks of scientific citations. A study by Sinovation Ventures on citations in the top one hundred AI journals and conferences from 2006 to 2015, cited by Lee (2018, p. 89) showed that there had been a rise in the percentage of papers authored by researchers with Chinese names. These outputs are said to have doubled from 23.2 to 42.8% during this period. The great majority of these authors work in China, according to the study. This development is notable if one considers that in 2000 China accounted for only 4% of published articles (Xie and Freeman 2019, p. 3). The authors further observe that Chinese contributions accounted for 36% of all global scientific publications in the Scopus database in 2016. China has risen to become a significant contributor to global scientific

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activities through heavy investment in science and engineering. Among the top-ranked world universities in 2020, China’s Tsinghua University featured at 16th out of 100 universities, with Peking University at 22, and Fudan University at 40 (QS World University Ranking 2020). The political economist Susan Strange developed an analytical framework of structural power as manifest in four more interrelated structures: security, production, financial, and knowledge power (Strange 1988). Knowledge structure, according to Strange (1988, p. 121), “determines what knowledge is discovered, how it is stored, and who communicates it by what means to whom and on what terms.” The Chinese government stands behind efforts to produce and disseminate Chinese knowledge, not just of the scientific kind embodied in technological products and services such as Huawei, WeChat, TikTok, and various other digital platforms, but also through the promotion of Confucius Institutes around the world and academic exchanges to socialize other countries into Chinese knowledge systems. Undoubtedly, China is challenging the United States pre-eminence not only in the domains of production, trade, and finance— areas in which it has already taken the lead—but also in cutting edge scientific knowledge, especially in the realms of AI. This explains why the United States has since the Barack Obama administration to the Joe Biden ones feels threatened by the rise of China, an anxiety that has triggered trade and tech war. The tech race has implications on the possible options for the African continent to navigate its economic development. Increasing use of technology for geopolitical ends could affect how others manage their digital transformation.

Africa’s Geopolitical Positioning and Economic Diplomacy The ability of states to maneuver in the international system is fundamentally determined by their relative (economic) power in relation to other states. Because of this, they act to maximize their relative power in their pursuit of political and economic ends. States, as the Realist theory in International Relations stresses, are power maximizers. This is precisely because, as Bull (1977, pp. 16–17) reminds us, states privilege self-preservation more than system preservation, and bolstering their aggregate power in an anarchic international is a form of security. This is more so in the context of what Haass (2017) refers to as a world in disarray, and whose stability rests on bounded rivalry between

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major powers, which yield a balance of power that sustains stability. Such stability, based on rivalries, cannot be taken for granted, especially since we now know from the Trump era that leaders can act in irrational manner to produce outcomes that harm others and their own interests. The current geopolitical rivalry between America and China might yield some balance of power, but no one can vouch for how long that would last and with what outcomes. Even if such balance can be achieved perfectly, it does not mean it is progressive or good for global welfare. It could be especially harmful it leads to disruptions in commerce in ways that affect the welfare of nations or upset technological networks that create global public good. Further, balance of power could make it harder for countries to cooperate on other areas that are essential for other public goods, for example to reduce carbon emissions and achieve a global green new deal. The US–China rivalry is essentially a battle for survival in a world that is increasingly taking an anarchic turn; it is about trade, knowledge, and technological supremacy, as well as building spheres of influence along these domains. There are at least two ways to view this development: the first is that African countries could take advantage of this emerging divide and exploit it for its benefit; alternatively, the African continent could align with one of these powers. I discuss Africa’s options in the emerging technological divide in Chapters 8 and 9. I would argue that the best approach is for the African continent to pragmatically engage with these two major powers based on the continent’s potential strength. Africa has a high share of world mineral reserves in certain critical minerals such as the platinum metals group and associated minerals, such as chromium and titanium, among others. As such, the continent can be a mineral superpower, if it gets its house in order and astutely use its natural resources strategically. This window could be narrowing as the pendulum is slowly shifting toward clean energy, and extractive activities tend to have a high carbon footprint. African countries will need to act with speed and purpose in maximizing these resources. Crucially, such resources will need first to be utilized domestically to enhance structural transformation, human capital, and public infrastructure, which are forces that lend countries confidence to participate more meaningful in international political and economic relations. It is not enough to rely on natural resources; African countries can use these to power their development up the value chain and to extract better returns in trade and investment relations with other countries. In Chapter 8 I explore in more detail how

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African countries can manage their development and integration into the global economy. It is important that Africans approach their relationships with external partners from a pragmatic perspective rather than through narrow ideological lenses that frustrated Africa’s progress during the Cold War. The old formulae of “imperialism” or “colonialism” that many African leaders obsessed with in the past, will not help Africans to navigate the complex terrain of geopolitics and maximize diplomatic relationships for economic benefits. Pursuing the idea of autarky that was once promoted by thinkers such as Samir Amin who offered de-linking from the world economic system is also not the answer for developing countries. The more realistic approach for developing countries—and the African continent broadly— is to realize agency by engaging actively in the global system. And this should be backed by institutional soundness, effective governance, and astute utilization of the continent’s resources. African countries need to engage with outsiders from a position of institutional strength cultivated both domestically and regionally. Blackwill and Harris (2016, p. 20) define geoeconomics as the “use of economic instruments to produce beneficial geopolitical results.” Using this conceptual frame in reverse may be more appropriate for African countries: to take advantage of geopolitical tensions to achieve economic results. Thus, Africa should be less interested in taking sides in the geopolitical contests or act as cheer leaders for one of the leading protagonists. Africa’s main preoccupation should be to improve its relative position in the global system and to advance its economic development along structural diversification and digital revolution. It is important to bear in mind that Africa is not one homogenous entity; it is a continent made up of diverse countries with varying levels of economic development, institutional quality, political systems, and economic aspirations. Chapter 7 discusses the implications of this diversity in greater detail and offers options for how African countries can think about managing multi-track development. There are, no doubt, areas of convergence for many African countries. They share the same history, patterns of institutional evolution from colonial to post-colonial era, and socio-economic characteristics. Africans will not always agree on every approach or strategy. Some countries will have a higher level of ambition than others. The development path for the continent may likely assume variable geometry, a concept I discuss in Chapters 7 and 8. In some critical respects, African countries will coalesce

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around common positions in engaging with the external environment. They must strengthen collaboration if they are to preserve themselves and boost their profile in a changing global system. Importantly, there is an imperative for greater collaboration on shared concerns around improving trade, infrastructure, building institutions, sharing knowledge and expertise, and working together to address common challenges related to climate, energy, diseases, and finance for development. The domestic level has primacy, followed by the regional and the continental. It is impossible to realize a pan-African vision without the cultivation of national consciousness and overcoming institutional stasis and political weaknesses at the domestic level first. Regionally, developments such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTFA) hold more significant promise for promoting intra-Africa trade and structural diversification. I discuss this new integration mechanism in later chapters.

From Hegemonic Incorporation to Strategic Rivalry The rivalry between the United States and China takes both a geopolitical and geoeconomics form. The former category is essentially about longterm political ends, to gain relative power in the realist sense. It is about shaping the institutional core of the global system in the mold of one’s interests and preferred values. Geoeconomics, on the other hand, is about using economic instruments to project power. The global financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of China have accelerated this geoeconomics rivalry before these two powers. Before the crisis, the relationship between the United States and China was that of managed rivalry and cooperation, with America hoping to coopt China to embrace liberal internationalism and as a key actor in a hierarchically ordered international system presided over by the United States. The United States, especially during the George Bush Jr. administration, preferred what Wade (2011) refers to as hegemonic incorporation. Wade distinguished between three modes of participation in the global system: hegemonic incorporation of new powers, with existing rules remaining intact; multilateral cooperation which is based on compromises and trade-offs; and Westphalian assertion, marked by deeply divergent interests and blocking of each other’s positions. The strategy of hegemonic incorporation prevailed in the postwar order beginning in 1945 as distinct from the Westphalian assertion that marked the pre-World War

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I and the interwar periods. Conflict avoidance through creating a rulesconstrained order characterized the US–China engagement in the short period between 2006 and 2009. Socializing China into the liberal order would, in the calculation of the United States, achieve better outcomes for global stability than isolating China and antagonizing it, which would only serve to recreate the allconsuming Cold War-like international system—and something that the actions of Trump and Biden administrations threatened to unleash. It is not that the United States was serious about drawing China into the liberal international system as a stabilizing force, but that it would keep it on a leash and force China’s acquiescence on America’s terms. The United States had engaged Japan similarly before at the end of World War Two. The aim was to bind Japan to the liberal internationalist order and make it an integral part of global economic institutions, including the G7 and later the G20. President Bill Clinton attempted, in the 1990s, to hitch China onto the liberal internationalist order when his administration signed an agreement that paved the way for China’s accession to the WTO. Although the relations between these two countries in the early 1990s stumbled over the US linkage of the most-favored nation status that it had granted to China to improvements over human rights issues, both countries tolerated their normative differences as they redefine the strategic priorities of their engagement in the direction of trade and investment openness. The Biden administration today is using a similar ploy of placing human rights ahead of deepening its cooperation with China, oblivious to America’s own checkered record in Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq, among others, as well as its failure to accord its Africa-American population the citizenship rights of dignity and fairness. Even on climate change, America is a neophyte and George Bush, in 2001, held back progress on the Kyoto Protocol even though the country accounted for the quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions (Hutton 2007, p. 11). The major achievement of the Clinton administration—and this would later be a source of anxiety in the United States during the Trump administration—was China’s accession to the WTO. China’s high import tariffs on US auto, subsidies to various industries and agriculture, restrictions on foreign investment in the financial sector, requirements for technology transfers, and intellectual property protection were some of the major tension points between the two countries during the Clinton Administration (Davis and Wei 2020). Clinton

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and the Chinese President Jiang Zemin, with active involvement of the reformist Premier Zhu Rongji, facilitated China’s participation in the multilateral trading system. In 1999, at the height of the negotiations for China’s membership of the WTO—the country would eventually accede in 2001 after meeting various conditions mainly set by the US—China was heavily dependent on the US market, and the discretionary mostfavored nation provision helped to improve market access in the United States. As Naughton (2019, p. 129) points out, “At its peak, in 1999, the US market accounted for 42 percent of China’s exports.” China has since diversified its export destinations, even though the United States remains the most significant market for Chinese exports. Although China acceded to the WTO in 2001, various sectors of the economy, including finance and telecoms remained off-limit to foreigners, its intellectual property protection was still weak, and the state-owned enterprises loomed large in the economy. These are all issues Trump has used as the basis of his confrontation with China.

Instruments of Hegemonic Incorporation: The Strategic Economic Dialogue Under the Bush Jr. administration, the US Secretary of Treasury, Hank Paulson, played a pivotal role in drawing China into America’s orbit to facilitate its hegemonic incorporation into the liberal world order; or, to use the words of Robert Zoellick, United States Trade Representative under the Bush Jr. administration, to make China a “responsible stakeholder” in the global system. Paulson proposed the strategic economic dialogue initiative, which both the Chinese President Hu Jintao and the US President George Bush launched in 2006. This platform represented a shift in the US–China relations from security concerns that were a product of the Cold War era to a more textured relationship that placed commerce at the center. This engagement was forged to build trust between the two major global powers (Paulson 2015). However, this was on terms that were decidedly American. Averting any possible trade war was a priority for the United States. The agenda included issues such as the Chinese exchange rate, energy, environment, food, intellectual property, and product safety. The inaugural strategic economic dialogue took place in Beijing in December 2006. The main discussion points centered on China’s development strategy, trade and investment, intellectual property concerns of the US

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cultural industry, visa restrictions and energy and environmental issues. These two powers were conscious of their role as pivots of the global economy, and that more in-depth cooperation between them was essential for building confidence for system stability. Undoubtedly, maximizing its power was America’s ultimate goal. This agenda would grow over time. As a show of goodwill, China had during this period, selected the US-based Corporation, Westinghouse Electric Company as a technology partner for building its four nuclear plants (Paulson 2015, p. 201). It was conventional for these dialogues to be reinforced by announcements of large Chinese orders that benefitted major US companies such as General Electric and others. In the Trump years, the Chinese learnt quickly to sweeten the relationship by supporting businesses of Trump’s family members (Davis and Wei 2020). In the strategic economic dialogues under Bush and Hu Jintao, the United States notched further gains: China allowed the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market to have a presence in China; and liberalization of air travel to and from China (Paulson 2015, pp. 202–211). In later iterations—Strategic Economic Dialogues I, II, III, IV and V—various other concessions were made by both countries. Many of these concessions concerned financial sector liberalization, product safety, and the adoption of clean coal technology. The dialogue mechanism itself played an important role in deescalating tensions and finding common ground. Crucially for America, it allowed the administration to persuade Chinese leaders not to sell US securities and exacerbate America’s woes during the global financial crisis (Davis and Wei 2020). Unlike the Trump administration approach, which was blinded by parochial nationalism, America’s attempt at hegemonic incorporation during the Bush years aimed to gain China’s acquiescence to multilateral rules. Economic interests were, no doubt, at play. Still, the United States at the time saw China as an important partner in shouldering the burdens of global leadership—from sustaining the multilateral trading system to taking responsibility for greenhouse emissions. Further, the American political was also wary of China’s growing resource extraction in developing countries, including in Africa, and sought to maintain a close relationship with it to check its activities. Hegemonic incorporation or seeking acquiescence of Chinese leaders was a calculated move by the Bush administration since it meant that if China became a superpower, it might embrace the America’s ideational framework, sanitized of realist edges, and be less of a threat to those values

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the United States articulated in word only. This attempt at hegemonic incorporation, however, failed precisely because future administrations— especially the Trump administration—would not allow a new challenger, whether it embraced liberal internationalist values or not, to compete with America economically and technologically. The Trump administration wasted no time in actively undermine liberal internationalist values in preference for parochial nationalism. China was prepared to accept elements of liberal internationalism but on its own terms, and in a way that fitted its conception of how the Chinese government would manage social and economic change domestically, as well as regional affairs, including bullying its neighbors, without interference from the West. The US–China hostilities reached a nadir during 2018, and the outlines of the tensions between two are set out in Chapter 9. There are implications for Africa in the deepening tensions between these two major powers. Both America and China are heavily invested on the African continent through diplomatic ties, development aid, and economic relations. It is inevitable that the African continent will find itself in the crossfire were US–China tensions to intensify. In Chapters 8 and 9, I look at what this could mean, in particular, for Africa’s structural transformation and digital transformation.

China–Africa’s Relations and Its Discontents China ventured into international relations during the Cold War era squeezed between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, the Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, determined to come out of the shadow of Russia and dominate the international socialist scene (Wenqian 2007). The rivalry that later emerged between Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, and Mao would eventually nudge China to the embrace of the United States. In the interregnum, China was caught between the two superpowers, and forced to chart its own independent foreign policy outside of the two imperial rivals, an act that would see China exporting its revolution (Shambaugh 2020). China was a participant at the formation of the non-aligned movement in Bandung in 1955 and, even though it was an observer, it contributed to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; mutual non-aggression; non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit and; peaceful coexistence.

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Early on China burnished its credentials as a friend of developing countries. As noted earlier, the Chinese received Mobutu Sese Seko on a state visit in 1963, followed by a tour of Africa by Premier Zhou Enlai the following year. In addition to supporting various liberation movements on the African continent, and infusing them with the ideology of peasant revolution, China extended loans to several African countries. According to Fenby (2019, p. 423) these amounted to $2bn over a twenty-year period from 1963 and on favorable terms. Further, the Chinese government sent 150,000 workers to support development projects on the African continent. These included the construction of the 1150-mile railway line between Lusaka and Dar es Salaam in the early 1970s. There were 25,000 Chinese engineers who were deployed in this infrastructure project which was completed two years ahead of schedule (Fenby 2019). The Lusaka railway line project represented China’s “largest single foreign aid” at $401 million (Yu 1971). Although China forged diplomatic ties with countries south of the Sahara since the 1960s, China’s serious foray into the African continent was initiated by the Chinese President Jiang Zemin when he undertook a state visit to Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mali, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in May 1996. During this visit, the Chinese leader stressed China’s solidarity with the African continent and a commitment toward world peace on the plank of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. During this state visit, trade and economic cooperation agreements were signed between China and various African countries. By the mid-1970s, China had surpassed the United States in the extent of aid programs in different African countries, and in the 1980s and 1990s China was providing technical knowledge in various infrastructure projects in the continent, mainly for rehabilitation (Brautigam 2011). China–Africa relations blossomed when the Chinese president Hu Jintao toured several African countries in 2006, covering Morocco in North Africa, Nigeria in West Africa, and Kenya in East Africa. During this period, China hosted a summit for 48 African leaders and pledged $5bn as part of a package of development assistance. This was the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) held in November that year. As a culmination of this partnership, between 2007 and 2010, China spent cumulatively $20 billion in infrastructure and trade finance, with focus on oil producing countries such as Sudan, Angola and Nigeria (Hutton 2007, p. 246). In Nigeria, China was interested in exploration rights to four blocks in exchange for refinery in the northern city of

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Kaduna. The Chinese government also extended development assistance to Nigeria to the tune of $5.7 m to purchase anti-malaria medicines. This was China’s commercial diplomacy in action. This tour culminated into the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) that was held in Beijing in November 2006, as a platform for declaration of pledges for development aid and trading opportunities extended by the Chinese government to African countries. In 2007, Hu went on an 11-day tour visiting more African countries and scouring the continent for natural resources. He announced $3bn in credit to African countries. Development aid and interest-free loans were also extended. China was quick to emphasize that unlike Western countries, it had no colonial baggage on the African continent, and that its aid came with no strings attached. This was not entirely true. African countries had to mortgage their natural resources to China, thereby depriving the future generations of an annuity from these assets. China cared less about supporting beneficiation efforts to enable African countries to move up the value chain; it was more interested in keeping its smelters powering on all cylinders for its own industrial development. That is more like a convenient friendship. China’s commercial diplomacy has since expanded to several other countries including Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, among others, using loans and infrastructure for resources framework (see Alden 2007; Brautigam 2011). Chinese have focused on platinum, iron ore, copper, cobalt, timber, and petroleum. Unlike the West, which had liberal pretensions but supported autocratic regimes around the world, China has been consistent. It had no pretensions of having a civilizing mission on human rights. It is pragmatic in its approach and pursues its national interests through a give-andtake framework within the predominant paradigm of realism dressed up with themes such as friendship and mutual respect. China is perfectly at home with autocrats and cares less about democratic deficit in countries it operates in as long as they satisfy its thirst for natural resources. It is worth highlighting that, while China has often been viewed as a villain and wrongly accused of recolonizing Africa, Western firms have abetted human rights violations through their supply chains. In 2019 US tech firms such as Apple, Alphabet (parent company of Google LLC), Microsoft, Dell and Tesla were implicated in a lawsuit brought in Washington DC court by 13 Congolese families (the Claimants), according to Forbes Magazine. Essentially the claim is that many children were killed

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while mining for cobalt, which is used in rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and supplied to these American tech companies (Ochab 2020). It was only late 2020 that Apple would develop a supplier code of conduct with emphasis on human rights. This code of conduct is yet to be tested. With the growing emphasis on clean energy and clean minerals, the future may point to the use of laboratory-developed synthetics, which means that African countries need to use the current window of demand for their minerals astutely to diversify their economic base. By the end of 2013, Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa topped $26bn, rising to $36bn in 2017 in 66 projects, compared to Chinese FDI in the US at $22bn. This financial muscle amply demonstrates the seriousness with which the Chinese regard Africa as a strategic arena for exercising their commercial and trade diplomacy (Chen et al. 2015). Many African leaders thus view China as a dependable partner that, unlike America, does not try to preach values it can’t keep up with. That China has prospered economically despite its authoritarian rule has discredited, in the eyes of some, the assumed association between democracy and development. However, many countries that are languishing in poverty are those ruled by despots and lack any institutional restraints on the excesses of public officials. Poor countries might show high growth rates on the back of natural resources, but they often lack hard and soft infrastructure; they also fail to develop inclusive institutions. Hutton (2007, p. 11) reminds us that: The social dimensions of development – access to drinking water, girls’ literacy, health care – are better in democracies. Life expectancy is typically nine years longer in poor democracies than in poor autocracies; the likelihood of finishing secondary school is 40 percent higher; infant mortality rates are 25 percent lower; agricultural yields are about 25 percent higher.

Thriving non-democracies such as Singapore and China (and perhaps Rwanda in Africa) are exceptions that are sometimes generalized by Africans to explain away the imperative of democratization. They hold up selective cases of poor democracies as examples of why “Western” systems do not accord with Africa’s development interests; yet, they ignore a vast number of cases of poverty under autocracy. Many African leaders have been in power for decades without anything to show for their authoritarian streak. To claim that more authoritarianism is needed for

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development is rather disingenuous. Where democracy has failed, it is often that it was not practiced faithfully. Authoritarianism is always carried out to the core. Africans should, therefore, not be shopping for political fashions conveniently form countries that are authoritarian. Democracy is adaptable. The idea of adapting authoritarianism is grotesque. African countries can implement their own political systems, with people placed at the center, something that despotic powers found anathema. Africans can also take the best of liberal democratic systems and blend them with elements of customary practices and indigenous leadership systems that are founded on progressive values and underpinned by inclusive institutions that also guarantee security and stability. They will also need to enlarge the possibilities for freedom, including giving greater room to civil liberties, protection of the rights of women, and safeguarding human dignity. Democracy is not something that should be implanted by the West to African states. It should not be seen as static either. Whatever the political orientation of China is, and its projection of its brand of diplomacy as established on friendship and mutual respect, there are structural challenges that need addressing in China’s relationship with Africa. Much of Africa’s exports to China comprise low valueadded commodities, whereas African countries import relatively higher value-added and manufactured products from China, including capital and consumer goods. Furthermore, African countries have no leverage in this relationship: the Chinese set the agenda, the flow of resources is controlled by them, and the measurement of impact is based on Chinese calculation. This relationship is also deficient in institutional dimensions and, so far, it has not focused on upgrading the capabilities of African partner countries, especially their ability to participate in global value chains (Qobo and Le Pere 2018). Africa’s dependence on China for its exports has not been entirely healthy. Sectors such as manufacturing, construction, and real estate that have in the past absorbed most of Africa’s commodities, have witnessed a slump. In the past two decades, Africa’s business cycle has been tightly aligned to that of major emerging economies, especially China, and this coupling has been a major impediment to Africa’s industrial development. According to an IMF paper which assessed Africa’s exposure to China, 1% growth in China’s real fixed investment growth is associated with a 0.6% increase in sub-Saharan Africa’s exports (Drummond and Xue 2013). This dependence could have harmful consequences for Africa’s long-term

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prospects. Since China is a global price setter, which is a factor of power, African countries’ room for maneuver is limited. For African countries that are dependent on export markets, intensification of US–China rivalries could constitute a significant challenge for their trade and investment strategies. Both the United States and China are major export destinations for many African countries, and sources of much needed foreign direct investment and development aid. In 2018, sub-Saharan Africa’s trade with China was valued at US$37,570 million, whereas its trade with the United States was worth $14,638 million. The bulk of Africa’s exports to China are commodities, with African countries importing value-added and manufactured products. This reflects the realities African countries lived under during colonialism and in the postcolonial era. China and the United States have long-standing relationships with African countries, and they have an important role in Africa’s integration into the global economy. Thus, if the tensions between these major powers deepen further, African countries could be forced to take sides, something they should resist. In Chapter 9 I discuss some of the threats related to trade agreements and a possible tech iron curtain that is expressed in bifurcated and closed technology systems based on nationalism. African decision-makers have an opportunity to use their agency more effectively. Africans will need to deepen collaborative relationships through processes such as the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. They will also need to shore up domestic institutional capabilities, improve their production profile, take a leap in innovation, and negotiate with external partners on a sounder institutional and economic basis. African countries failed to exercise positive agency for their development during the Cold War and have not progressed much since independence. Below I look at some of the instruments that China has used to project its global actor profile and engage commercially with the African continent, focusing on the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and the Belt-and-Road Initiative.

The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation The Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and the BRICS mechanism, including Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, are directed, respectively, at a tier of mostly low-income and emerging

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economies. As Qobo and Le Pere (2019) have pointed out: “Achieving global power and influence requires building confidence gradually and gaining the consent of varied groups of countries, a purpose that is served by a more dispersed set of pragmatic alliances that China has been developing in the last 15 years.” China has been promoting the FOCAC since 2000, and this gained more traction during Hu Jintao’s term. This initiative has helped to expand and to deepen China’s footprint on the African continent. China has, no doubt, contributed positively toward Africa’s development since FOCAC was founded. This contribution is especially pronounced in areas such as debt cancelation for heavily indebted poor countries, provision of training for African professionals, the extension of credit lines to African governments—and cooperation across a range of dimensions, including education, science and technology, public health and peace and security. These initiatives have cast China in a positive light in Africa. China made the most far-reaching commitments at the sixth FOCAC summit held in South Africa in December 2015 and followed up by similar commitments at the seventh summit in Beijing in 2018. In South Africa, President Xi Jinping announced a $60bn package for financing ten significant initiatives. This financing package included $10bn for a fund dedicated to building industrial capacity and investment in manufacturing, hi-tech, agriculture, energy and infrastructure. In addition, there was $5bn for aid and interest-free loans and $35bn for export credits and preferential loans (Qobo and Le Pere 2019). China is sub-Saharan Africa’s leading trading partner with the total value of trade worth $192bn in 2019, up from $185bn in 2018 according to the dataset compiled by the University of John Hopkin’s China-Africa Research Initiative (http://www.sais-cari.org/). The US–Africa two-way trade, on the other hand, had a total value of $55bn, suggesting that on the commercial stakes, China excels the United States in Africa. However, much of the two-way trade favors China, with Africa importing from China goods worth $113bn compared to its exports to China to the value of $79bn, according to China-Africa Research Initiative. It is only resource-rich countries such as Angola, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Equatorial Guinea that enjoy current account surpluses in their trade with China. The bulk of Africa’s imports from China and the United States comprise capital equipment and machinery, textiles and clothing and other manufactured products. The United States and China have their

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eyes set on gaining more market access for their goods and services especially targeting Africa’s growing consumer market and supply their equipment to African businesses. Politically, these major powers see Africa as a potential ally in the shaping of the global order. These two countries are also moving into new domains of competitiveness—to enlist Africa as an ally in the tech contestation, a theme that I discuss in Chapter 9. Through initiatives such as FOCAC, China can use the African continent as an avenue for bolstering its global profile. Moreover, FOCAC helps China solidify a single, favorable, perspective on China for the entire continent at one go, even if such a goal is tenuous, as there are still divergent views about China across the African continent. As Breslin has argued (2013, p. 617), China uses FOCAC to forge alliances with Africa on the basis of shared developing country identity and with common pain of colonialism and being on the margins of the global economy for a long time. China has also positioned itself as a relatable standardbearer of an alternative development approach—some “Beijing Consensus that is contrasted to the “Washington Consensus”—that African countries can learn from (Breslin 2011, p. 1324). Despite its pretensions, China is a powerful country that is vying for global leadership, and African countries should not fall into the lull of embracing China as merely a benevolent actor; it is no different from other global powers that seek to pursue their economic interests. As I have noted before, there are structural asymmetries in this relationship, and these most pronounced in trade patterns, where China imports from Africa mostly raw material and African countries import from China mainly value-added products.

The Future of China’s Engagement in Africa There are other instruments that the Chinese government uses to project its global actor identity. China’s Xi Jinping launched the Silk Road in 2013. It was later called One-Belt-One Road (OBOR), and then rebranded Belt and Road Initiative or BRI. This mechanism represents the revival of “going global” strategy that was that was punted at the third session of the ninth National People’s Congress in 2000 (Luo et al. 2019, p. 1654). The BRI membership comprises of over 80 countries. It is a platform that helps China to open up “alternate routes to transport natural resources, routes that are not controlled by the US and its allies” (Dollar 2019, p. 2). BRI is a series of bilateral agreements signed between China and members. These agreements, according to Naughton (2019)

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“specify a wide variety of infrastructure projects - ranging from ports to rail lines to electric grids to IT networks—and make financing arrangements for them.” Improving infrastructure linkages through transport and communications is the main focus of this initiative. Scholars such as De Conti et al. (2019), have compared the BRI to the US Marshall Plan, which was implemented post-World War Two, and suggested that in some respects these two initiatives are different (the contexts are dissimilar) and in others, especially in the scope of their ambitions, with China having a wider reach in its trade and investment objectives. This initiative is anchored on the financial muscle of the China Development Bank, which also acts as a lead planning agency (Naughton 2019). Economists such as Dollar (2019) have expressed concerns that BRI could complicate debt sustainability in other developing countries, that there is lack of transparency in Chinese loans, and that the Chinese loans are not as generous as the concessional lending by the World Bank. The World Bank’s concessional lending is highly constrained, a point that Dollar concedes. But also, the World Bank’s financing is onerous as it often comes with stringent conditions. John Bolton, National Security Advisor under Trump accused China of using the BRI to promote “corrupt practices and debt-diplomacy” (Bolton 2020, p. 288). According to Bolton the Trump administration took upon itself to “spread awareness of how treacherous China’s Belt and Road Initiative was, based on “debt diplomacy,” luring countries with seeming advantageous credit terms, then getting them hooked financially, from which Third World nations especially couldn’t extract themselves” (Bolton 2020, p. 307). This sounds more like a description of the IMF in the 1980s and 1990s. In raising the scarecrow of debt-trap to paint China in a bad light and to discourage Africans from working with China, America is also projecting its low esteem of African countries as unable to reason for themselves and make judgment between what is good and bad for them. America is burdening itself with safeguarding Africans from self-harm, precisely because it does not judge them as equally capable of making diplomatic and commercial judgments. Negative sentiments about China’s commercial diplomacy are ingrained in American politics and may likely deepen under Joe Biden’s administration. In April 2021, leaders of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced measures aimed at countering China’s global influence through BRI by underlying strong human rights conditions and recommending budget allocation of $655 million to undermine the

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BRI (Zengerle and Brunnstrom 2021). US obsession with China detracts from other important foreign policy objectives. It also risks backfiring by enabling China to draw strength from victimhood. A leading scholar on Chinese trade and investment activities, Deborah Brautigam has sought to debunk the myth about BRI as China’s strategy to get developing countries indebted, and upon default, lay a claim on their natural resources. Brautigam (2011) draws on extensive research to show that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans, and that there is no evidence of the Chinese having seized any asset from a defaulting country.

Concluding Reflections African countries should decide for themselves what is good for them rather than taking a cue from America. The magnitude of development challenges faced by African countries is better served in a climate of diverse financing sources. African countries, however, need to have a clear strategy of engagement that defines priority infrastructure, long-term objectives, and management of their borrowing against macro-economic realities and prospects of future capacity to meet their debt obligations. China’s search for global prominence will share similarities with previous hegemonic powers to enlarge the diplomatic and economic footprint in the resource-rich African continent. However, China’s rise will not necessarily follow the West’s hegemonic path; it will express its unique qualities as a different civilization that is nevertheless circumscribed by a liberal order with near-universal appeal and legitimacy. Without a doubt, China’s quest for global supremacy will require that it balances its interests against those of the United States. China’s strategic calculus must consider the decline of US absolute global dominance and the latter’s historical role as the standard-bearer of the liberal order. The key consideration for African countries is how they use this relationship to diversify their production base, improve the profile of their exports, and leverage Chinese technologies through requirements for joint ventures and technology partnerships to advance Africa’s digital transformation. The Chinese FDI on the African continent has concentrated on the extractive industry, with resources exported to China in their unprocessed form. More strategic targeting of investment to focus

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on those kinds of commercial opportunities that are likely to diffuse technology and create a spillover effect on the manufacturing sector is what the African continent needs. Currently, oil, gas and mining continue to dominate Africa’s exports to emerging and established powers. Revenues generated from these commodities are hardly re-invested to diversify the economies. African leaders need to expand their vision of long-term development beyond reliance on China. While on balance China’s contribution to Africa has been positive, as it has increased growth and national incomes, African countries still need to improve their productive base and insist on trade relations that promote value addition and broad-based development. It is important that African countries approach relations with external powers based on their own interests—to improve their economic profile and enable more beneficial integration into the global economy. Relations with China will not automatically define a sustainable pathway for Africa’s development unless the continent uses the lens of geoeconomics in approaching these relationships. Africans can instrumentalize their natural resource endowments to extract more gains from China—or any external actor—to support the continent’s developmental drive on a sustained basis. The next chapter turns its attention to how the US–Africa relations have played themselves out and builds a case for sharpening Africa’s agency.

References Alden, Chris. 2007. China in Africa. London: Zed Books. Blackwill, Robert D., and Jennifer Harris. 2016. War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bolton, John. 2020. The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Brautigam, Deborah. 2010. China, Africa, and the International Aid Architecture. African Development Bank, Working Paper Series 107, April. Brautigam, Deborah. 2011. The Dragon’s Gift. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Breslin, Shaun. 2011. “The ‘China Model’ and the Global Crisis: From Friedrich List to a Chinese Mode of Governance”. International Affairs, 87(6): 1323– 1343. Breslin, Shaun. 2013. “China and the Global Order”. International Affairs, 89(3): 615–634. Bull, Hedley. 1977. The Anarchical Society. London: Macmillan.

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Chen, Wenjie, David Dollar, and Heiwei Tang. 2015. “China’s Direct Investment in Africa: Myth or Reality”. Brookings Institution, 3 September. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2015/09/03/chinas-dir ect-investment-in-africa-reality-versus-myth/. Davis, Bob, and Lingling Wei. 2020. Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War. New York: Harper Business. De Conti, Bruno, Marina Sequetto Pereira, and Daniela Magalhaes Prates. 2019. “Belt and Road Initiative: A Chinese Marshall Plan”. Papel Politico, 24(2). Dollar, David. 2019. “Understanding China’s Belt and Road Infrastructure Projects in Africa”. Brookings Institution, September. https://www.brookings. edu/research/understanding-chinas-belt-and-road-infrastructure-projects-inafrica/. Drummond, Paulo, and Estelle Xue Liu. 2013. “Africa’s Rising Exposure to China: How Large Are Spillovers?” IMF Working Paper, WP/13/250. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2013/wp13250.pdf. Fenby, Jonathan. 2019. The Penguin History of Modern China. London: Penguin Books. Ferguson, Niall. 2009. The Ascent of Money. New York: Penguin. Haass, Richard. 2017. A World in Disarray. New York: Penguin Press. Hutton, Will. 2007. The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century. London: Abacus. Lee, Kaifu. 2018. AI Superpowers. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Luo, Changyuan, Qingyuan Chai, and Huiyao Chen. 2019. “Going Global and FDI Inflows in China: One Belt & One Road Initiative as a Quasi-Natural Experiment”. The World Economy, 42: 1654–1672. McBride, J., and Andrew Chatzky. 2019. “Is ‘Made in China 2025’ a Threat to Global Trade?” Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/backgr ounder/made-china-2025-threat-global-trade. Meredith, Martin. 2011. The State of Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Naughton, Barry. 2019. “China’s Global Economic Interactions”. In David Shaumbaugh (ed). China and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ochab, Ewelina U. 2020. “Are These Tech Companies Complicit in Human Rights Abuses of Child Cobalt Miners in Congo?” Forbes Magazine, 13 June. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2020/01/13/are-thesetech-companies-complicit-in-human-rights-abuses-of-child-cobalt-miners-incongo/?sh=4e7c7bfe3b17. Ohmae, Kenichi. 1985. Triad Power: The Coming Shape of Global Competition. New York: Free Press. Paulson, Hank. 2015. Dealing with China. New York: Headline. Pitron, Guillaume. 2020. The Rare Metals War. London: Scribe.

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Qobo, Mzukisi, and Garth Le Pere. 2018. “The Role of China in Africa’s Industrialization: The Challenge of Building Global Value Chains”. Journal of Contemporary China, 27(110): 208–223. Qobo, Mzukisi, and Garth Le Pere. 2019. “China and US Geoeconomics Tussle and Implications for Africa”. International Journal on Belt and Road Initiative, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.1142/S2591729319500147. QS World University Ranking. 2020. https://www.topuniversities.com/univer sity-rankings/world-university-rankings/2020. Shambaugh, David. 2020. China and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strange, Susan. 1988. States and Markets. London: Pinter. Wade, Robert. 2011. “Emerging World Order? From Multipolarity to Multilateralism in the G20, World Bank and the IMF”. Politics and Society 39(3): 347–347. Wenqian, Gao. 2007. Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary. New York: Public Affairs. Xie, Qingman, and Richard B. Freeman. 2019. “Bigger Than You Thought: China’s Contribution to Scientific Publications and the Impact on the Global Economy”. China and World Economy, 27(1): 1–27. Yu, George T. 1971. “Working on the Railroad: China and the Tanzania-Zambia Railway”. Asian Survey, 11(11): 1101–1117. Zengerle, Patricia, and David Brunnstrom. 2021. “Details of Sweeping Effort Emerge to Counter China in U.S. Senate”. Reuters, 8 April. https://www. reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-senate-idUSKBN2BV1UE.

CHAPTER 5

The Evolution of US–Africa Relations: From Idealism to Realpolitik

Since the end of the colonial era to the present age, the relationship between the United States and the African continent has had twists and turns. The end of the Cold War marked a significant shift in international relations. When Africa was writhing under Europe’s colonial grip, the United States looked the other way so as not to offend its European allies, mainly to preserve its close relationship with Britain. As Borstelmann (2001, Kindle Location 1003) observes: “The racial element in US tolerance of European colonialism showed up most starkly in regard to Africa. The centrality of race in US policy toward that continent was due partly to the European tendency to contrast ‘black Africa’ with ‘white Europe’, which mirrored the bipolar racial thinking typical in the United States, and partly to Africa’s status as the last major area of European overseas control.” Integrating the African continent into the global system on favorable terms was not a priority for US administrations. Race still played a role in understanding international relations among the Western countries even after colonialism had ended. Moreover, the Cold War became another prism through which the United States graded its relationships with different countries and regions of the world—you were framed as either for America or against it, even if you maintained neutrality. Instead of showing sympathies to nationalist groups that were fighting for the same values that the United States professed to uphold—liberty © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Qobo, The Political Economy of China–US Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1_5

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and self-determination from oppressive regimes—America marked them as trojan horses for spreading communist influences in Africa; it equated anti-colonialism with anti-capitalism. At various points, the United States sided with white minority regimes in southern Africa, thereby undermining the prospects for democratic rule. African countries that gained independence in the 1960s may not have had strategic significance to the United States initially. Still, in a world marked by Cold War tensions, America opted for realism rather than staying faithful to its Wilsonian ideals of making the world free and peaceful. Containing the influence of the Soviet Union in Europe and Asia became a singular preoccupation of the US government at the height of the Cold War. Over time, strategic considerations came to color US approach toward certain African countries. Congo possessed rich mineral deposits. Other countries such as Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe were under white minority governments and served as a bulwark against communism and nationalist organizations agitating for liberation. Contrary to the accounts of many observers who place a singular focus on the Cold War as a determinant of foreign policy choices, in Africa, race also played a crucial role in conditioning the US foreign policy. In the United States race was always a potent reality from the end of slavery right through to the violent tensions that erupted at the tail end of the First World War, the Detroit race riots of the early 1940s, the civil rights movements of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, all the way to the current struggles over Black Lives Matter. The historian, Keisha Blain discusses the global struggles for freedom led by black nationalist women across North America, the Caribbean and Africa, who formulated along the lines of Pan African unity, Africa’s redemption from European colonialism, black pride, black separatism, and economic self-sufficiency. Although the main avenue for the launch of these struggles was the United States, its framing was Africa’s decolonization and resurgence (Blain 2018). These nationalist movements were part of a revolutionary ferment inspired by the intellectual fount of Marcus Garvey and WEB Du Bois who, even though they were in rival camps, breathed life to Pan Africanist thought and strengthened the bonds between the struggles for black rights in the United States and African nationalist struggle to break free from the colonial yoke. Foreign policy as a continuation of domestic norms, politics, and interests would carry both the good and the ugly face of America’s identity to the rest of the world. These factors should be taken into consideration when assessing the leadership role of the United

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States in the global system since the end of the Second World War. The narrative of America as having played a positive leadership role in the world and a force for stability and peace are only partially true; the other half of the story is of a destabilizing America that pursued naked selfinterest and that did not always stand up for the weak in multilateral institutions. In this chapter, I discuss how all of this comes together, and how US foreign policy softened toward the African continent after the end of the Cold War, with a greater orientation toward exploiting economic opportunities in the continent. According to Brzezinski (1997, p. 24): “American global power is exercised through a global system of distinctively American design that mirrors the domestic American experience. Central to that domestic experience is the pluralistic character of both the American society and its political system.” What Zbigniew Brzezinski failed to appreciate are the discontents within the American society, especially the normative dissonance of professing values of liberty and equality on the one hand, and the racism embedded in its political tradition and social and economic institutions, on the other hand. America’s ugly political tradition is examined in greater detail in texts such as Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy that looked at the tensions between American ideals and the lived reality of black Americans through history, grappling with such themes as perceptions of African Americans by White Americans in the South, race relations in sectors of the economy, and patterns of income, consumption and housing that were mediated by race (Myrdal 1944). The realities of racism and socio-economic exclusions that Myrdal shone light on back in the 1940s still affect African Americans in the twenty-first century. Scholars such as Borstelmann (2001), Lake and Reynolds (2008), Blain (2018) and Gates (2019) places these contradictions on the vast canvas of history, with the benefit of the present to help us understand the linkages between struggles for the recognition of the rights of African Americans in the United States, and America’s foreign policy posture on the African continent. Their observations also help us to make a better sense of the behavior of the Trump era and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement and its international reach. Further, these texts cast a harsh light on the contradictions that plague the American political and cultural life. The American dilemma or normative dissonance, as I argue here, has been sharply reflected in America’s foreign policy, especially in its

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approach to Africa throughout the course of history, and in particular in the inter-war years and the period after the onset of the Cold War. As Borstelmann (2001, Kindle Location 1061) contends, “the Cold War focus on the ideals of democracy and freedom assured that racial exceptions to the American practice of these principles would receive careful attention [by the rest of the world.]” Borstelmann further reminds us that this was also the time when the United Nations and its Human Rights Convention came to life. The international hegemon— the United States—was simultaneously projecting ideals of freedom in the world, while at the same time unable to respond to the root causes of racial violence in rural areas such as Dixie which made their way onto international headlines. The rhetoric of international peace and freedom was at odds with the lived reality of many black Americans—their economic marginalization and the deprivation of various civil liberties—and those countries in the throes of colonial oppression in Africa. These tensions were made all the more complicated by the US government’s strategy to delegitimize the civil rights movements in the 1950s and 1960s by demonizing them as proxies of the Soviet Union or trojan-horse to facilitate communist takeover (Zeigler 2015). The Soviet Union seized upon these race tensions to discredit the legitimacy of the United States as a global leader. There was also growing closeness between the struggles waged by nationalist leaders in Africa and civil rights movement in the United States. Thus, the grievances of African Americans were not taken that seriously, with communism used as a ruse by successive governments to avoid confronting deep-seated white supremacist ideas domestically.

Growing US Interest in Africa During the Cold War It was in the early 1960s that the United States started to take a closer interest on the African continent beyond the rhetoric of selfdetermination that was set out in the Atlantic Charter, a historical moment that yielded a tenuous accord between the United States and Britain in 1941, and whose major thrust was to champion the independence of territories occupied by Axis powers in Europe and Asia rather than complete emancipation of the African continent from the colonial grip. “While the charter symbolized the United States’ and Britain’s commitment to human rights, freedom, and justice”, Blaine observes, “it

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ultimately excluded people of color” (Blain 2018, p. 156). It is hardly the progressive document that is often touted as. Its spirit was marred by the deep-seated prejudices that were ingrained in the United States and Britain when it came to Africa’s self-determination. These countries could not imagine African countries seating as equals around the table in grappling with international issues of security, trade, and monetary stability. America’s interest on the African continent would later grow and stretch across Congo, Angola, and South Africa, spanning John F. Kennedy’s presidency in the early 1960s to the Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the late 1980s. Many of the nationalist movements in the continent, mainly in Algeria, Guinea Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, and Angola were supported politically and materially by the Soviet Union. When these nationalist movements gained independence, they gravitated toward the Soviet Union. Among these nationalist movements was South Africa’s African National Congress, which would in the main find an abode in independent African states in Southern Africa. Protecting white rule in countries such as Angola, Mozambique and South Africa was America’s key interest, and this was explained by the brotherhood of race that I discussed in Chapter 2. As Borstelmann (2001, Kindle Location 1035) notes, there were other common interests that linked Washington and Pretoria. Both enjoyed historic alliances in the two world wars and the Korean War, harbored strong anti-Communism sentiments, and deepened their trade relations. South Africa played a notable role in providing air support for the West’s Berlin airlift and Korean campaign and was a reliable partner in the fight against communism (Jaster 1988, p. 2). There was always an expectation on the part of South Africa’s white political elite that the country would be drawn into the NATO orbit as a southern satellite. Further, South African manganese, chrome, and uranium were essential for America’s post-war development. On race ties, Borstelmann (2001, Kindle Location 1047), further notes that, “White Americans were also strongly inclined by tradition to identify culturally with white South Africans, whose European ancestry and frontier past seemed so like their own: bearers of Western civilization and Christianity to a continent inhabited by less technologically sophisticated, non-Christiaan, darker-skinned people.” Despite his professed progressivism, in 1896, Theodore Roosevelt expressed a view that “it is to the interest of civilization that the English speaking race should be dominant in South Africa, exactly as it is” (Cited in De Conde 1992, p. 45).

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This view would later be echoed by US foreign policy leading light Dean Acheson in the early 1970s. Post-World War Two, containment of communism became the raison d’etre of US foreign policy. In Congo, the United States actively championed pliant leaders such as Mobutu Sese Seko in this part of the African continent that boasted vast mineral wealth, including uranium. America’s foreign policy toward Africa should be understood through the lenses of both the Cold War dynamics and the idea of the hierarchy of race that shaped the Western view of the African continent. Europe was the centerpiece of US foreign policy. In the first place, Europe offered a rationale for the United States to break its longstanding tradition of isolationism and entered the First World War in April 1917. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his push for the formation of the League of Nations were primarily designed to ensure permanent peace in Europe—or more precisely white Europe. Africa was not part of the design of this ill-fated international order. Du Bois (1920, p. 63) observed: Annually $200,000,000 worth of goods was coming out of black Africa before the World War, including a third of the world’s supply of rubber, a quarter of all of the world’s cocoa, and practically all of the world’s cloves, gum-arabic, and palm oil. In exchange there was returned to Africa one hundred million in cotton cloth, twenty-five million in iron and steel, and as much in foods, and probably twenty-five million in liquors.

America turned a blind eye to the continuation of colonial practices until much later. In Versailles, for example, the great powers were tolerant of participation in the peace deliberations by leaders from undemocratic states. The only statesman from sub-Saharan Africa who participated actively in these efforts was General Jan Smuts, and he regarded white South Africa as part of the white European identity. He saw the umbilical cord of the white race in South Africa as buried in Europe, in what he called “the Old World – in the motherlands of our European civilization…” (Smuts 1934, p. 16). Despite presiding over a government that denied civil rights to the black majority in South Africa, Smuts enjoyed legitimacy in the eyes of American and European leaders at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and during the establishment of the United Nations 26 years later. He would write much of the Preamble to the Charter of

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the United Nations, with reference to human rights, despite his government’s discriminatory policies toward the black majority in South Africa. That the major European powers and America regarded him as having legitimacy to participate in this important international event even though he presided over white supremacist regime in South Africa was testament to the backwardness of major powers on race and the strong bonds of the transnational race project founded on white supremacist ideas. As Du Bois (1920) pointed out, among major powers there was an acceptance of the idea that “…it is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good” (Du Bois 1920, p. 41). In South Africa, the black race was categorized as nonEurope and viewed by the British colonialists—and later by the Afrikaner nationalists—as bereft of any positive identity, and outcasts from Western civilization. The US government’s sympathies with white South Africa shone perverse light on this unity of transnational racial alliance between the white races in South Africa, America and Europe, and their selfidentification as belonging to a “civilized” world from which the multilateral institutions we have today derive their essence, including their practices of marginalizing Africa’s development interests. From the time of Dean Acheson, who professed admiration for the white minority regime in South Africa to the Nixon era and right up to Reagan’s presidency in the early 1980s, the United States had never taken a bold stance against undemocratic white rule in Southern Africa. Even in the 1980s, when it was clear that this illiberal regime had a limited shelf life, the United States continued to hope for an accommodation that would secure the future of white minority’s political, if not economic, power with constitutional guarantees. I contend that the United States lacked progressive historical themes to shape a positive engagement with the African continent, and therefore the claims about its positive hegemony in giving birth to a liberal internationalist order are exaggerated. Its celebration as an enlightened hegemon in the post-war era is unmerited given its poor record in opposing colonialism, racism, and the excesses it committed in the Third World through supporting military juntas and dictators.

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Race Relations in Historical Perspective and Influence on US Foreign Policy The roots of America’s normative dissonance and the mindset that sowed the seeds of racial discord go deep in history. America’s founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, held a strong belief in the innate inferiority of Africans, with some of these leaders counting among slave owners (De Conde 1992, p. 24). After President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation ending slavery in 1863, with the Congress passing the 13th Amendment ending slavery in 1865, acts of discrimination and racial violence continued in southern parts such as Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Oklahoma (Johnson 1997, p. 551). Disenfranchisement and the poll tax were used as instruments to keep blacks as second-class citizens. White supremacist ideas would endure for many decades, especially in the southern states; they would, in turn, inform US foreign policy toward Africa in the early years of decolonization (see Borstelmann 2001). When the number of freed slaves grew in the early nineteenth century, Robert Finley established, in 1816, the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, which became commonly known as the American Colonization Society, to encourage freed slaves to settle in Africa. American slave owners had long believed that they were offering the slaves a better deal than the plight of tribesmen in Africa and that these “savages” ought to be grateful for it. They thought less of the enslaved, and less so of Africa. Leading slaveowners were anxious that as freed slaves grew in the South, the rebellion would break out among other slaves. There was also a great deal of opposition to the idea of integration of slaves into the American society. This movement saw Africa as the right kind of destination for encouraging the resettlement of freed slaves, to keep America “pure”—an idea that has lived on through to the twenty-first century among white supremacists in the United States. This thinking is echoed in antiimmigrant sentiments and anti-black racism in the United States and the nostalgic Trump slogan popular among the nativists of “Make America Great Again.” In the nineteenth century, the rallying cry of those behind the American Colonization Society was “go back to Africa,” with Liberia eventually chosen as such a settlement (De Conde 1992, p. 25). The

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Garveyism movement of the early twentieth century would also mobilize using the same theme of resettlement of African Americans to the African continent, especially in Liberia which was one of the two African independent nations at the time but were impelled by a different spirit and motive—to achieve self-determination and to use Africa as a base from which to fight racial discrimination, colonialism, and imperialism (Blain 2018; Grant 2008). Theirs was not an affirmation of the white supremacist claim for a racially pure America as it was a sign of giving up the battle to improve race relations and redirecting energies positively to turn the African continent into a prosperous haven for those rejected by America. Other leading Pan Africanist thinkers such as Edward Blyden also saw an opportunity in the idea of “back to Africa” to “restore the race to its original integrity; to itself; and working by itself, for itself…” (Blyden 1883, p. 18). Blyden’s idea, which was later shared by Marcus Garvey, was that when African Americans resettled in Africa they would find a fertile soil to advance their own civilization and scientific progress. Liberia became the first real link between America and Africa, and the focal point of America’s foreign policy toward Africa. The United States would later become heavily involved in Liberia’s affairs and rolled its sleeves to develop trade and military relations with Liberia. America’s conception of Africa was that of a place where their accursed was resettled—a symbolic return of the biblical Ham to where he was condemned in the first place. The early nineteenth-century race theorists such as the French naturalist Cuvier deployed the scripture to advance the dubious notion that Ham, the youngest of the three sons of biblical Noah, who was cursed for not covering his father’s nakedness, was allotted his portion as Africa, presumably the place of darkness, and that he represented all that was ugly in the world (Jackson 1939). Unlike the Europeans, Africans were seen as freed slaves, and who could be hauled back to slavery, rather than people born free and who were naturally equal to Westerners. By the early twentieth century, there were still deep-seated attitudes of racial superiority among Americans, which were reinforced by Jim Crow laws—an amalgam of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation from the post-reconstruction era, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century right up to the late 1960s. At the end of slavery, the tide against the integration of African Americans into mainstream society was strong, particularly in the South, and white America’s hostility intensified as African Americans drifted up North in what became known as Great Migration to work in the war economy in preparation for

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the First World War and later for the Second World War. This northward movement would have a transformative effect on the United States social structure and propelled the wave of civil rights movements in the 1960s (Wilkerson 2011). These tensions surfaced again during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt in May 1943 over the integration of blacks who had migrated from the South to the North to work in the industrial sectors of the economy, with fissures deepening along racial lines among the working class, and this set the stage for violent confrontations in Detroit (Black 2003, pp. 824–825). Just like with the First World War, the rally for Second World War had triggered a migratory flow of black workers from the South to the North in search of new economic opportunities in the war economy as industrial production expanded from the automotive sector to the armaments industry (Capeci, Jr and Wilkerson 1990, p. 50). The racial violence that flared up in Detroit in the 1940s cast America in a bad light internationally. The Axis powers capitalized on the racial violence that was flaring up in the wake Northern migration and framed these incidents as indicative of a degenerate America. The Soviet Union seized upon this underbelly in American politics and showed it up as evidence of America’s hypocrisy as a country that claimed adherence to ideals of freedom while turning a blind eye to domestic racism. Racial segregation in the US armed forces during both the First World War and the Second World War reinforced this negative image. At the height of the Cold War, communist regimes abroad would point to the prevalence of racial discrimination in the United States as part of their propaganda to discredit its moral voice (Baradaran 2017, p. 131). The condition of black Americans became a bludgeon for the Soviet Union, which accused the United States of hypocrisy when it called for self-determination of Eastern European countries that were under the control of the Soviet Union (Dallek 2010, p. 219). This criticism was more jarring for European countries that still held onto colonies in Africa, with the United States silent on this ugly practice. Racial segregation remained a feature of American life, especially in the Southern states until the late 1960s. American leaders from Wilson to Eisenhower lacked the courage to stare down white supremacist tendencies and institutional racism. These leaders pandered to Southern constituencies for fear of losing electoral appeal if they went against the grain. Since Wilson’s era, the US projected Janus-faced values: it was on the one hand afflicted with the demon of racism at home, while on the other it pursued universalist ideals that were at odds with its domestic

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socio-political reality. The latter dimension was also bifurcated: positively inclined toward Europe—and to some extent, Japan—and indifferent to African who suffered under colonialism.

The Shift in America’s Tone and Early Signs of US–Africa Engagement A major development on race issues in the United States would come with the Supreme Court decision in 1956 that racial segregation of passengers on public buses unconstitutional. Eisenhower was initially critical of this decision as he expressed the fear that it might worsen racial tensions than help to mitigate them, a concern that more than anything else betrayed his backwardness on racial issues (Hitchcock 2018, p. 347). Eisenhower’s era, as his biographer Hitchcock describes it, was that of racial turmoil. But Eisenhower himself was reluctant to use the law as a means to dealing with segregation; he preferred gradualism in dealing with civil rights issues and was predisposed to the kind of change that would not shock the system. Eisenhower was of the view that improvement in race relations should happen organically within communities than imposed by law or achieved through compulsion (Hitchcock 2018, p. 221). He was also unprepared to disappoint Southern constituencies that harbored deep racial prejudices. Eisenhower would loosen up later in his administration. He would promote modest desegregation measures, including the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. At the core, he did not believe in equality. His outlook was shaped by his time in a desegrated army. The push for civil rights persisted into the early 1960s, spanning the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In the same year, Eisenhower sent his deputy Richard Nixon to offer good wishes to, and witness the installation of, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah as the first post-colonial leader in sub-Saharan African. Gradually pragmatism in America’s approach to former European colonies was finding its bearings. For the first time, Eisenhower administration was giving Africa some attention, and outlines of US–Africa foreign policy began to emerge. American foreign policy toward Africa was one of Eisenhower’s campaigning points for re-election. Upon his return from Nkrumah’s inauguration in Ghana, Nixon lobbied for the creation of the Bureau of African Affairs to signal America’s intention to give more attention to the African continent (Hanes 2007, p. 24). The Bureau gave permanence to US–Africa foreign policy for many decades to come. As discussed in

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Chapter 6, this relationship assumed a different texture under various American leaders. For Eisenhower, the rhetoric about Africa during his reelection campaign was aimed at appealing to liberal instincts as well as gaining the support of African Americans. This turn to Africa in US foreign policy grew to become nothing more than mere symbolism and with no grander ambitions beyond moderating racial tensions within the country. The Eisenhower administration, as Hanes (2007, p. 24) would point out, was characterized by an elitist administrative culture, which exhibited “proEuropean pro-racial attitudes and negative stereotypes about people of color’’. Even when the United States broadened its interest in international development during John F. Kennedy’s presidency, with the creation of the United States International Development Aid, there was no seriousness about Africa’s development; the main preoccupation remained containing the Cold War. As Kennedy’s one time associate, Ted Sorensen, pointed out, the president saw international aid as the “great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today” (Sorensen 1965, p. 529). America was trailing Russia, which had already earned the allegiance of many newly liberated countries and training liberation movements in countries that were still in the clutches of colonialism. The Soviet Union made its support in more subtle ways as less tethered to ideological commitments compared to the more proselytizing American approach. The United States had to play catch-up with its development aid. To his credit, Kennedy made a shift in emphasis from military to economic assistance, even staring down opposition to international aid in the Congress (Sorensen 1965, p. 531). This was all tied to US national interests: to curb the influence of communism, and to advance America’s commercial interests in Africa. A program that would turn out to be controversial was the food for peace program, which Kennedy launched in the early 1960s as an enhancement of the US food aid policy that was adopted in the 1950s. Through the food for peace program, the United States shipped subsidized agricultural products to developing countries as part of its aid package, and this became an important pillar of its foreign policy. Essentially, this program facilitated the export of US food surpluses to poor countries. Its effect was depression of agricultural prices, while also hindering production in poor countries. Over time this eroded employment opportunities in the agricultural sectors. Meanwhile, farmers in the United States over-cultivated their farmland (Morgan 1979, p. 10).

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On foreign policy matters, Kennedy’s presidency was primarily preoccupied with US–Soviet Union competition. This was not only in the space program but also in purchasing the allegiance of former colonies. Kennedy felt the pressure to respond to what Khrushchev defined as new areas of peaceful competition between America and the Soviet Union, a stance the Soviets announced ahead of his inauguration. These centers included national liberation wars and other pivots of revolutionary struggles against imperialism in Asia, Africa, and in Latin America (Johnson 1997, p. 715). As I have argued, the United States hitherto lacked a normative basis at the domestic level for a progressive foreign policy aimed at supporting the decolonization project in Africa. Even during the Kennedy presidency, which was widely seen as progressive, the United States regarded Africa as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. It was not in the interest of the United States to cultivate relations with the African continent for the purpose of improving its global profile and ensuring its beneficial integration into the global system.

US Foreign Policy Engagement Under Nixon The intensity of America’s involvement on the African continent increased during Nixon’s presidency. Upon assuming office in 1969, Nixon ordered a review of US foreign policy in Africa. The outcome of this review was an option that the Nixon administration preferred under the guidance of secretary of state Henry Kissinger to relax previous American measures against the white minority regimes in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe in the main. Further, the United States supported mercenaries that fought alongside South Africa in destabilizing Angola and Mozambique. Kissinger trivialized Africa and other southern countries when he stated that: “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington and then goes to Tokyo. What happens to the South is of no importance” (Towdall 2009, p. 5). In not so many words, Kissinger invoked the paradigm of race hierarchy that had been part of the US psyche for over a century since the emancipation proclamation in 1863. For Nixon, there was a sense of permanence of the white minority regimes; it was too much of a mental leap to imagine Africa’s southern parts governed by a black majority. Nixon and Kissinger were thinking through the frames of racial hierarchy which, as I have already discussed, had deep roots in America’s

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history of slavery and anti-black racism. Nixon’s administration ignored the fact that the Southern African nationalist movements sought to gain liberation from imperial powers and white minority regimes and should have been supported by the United States from a moral standpoint, especially since the United States projected itself as a standard-bearer of liberal values. Instead, Nixon’s administration preferred to maintain cordial relationships with illiberal white regimes while paying lip service to pave the road to independence. According to Braxton (2007, p. 3), the American administration from the time of Nixon to Reagan treated Africa as “poor, dependable, laughable, irresponsible, and in general not worthy of much consideration.” Countering black nationalism is a path that the successive US administrations preferred until the end of the Cold War and the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. The United States framed nationalist groups fighting for independence as trojan horses for communist infiltration in Southern Africa and a threat to white minority interests. There were also clear commercial intentions that the United States pursued which were tied to the security interests of the white South African regime: the United States increased the value of its aircraft sales to South Africa from $23,483,380 in 1967 to $80,485,712 in 1972 (Lockwood 1974, p. 65). This is one example of the extent to which America stood behind South Africa and succored the white minority rule. Further, in 1970 the US Exim-Import Bank enhanced its insurance coverage for exports destined to South Africa, signaling a commitment to conduct business with the apartheid government. The United States boasted about 300 companies in South Africa across sectors such as banking, pharmaceutical manufacturers, automobile manufacturers and automobiles, and with the value of investments to the tune of $1bn (Easum 1975, p. 67). It was only in 1986 that the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act was passed in the United States to prohibit new investments in South Africa by American companies. Significantly, Reagan had initially opposed this measure when it was first introduced to the Senate in 1985 as he preferred milder sanctions than those initially proposed in the Bill. By then it was plain that the apartheid regime was running out of steam, with the State of Emergency that was proclaimed by President P.W. Botha in 1985 a clear signal of a political power that was fast losing its confidence and grip on power.

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What changed the decking of political stakes in South Africa, in particular, was when an army soldier in Mozambique staged a coup against the government of Marcello Caetano in April 1974 and promised to grant independence to Portuguese colonies (Braxton 2007, p. 8). When these political shifts became evident, the United States changed its tone somewhat and recognized the importance of adhering to the principles of self-determination, majority rule, equal rights, and human dignity. Still, the United States could not maintain its neutrality for long. As Shubin (2008, p. 38) has noted, during the political transition in Angola between 1974 and 1975, “the 40 Committee of the US National Security Council approved providing Holden Roberto (the reactionary leader of one of the nationalist factional armies) $300,000 to enable him ‘to compete’ with other movements in the transition government”. This lent Roberto’s army the muscle they needed to attack the MPLA in Luanda and Northern Angola. With various interested parties (including the Cubans, Russia, and the South African government) involved in Southern African affairs, the United States gravitated toward supporting one faction over another: Roberto’s FNLA over Augustinho Neto’s Marxist–Leninist MPLA, for example. External parties such as Cuba and the Soviet Union became deeply involved in Angola’s events; the US mission in defense of the white minority regimes became more committed and brazen in expression. The stakes were particularly high on the eve of Angola’s independence in 1975. There was a stampede among various countries located far away from the region to influence the shape of change. The Chinese also took an interest by supporting the Congo-based Angolan rebel group, the FNLA, in its designs on political power. This was after the President of Congo-Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko had visited China in January 1963 and met with the Chinese leader Chairman Mao Zedong. Mobutu was accompanied by Commissioner of State for Foreign Affairs, Nguza Karkl-I-Bond, and chief advisory in the presidency, Mokolo Wa Mompombo, and other assistants, thus making this an important state visit for Kenya in its quest to seek new international allies. As the reports at the time noted, “The city of Peking was immersed in an atmosphere of friendship between the Chinese and Zaire’s people” (Peking Review 1973, p. 3). For its part, China was represented by Chairman Mao, Premier Zhou Enlai, foreign minister Chi Peng-Fei and other assistants.

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China’s involvement was ostensibly meant to support nationalist movements that were coming out of the shadows of colonialism, and the country expressed a shared identity of belonging to the Third World and standing against imperialism and colonialism. For China, new relations with Africa were part of redefinition of its foreign policy as less tethered ideologically to the Soviet Union and aimed at charting an independent path. It was in this context that China became embroiled in Southern African tensions. China was not just a pacifist friend; it supplied arms to the FNLA, the Angolan nationalist movement that was supported by Mobutu and opposed to the MPLA and provided military training to FNLA personnel (Shubin 2008). This was possibly intended at ensuring that the FNLA leader, Holden Roberto, would be installed in Angola and deliver the country to China as its client state. The relationship between Zaire and some of the warring factions in Angola, on the one hand, and China, on the other, continued through Deng Xiaoping’s era. The CIA, on the other hand, also prepared a covert action plan for Angolan operations in support of the MPLA rivals. President Gerard Ford approved this clandestine plan. The Cubans would arrive later in the year in the wake of the departure of Americans from Luanda, with the Soviets also stepping into the action (Shubin 2008, pp. 43–46). Stability in Angola and Southern Africa broadly was made all the more difficult by the internecine conflicts between domestic groups that claimed legitimacy to political power, and these were all supported by a cacophony of foreigners who sought to further their own interests. America was heavily involved not only in Angolan and Mozambican affairs but in negotiating a transition to democratic rule among Frontline states and nudging Ian Smith in Zimbabwe to set a timetable for the transfer of power, something that would only be realized in 1979 with Britain presiding over the hammering out of the Lancaster Agreement. From Nixon to the successive administrations of Gerard Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the United States projected a deceptive visage as an honest broker, a reorientation that was becoming important to safeguard its strategic interests that were linked to natural resources on the African continent (Braxton 2007, p. 10). The US biases were clearly patterned along the hierarchy of race and in furtherance of the white minority regimes’ interests in Southern Africa.

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US Foreign Policy and Political Tensions in Southern Africa Beyond Nixon Beyond Nixon’s era, America continued to be intensely engaged in shaping events in Southern Africa between 1975 and the 1980s, a period that spanned Gerard Ford and Ronald Regan’s administrations. This era covered the liberation of Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and the later push by the Reagan Administration for what it called “constructive engagement.” Reagan reoriented America’s foreign policy to wage a final battle of ideas with communism across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia (Turner 1988, p. 126). During the Reagan years, the United States was engaged in peace-making efforts in the region between liberation movements and counter-insurgency movements in battles that often involved the then apartheid government in South Africa. As Chester Crocker, the US Assistant Secretary for Africa in the Reagan Administration put it, “Ronald Reagan had not been elected to make Africa safer for Marxism, still less to work for yet another Marxist takeover in the wake of the 1975– 78 Soviet-Cuban gains in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia, and the 1980 Mugabe victory in Zimbabwe” (Crocker 1992, p. 63). The United States stayed committed to seeing political developments on the African continent through the lens of the Cold War and hierarchy of race since the white regime in South Africa and its colonial extension in Namibia were the prizes the United States wanted to secure. For the US strategist, Crocker, the solution to the inevitable political transition was to protect white South Africa by “entrenching basic constitutional checks and balances, minority rights and property rights” (Crocker 1992, p. 64). Essentially Crocker’s approach pushed for the weakening of majority rule, a ploy that would ensure that transfer of political power did not change the basic coordinates of economic ownership by the white minority. As such this ensured that the democratic dispensation in South Africa left the racially skewed patterns of economic ownership intact. The real interest for US involvement in Southern Africa was to ensure that the newly liberated states in the region would not pose a threat to white South Africa at the behest of the Soviet Union. There was a strong assumption in the US administration that South Africa was a natural ally of the West, whereas the other newly independent states were either pro-Marxist or just downright anti-Western. South Africa’s regional security interests, therefore, weighed heavily in successive but abortive US

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attempts at brokering peace in Southern Africa either by the surreptitious tactics employed by the Nixon regime or the apologetic posture of the Reagan Administration.

Concluding Reflections The hierarchy of race, and not just the Cold War calculations, was the key lens through which the US administration viewed the events in Southern Africa. The Jimmy Carter’s Administration was probably the exception to the rule, but Carter’s efforts to reach out to black leaders in Southern Africa were never popular back at home. And Carter never went beyond the first term of office for foreign policy observers to fully analyze his foreign policy priorities on the African continent. In essence, there was not that much change in the US strategic posture, influenced as it was by Cold War realities and the idea of racial hierarchy. For their part, the African countries lost an opportunity to exploit the tensions between the superpowers to bolster their own development and negotiate better terms of integration into the global economy. Instead, they clamored for recognition by either of the superpowers. They also pursued narrow political ends that did not go beyond preserving political power. They lacked a long-term development vision. As such, their agency remained weak. In southern Africa, however, the challenges were more complex: the existence of the last white minority governments in countries such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia stacked the odds against nationalist leaders. Their path to democracy was fettered with constitutional safeguards, mainly to maintain existing property relations and economic privileges for white minorities. The next section looks at the US–Africa relations beyond the Cold War and offer an assessment of the period spanning Bill Clinton until the chaotic end of Donald Trump’s term of office.

References Baradaran, Mehrsa. 2017. The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Black, Conrad. 2003. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom. New York: Public Affairs. Blain, Keisha N. 2018. Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Blyden, Edward Wilmot. 1883. The Origin and Purpose of African Colonization. New York: Forgotten Book. Borstelmann, Thomas. 2001. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Braxton, G. 2007. “Introduction”. In Hanes Walton, Jr., Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Bernard Rosser, Sr. (eds). The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis. New York, NY: Lexington Books. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. 1997. The Grand Chessboard. New York, NY: Basic Books. Capeci, Dominic, Jr., and Martha Wilkerson. 1990. “The Detroit Rioters of 1943: A Reinterpretation”. Michigan Historical Review, 16(1): 49–72. Crocker, Chester, A. 1992. High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighbourhood. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Dallek, Robert. 2010. The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945–1953. New York: Harper Collins. De Conde, Alexander. 1992. Ethnicity, Race and American Foreign Policy. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1920. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe. Easum, Donald. 1975. “United States Policy Towards South Africa”. Journal of Opinion, Autumn: 66–72. Gates, Louis, Henry, Jr. 2019. The Stony Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin Press. Grant, Colin. 2008. Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanes, Walton, Jr. 2007. “African Foreign Policy Before the Kissinger Years: The G. Mennen ‘Soapy’ Williams Era 1961–1966”. In Hanes Walton, Jr., Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Bernard Rosser, Sr. (eds). The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis. New York: Lexington Books. Hitchcock, William I. 2018. The Age of Eisenhower. New York: Simon & Schuster. Jackson, John G. 1939. Ethiopia and the Origins of Civilization. New York: Blyden Society. Jaster, Robert Scott. 1988. The Defence of White Power: South Africa’s Foreign Policy Under Pressure. London: Macmillan. Johnson, Paul. 1997. A History of the American People. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lake, Marilyn, and Reynolds, Henry. 2008. Drawing the Global Colour Line. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lockwood, Edgar. 1974. “National Security Study Memorandum 39 and the Future of United States Policy Toward Southern Africa”. Journal of Opinion, 4(3): 63–72. Morgan, Dan. 1979. Merchants of Grain. New York: The Viking Press. Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Peking Review. 1973. Chairman Mao Meets President Mobutu. https://www.mar xists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1973/PR1973-03.pdf. Shubin, Vladimir. 2008. The Hot “Cold War”: The USSR in Southern Africa. London: Pluto Press. Smuts, Jan C. 1934. Freedom: The Rectorial Address Delivered at St. Andrews University, 17 October. London: Alexander Maclehose & Co. Sorensen, Ted. 1965. Kennedy: The Classic Biography. New York: Harper Perennial. Towdall, Aaron T. 2009. The Birth and Death of a Tar Baby: Henry Kissinger and Southern Africa. Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia. Turner, Michael. 1988. “Foreign Policy and the Reagan Administration”. In D. John Lees and Michael Turner (eds). Reagan’s First Four Years: A New Beginning? Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2011. Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage. Zeigler, James. 2015. Red Scare, Racism and Cold War Black Nationalism. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

CHAPTER 6

US–Africa’s Engagement from Clinton to Trump

President Bill Clinton ascended to office, in 1992, against the backdrop of a world that was convalescing from recession, with the African continent experiencing economic strains including an acute debt crisis. At the time of Clinton’s rise to power, the United States had reached an imperial overstretch, having overly invested in fighting communism, and picked up more scars in the Vietnam war during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon years. Clinton emerged at a time when America was viewed negatively by Africans owing to its destabilizing tendencies and protection of white minority interests in southerner tip of Africa. America had acquired an image of an overbearing empire that was not trusted by many developing countries especially those that had come out of the shadows of colonialism. After a decade-long period of lack of direct activity of the United States in African affairs, Bill Clinton brought a renewed sense of urgency about engaging the African continent on commercial terms. Remarkably, this period coincided with the tail end of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, a tortuous round of trade negotiations that the Clinton’s administration helped to conclude, and the last round of multilateral trade negotiations to ever be concluded. The Clinton administration’s era was seen as heralding the age of optimism, fueled by the growing intensity of globalization. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama captured the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Qobo, The Political Economy of China–US Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1_6

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spirit of the moment in his bold proclamation of the end of history, which in his view was characterized by the emergence of the final moment of fusion between the collapse of Communism, which the Western world saw as a tyrannical system, and humanities’ yearning for liberty. For Fukuyama all that the human spirit had longed for was finally achieved with the triumph of liberal democracy (Fukuyama 1992). His idea of history as a succession of different forms of consciousness drew from the Idealist philosopher, Friedrich Hegel, and postulated the view that the collapse of communism signified a succession to “higher levels of rationality and freedom” and an achievement of “absolute consciousness” where all contradictions in liberal societies came to an end (Fukuyama 1992, p. 64). As an aside, it is curious that Fukuyama saw the problems of the twentieth century as mainly about totalitarianism in the shape of Nazism, Fascism and Communism, and did not dwell on colonialism as a stain on Western liberalism, if not its progeny. The 1990s were greeted by a sense of triumphalism. America was buoyed by self-belief in its redemptive role in the world. It was as if history had thrust upon America the role of an unquestioned superpower in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. A new universalism was on the ascendance with all the contradictions of race, nationality and class subsumed under this new and all-encompassing spirit of globalization, which was seen by many in the West as a force that would achieve economic convergence among nations. This optimism was advanced by thinkers such as Fukuyama even though millions of people on the African continent were still trapped in the conditions of want and grinding poverty. These hopes in the West would later come crushing down with the onset of the global financial crisis of 2008, when the US economy took a heavy knock and a groundswell of restive forces in the old industrial and farming areas shunted international openness and gravitated to populist nationalism. While globalization, no doubt, bore many positive elements in the explosion of international trade, rise in economic activity, increase in innovation and rising standards of living, especially in advanced industrial and newly industrializing countries (see Bhagwati 2004; Friedman 2005), it also had its downsides: It was not a rising tide that lifted all boats—some countries powered ahead, and others were left behind. Fukuyama paid little attention to the internal defects of global capitalism, expressed in income inequalities, immiseration of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, its promotion of greed and excessive risk taking by financial

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markets that generated social risks, and the environmental degradation that it would leave behind—all of which would induce a turn to illiberal or populist nationalist tendencies in the West as a reactionary double movement. Breslin (2011, p. 1325) also points out that “Fukuyama’s claim that ‘liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration’ seemed challenged by the emergence of China’s politically illiberal strong capitalism, and the desire of some to emulate it.” It is not just China that evinced illiberal tendencies. America under Trump turned to nativism. Populist nationalism also swept across Europe and became a force that rendered the Brexit tendencies in 2015 and generated anxieties about the future of the European project. Fukuyama would later recast his thesis. His later work reflected more on the potency of identity politics, arguing that the force of identity politics drawn from a different sort of yearning—that of recognition, moral valuation of self, and need for dignity—has been instrumentalized into a political project (Fukuyama 2018). In reincarnated Fukuyama, it was no longer the yearning for liberty that had primacy, but identity fashioned out of recognition and dignity. Globalism had wobbled under the weight of groups that felt socially and economically excluded. It was not just the inequalities between countries that created anxieties for those at the bottom rungs of the social ladder, but also inequalities within countries became a powder keg that would set off widespread social discontent placing pressure on politicians to focus inwardly rather than act as champions of globalization. For Rodrik (2017), this political project should be understood as a logical culmination of hyperglobalization that has brought to prominence the nativist, illiberal platform of Donald Trump. Clinton’s legacy of hyperglobalization was exhausted with the global financial crisis, and what Chua (2018) refers to as political tribes engendered by a yearning for belonging, identification, and othering. Yet, it is important to understand the precise nature of Clinton’s vision and strategy and locate Africa’s place in a world that was changing within a broader Clintonian vision of the world.

Clinton and the Era of US Commercial Diplomacy The emergence of Clinton heralded the growing role of American multinational firms in scouring the world for commercial opportunities. Globalization was believed to be the ultimate equalizing force that would create wealth for all nations, except that the lion share of its benefits

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accrued to the elites. Over time, globalization became a great source of social tensions between the elites and those at the bottom, creating friction between the rich and poor countries, as well as between the elites and the marginalized within countries. One of the major institutional expressions of globalizations was the establishment of the WTO, which we discussed in chapter three, at the end of marathon multilateral trade negotiations. Under the US leadership, the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was finally concluded in 1994 after eight years of negotiations, paving the way for the creation of the WTO. Another of Clinton’s innovation was the establishment of the Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China to improve trade relations between the two countries. This was building on two decades of rapprochement between the two countries since Henry Kissinger reached out to China in 1972, a move that opened a fresh chapter in international relations. In its larger region, the United States championed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was eventually signed in 1994 to foster three-way trade between the US, Mexico, and Canada. This built on the initial agreement the United States had signed with Canada in 1989. The emergence of Clinton gave promise of a new era of US internationalism, with commercial diplomacy increasingly becoming the major thrust of US foreign policy. As Greenspan and Wooldridge (2018, p. 347) reflect on this period, “America’s business renaissance produced a wider sense of optimism about the country’s rule in the world. Companies reorganized to take full advantage of globalizations.” Major US firms lobbied hard for Clinton to extend the most-favored nation the United States granted to China, and which was renewed annually, and to conclude negotiations for China to accede to the WTO. US companies wanted the Chinese economy to be more open, and to also gain greater market access to what was evidently a highly promising market. American companies took off to distant parts of the world in Latin America and Asia, with offshoring as a preferred market-entry strategy for US iconic companies such as the IBM, Ford, Dell, and Cisco. Ron Brown, the Secretary of Commerce under Clinton, and his deputy Jeffrey Garten, were hard at work on a new commercial diplomacy strategy that would infuse America’s foreign policy with a new purpose defined in concrete economic interests. In his book that identified the Big Ten Emerging Markets that the United States would need to target as part of this commercial diplomacy shift, Garten (1998, p. 33) remarked that:

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“Indeed, if we make a cold-eyed assessment of where our future priorities lie, we would conclude that the world’s dynamism is unlikely to be found in Europe or Japan, but instead in the Big Emerging Markets … our global commercial interests … will be expanding in the big emerging markets to a greater degree than in Europe and Japan…” In Africa, South Africa was identified as one of these Big Ten emerging markets alongside Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, South Korea and Turkey. The rest of sub-Saharan Africa featured as part of the unilateral trade preference scheme, the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) that was initialized in Congress in 1998 but would come into force in 2000. America’s place in the world exhibited a combination of fragments of Wilsonian themes of establishing a peaceful world and a Rooseveltian vision of making the world safer for American capitalism. It was a revision of what the scholar John Ruggie (1982) once referred to as “embedded liberalism”—an approach that sought to create stability at home while opening markets abroad. During the George W. Bush era, this assumed the form of competitive liberalization, with US Trade Representative under Robert Zoellick championing aggressive market opening around the world. In the words of Warren Christopher, the US Secretary of State under Clinton during the early days of the administration, “The United States has a remarkable opportunity to help shape a world conducive to American interests and consistent with American values: a more secure and prosperous world of open markets and open societies that will improve the lives of our people for generations to come” (Christopher 1995, p. 6). The Clinton administration took a bold position that America would exercise leadership in the world, since there was no one else to take on the mantle of leadership. It was not foreseen at the time that China would in a matter of a decade and a half emerge as a credible challenger. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left America feeling like an invincible superpower. America saw this era as marking the end of all contradictions, with universalism or globalism the only creed that countries would have to embrace, that there was something positive for everyone, and that economic gains will diffuse equitably.

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Clinton and the Changing Character of US–Africa Policy On the African continent the Clinton administration expressed an interest in strengthening the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), as the United States was reluctant to stretch itself militarily in African conflicts. Instead, America preferred to work with the continental body. The rise of intrastate conflicts such as those that took place in Sierra Leone in May 1997, the inter-state conflict between Sierra Leone and Ethiopia the following year, and another wave of civil war in Liberia in 1999 made it clear to the Clinton administration that solutions to violent conflicts in Africa would not be possible without the involvement of African leaders through the OAU. At the normative level the administration borrowed from Wilsonian ideals of promotion of democracy and human rights (see Christopher 1995, pp. 10–15). Clinton viewed trade and investment as key instruments for promoting economic development in poor regions of the world, and on the African continent. Political liberalism and economic growth through trade were, in this respect, viewed as co-reinforcing. For Susan Rice, then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, one of the goals the United States needed to pursue was to accelerate Africa’s full integration into the global economy and to defend the United States from national security threats that flowed from the African continent (Alden 2000, p. 358). Improving its commercial position on the African continent relative to major European countries, and broadly the European Union, was thus an important consideration for US foreign policy goals. Having taken off the ideological lenses that were tinted by Cold War calculations, the United States worked to realize distinct national interests tied to its corporate firms and specific political economy interests at home. It was along these calculations that AGOA was created. Although discussions on AGOA within the United States started in the late 1990s, this trade measure was passed by Congress in May 2000. It focused on reducing tariffs on textiles and on increasing duty-free concessions for 1800 other products from participating African countries; promoting private American investment by using investment guarantees through a $150m equity fund administered by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and a $500m infrastructure fund for Africa; supporting bilateral and multilateral debt reduction; establishing the US–Africa Economic

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Cooperation Forum; and preparing for a US–Africa Free Trade Area by 2020, a deadline that has clearly been missed (Alden 2000, pp. 361–362). The United States was hoping that by ramping up trade relations with Africa, dependence on aid would be reduced; that socio-economic deprivations would be eliminated; and that security threats would subside. These socio-economic ills, especially affecting Africa’s youth, made it easier for terrorist and counter-insurgent movements to mobilize this segment of the population as a fodder against the West. The deep sense of what the political scientist Robert Ted Gurr characterized as relative deprivation fueled rebellion among youth and emboldened them to enlist in terrorist movements and militias (Gurr 1970). It was not just lack or poverty that galvanized others to take up arms and fight for a just cause, but the fact that their circumstances were, in a relative sense, worse than those of others. According to Gurr’s conceptual schema, it is the gap between the socio-economic position that a group occupies relative to that of another social group which becomes the basis for resentment which, in turn, fuel rebellion. High-levels of poverty and socio-economic inequalities on the African continent were seen by the United States as trigger points for civil conflicts. In 1998, President Bill Clinton undertook an 11-day visit to the African continent, visiting Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa as part of his effort to redefine America’s relationship toward the African continent. In a speech made before the joint sitting of the South African Parliament in March 1998, Clinton placed emphasis on the themes of trade and investment as pivots for US realignment with Africa and signified a departure from the old Cold War template. He also underlined goals related to security. Accordingly, the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI) was designed in 1996 to train African armies in peacekeeping, something that became an urgent consideration after the United States lost 18 of its marines during a peacekeeping intervention in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993. The ACRI framework took off with Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe engaged in joint military exercises with the United States (Korwa 1998, p. 72). Two years after Clinton’s 11-day visit to Africa, and marking his second term of office, the US Congress passed the AGOA as a unilateral trade preference scheme that would make 1835 products eligible for duty-free market access. Section 112 of the AGOA provides duty-free treatment for apparel assembled in eligible beneficiary countries from raw material obtained from the United States or other eligible participating countries.

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When an African country loses the AGOA status, as happened to Rwanda and Swaziland, it reverts to the Generalized System of Preference (GSP) arrangement which is available to all other developing countries and has been in place since the 1970s. Technically schemes such as AGOA are not WTO compatible, and for this reason they must obtain a waiver, they gain their legitimacy from the objectives they purport to achieve, namely, to alleviate poverty in Africa, promote stability, encourage regional integration, and to facilitate Africa’s integration into the global economy on beneficial terms. The expectation is that beneficiary countries will at some point graduate from the scheme and be fully integrated into the reciprocity-based multilateral trading system. AGOA has been in place for over two decades, and no country has ever volunteered to graduate. The very basis for granting a WTO waiver is the assumption that preferences possess developmental utility for poor countries and could eventually serve as a steppingstone to full integration into the multilateral system based on reciprocal exchange of concessions. As discussed in the previous chapter, many African countries face supply-side constraints and are monocultures, making it harder for them to fill the quotas available in the preference systems. Besides, the global trading system suffers multiple distortions because of subsidies, tariffs, and tariff escalations by advanced industrial economies. Preferential trading schemes do not correct the structural flaws of the system, but a needed lifeline to secure markets access for African products.

The Political Uses of Trade As much as trade was important to the Clinton administration, I would argue that the United States placed unrealistic expectations on what could be achieved through trade relations, especially given weak production capacities on the African continent, the marginal role African countries played in the multilateral trading system, and existence of trade distortions in the global economy. AGOA had limited ability to drive structural transformation in African economies. It did register achievements in boosting special economic zones that earned various countries much needed foreign exchange earnings and sustained jobs in various export sectors in East Africa, West Africa, and Southern Africa. Growth in the apparel sector driven by medium-sized Chinese entrepreneurs who took advantage of trade preferences are covered extensively in Irene Yuan Sun’s work, along with the poor labor and environmental standards (Sun 2017).

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The AGOA scheme has helped facilitate South Africa’s auto and steel exports to the United States. It has also supported apparel exports from Mauritius, Lesotho, and Kenya. As a mark of structural weaknesses in African economies, there is significant underutilization of AGOA preferences: in 2019 only 40% of the available 1835 tariff lines for duty-free exports were used (Engineering News, 5 August 2019). By and large, US imports mainly commodities from the African continent (apart from countries like South Africa), a factor that leaves Africa’s structural profile unchanged. So, while delivering some gains in the apparel and auto sector, AGOA does not induce deep structural transformation. Even under the best of circumstances, transforming Africa’s economic base would require sound institutional foundations, including stronger governance frameworks, adherence to rule of law, and political accountability at the domestic level. Human capital is also important for structural transformation, especially because climbing up the value chain requires a fair amount of skilling. I have discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 how African countries were ignored by the United States and were not beneficiaries of technological diffusion in the same way that, for example, European countries or Japan benefited at the end of the Second World War. Even economic partnerships such as those that exist with China in the form of the Forum for China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) have not induced structural transformation in any noticeable way on the African continent. There is also a dearth of technical and vocational training in the continent to produce a semi-skilled labor force that could drive industrialization. The absence of an institutional climate that fosters entrepreneurship supported by government stunts economic activity and innovation in the continent. It is worth pointing out that technically AGOA is not a “freebie” that its proponents like to project it to be. It allows the United States to exercise control over a country’s political destiny as well as reordering its political economy interests if it so wished. The case of South Africa, discussed below, is instructive. Further, when the US Congress gives a go-ahead for AGOA renewal, it has an expectation that the beneficiary countries would reduce tariff and non-tariff barriers to American products that are exported to sub-Saharan Africa. Through a sleight of hand, AGOA becomes a bilateral trade arrangement, albeit on terms dictated by America. Given the asymmetries of power and capabilities, the bigger economy is likely to benefit more in the long run through both commercial strength and diplomatic muscle.

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US–South Africa Tensions Over Poultry and AGOA Despite its benefits, AGOA also enables the United States to exploit the vulnerabilities of African countries that are dependent on its duty-free market access to achieve its own trade policy and political objectives. Its effects, in this respect, can be harsher than a symmetrically negotiated free trade agreement that has a dispute settlement provision. AGOA has no such dispute settlement mechanism; the US President can revoke a country’s membership at any time using a political or domestic trade policy rationale. The interplays of power in trade arrangements were evident in the stand-off between South Africa and the United States in 2014 and 2018. When South Africa imposed anti-dumping tariffs on US chicken in 2014, the US strong-armed South Africa to moderate those measures under the threat that it would lose its eligibility to AGOA. Similarly, when animal health issues broke out in some of the American states in 2018, compelling South Africa to block imports of US poultry, beef and pork, the United States forced South Africa to concede. The United States raised concerns over anti-dumping duties South Africa imposed on importation of chicken, in particular bone-in chicken, from the United States in 2014. This was at the behest of sectoral interests in the United States, the Poultry and Egg Export Council, whose political representatives in the states of Delaware and Georgia threatened to block South Africa’s participation in AGOA. For a country like South Africa, with a relatively diverse production base, there are no doubt important benefits to be had from AGOA. During the 2014 anti-dumping stand-off, the US and South Africa’s poultry industries entered into negotiations to find a resolution to South Africa’s anti-dumping measures that were aimed at protecting the South African poultry sector. These negotiations commenced at the end of 2014 and were concluded sometime in 2015 and yielded a deal that excluded 65,000 tons of US chicken from anti-dumping measures. With this deal, the way was paved for South Africa to be included in the renewed version of AGOA that will last until 2025. Before the Obama administration included South Africa, the country had to subject itself to a three-year review to determine eligibility. As part of this review, policy instruments such as South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment as well as policy uncertainty and other legislative measures, such as tight regulation on private security companies, that

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the US economic interests were opposed to would come under a sharp spotlight. This review period also coincided with the outbreak of animal diseases (“Avian Flu”) in 20 US states, which saw South Africa imposing another ban on health and safety grounds. This opened another round of technical negotiations over what could or could not be allowed to enter the South African market. The United States muscled its way, with the Obama administration announcing a 60-day deadline to suspend South Africa’s agriculture benefits in AGOA unless South Africa allowed US poultry to enter its market by 31 December 2015. The United States also subjected South Africa to inspection by its own authorities, a humiliating exercise that suggested that the US government had no confidence in South Africa’s own inspection authorities. South Africa eventually conceded as it feared losing AGOA benefits. It is worth pointing out that AGOA does not have permanence, and it is up to beneficiary countries to improve their production capacity and export competitiveness so that they are able to participate meaningfully in international trade when AGOA is no longer in existence. Since July 2020, the United States, under the Trump administration, commenced negotiations for bilateral trade agreements in sub-Saharan Africa, with Kenya as a test case. The United States has high ambitions for this particular trade deal and is pushing for a comprehensive free trade agreement, something that might take a different shape under Joe Biden’s administration. At the end of the first quarter of 2021 there were still no clear US foreign policy themes on Africa. This could be hobbled by America’s obsession with China in its foreign policy, something that could render the United States a reactive power that lacks innovative tools of engagement but simply counters China’s efforts on the African continent. Gavin (2021, p. 19) warns that, “…major power rivalry risks drowning out African agency and Africa’s own agenda.” In the final analysis, it is up to African countries to determine how to engage more effectively with major powers on Africa’s own terms.

US Foreign Policy Priorities in Africa Under Bush Following the end of the Clinton’s administration, President George Bush Jr. formulated new foreign policy priorities for Africa. During his campaign trail, Bush had under-promised on Africa. He said he did not see Africa fitting into US national interests, and he viewed peacebuilding as an ill-conceived exercise (Schraeder 2001, p. 390). The war on terror,

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which became a preoccupation after the 2001 terrorist attacks, justified increase of funding by the United States toward Africa, with much of this directed toward maintaining security and for counterterrorism efforts. Measures such as the Financial Action Task Force were created in the wake of 2001 as a means to curb terrorism and throttle financial lifelines for the terrorists. Many African regions created affiliate structures to the Financial Action Task Force, with various countries establishing the Financial Intelligence Units or Centers. At the regional level, there is the East and Southern Africa Money Laundering Group (ESAAMLG), covering East and Southern Africa; and the Intergovernmental Action Group Against Money Laundering in West Africa (GIABA). All these were institutional legacies that were spawned during the Bush administration and focused on creating a nexus between financial practices and security considerations. As terrorist threats African observers raised questions about the precise position Africa would occupy in America’s foreign policy calculations. These were seen clear as the Bush administration signaled that the African continent would be key in its fight against terrorism. As Soko (2003) put it, “global terrorism has elevated Africa to the top of US strategic priorities in the same way as the fear of communism did at the height of the cold war… In its national security strategy, the US administration has identified state failure as a serious threat to global stability and US national security.” The indifference to Africa that marked the early months of the Bush administration in the wake of 2001 terrorist attacks on American soil, and growing state instability in Africa, was soon overshadowed by an overwhelming sense of urgency to do something about Africa. America quickly developed military networks in East Africa, Sahel and West Africa, regions that it identified as terrorist hotspots, which it sought to neutralize. In in October 2002 the United States established the Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa with the deployment of 1800 US soldiers based in Djibouti to counter threats in Kenya, Somalia and Yemen (Van de Walle 2010, p. 7). The activities of this mission were to be expanded to Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Chad. It was only in 2008 that various defense-oriented initiatives in Africa were folded under the Africom in 2008, a structure that became a coordinating point for counterterrorism in the region. Germany became the new base for the US military activities on Africa, and a budget of $389m was allocated to this initiative (Van de Walle 2010, p. 8).

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It was not just terrorism that was uppermost to US foreign policy considerations, but also the pressure to diversify away from Middle Eastern oil sources and look toward sub-Saharan Africa as a new source of crude oil. With the Persian Gulf presenting the United States with unpredictable security risks, the Gulf of Guinea was to be America’s new commercial playground to meet its insatiable need for oil. The focal points in Bush’s strategy were Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Cameroon, Sao Tome and Nigeria. America’s foreign policy in Africa was both focused and differentiated at the same time. Those areas where Clinton had played a key role, such as AGOA, were left intact; whereas new areas of focus that were centered on security and terrorism, development, and health were boldly defined. The Department of Defense assumed more prominence than the State Department, a development that signaled the Bush administration’s gravitation toward a security thrust. Another feature of US foreign policy under Bush that would evolve over time was that of nation-building. America’s nation-building efforts on the African continent were more pronounced in Sudan where the United States made significant diplomatic investment in peacebuilding and development aid which elevated that country to the position of third largest recipient of US aid behind Iraq and Afghanistan (Hamilton 2011). It was in Sudan that the Bush administration achieved the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that set out power sharing and territorial arrangement that was signed in May 2006 (Gates 2020). The Bush administration also forced Liberia’s Charles Taylor out of power in 2003 and paved the way for democratic rule under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in 2006. America’s foreign policy in Africa had evolved from many years of neglect between the end of the Cold War and the late 1990s when Clinton introduced AGOA. This relationship was growing in the direction of commercial diplomacy and security engagement. Africa was no longer just a basket case that simply required humanitarian attention, even though there were intractable cases of civil strife, but was increasingly seen as ripe for deeper commercial engagement in the service of US national interests, especially in the oil and gas sectors. To secure its national interests, the United States needed to develop a coordinated strategic profile in its foreign policy, a step that would promote regional stability, counterterrorism, human development, and democracy and human rights (Goldwyn and Ebel 2004, p. 6). The

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Bush administration drew a strong link between security and development. During this time America’s foreign aid to Africa surged to $2.5bn in 2000, and seven years later it had tripled to $7.5bn (van de Walle 2010, p. 8). Van de Walle further points out that in 2008, five African countries were among the 15 leading US recipients of US foreign aid, and these were Kenya ($599m), South Africa ($574m), Nigeria ($486m), Ethiopia ($455m) and Sudan ($392m). The Millennium Challenge Account that was signed at the UN-sponsored Millennium Summit in 2000 was endowed with development assistance of $5bn over a threeyear period and would be directed toward countries that showed signs of political liberalization, fight against corruption, respect for human rights, and adherence to the rule of law (Gates 2020, p. 244). The health focus would prove to be the major foreign policy imprint of the Bush administration in Africa. A third of total aid to Africa was for humanitarian assistance, a fifth went to the President’s Emergency Programme for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). Van de Walle (2010, p. 11) points out that the increase in aid did not follow clearly defined strategic thinking on the part of the Bush administration. Perhaps it is this strategic weakness that China would later exploit when it launched the FOCAC. PEPFAR came up for criticism by analysts for its lack of integration into a broader public health strategy aimed at boosting health infrastructure in recipient countries (Van de Wall 2010).African countries still depended on expensive drugs from American pharmaceutical companies. As Sun (2017, p. 156) has observed: “The clearest loser in the current global health approach toward Africa is Africa’s pharmaceutical industry.” This was another case where aid targets the symptoms of a deeper structural problem but does little to solve it. “In their pursuit of a noble goal,” Sun would point out, “the donors doomed African pharmaceutical manufacturers.” (Sun 2017, p. 157). Although good at tackling an immediate challenge, initiatives such as PEPFAR and other narrow donor programs were not designed to build a resilient public health sector in poor countries. They were built for emergencies and not for sustainability. They merely championed interventions on one or two diseases, but the complex structure of the problem, for example a creaking health sector with insufficient human capital remained intact. Capabilities to manufacture drugs was also not something prioritized by these programs. While a great deal of change was introduced in how the United States engaged with Africa during the Bush years, this did not generate sustained economic dividends for the continent. There was no noticeable

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change in Africa’s production structure. The continent remained poorly integrated into the global economy and continued to suffer terms of trade effects. America’s priority was to maximize its own interests either through enhancing security of supply of critical raw material or improving the trading environment for US companies that wanted to do business in this promising market. The health sector, and in particular efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, was perhaps the most enduring success story of US engagement in Africa under the Bush administration, notwithstanding its deficiencies. The old problems related to terms of trade and constraints to moving up the value chain in the production processes remained largely unchanged by the time Bush’s term came to an end. When Bush left office, the United States had been mortified by a major financial crisis and much of its energies would focus inwardly. It took a while for Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama to find his bearings on foreign policy issues. On the whole Obama’s foreign policy legacy in Africa was thin.

Obama’s Tentative Foray in Africa Obama started his term tentatively, with no distinct foreign policy themes on Africa. There was powerful symbolism in having in the White House a president of African origins, and with Kenyan roots. Many began to project their own hopes onto him (Zeleza 2009, p. 225). This was not an insignificant development given the history of race relations in America, and how this had colored perceptions about a white imperial America strutting about the world. There were those who saw in Obama’s ascendance to high office a possibility for improving race relations and making a shift to post-racial America, a fanciful idea given the centuries long endurance of race thinking in the Western world (see Gates 2019). There was also the hope that Obama’s ascendance would boost the projection of America’s soft power and shift the terms of its relations with Africa for the better. His rise was, therefore, greeted with euphoria in many European capitals and on the Africa continent. His singular most important foreign policy statement is perhaps symbolic rather than concrete. Obama’s emergence generated high expectations of what was possible, and perhaps having an African American in the White House brought about a major psychological boost. Some started dreaming about the emergence of a post-racial dispensation in America, a distant possibility. It took less than a decade before this façade crumbled, and the United States was back to its old ways, with ethno-nationalism and race thinking

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enjoying full expression during the Trump administration. With the arrival of Obama there were hopes that the flagging multilateralism would be revived, especially since the global trade agenda had stalled for some time. It was not long after he left office that such hopes would prove forlorn. On the international front, tensions between the United States and China had resurfaced over issues such as climate change. Even though these would later be overcome, with both the United States and China signing a historic Paris climate deal, the Trump administration reversed it. This is one of Obama’s signature achievements that Trump sought to trash, and which Joe Biden restored. Expectations that Obama’s emergence would bring about a sea change in American politics were unrealistic given the relative decline of the United States as a superpower, the economic woes that the United States was going through as a result of the global financial crisis, deepening inequalities within America, the growing chasm between the United States and China over security issues in the Asia Pacific, disagreements over trade and exchange rate, the broken trust between the United States and Europe since the Iraq war, the burden of decision over withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and increasing pressure from US allies such as Japan that were fearful of a rising China and were looking to the United States for protection in the face of a belligerent China. Hilary Clinton, the US Secretary of State under Obama, signaled a shift in US foreign policy priorities by heading to Asia for her first official foreign trip, covering Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and finally China (Clinton 2014, p. 41). Clinton believed that the United States should act as a counter to China in the Asia Pacific and that it should provide a protective cover to other Asian countries. This nascent Clinton doctrine evolved into what became known as Asia Pivot, a coinage credited to Kurt Campbell, the former Assistant Secretary of State for Asia under Secretary of State Clinton. This shift in diplomatic and military attention to Asia antagonized China, which was already hyper-sensitive to interference in its sphere of influence and was concerned that America wanted to contain its rise in the same manner that it undercut the expansion of Soviet communism. As part of this Asia Pivot, Obama’s administration would expend significant capital finalizing the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was to be a comprehensive trade agreement with 11 other Asia Pacific countries and covering a broad negotiating agenda that went beyond trade in goods and services to incorporate regulatory issues—something that was aimed

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at counter-balancing China in that region. The mega-regional deal was spoiled by the Trump administration. There was little energy left for Obama to devote to the African continent, leaving this area until much later in his term of office. It was only during his second term that Obama developed some ideas on how America would engage the African continent. During his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa in July 2009, Obama’s first stop was Ghana where he set out the outlines of his thinking on Africa’s challenges. In his speech he emphasized the importance of good governance and civil society as critical pillars for development. He also alluded to the value of mutual responsibility between the United States and Africa as the basis of partnership, and that the United States would support efforts underway to improve governance on the African continent. In his view, solutions to Africa’s governance challenges were in the hands of Africa’s youth; and that through a leadership development initiative championed by his administration, Africa’s youth would in the long run be pathfinders for democracy and good governance. He seemed not to have much hope that the African continent could make a quick turnaround. Apart from his strident criticism of corruption and abuse of human rights by autocratic regimes, and his focus on aid to improve food security, there was little that was original in Obama’s foreign policy ideas. He stressed many of the themes of his predecessors, including promoting trade and investment promotion, renewable energy (which was a new focus to be realized through the Power Africa program under USAID), supporting the health sector through America’s global health strategy, and supporting conflict resolution efforts through a strong regional security architecture spearheaded by Africans themselves as well as through an increased role of the Africom in Africa. Obama did not want the United States to be entangled in African conflicts or be drawn into a donor role. In his calculation, the supply of leadership was the responsibility of Africans themselves, and he saw his role as that of a facilitator through creating the Young African Leadership Initiative. He did not possess the bravado of Clinton who sought to frame US role in the world as that of a leader, moving in spaces that were left vacant by the collapse of the Soviet empire; nor did he undertake daring and bold initiatives of the kind Bush set in motion. Obama had to chart a new path, something that was difficult to do given the weight of the domestic challenges, including the effects of the global financial crisis that

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his administration had to bear. In Africa, the ground on trade and investment had been laid through the work undertaken by Clinton; and Obama was going to either expand or maintain that architecture of foreign policy relationship, while complementing it with new project-oriented initiatives. In a speech that Obama gave in 2001 in Cape Town, South Africa, he reiterated some of the themes he set out during his Ghana visit two years earlier. He committed to launch trade missions, renew AGOA and promote investment by US companies—all programs that were initiated by Clinton and accelerated by Bush. Further, Obama set out to promote food security; bolster initiatives aimed at the health sector; and continue to support measures toward combatting HIV/AIDS. There were four broad themes that were underlined by Obama in his Africa engagement: promoting opportunity and development; spurring economic growth, trade, and investment; advancing peace and security; and strengthening democratic institutions (Clinton 2014, p. 270). He also publicly announced a new US energy initiative—Power Africa—that had a goal of doubling access to power in Africa, with an initial investment of $7bn, to be delivered through public–private partnerships. The latter initiative, even though one of his flagship policies, lacked scale. More importantly, though, it powered those parts of the African continent that had no hope of accessing electricity. The Power Africa initiative came on the back of domestic initiatives in the wake of the global financial crisis, with Obama intent on directing some of the resources earmarked for American economic recovery toward diversifying the energy mix in the United States. America had less need for seeking oil in Africa and the Middle East since huge shale gas deposits were discovered in the country around 2008. In Africa, the new USsupported energy play was to be based on structuring partnership between governments and the private sector to expand renewable energy production and to increase the availability of electricity in various countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Obama’s flagship initiative—the Young African Leaders Initiative—was meant to be his legacy initiative which he hoped would have long-term value in driving democratic change in Africa. Toward the end of his term, he convened a summit with African leaders in Washington, and this proved to be a weak attempt at catching up with China. At the time when Obama took office in 2009, China overtook the United States as Africa’s leading trade partner and its investments on the African continent were surging. American leadership were concerned that on diplomatic stakes,

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their country was outwitted by China in Africa. China’s relationship with Africa was more concrete and focused on infrastructure building and soft loans. There were, however, weaknesses in this relationship, such as for example the poor quality of workmanship by the Chinese in some of the infrastructure projects in countries like Zambia; poor labor standards; ignoring of environmental harm; and lack of product diversification in Africa’s exports to China. The United States was unable to exploit these weaknesses. It had no clear strategic sense of how to carve its own niche in engaging African countries beyond rhetoric or discrete projects that were often uncoordinated and lacking strategic anchorage.

Trump and Africa: An Absent Foreign Policy Despite the numerous initiatives that successive US leaders have formulated and tested in Africa, there is little that has shifted in a positive direction. Africa is still marginalized in the global economy. It is not fully served by the various multilateral institutions and remains a humanitarian case in the eyes of the West, something that is likely to be exacerbated by the looming debt crisis on the back of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the Trump era, America had no coherent foreign policy for Africa. His memorable reference to the African continent is when he lumped it with Haiti and El Salvador, calling them “shithole” countries. This was in the context of a meeting Trump held with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House on immigration issues. Trump took a dim view on protecting immigrants from Africa, Haiti, and El Salvador, expressing a preference for immigrants from Norway (Dawsey 2018). The most prominent initiative of the Trump administration in the continent was the signing of the free trade agreement with Kenya in July 2020. This was to serve as a template on U.S. would forge comprehensive trade agreements with African countries beyond the lifespan of the current Africa Growth and Opportunity Act cycle that ends in 2025. Apart from the trade deal with Kenya, and warm relations between Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta and Trump, there was little nothing much on foreign policy front happened between the United States and Africa. There was the much-publicized Ivanka Trump visit to Ethiopia and Cote d’Ivoire to promote empowerment of women entrepreneurs. This was a once-off tour with concrete program implemented. On the US–Kenya FTA, America’s negotiating position covered 24 chapters that include trade in goods which would encompass both tariffs

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and non-tariff goods to enhance market access for U.S. industrial and agricultural products; technical barriers to trade, including sanitary and phytosanitary measures; customs and trade facilitation; rules of origin to support production capacity; standard-setting processes that could constitute technical barriers to trade; regulatory harmonization; trade in services including telecommunications and financial services; digital trade in goods and services and cross-border data flows; investment rules; intellectual property; regulatory standards on state-owned enterprises; labor standards; and various other technical issues. For its part, Kenya adopted almost all the U.S. negotiating objectives. From these negotiations, Kenya expects to gain benefits such as technical and capacity-building support to aid its full participation in the FTA and enable its economy’s competitiveness. As such, it entered these negotiations aware of power imbalances, which will inevitably produce outcomes skewed in U.S.’s favor. Rarely does technical assistance yield benefits for diversifying the structure of the economy. More substantive benefits can be gained by pushing for market access for diversified products. While some things might change or slowdown under the Joe Biden administration, some things are likely to remain the same. The U.S. has a history of aggressively negotiating trade deals, especially since George Bush Jr. America will likely set its sights on achieving a more comprehensive and reciprocal trade relations with African countries beyond AGOA. Importantly, African countries should deploy solid technical capabilities when negotiating with external actors, share information among themselves something that can be made possible through an AU trade negotiating technical support instrument that coordinates with regional economic communities and individual countries that are entering into trade negotiations. Further, in the actual negotiations, Africans should insist on generous transitional periods for liberalizing sectors designated infant industry, push for technology transfers and joint ventures, and secure concessions for certain local content thresholds.

Concluding Reflections To a considerable extent, African leaders bear responsibility for the lack of development in the continent. Institutional decay and the related ills of corruption, lack of accountability, and weak democratic participation by citizens explain much of Africa’s failure. I have covered many of these institutional deficiencies in Chapters 1 and 2. While we may never witness

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the form of generosity offered by the United States to Europe as part of the Marshall Plan, there are pathways that Africans can explore to achieve their own development. There are options for the African continent which I discuss in the next three chapters. For such options to bear enduring outcomes, African countries will still require progressive international partnerships, especially for knowledge sharing, technical capacity-building, technology diffusion, investment in structural diversification, and increased market access. Crucially, African countries will need to set a clear framework of standards on how they engage across these dimensions. If the African continent is to change the way the Western world sees it, African leaders and decision-makers will need to take seriously the development of Africa’s agency, an asset that rests on proper utilization of the continent’s resources, building effective governance systems, creating sound institutions that are inclusive, and have a clear sense of economic interests and how to promote these in bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations. The next chapter turns its attention to development paradigms, institutions and the importance of structural diversification that is underpinned by digital progress.

References Alden, Chris. 2000. “From ‘Neglect to Virtual Engagement’: The United States and Its New Paradigm for Africa”. African Affairs, July, 9(396): 355–371. Bhagwati, Jagdish. 2004. In Defense of Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Breslin, Shaun. 2011. “The ‘China Model’ and the Global Crisis: From Friedrich List to a Chinese Mode of Governance”. International Affairs, 87(6): 1323– 1343. Christopher, Warren. 1995. “America’s Leadership, America’s Opportunity”. Foreign Policy, 95: 6–27. Chua, Amy. 2018. Political Tribes. New York: Bloomsbury. Clinton, Hillary. 2014. Hard Choices. New York: Simon & Schuster. Dawsey, Josh. 2018. “Trump Derides Protections for Immigrants from ‘Shithole’ Countries”. Washington Post, 12 January. Friedman, Thomas. 2005. The World Is Flat. New York: Allan Lane. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 2018. Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Garten, Jeffrey. 1998. The Big Ten. New York: Basic Books.

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Gates, Louis Gates. 2019. The Stony Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin. Gates, Robert. 2020. Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World. New York: Knopf. Gavin, Michelle. 2021. “Major Power Rivalry in Africa”. Discussion Paper Series on Managing Global Disorder No. 5, May. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/report/major-power-rivalry-africa. Goldwyn, David L., and Robert E. Ebel. 2004. “Rising US Stakes in Africa”. In A Report of the Africa Policy Advisory Panel. Washington, DC: Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Greenspan, Alan, and Adrian Wooldridge. 2018. Capitalism in America. New York: Allen Publishers. Gurr, Ted. 1970. Why Men Rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hamilton, Rebecca. 2011. “US Played Key Role in Southern Sudan’s Long Journey to Independence”. The Atlantic, 9 July. https://www.theatlantic. com/international/archive/2011/07/us-played-key-role-in-southern-sud ans-long-journey-to-independence/241660/. Korwa, G. Adar. 1998. “The Clinton Administration and Africa: A View from Nairobi, Kenya”. Journal of Opinion, 26(2): 70–74. Rodrik, Dani. 2017. Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ruggie, John G. 1982. “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order”. International Organisation, 36(2): 379–415. Schraeder, Peter. 2001. “Forget the Rhetoric and Boost the Geopolitics: Emerging Trends in the Bush Administration’s Policy Towards Africa, 2001”. African Affairs, 100(400): 387–404. Soko, Mills. 2003. “Africa Needs to Resolve Where It Stands in the Global War on Terror”. Business Day, 28 January. Sun, Irene Yuan. 2017. The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Van de Walle, Nicolas. 2010. “US Policy Towards Africa: The Bush Legacy and the Obama Administration”. African Affairs, 109 (434): 1–21. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. 2009. Barack Obama and African diasporas: Dialogues and dissensions. Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing.

PART III

Digital Futures and African Agency

CHAPTER 7

Paradigms, Inclusive Institutions, and Structural Transformation

Africa’s development will not follow a linear path. African countries have diverse political, economic, and institutional structures. There is also no singular economic model they will adopt to realize a better destiny. They will draw lessons from other countries, tap into indigenous knowledge systems, find better ways of collaborating to aggregate their capabilities, and ride on the wave of digital changes that are upon us. It will be a multi-track, multispeed, and dynamic development, in part experimental and in part adopting strategies that have been tried and tested in similar contexts. There are conflicting narratives and paradigms about the African continent and its development prospects. Since the end of colonialism until mid-1990s Africa was seen as a failure and a humanitarian case. There was a fleeting moment in the early years of independence when idealism seized many African countries, and citizens hoped that their leaders would usher them to nirvana. These dreams soon turned into nightmares, with many newly independent African states enduring military coups, civil wars, and famine. This picture was affixed in the Western imagination of Africans. The seeds of destruction were sown in the colonial era, the management of the transition from the colonists to the new elites, and by the venality of Africa’s postcolonial elite who had no interest in building inclusive

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institutions and developing the economic capacities of their country and the capabilities of Africans. In the post-1990 era, the negative views about Africa were, for a brief moment, eclipsed by notions of Africa Rise. However, with every major international crisis exposed Africa’s lack of resilience. In the three decades since 1990, commentary on Africa has shifted several times from that of a dark continent to a continent filled with boundless possibilities. Africa’s institutional and fiscal strength could not match the severe crises in the 1990s and those that confronted it in the first two decades of the twentyfirst century. These crises included the global financial crisis in 2008, the commodity down-turn in 2014, and the Covid-19 pandemic, which threatens to trigger a sovereign debt crisis in many African countries. External shocks have always exposed Africa’s lack of resilience. There are, however, promising signs of long-term recovery on the back of institutional reforms undertaken by several African countries; there also possibilities for progress that lie in the deepening of Africa’s economic integration and advances toward digital transformation, a theme that I explore in greater detail in Chapters 8 and 9.

Paradigms of Development The idea of modernity implies a supersession of traditional forms of life by what Jürgen Habermas refers to as the “structures of purposive rationality” or “means-end rationality” (Habermas 1987, pp. 1–2). The very emergence of modernity had the pretense of seeking “the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). For Gordon (2014), the modern does not possess singularity or homogeneity but reflects a variety of tensions through which the present emerges. This tension can also be in the form of a dialogue between the past and the present, without presupposing that modernity signifies the death of tradition or that it represents an end of history, a thesis that was also offered by Fukuyama (1992). The emphasis on modernity as simply about following a linear path to knowledge production that discards all past (or traditional) forms of knowing as it moves to higher stages, misses the importance of context and how tradition, as Stasi puts it, “is always engaged dialectically with the present” (Stasi 2011). Samir Amin who represents the radical strand in dependencia school, cautioned that linearity in phases of development accentuates polarization in the future (Amin 1994). As he put it in his

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critique of the modernist perspective: “There is a strong tendency to read history as continuous development, with each step preparing for the next. This method tends to diminish the impact of moments of rupture and accelerated or abrupt change, especially social, political, technological, and ideological revolutions” (Amin 1994, p. 81). Modernity as an economic system cannot be entirely discarded. Even Marx conceived of it as carrying transformative possibilities in developing productive capabilities in a society. However, he was linear in his mapping of different phases from feudalism to capitalism to communism or in applying his formulaic framework of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis, gave no room to the Hegelian idea that opposites or contradictions could be reconciled. Traditional modes of knowing can offer useful sources of inspiration for how African countries chart their own innovation path through learning, applying, and interacting. A crude view of modernity would foreclose options for evaluating what has worked in Africa in the past, including in the precolonial times, or to improve on indigenous knowledge systems— including social and production structures—and blend these with new innovations that have been implemented successfully elsewhere. In the field of innovation, Clayton Christensen caution against onesize-fits-all models, and places premium on context and discovery-driven process that is purposeful (Christensen and Raynor 2003). Christenson’s conceptual frame was aimed at companies and makes the basic point that incumbent companies that have a sustained innovation lead tend to be blindsided by disruptive companies that overcome their resource constraints to churn out products and services for an overlooked segment of the market. Nonetheless, there is in Christensen’s work an important lesson for countries that are thinking about using innovation to create economic prosperity. The lesson is about how governments can transform their resources and capabilities for supporting market-creating innovation that in turn generate new jobs and other economic opportunities. In later work, The Prosperity Paradox, Christensen et al. (2019, p. 12) argued that, “for nations to sustain long-term prosperity, they ultimately need good governments that foster and support a culture of innovation.” When the idea of development gained attention in economics debates in the 1950s, a growing number of African countries were influenced by a heterodox mix of approaches such as the mechanical application of Keynesian demand management that drew on the postwar reconstruction of Europe, the efficacy of the Marshall Plan, and Soviet-style dirigisme and

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the virtues of central planning. None of these could be perfectly applicable on the African institutional setting. These perspectives ignored the context and were not geared toward market-creating institutions. Many of these views focused narrowly on growth, which is no doubt important, but insufficient to create shared prosperity, especially in the absence of inclusive institutions. There are countries in the non-Western world that advanced their industrialization from the end of the Second World War that did not appropriate the entire gamut of Western economic frameworks—and their modernization was not a copy and paste exercise, although there was a fair amount of selective borrowing from other countries’ models. Japan insisted on technology diffusion through licensing while preserving the Zaibatsu model among its firms. As Johnson (1995, p. 21) has pointed out, Japan evolved into “a capitalist society in which the private property rights are real, defensible in law and inheritable, but one that prefers much higher degree of plan rationality in its economic policies than almost any other capitalist society.” Japan is, for Johnson, a country that is a modernized society yet challenges the modernization theory. The point is that African governments do not have to imbibe everything from the West— or the East for that matter—as the only recipe for economic progress. Traditional social values embedded in Confucianism and the role of the state in managing capitalism played no small part in shaping Japan’s brand of modernization. China managed its economic development within the paradigm of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” denoting a commitment to a trial-and-error mode of reform, in part drawing from the past and in part envisioning a grand image of China on the global stage in the future. China also gradually opened up incorporating Western lessons in some respects and preserving core dimensions of the country’s culture and socio-political framework in other respects (Xi 2014, pp. 7–22). At the heart of this “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is a balance between what the Chinese President Xi Jinping characterizes as the development of productive forces and freeing them up to ignite economic development that is people-centered; sustainable development that considers ecology; embrace of innovation and reform in governance and the economy; the building of institutions; and achievement of balanced or harmonious development.

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Development need not follow a linear path along a predetermined straight line of modernization. A seminal work that formed the theoretical foundations of the modernization perspective was Rostow’s 1960 work, “The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-Communist Manifesto.” Rostow (1960) argued that: “It is possible to identify in all societies, in their economic dimensions, as lying within one of five categories: the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of mass-consumption.” This presented economic growth as linear, and as a universal process that can be applied to all societies uniformly to produce the miracle of development. Rostow’s work was essentially a survey of how the Western state had come to develop. Rostow took little cognizance of the developing world’s unique history, assuming that a universal—or one-size-fits-all— approach could solve development problems in all contexts, irrespective of social, cultural, and institutional conditions that prevailed. Furthermore, Rostow’s modernization perspective ignored the external environment with which the developing world had to contend in its quest for economic growth. This perspective lacked imagination about what could be possible through technological innovation to leapfrog stages of growth. Irene Yuan Sun’s work on “The Next Factory of the World” fits this paradigm. Its key argument is that Africa is experiencing something like the “flying geese model” that was once depicted in Japan’s role in relocating low-end and labor-intensive activities to other East Asian economies as it moved up the value chain. That context was characterized by a more benign international trading environment. Both Japan and East Asian countries benefited from the US market access largesse. Japan drew on technology diffusion from American firms. The character of the global environment—the Cold War conditions—and America’s determination to ensure Japan’s hegemonic incorporation, as well as the adoption of export-led growth, constituted a confluence of factors—including Japan’s idiosyncratic approaches—that propelled its economic prosperity. A joke about Japan in the 1950s was that the Japanese recession was when there was a slowdown in growth to a rate normal for most other countries (Solomon 1977, p. 111). A similar trend would be observed in China five decades later. Many African countries today compete with other developing countries like Bangladesh, Mexico, and Vietnam for labor-intensive manufacturing, and global supply chains take into consideration geographic proximity to final markets and efficiency factors related to the cost of production.

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Much of the success that came with the relocation of Chinese production activities in African countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, and Lesotho, both capital intensive and labor-intensive that Sun covers in her work on Africa’s manufacturing, ride on program such as AGOA. AGOA’s limit, as we pointed out in the last chapter, is its lack of permanence or even a dispute resolution mechanism. Except for major economies such as South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Kenya that have relatively large consumer markets, it is difficult to imagine African countries developing strong comparative advantage beyond textiles and possibly agro-processing. That is not to say industrialization should not be attempted. The kind of industrialization that will break the vicious cycle of Africa’s dependence on the West is of a smart type, based on building sound institutions, developing human capital, and repositioning the state to play an active role in investing in innovation. This should also entail fusing indigenous knowledge systems with conventional knowledge structures, requiring a paradigm shift from the binary tension between tradition and modernity.

Looking Beyond Structural Transformation Lewis (1954) articulated the idea of “dualistic” economies in the developing world. The Arthur W Lewis model of growth reflected on a theoretical and policy synthesis for structural change based on modernization and industrialization that found broad appeal in Africa, starting with the post-1960s period of independence. This perspective assumed that the experience of the West could be replicated by moving away from subsistence-based agriculture to a modern industrial economy (Qobo and Le Pere 2018). The initial euphoria about industrialization in postcolonial Africa saw a decline in agriculture’s status as the mainstay of economic life. At the same time, preference was given to capital formation for industrialization, urbanization, and technological transformation (Qobo and Le Pere 2018). The result was rising food imports and a failure of export earnings to grow fast enough to generate the required industrial inputs. This reality forced African countries to seek more external support in the form of aid and to put pressure on the IMF in the 1960s to address their concerns related to terms of trade effects. As we saw in Chapter 2 these efforts failed. Africa’s dualistic economies consisted of a traditional sector that was focused on subsistence farming on the one hand; with a more modern,

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urban sector oriented to production and commercialization of agriculture on the other hand. The aim of public policy was then to develop and expand the modern sector, co-opting those in the traditional sector to offer their labor in the expanded industrialized economy. In essence, modernity would expand to swallow up the primordial features of society. Dependency theory emerged as a response to and a critique of modernist notions of linearity in economic growth. Dependency theory contained various strands of thought ranging from approaches that championed reforms of the capitalist system to a more radical version of Samir Amin that sought autarky or the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production (Amin 1990). The central contention of dependency theory was that developing countries were inserted into the global economic system on unequal basis, they were cast on the periphery, and their position in the international division of labor made it impossible for them to succeed. They participated on generally unfavorable terms as both price and policy-takers and with terms of trade stacked heavily against them. The flow of resources from the periphery to the core economies ensured that developing states remained impoverished, underdeveloped and heavily dependent on developed countries. Walter Rodney, who expanded on this view, identified the core economic problem of developing regions as that of unevenness in the patterns of development between industrialized and underdeveloped countries and offered an expansive definition of development as more than just economic wellbeing, but mastery of the environment (Rodney 1972). Such mastery could also be understood as economic emancipation.

Is Africa Rising or Varied Development Paths? In recent times the idea of Africa’s rise has gained popularity. This idea is, in large part, articulated within the conceptual framework of modernity. This began in the late 1990s with literature celebrating African Lions on the move (a title of a Mckinsey Report in 2010) as a comparative play on Asian tigers. Some of these glowing accounts have been in the form of books such as Emerging Africa by the Nigerian scholar Moghalu (2014), the works of Sun (2017) and Leke et al. (2018), as well as volumes of other reports by companies such as EY and PwC. The work of Sun (2017) on Africa as the “Next Factory of the World” falls under this rose-tinted literature.

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Africa is, no doubt, emerging, but this will not necessarily assume some linear progression. Despite Sun’s fixation on the idea of low-end industrialization as Africa’s destiny, her observation that Africa’s growth will be uneven or take a multi-track form is more nuanced, and perhaps closer to reality than the more generalized accounts of “Africa Rise.” African countries will likely follow a variable geometry in their development, marked by multispeed and multi-track progression. Some countries may slip and fall behind several times before they learn the right lessons. Yet, still, Africa’s industrialization is unlikely to assume the same character as other Asian countries. Regional pivots such as Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have the potential to create a massive wave that could push the continent forward, and these countries need to consciously show demonstration effect in the way they manage and implement their economic policies. They also need to take critical public policy actions: retool their institutions, enhance the rule of law, and build state capacity for effective governance and quality of life improvements for their citizens. They must work more collaboratively in reinforcing continental institutions to deepen trade, expand infrastructure, harmonize standards and regulations, improve conditions for doing business, aggregate public investment in infrastructure and innovation, and promote continent-wide economic development. As many scholars have noted, African countries need structural diversification. However, this will not be enough to lift the continent if there is no serious thinking about improving Africa’s technological profile. At some point, it was unthinkable that Singapore, China, and South Korea could become high-growth and innovation-led economies. At some point, these countries also experienced corruption and poor governance. There was a time when these countries’ per capita income was below those of some of the African countries that are still poor today. Yet through imaginative and bold leadership, combined with sound institutions and an ecosystem that fostered innovation, they were able to power ahead and overtake many of the advanced industrial economies in the West. The cases painted above show what is possible when countries place a premium on leadership and commit themselves to build what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson refer to as inclusive institutions that foster growth in contrast to those that are extractive and constitute a hindrance to growth (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). For Africa, it is the right kind of leadership combined with sound and inclusive institutions that

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is required for creating conditions for prosperity. As Lee Kuan Yew has reminded us, it is of no use to have democratic institutions without effective leadership that is ethical, as examples of constitutions with pretensions of democratic commitment that were left behind by former colonialists in Africa have proven (Yew 2013). Effective leadership does not mean having a strong man who runs roughshod over society in the name of pursuing development.

Possibilities That Lie in Structural Diversification In explaining structural diversification, the development economists Ricardo Hausmann and Bailey Klinger, suggests that this entails a shift in the character of production to a higher level of sophistication—a narrow modernity path—or what they refer to as the near “product spaces.” Product spaces, according to Hausmann and Klinger (2006), refer to a network of relations between products. A basic example is that of a shift from primary agriculture to certain forms of agro-processing; yarn production to full garment; or shifts within clusters of related electronics from a simple semi-conductor to a more complex microchip. According to Hausmann and Klinger’s view, countries should think of their development in terms of an incremental approach that builds on their existing collective know-how (or clusters of existing activities within a product space), where they make a gradual shift from one space to an adjacent but more sophisticated one. While on the surface this seems to make sense for diversifying the production base, this conceptual frame pigeonholes countries by their “collective know-hows” or known comparative advantage at a fixed point in time. It does not fully explore what is yet to be known or could be known, for example, through research and development processes or taking experimental leaps in ways that were, for example, possible for Nokia to move from rubber production to electronics, a process that was also evident in companies such as Samsung. This limited approach to adjacent product spaces articulated by Hausmann and Klinger ignores the role of technology in bridging know-how or significant chasms that may exist between different product spaces. As discussed in the next chapter, when governments provide public investment in innovation and in digital infrastructure, they can help their countries to leapfrog product spaces while simultaneously undertaking structural shifts in product spaces. Such structural shifts need not be conceived narrowly in terms of “adjacencies,” but

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they can also entail giant leaps both of imagination—or what some refer to as moonshots—and through public investment in innovation, which is a perspective associated with Mariana Mazzucato (2021). Lopes and Kararach (2019) trace the idea of structural transformation in the 1950s and 1960s and note that this is mainly based on experiences of Western countries. The idea of structural transformation rests largely on the notion of catching up with advanced industrial economies and, in more recent times, refers to how developing countries in Africa could replicate the developmental experiences of East Asian tigers. In the conception of Lopes and Kararach, the notion of structural transformation “shifted from a simple reallocation of economic activity across three broad sectors, namely agriculture, industry, and services that accompanied the process of modern economic growth but also encompassed challenges of sustainability and enhanced workers’ productivity” (Lopes and Kararach 2019, p. 14). The idea of structural transformation has not been sufficiently expanded to consider the growth of productive capabilities in non-linear fashion or to express consciousness of distributive questions related to socio-economic groups that benefit the most from growth. Green growth or digital transition are not factored into these linear conceptions of structural transformation. Nor are dynamic shifts resulting from technological breakthroughs considered. In Sun’s view, Africa’s salvation lies in labor-intensive production processes at the low-end, characterized by rows upon rows of sewing machines producing garments for global supply chains that are conduits of major retailers in the developed world (Sun 2017). This perspective’s narrow assumption is that the international division of labor is static, and technological shifts have neutral effects or shifts are only possible through product shifts to adjacencies. I devote Chapters 8 to discussing possibilities for innovation beyond the limited frame of structural transformation.

Africa’s Structural Transformation and Global Value Chains There is no doubt about Africa’s need for diversification and industrialization to participate effectively in global value chains, but this structural shift should not be conceived in linear terms. There are risks that face African countries, especially considering changes in the global value chains against the backdrop of an uncertain and volatile global economy. There

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are also shocks associated with Covid-19, which have seen many countries relocate their supply chains and sourcing strategies domestically and regionally, and away from distant shores. It is not just the Covid-19 that has cast light on risks in global value chains but also a host of other factors. As the Global Mckinsey Institute that studied shifts in global value chains has noted, unpredictable risks and external shocks have led many manufacturers to rethink their supply chains to avoid risks associated with pandemics, financial crises, terrorism, and extreme weather shocks (Mckinsey 2020). African countries with relatively larger markets—or that have proximity to larger markets—such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa are, as Sun (2017) also point out, more resilient than those reliant on the rest of the world. Growing investment in artificial intelligence through industrial robotics in manufacturing and optimization of supply chains constitutes another source of risk in the form of decimation of labor-intensive sectors in agriculture and manufacturing. As Schwab (2016, p. 92) has pointed out, “robots and algorithms increasingly substitute capital for labor, while investing (or, more precisely, building a business in the digital economy) becomes less capital intensive.” Africa’s leading AI scholar, Tshilidzi Marwala (2020) has observed that the future of work across sectors, including in labor-intensive and white-collar services sectors will be unlike the past. Structural transformation in the old modernization frame will not be sufficient if it does not prepare African countries to participate meaningfully in the digital economy through capturing a share of dispersed global value chains. A thriving digital economy’s key success factors include well-developed state capabilities that enable the state to drive public investment in innovation, upgrade the human capital in society, set the right policies that are aimed at achieving growth and inclusion, and clear regulatory frameworks to both encourage and discipline the markets. One of the mission-critical outcomes for Africa, in the long run, is to build a digital economy that promotes greater inclusion. Since many of the technologies the African continent relies on come from outside, it is vital that the continent develops standards and regulatory frameworks to govern the sets of relationships between technology suppliers and African consumers, as well as establish clear rules of the game regarding access, storage and use of data. The blueprint for structural transformation does not have to be conceived narrowly in modernization terms. Instead, African economies should aim for greater value addition to existing commodities, for

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example, building capacities for refining of crude oil, as is the case with the entrepreneur Aliko Dangote’s initiative in Nigeria; insistence on capturing the value of processing and polishing of diamonds, as Botswana has done with its mining, where the government is in partnership with De Beers; building a pipeline of finished garment production for exports into the United States through the AGOA initiative, driven via various special economic zones in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho and Mauritius; and tapping into indigenous knowledge systems as part of charting an innovation path on the African continent. It is worth stressing that Africa cannot just be content with taking one step up the value chain or simply be locked in production of textiles at the mercy of Chinese entrepreneurs or be wholly reliant on outsiders for essential supplies. Africa should not fixate on moving to adjacent product spaces. It is important that the continent’s leaders develop a strong drive toward building the next frontiers of the manufacturing value chains, services and digital technologies; commit public resources for innovationled growth. If there are any obstacles to Africa’s leap into a different future, it is the weak infrastructure of governance and lack of imagination. If African governments are serious about their countries’ economic progress, they will do all that is necessary to build institutions, create an enabling environment for investments and technology diffusion, and invest resources in education and innovation.

The Role of Institutions in Africa’s Development Africa’s success hinges partly on building institutional capabilities and investing in human capital, including creating an ecosystem of digital economy underpinned by digital skills. Critical capabilities such as skills, institutions and infrastructure enable countries to create the basis for diversification. Further, public investment in innovation broadens the possibilities for dynamic growth. Apart from building value chains in production as well as supporting service-based supply chains, there are various other possibilities Africans should explore in digital transformation and green transition. This is not to be done blindly given the vast endowments of natural resources that African countries possess. That these commodities have in the past been sources of conflicts and produced “Dutch Disease” in shifting resources from other economic activities, for example, agriculture and industry, and inflated the exchange rate in ways that erode export competitiveness of manufacturing sectors, does not

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mean the African continent is condemned to commodity dependence. It should not mean that resource-rich countries should turn their back on natural endowments but transform these resources to create sustained prosperity. They should sweat these natural resources while seeking pathways of incremental innovations to diversify away from them in the long run. Apart from East Asian examples, African countries can also draw lessons from Scandinavian countries like Norway that have managed to put their natural resources to greater use using sovereign wealth funds as a store of wealth and an instrument to drive diversification between commodity dependence. Africa’s economic failure is not the result of an abundance of natural resources, but weak institutions, deficiencies in governance frameworks, and poor state capacities for planning and execution. Various scholars have offered rich perspectives on the importance of institutions in creating conditions that are propitious for development. Neoclassical institutionalists such as Douglas North have stressed the efficacy of institutions such as property rights in buttressing the structure of exchange through ensuring predictability and certainty in economic transactions (North 1991, pp. 33–35). Political scientists such as Robert Rotberg have cast a spotlight on the African continent’s need to overcome infrastructural (or hard institutional) deficit to create a supportive environment for sustained development (Rotberg 2013, pp. 116–133). Pan-Africanist thinkers such as Ali Mazrui and Francis Wiafe-Amoako have emphasized that institutions underlie state stability, security, and development (Mazrui and Wiafe-Amoako 2015). Postcolonial leaders such as Tom MBoya placed a premium on capital investment and skilled citizens as critical inputs for development (Mboya 1969, p. 189). Former Nigeria’s finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has stressed the importance of institutional and regulatory reforms as critical success factors (Okonjo-Iweala 2012). Scholars such as Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) have underlined the importance of creating institutions that promote economic success. If there is any lesson to be learnt from the wasted years that followed Africa’s independence, it is that governance (including the presence of sound institutions) and leadership matter for Africa’s prosperity. The African continent has, undoubtedly, come a long way since the era marked by uncertainty and false starts from the end of colonialism to what would become known as the lost decade of the 1980s in the wake of the world economic recession and debt crisis. There are many experiences, good

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and bad that the next generation of African leaders can draw from in navigating different pathways for governing their countries and setting the continent on a better development trajectory. It is now clear that merely having leaders who are progressive in name only and having a prefix “Democratic” in front of their country’s name does not translate to good governance or quality of life outcomes. As Crawford Young has noted, “despite the numerous examples of a multiparty reality, the doctrine of single-party rule became a continental dogma all at once” (Young 2012, p. 128). Many postcolonial elites had shallow commitments to constitutional democracy; they much preferred personal rule. This weakened the basis for economic growth on the back of thriving market economies. We have also learnt from the postcolonial era that state interventionism without a sound normative base and capabilities is not enough to create economic prosperity. Failure to advance economic development and build quality institutions has meant that the African continent remains locked at the bottom of the global power hierarchy and that its participation in the global economic system would be stunted for many decades. The future does not have to mirror the past. Sound institutions, a purposive state, and robust capabilities that can support structural transformation beyond just a gradual shift to adjacent product spaces will need to be built, along with a search for technological breakthroughs.

Toward Variable Geometry in Development Paths African countries will not prosper all at once, even with the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Rather, African countries will follow a variable geometry or multi-track progression, based on the quality of their institutions, governance framework, and the types of economic policies they implement individually. It is worth looking at the performance of key regional African countries, including regional powers, in the second decade of the 2000s. This is to demonstrate the difficulties of undertaking reforms and policymaking contingencies, especially in the wake of external shocks. The picture depicted below may likely change in the future. The policy actions required to create positive shifts will remain relevant for many years to come.

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Nigeria Some of the key policy actions undertaken by the Nigerian government in the first decade of the new millennium included a sustained fight against corruption; restructuring of the public services; privatization of the stateowned enterprises; de-regulation of the telecommunications sector; and cutting red tape to improve the conditions of doing business. Before the 2008 global financial crisis, Nigeria’s non-oil sector had been the main driver of growth, with services contributing about 57% to the economy; manufacturing 9%, and agriculture 21%. The government’s economic development strategy placed a strong emphasis on building the non-oil sector. In its Vision 2020, Nigeria set out to promote an open, market-based economy that prioritizes sectors such as ICT services, telecoms equipment manufacturing, building ICT industry clusters, improving the performance of the agricultural sector, increasing manufacturing value-add as a proportion of the GDP, and improving the finance sector (African Development Bank 2015). Further, this vision cast Nigeria as one of the 20 largest economies in the world by 2020. In 2020, Nigeria was the 27th largest economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP and the 24th largest in terms of purchasing power parity—not far behind its vision. In the early to late 2000s, Nigeria’s economy took a positive shape as a result of the measures that were implemented by the reformists under President Olusegun Obasanjo, mainly spearheaded by the finance ministry. As a result of these reforms, the share of services in Nigeria’s economy has doubled since 2008. In Nigeria, service-related sectors that have shown good performance include retail, wholesale trade, real estate, and information and communications technology. If the refining capacities are expanded, this will likely boost the output of services on the back of the country’s oil endowments. Special industrial zones were created to promote clustering of manufacturing activities, and the country increasingly positions itself as a preferred investment destination for laborintensive manufacturing, riding on the wave of China’s rising labor costs. As discussed previously, this has its own limits in the long run, if not underpinned by investment in digital infrastructure and new technologies. Despite Nigeria’s reform efforts, the country is proving hard to diversify from natural resource dependence as a source of export earnings. Nigeria was hard-hit by the decline in commodity prices between 2014 and 2015, with its fiscal position significantly compromised. Nigeria’s

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GDP grew at an average of 7% between 2000 and 2014 but dipped substantially to 2.7% in 2015 at the height of commodity price decline. This has since stabilized at 2% in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic. This African giant has become sluggish and decelerated its reform trajectory. Low oil prices have exerted intense downward pressure on government revenues and triggered macroeconomic imbalances (International Monetary Fund 2016). Although it was positioned as the 27th largest economy in the world in 2019, the country ranked poorly at 116 out of 140 countries in the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index in 2019. In 2018 the country registered a GDP growth rate of 1.9%, up from 0.9% in 2017. President Muhammadu Buhari’s government launched a mediumterm Economic Growth and Recovery Plan in 2017 as a response to the 2016 recession triggered by terms of trade shock and is aimed at restoring the country’s growth. Nigeria is yet to turn the corner from the commodity price declines of 2014–2015. This makes it all the more urgent for the country to push strongly for diversification to build a strong and stable non-oil sector on the back of earlier reforms. This should include increasing the quantity of the oil that is refined in the country to reduce the import bill (IMF 2019b, p. 9). In August 2020, Africa’s richest entrepreneur, Aliko Dangote, announced plans to spend $15bn to build one of the world’s biggest refineries to revive Nigeria’s economy (Sguazzin and Bala-Gbobo 2020). Nigeria’s path to structural diversification will need to involve turning its oil wealth into a catalyst for broad-based development. Nigeria has put a slew of development plans in place, including the National Industrial Revolution Plan and the National Integrated Infrastructure Plan as part of its efforts to turn the economy around. Like other African countries, Nigeria was not spared of Covid-19 economic effects and has not made the necessary improvements in its economic performance. However, Nigeria suffers governance and institutional weaknesses that will continue to undermine confidence in government’s ability to manage economic change. Institutional deficiencies blight the prospects of many African countries.

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Kenya The East African giant, Kenya boasts a demographic profile that positions the country for dynamic growth, fueled by a growing entrepreneurial spirit, a steadily rising domestic consumer base, with a burgeoning middle class that is a source of human capital in the public service and the private sector. Agriculture is the main driver of economic activity, although there is a growing expansion in construction, manufacturing, finance, insurance, ICT, wholesale, and retail trade. The auspicious tourism sector has fallen victim to terrorist attacks a few times. However, overall economic performance has been impressive. For a decade since the 2008 global financial crisis to 2018, Kenya’s growth averaged 5.5% (IMF 2019a). In 2019, growth averaged 5.7%, and the country has enjoyed a stable macroeconomic environment and positive investor confidence and resilient services sector before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic (World Bank 2020b). Kenya also made strides in improving the business environment. It increased public investment in infrastructure over the decade between 2010 and 2020, and this has driven up debt and debt service costs in ways that have heightened fiscal vulnerabilities, especially since revenues have been in decline in 2016 and 2017 (IMF 2019a, p. 7). Kenya registered some excellent progress in decreasing poverty rates by over ten percentage points (to 36.1%) over 2006 to 2016 (IMF 2019a, p. 4). In 2019 Kenya launched negotiations for a free trade agreement with the United States, to retain its market access to the United States when AGOA expire in 2025. Kenya benefitted from this unilateral trade scheme by the United States and the US Power Africa program, which has enabled nearly one million Kenyans to access electricity from mini-grid installations. Apart from high poverty levels, Kenya has continued to face security challenges emanating from the Somali-based extremist group alShabaab, which has stretched the country’s resources. These insecurities have also reduced confidence in sectors such as travel and tourism, which are key foreign exchange earners. There is a strong push for structural transformation to diversify the economic base. The US–Kenya free trade agreement is viewed by the Kenyan government as one avenue to achieve this, but this hinges on the future of US bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) strategy under Biden.

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Ethiopia With a population of about 109-million people and the fastest growing economy in sub-Saharan Africa, Ethiopia has also shown great economic potential in the recent past. It achieved an average growth rate of 9.9% a year from 2007/08 to 2017/18, compared to a regional average of 5.4% (World Bank 2019c). Construction and services accounted for much of the country’s growth in 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. As pointed out by the World Bank, demand-side growth is driven by private consumption and public investment. While the country still has a large proportion of its citizens blighted by poverty, Ethiopia has seen a decrease in the number of people living below the national poverty line from 30% in 2011 to 24% in 2016. The Ethiopian government has the ambition to expand the country’s infrastructure and push strongly for structural transformation by bolstering the profile of the country as a manufacturing hub. Competitiveness has been a challenge for Ethiopia, and so has been attempts at reducing poverty and achieving social cohesion. In 2011 the Chinese Hujian Group made an important contribution to Ethiopia’s manufacturing vision by building the leather value chain when it opened its labor-intensive shoe production factory as part of establishing a $2bn special economic zone (SEZ) that would absorb nearly 100,000 workers. The special economic zone is earmarked to be a manufacturing platform for export production to global markets. It also spearheaded a coffee processing plant. The Chinese footwear plant is known for manufacturing Ivanka Trump shoes. Concerns were raised, however, about working conditions and labor exploitation in the Hujian plant. As discussed previously, in the age of industrial robotics and integration of artificial intelligence processes in production and global supply chains, the window for Africa’s manufacturing competitiveness is narrowing. Ethiopia’s improved economic performance has taken place on the back of prudent fiscal policies, and broad macroeconomic stability. The country has experienced some structural transformation that has witnessed a decline in the share of agriculture in the GDP, while services and industry have expanded. Some accounts have suggested that Ethiopia could reach middle-income status by 2025 (World Bank 2013). While Ethiopia’s economic picture looks promising, much is unknown about the future since many African countries are yet to count the cost of the Covid-19 pandemic on their economic and social structures.

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Since November 2020, Ethiopia has been consumed in internecine battle between government federal troops and the People’s Liberation Front in the northern Tigray region with allegations of war crime leveled against the government. While the proximate cause of the conflict was the attack by Tigray forces on government’s army base, there are many layers to this confrontation which goes deeper in Ethiopian politics and system of government. Various other triggers include grievances related to political reforms undertaken by Abiy’s governments which created unease in Tigray for their likely effect in centralizing power and marginalizing the region. Whatever justification Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government gave for the military offensive to rein-in centrifugal tendencies in Tigray and restore order, the conflict has created a humanitarian crisis that the rest of the world could not just ignore. With Eritrea now involved on the side of the Ethiopian government, this has ceased to be a domestic affair; it has a cross-border dimension. Over 3 million people were displaced by April 2021 and refugees entered the neighboring Sudan, and with implications for regional spillover on the Horn of Africa (Walsh and Dahir 2021). The means—wanton violence, sexual assault, and other human rights abuses—cannot be used to justify the ends, to quell restive forces in Tigray and push for centralization. This conflict threatens to set back the economic gains the country has notched in sustaining high-growth levels. Menacingly, this has raised the specter of large-scale humanitarian crisis with external donors and multilateral institutions anxious about the prospects for lasting peace, domestic stability, and well as macroeconomic outlook in the country (de Waal 2021). The case of Ethiopia demonstrates once again how easy it is for the gains of democracy and development to dissipate if inclusive institutions are not strengthened. Mozambique Mozambique is another country that has shown great promise since the mid-2000s. It is a story of both impressive turnaround and regression within a very short period of time. The country is endowed with arable land, water and energy, and mineral resources. It also boasts a large potential pool of labor which could be an important resource for fueling the expansion of the manufacturing sector. The country has had a good track record of high economic growth, but with hidden debt problems linked to unreported external borrowing. Apart from the debt crisis

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uncovered in 2016, the country also suffered cyclones Idai and Kenneth in 2019. Cyclone Eloise visited Mozambique in 2021, with devastating consequences as thousands of people were displaced. These cyclones will likely intensify the country’s fiscal pressures in the middle of Covid-19 pandemic. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Mozambique’s growth barely touched 2%, and its economic profile is expected to worsen in the years ahead on the account of Covid-19 related effects. Further, Mozambique has experienced new sources of conflict and instability. There were accusations of election rigging in the October 2019 elections, with the opposition Renamo threatening to unravel an earlier African Union-supported accord signed in August 2019 to guarantee peace and stability. Integrating Renamo fighters into the regular army remains a challenge the Mozambican government has yet to surmount. The violence that marred the elections undermined the efforts toward building a stable society. Since November 2017, extremist groups that are linked to Islamic State (ISIS) have also been a destabilizing factor in the North of the country, with their attacks concentrated at gas-rich Cabo Delgado province. In August 2020 the ISIS militants seized the strategic port city of Mociamboa da Praia after intense fighting by the Mozambican military which was reinforced by mercenaries from South Africa. Since then, ISIS has ransacked the coastal town of Palma, brought to ruins public infrastructure, and killed scores of people. These attacks have had a negative effect on investment and raised questions about the future stability of the country. The natural gas projects in this area are estimated at $60bn and commercially backed by a British loan to the tune of $1bn. Total has had to halt the development of its $20bn development of gas deposits amidst this conflict, which at the beginning of 2021 intensified in areas that are in proximity to the major natural gas investment (Cotterill 2021). This has also triggered a humanitarian crisis and underlined the fact that fragility in areas that have a long history of conflict in Africa is still a significant risk. It is not enough to rely on high-growth rates based on a single sector; it is important that African countries take seriously the importance of building inclusive institutions, d take significant steps in improving governance, and lay a firm developmental path.

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Rwanda Rwanda is a country whose star has been on the rise since the end of the genocide of the early 1990s. Under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, the country stabilized at the end of the Tutsi-Hutu gruesome conflict. In his nation-building efforts, Kagame introduced various initiatives that were aimed at reconciliation including the use of traditional communal justice in the form of the localized court system or Gacaca. Although not democratic by Western standards, the country has made good social and economic strides, and with notable successes in economic stability, gender equality, and poverty reduction. Rwanda’s National Strategy for Transformation, formulated in 2017, has set out clearly defined areas of interventions and targeted outcomes by 2024. These interventions include creating 214,000 jobs annually (1.5-million by 2024); accelerating sustainable urbanization from 18.4% in 2016/17 to 35% by 2024; making Rwanda a globally competitive knowledge-based economy; promoting structural transformation toward high-value products; positioning Rwanda as a financial hub services hub and a magnet for investment; modernizing and increasing productivity of agriculture and livestock; and promoting sustainable management of the natural environment. A combination of public investment, private investment, and interventions to promote economic diversification has all helped sustain growth and economic development. Using the model of special economic zones, the country has focused its energies on creating a favorable climate for the private sector. On the soft infrastructure side, Rwanda has also set out to reduce poverty through, among others, the deployment of social protection; eradicating malnutrition; ensuring access to quality health care on a universal basis; improving the quality of education; and ensuring affordable and adequate access to infrastructure and social services. In bolstering its economic diversification, Rwanda has set out an ambitious industrial policy framework. “Made in Rwanda” aims to create import substitution to the value of $400m by 2024. This industrial policy includes plans to build a pharmaceutical plant, a mosquito nets manufacturing plant, chemical fertilizer plant, and industries to produce construction materials. Further, the government seeks to develop value chains in agro-processing, construction materials, light manufacturing, garment production, tourism, knowledge-based services, and steel and iron. Through its Rwanda Vision 2050, the country projects its ambition

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to achieve middle-income status by 2035 and high-income status by 2050 (IMF 2019c, p. 6). Like other countries in sub-Saharan Africa whose economies were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, Rwanda has had its trade disrupted, and its tourism sector was badly affected by Covidrelated restrictions on traveling. It has also faced fiscal strain and balance of payment challenges (World Bank 2020a). However, the democratic deficit remains Rwanda’s underbelly. President Paul Kagame has previously pushed for the change of the constitution to allow him to run for a third term, something that does not bode well for democratic governance and human rights. He is known for harassing his political opponents and his regime has rendered a culture of silence and fear, an instrument that is rationalized through the country’s ugly history and the need to maintain ethnic stability at all costs. It may well be that Kagame is a benevolent dictator who produces tangible results, but the path dependence that could endure for generations may in future open the way for self-interested dictators who care little about improving quality of life and who would design institutions perversely to suit their whims. A strong culture of democracy with a commitment to building institutions that create a stable economic base and improve quality of life is more sustainable than a dictatorship where personal rule is the norm.

Concluding Reflections Africa’s development will not be based on a model that is out there, which other country’s may have implemented. Context matters for thinking about development strategies. There is much that can be learnt from other countries, including transforming and deploying state capacities in a way that promotes development and inclusive institutions. The narrow interpretation of modernity as about letting go of traditional practices and making a leap to Western modes of development is not a helpful one. Development should be thought of in terms of dialectical engagement or discursive interaction between the past and the present—and to take the best from both worlds. In the main, development should be about not more than change but progress yielded in improvements in the quality of life of the population. This is also a standard against which the utility of technological innovations should be measured. Further, it is important to realize that African countries will not travel the same path at the same pace; some

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countries will move at speed and others reach development milestone at slower pace, since African countries possess different endowments and institutional properties. Notions such as Africa Rise miss this dynamic reality about development. There more African countries collaborate and strengthen regional and continental institutions, the greater the possibilities are for regional innovations to develop and for knowledge to be diffused across the border. Leadership is going to be important, but this should not be the reflected in strong man who are all-knowing and who see themselves and their thoughts as embodiment of society’s aspirations yet do not create space for public engagement and room for pluralistic voices to be expressed. Leadership and institutions have a pivotal role in driving and sustaining reforms and creating the basis for structural transformation. Having leaders who are not extractive but are driven by transformative ideals and building political and economic institutions that support growth-enhancing measures and social inclusion are critical success factors. African countries do not have to clone Kagame to engineer development and social inclusion. They can, however, blend democratic forms with aspects of indigenous regimes that are progressive. In the next chapter we look at pathways for Africa’s development beyond the narrow conception of modernity or linear structural diversification and assess the continent’s prospects for digital leaps.

References Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. London: Profile Books. Adorno, Theodore, and Max Horkheimer. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. African Development Bank. 2015. African Economic Outlook. Abidjan: AfDB. Amin, Samir. 1990. Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. London: Zed Books. Amin, Samir. 1994. Re-Reading the Postwar Period. New York: Monthly Review Press. Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. 2003. The Innovators Solution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard School Publishing. Christensen, Clayton, Efosa Ejomo, and Karen Dillon. 2019. The Prosperity Paradox. New York: Harper Business.

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Cotterill, Joseph. 2021. Mozambique Attack Threatenes Africa’s Biggest Investment. Financial Times, 28 March. https://www.ft.com/content/24331d93504d-42a4-b909-3f30d9f59243. De Waal, Alex. 2021. “The World Bank Should Not Fund Ethiopia’s War in Tigray”. Financial Times, 12 April. https://www.ft.com/content/60ea0fbd688e-4224-8219-c4c996d94513. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Hamish Hamilton. Gordon, Lewis R. 2014. “Justice Otherwise: Thoughts on Ubuntu”. In Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi Magadla (eds). Ubuntu: Curating the Archive. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourses on Modernity. London: Polity. Hausmann, Ricardo, and Bailey Klinger. 2006. “Structural Transformation and Patterns of Comparative Advantage in the Product Space”. Centre for International Development. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. http://www.iadb.org/res/publications/pubfiles/pubS-853.pdf. International Monetary Fund. 2016. “Nigeria: Staff Report for the 2015 Article IV Consultation”. IMF Country Report No. 16/101, April. International Monetary Fund. 2019a. “Kenya: Article IV Consultation”. IMF Country Report No. 18/295. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/ Issues/2018/10/23/Kenya-Staff-Report-for-the-2018-Article-IV-Consultat ion-and-Establishment-of-Performance-46301. International Monetary Fund. 2019b. “Nigeria: Article IV Consultation”. IMF Country Report No. 19/92. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Iss ues/2019/04/01/Nigeria-2019-Article-IV-Consultation-Press-Release-StaffReport-and-Statement-by-the-46726 International Monetary Fund. 2019c. “Rwanda: Article IV Consultation”. IMF Country Report No. 19/211. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Iss ues/2019/07/03/Rwanda-Staff-Report-for-2019-Article-IV-Consultationand-a-Request-for-a-Three-Year-Policy-47089. Johnson, Chalmers. 1995. Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State. New York: W.W. Norton. Leke, Acha, Mutsa Chironga, and Georges Desvaux. 2018. Africa’s Business Revolution. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Lewis, Arthur W. 1954 “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor”. Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, 22: 139–191. Lopes, Carlos, and Kararach, G. 2019. Structural Change in Africa: Misperceptions, New Narratives and Development in the 21st Century. London: Routledge. Marwala, Tshilidzi. 2020. Closing the Gap. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan.

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Mazrui, Ali A., and Francis Wiafe-Amaoko. 2015. African Institutions: Challenges to Political, Social and Economic Foundations of Africa’s Development. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Mazzucato, Mariana. 2021. Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. New York: Allen Lane. Mboya, Tom. 1969. The Challenge of Nationhood. London: Andre Deutsch. Mckinsey Global Institute. 2010. Lions on the Move: The Progress and Potential of African Economies. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/middleeast-and-africa/lions-on-the-move. Mckinsey Global Institute. 2020. Risk, Resilience, and Rebalancing in Global Value Chains, 6 August. Global Mckinsey Institute. Moghalu, Kingsley Chiedu. 2014. Emerging Africa. London: Penguin Books. North, Douglas. 1991. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi. 2012. Reforming the Unreformable: Lessons from Nigeria. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Qobo, Mzukisi, and Garth Le Pere. 2018. “The Role of China in Africa’s Industrialization: The Challenge of Building Global Value Chains”. Journal of Contemporary China, 27(110): 208–223. Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Rostow, Walt Whitman. 1960. Stages of Economic Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rotberg, Robert I. 2013. Africa Emerges. London: Polity Press. Schwab, Klaus. 2016. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. London: Penguin. Sguazzin, Antony, and Elisha Bala-Gbobo. 2020. “Africa’s Richest Man Makes His Biggest Bet Yet”. Bloomberg, 28 August. https://www.bloomberg.com/ news/articles/2020-08-28/aliko-dangote-africa-s-richest-man-is-betting-hismoney-on-a-vast-oil-refinery. Accessed 2 December 2020. Solomon, Robert. 1977. The International Monetary System 1945–1976. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Stasi, Paul. 2011. “The Future Holds More Than the Past Has Yielded: T. S. Eliot’s Invention of Tradition and the St. Louis Exposition of 1904”. Journal of Transnational American Studies, 3(2). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ 3bb1x47k. Sun, Irene Yuan. 2017. The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Walsh, Declan, and Abdi Latif Dahir. 2021. “Why Is Ethiopia at War with Itself? The New York Times, 7 April. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/ 05/world/africa/ethiopia-tigray-conflict-explained.html. World Bank. 2013. Ethiopia Economic Update: Laying the Foundation for Achieving Middle Income Status. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/

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press-release/2013/06/18/ethiopia-economic-update-laying-the-founda tion-for-achieving-middle-income-status. Accessed 12 April 2020. World Bank. 2019c. Ethiopia’s Steady Economic Growth Leads to Poverty Reduction. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/ethiopia/publication/ethiop ias-steady-economic-growth-leads-to-poverty-reduction. World Bank. 2020a. Rwanda Economic Update: Accelerating Digital Transformation in Rwanda. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. http://docume nts1.worldbank.org/curated/en/912581580156139783/pdf/Rwanda-Eco nomic-Update-Accelerating-Digital-Transformation-in-Rwanda.pdf. World Bank. 2020b. Kenya Economic Update: Securing Future Growth—Policies to Support Kenya’s Digital Transformation. Edition No. 20. https://openkn owledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32792. Accessed 28 January 2020. Xi Jinping. 2014. The Governance of China, Volume 1. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Yew, Lee Kuan. 2013. “The Grandmasters Insights on China, the United States, and the World”. In Interviews and Selections by Graham Allison and Robert D Blackwill, with Ali Wayne. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Young, Crawford. 2012. The Postcolonial State in Africa. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

CHAPTER 8

Africa’s Digital Futures

In the digital era, it does not make sense for African countries to strain to catch up with the rabbits at the pace of a tortoise just because Western countries moved gradually through adjacent product spaces. Developmental leapfrogging will require a shift in imagination, including how Africans see themselves and their destinies. There are limits to viewing your present and your future through the outsiders’ eyes. Africans grapple with double consciousness, to borrow a concept from WEB Du Bois, where they are both a part of the world and outsiders at the same time, but the Western world views them largely as outsiders and with contempt and pity. To attain a place in the world Africans must focus on improving their structural conditions, a process that begins with having the right kind of leadership and institutions in place. Further, Africans must approach commercial and diplomatic relations with external actors based on well-articulated interests. If one takes the example of a country like South Korea, which in the 1960s was agrarian, it is possible to imagine technological leaps that balk gradualism or deterministic stage-by-stage progression. As Mamphiswana and Sinha (2020) have pointed out, countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan that closed the technology gap with the West, did so by “coupling bold policies and active technological learning” China too

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did not follow a linear path to its development. China’s development was a good example of learning by doing, using, and interacting. As Rodrik (2017) has shown, China used heterodox policies and maintained openness while applying industrial policies, including subsidies, import tariffs, local content requirements, and joint ventures between foreign investors and local partners (Rodrik 2017). Technology diffusion through joint ventures was an essential part of China’s strategy for shifting its structural profile in dynamic ways. The country’s elites constructed a unique development model that expressed fidelity to “embedded liberalism,” with markets operating within a party-defined socio-political structure. The Chinese government has been pivotal in undertaking public investment in infrastructure on a large scale, and later in driving innovation through its industrial policy framework, “Made in China 2025”. That is not to suggest that African countries can simply copy and paste these models without the requisite resources and capabilities, and without cognizance of the social context. But African leaders can build dynamic capabilities within the state and set out clearly defined development frameworks that signal a preference for innovation-led growth that generates dynamism across different sectors of the economy rather than climbing staircases of development sequentially and mechanistically. As I pointed out in the last chapter, dynamic and growth-enhancing institutions play a vital role in promoting growth and innovation. The key to economic progress lies not in merely following Rostow’s stages or through reallocation of resources from agriculture to manufacturing as was believed by postcolonial leaders, but in taking large steps or what Mazzucato (2015, p. 4) characterizes as “transformational public investment” to move closer to the frontiers of technology. Rodrik (2017) calls for bigger and bolder ideas realized through institutional re-engineering. In his view, the state should drive investment in infrastructure and innovation, and to influence the direction of technological change. In some instances, the types of innovation that infuses the economy with dynamism takes the form of little bets and incremental shifts (Sims 2012; Ridley 2020), at other points it entails leaps of breakthrough and disruption (Christensen et al. 2019). In many cases, the state plays a crucial part in igniting the path for innovation and co-creating markets or laying the basis for market-creating innovation (Christensen et al. 2019; Mazzucato 2015), and in other instances state’s investment in innovation fail (Ridley 2020). What will likely drive major change on the African

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continent are leaps of innovation, with the state playing a critical role in investing in market-creating innovation, human capital, and public infrastructure. As Mazzucato (2015) proposes, the government needs to envision the direction for technological change and invest in that direction, as this “broadens the technological opportunity landscape and requires that the State creates a network of willing (not necessarily ‘winning’) agents that are keen to seize this opportunity through public–private partnerships.” Learning by doing, using, and interacting is equally important for capability building when catching up. This allows for backward integration. Below, I assess the opportunities that are possible through public investment in digital infrastructure, institutions, and human capital.

The Outlines of a Digital Economy in Africa Digital transformation is mainly about the growing use of digital products and services by companies, consumers, and nonprofit organizations. Its bedrock is a dynamic ecosystem made up of technological products and services that creates value across different sectors of the economy—agriculture, manufacturing, and services—and delivers greater public value through innovations in various public services modes. Whereas in the previous phases of capitalist development, the principal contention of labor was about exploitation—that working conditions and wages were perceived as insufficient for sustainable livelihood; in the new industrial era driven by artificial intelligence and intensive automation processes, labor displacement becomes a product of the introduction of new (labor saving) technologies. As Ford (2015) points out, the virtuous feedback loop that has always been taken for granted, marked by the co-reinforcing relationship between productivity, rising wages, and increasing consumer spending, no longer holds in the context of industrial robots and automation. There is nothing novel about the role of technology in promoting growth. Romer (1989) observed that technological change lies at the heart of growth; it is driven by investors responding mainly to market incentives. And once investments are made in technology, the costs are fixed, and technology could be exploited many times over. However, earlier thinking about the relationship between technology and growth did not consider transformations in labor processes. There was never a concern about the future of labor (or future of work) to the extent

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that this is uppermost in public policy discourses about the role of technology in society. In the new industrial era—which some characterize as the fourth industrial revolution—growth is increasingly less a function of growing exploitation of labor, and more of technology utilization across different domains of production. In advanced industrial economies, the growth in the overall pie of the economy is not accompanied by growth in the demand for labor.

Digital Economy as a Catalyst for Africa’s Development Africa’s demographics have often been singled out as a source of future growth. This potential dynamism can only be realized if African countries invest in skills development and the creation of job opportunities, especially in the manufacturing sector. Advances in digital transformation open more possibilities for the African continent to leapfrog stages of growth and venture into avenues beyond classical manufacturing. Again, this will require human capital development and public investment in forms of infrastructure that powers innovation. Since the digital economy grows on the back of stable internet connectivity, which provides the basis for innovation and expansion of economic activity, including through the development of new applications and growth in e-commerce, it is therefore necessary that African countries invest in digital assets, including infrastructure and human capital. Internet connectivity, which is a backbone for the digital economy, is weak or unstable in many African countries. It is no wonder that the adoption of new, AI-driven technologies, is low in the Africa continent than the rest of the world (Marwala 2020, p. 148). Given the strong linkages between internet connectivity and electricity—the towers that provide internet signal are powered by electricity—Africa’s energy constraints have an adverse impact on the reliability of internet connectivity, and this in turn has a negative bearing on productivity. The point is not to extol the virtues of the digital economy in a way that is blind to inequalities that are, on a broader scale, generated by technological divides or unevenness. Many African countries have only partial broadband coverage, and without access to quality broadband they will find it challenging to build digital economy platforms. Even the new domains of data governance requires that countries have capabilities to store and analyze large amounts of data, especially if they insist on localization of data, which is desirable

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for guaranteeing the protection of citizens’ information or data points. Investment in infrastructure such as high speed or super computers, as well as the necessary skills to utilize this infrastructure, become crucial. Undoubtedly the digital economy can be a critical source of growth, competitiveness, and socio-economic development in the continent if necessary investments are made. According to World Bank research, a 10% increase in broadband penetration in developing countries generates 1.4% increase in GDP (World Bank 2019a, p. 11). The various channels through which connectivity shapes countries’ development path include through bridging the information gap and improving communication especially for citizens in remote parts of the country; reducing information asymmetries in the economy, for example between consumers, producers, and other nodes of the value chain; and increasing productivity, lowering transaction costs, and optimizing supply chains. UNCTAD (2019) highlights three dimensions of the digital economy: (a) The core aspects that comprise fundamental innovations such as semiconductors and processors, core technologies such as computers and telecommunication devices, and enabling infrastructures such as internet and telecoms networks; (b) digital and information technology sectors, which produce key products or services that rely on core digital technologies, for example, mobile applications and payment services; and (c) a wider set of digitalizing sectors such as e-commerce, changes in business models to respond to digitalization, including a reformatting of activities such as media, finance, and transportation. African countries participate in some, but not all, of these, due to their weak economies, shallow digital infrastructure, and lack of requisite skills. These are all the constraints African governments need to pay more attention to. Although there have been some innovations on the applications and e-commerce, albeit, on a lower scale, African countries lag on the core aspects of technology infrastructure. The human capital development and public investment in innovation will have to be at the heart of development strategies in African countries. That is why it is not enough to push for structural transformation; it is crucial to search for more dynamism through public investment in innovation, digital infrastructure, and upgrading human capital. These policy drivers should aim at positioning the African continent advantageously in a changing global economy and shift negative perceptions about Africa as a permanent problem that others should deal with through development aid. If the right set of institutions are developed, and a policy environment

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conducive to innovation is present, Africa can certainly leapfrog stages of development. Kai-fu Lee (2018, p. 15) points out that the three success factors for an AI-driven ecosystem are big data, computing power and strong but not necessarily elite AI algorithm engineers. As such, African countries may not need to churn out elite engineers to get the continent out of economic slumber and take advantage of digital transformation trends. What Africa needs is a heavy investment in human capital and public investment in innovation. Having enabling policies and improving the tech start-up ecosystem can also help. Further, Lee argues that we are no longer living in the age of discovery but of implementation. In his view, vast trove of knowledge has already been accumulated over many decades, and this has helped to improve the AI knowledge architecture in the form of deep learning (Lee 2018, p. 12). Data is at the core of new progress. It is the raw material that is optimized by discovered knowledge. As Lee points out, it is no longer heavy engineering expertise primed to undertake new technological breakthroughs but the application of knowledge on a vast trove of data aided by computing power that is most needed. This offers hope for the African continent, given the potentially rich data markets present on the continent. A deficiency the continent will need to overcome to bring the latency of its data markets to full utilization is the fact that a large part of Africa’s data is stored outside of the continent by international cloud-storage firms. This deficiency can be overcome through policy and regulation, in particular setting out clear disciplines on data storage and uses. For Africa, public investment in innovation will have to respond to the pressing needs of the continent. Consider, for example, the case of Japan. In 2013, the Japanese government committed $24.6m to companies that focused on developing elder-care robotics to address the challenge posed by its ageing population (Ross 2016). As Ross further point out, lessdeveloped countries might be able to leapfrog technologies and venture straight into robotics in the same way as they reduced the space between fixed-line telephony and mobile telephony and jumped to the latter. What holds Africa back is imagination, institutional quality, and absence of transformative leadership. Of these three, imagination is key, for it also acts as a mirror through which outsiders view and treat Africans. It is up to the continent to change the lens through which it is viewed especially by major powers. On the technology front, both America and China are

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vying for Africa as a client for their own technology; they hardly see the continent as a technology partner that could in future hold its own in the global economy.

The New Era of Africa’s Tech Entrepreneurs There has in recent times emerged an army of innovators and entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of shaping Africa’s nascent digital economy. They are creating products and services that respond to social and economic challenges that are specific to the continent. They lack scale, but are impressive nonetheless given that the continent has been a laggard on the use of digital products and services. Africa’s rising entrepreneur and serial investor in tech start-ups, Sangu Delle, has surveyed digital trends that are pioneered by various entrepreneurs across different countries on the African continent. He observes that the investments in ICT made by various African countries are beginning to bear some fruit, enabling African entrepreneurs to spawn innovations and build businesses that did not exist before. In recent times, there has been a surge of investment into the tech start-up sector in Africa. According to Partech Report (2020), the total funding of African venture capital tech deals in 2019 was up by 74% to just over $2bn in comparison to the previous year. The deal size averaged $8 million, with 250 deals concluded in that year. This is meagre compared to other developing regions, but an important step in the right direction. For some time now, the signs of digital adoption have been evident on the African continent through the platform of mobile phones, which serve as conduits for financial transactions in an environment where the majority of the poor are excluded from financial services, or where there is “nonconsumption”, to use Christensen’s conception. Such transactions go beyond just receiving remittances from relatives in the diaspora to making payments for products and services. Much has been written about Kenya’s pioneering foray into this area through M-Pesa, and how this has transformed the way individuals and entrepreneurs transact. In 2018, remittance flows to sub-Saharan Africa grew by 10% to $46bn, and much of this rode on the convenience offered by mobile payments platforms. Digital banking and broadly fintech will expand on the African continent and become a preferred route for mediating transactions since bank charges in Africa tend to be prohibitively high. Various mobile companies will make strategic shifts toward building

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digital banking platforms or fintech in ways that could disrupt the retail banking in the continent, just like mobile network operators rendered fixed-line telephony obsolete in the 1990s. Some retail banks will likely join the party by acquiring fintech start-ups or incubating innovations in-house. Apart from mobile payments, there have been various other exciting developments that point to the continent’s appetite to make advances in the digital economy. Delle contends that structural transformation that depends just on industrialization will not be enough for Africa. Instead, the key driver of progress in the continent will be the digital revolution that is pioneered internally (Delle 2020, p. xvii). Essentially, digital technologies are key to increasing productivity in industrial ecosystem. In his book Making Futures, Delle surveys examples of digital transformations expressed in the innovations driven by entrepreneurs across 17 African countries covering North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, and Southern Africa. In Kenya, he showcases tech entrepreneurs who have overcome logistical or marketing constraints in the agriculture value chains, mainly affecting smallholder rural farmers. Some of the local entrepreneurs we encounter in Delle’s work have created technology-based solutions to aggregate farmers’ produce and facilitate their routes to markets, thereby cutting intermediaries that push up the transaction costs. In Nigeria, Delle shines a light on how some entrepreneurs such as Chinny Ogunro have tapped into digital tools to solve healthcare challenges, adapting solutions applied in India to deliver quality healthcare at affordable prices through a network of new generation hospitals in Africa. Various other digital solutions have been applied in the education sector to deliver high-quality education that produces work-ready graduates or go on ato start their businesses, thereby creating opportunities to absorb young Africans who would otherwise face a jobless future. There is also an increase in technology-driven solutions to address challenges in the payments system using fintech, and platforms such as Flutterwave started by the Nigerian entrepreneur Olugbenda Agboola are examples of African-led tech start-ups in fintech that are riding the digital wave and creating solutions that respond to problems that are specific to the continent. In Ghana, Wefarm taps into artificial intelligence to work alongside human beings to enlarge the scope of knowledge of smallholder farmers. This tech start-up and its technology solution avoids the stepby-step modernization paradigm and integrates technology into primary production processes. Wefarm aims to connect every smallholder farmer

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on earth and offers them solutions that help them better understand data related to crop production and overcome constraints posed by market information asymmetry. There are also major firms that support the development of a digital ecosystem that fosters entrepreneurial growth in a broader sense. Naspers had pioneered a venture capital initiative called Naspers Foundry which had set aside R1.4bn (roughly $300m when the initiative was announced) of investment over three years from 2018 to support technology start-ups in South Africa. This is targeted mainly at black-owned technology startups to address the country’s digital business ecosystem’s lack of inclusion. Telkom, South Africa’s telecommunications services provider, has also offered support to high school students to empower them with coding skills and make them future-ready. Another pan-African mobile company, MTN, founded in 1994, has lent a shoulder in broadening the commercial space for tech start-ups. Its investments have included the e-commerce platform, the meteoric Jumia. The company also works through universities on tech challenge contests to support a new generation of tech entrepreneurs among young South Africans. It has been active in driving universal connectivity and supporting social enterprise initiatives to ensure the availability of smartphone devices to enable access. In 2014 the Nigerian business leader, Tony Elumelu who is Chairman of United Bank for Africa announced that he was setting aside $100 million to train and fund 10,000 African entrepreneurs over ten years, intending to create 1-million jobs (Nsehe 2014). The kinds of problems that entrepreneurs and innovators solve through digital solutions reflect the unique nature of challenges that many countries on the African continent wrestle with. The solutions include affordable health care provision, delivery of quality education at a lower cost, overcoming information asymmetry and lack of market access among smallholder farmers, improving logistics and transportation, innovating payment systems through fintech to overcome exclusion by the formal banking sector and e-commerce platforms to take advantage of the growing consumer class in the continent. There are also tech-based initiatives that have been created to empower civil society and broaden the possibilities for democracy advancement. One such is Ushahidi, which was initiated by Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan activist and social entrepreneur, to improve the bottom-up flow of information and enhance public participation in policy.

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Ushahidi shows just how vital digital tools can be for civic engagement and to broaden the public square and the frontiers of political inclusion. Some of these are simple tech-based innovations to solve specific problems. Although from time to time, there are breakthrough innovations that are AI-based, these are not yet fully developed to cognitive technology level or meet the “Turing test.” The Turing test, named after an English pioneer of mathematical computer science Alan Turing, is about the presence of mind of a machine, and it is an idea that arose in the 1940s out of contentious questions over whether computers can think and might be able to reason like a human being. Turing’s test concerns whether we could arrive at a point when we might struggle to distinguish between responses given by a computer to a set of questions and those offered by a human being (see Isaacson 2014, pp. 124–128). In short, if a computer produces a sonnet or a piece of music that is indistinguishable from that written by a human being it could be said to have passed the Turing test—or possesses the capability to think like a human being. There are, however, skills shortages on the African continent for the more complex AI processes. These capabilities can be built over time, but, as Lee (2018) has shown, to take advantage of the technological breakthrough, a country does not need an abundance of elite engineering skills. Ridley (2020) documents a history of innovation based on incremental progress, and trial and error, rather than the bright sparks of professors or the most gifted. The African continent can tap into existing resources and indigenous knowledge systems to find pathways to incremental innovation. Setting the governance framework for technology partnership with major economies such as the US, China, Japan, South Korea, and the EU, on a non-exclusive basis, could help accelerate Africa’s innovation climb. The point, though, is that innovation does not have to rely on an army of elite engineers, as Lee reminds, nor will it follow some linear paths set by the West, East Asian countries, and more recently China, but will need to involve a combination of learning from others, experimenting, partnering, and interacting. The African continent is potentially a data-rich market from a demographic point of view and in various dimensions such as language, culture, consumer patterns, decision-making structures, talents, arts and craft, natural systems, and biodiversity, to name but a few. Africa should build innovation systems that fuse technology and indigenous knowledge structures to create solutions to problems that are specific to the continent. Webb (2019, p. 5) notes that human data is possibly the most important

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natural resource in the era of AI. It is worth highlighting that foreign companies control the data produced in Africa, making it all the more necessary for Africans to have sound data governance and data sharing frameworks to safeguard data ownership and control. Such data could be directed toward solving a defined set of problems or achieving a critical mission, for example, making advances in health, rural enterprises, food production systems, or any number of socio-economic challenges. The potentially data-rich markets in Africa partly explain why major tech firms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google have established a footprint in this burgeoning data market. And why Huawei has worked closely with security forces in Zimbabwe to build voice and facial-recognition systems and also exports its “smart cities” technology, which integrate surveillance and data collection practices, to other countries with weak norms around privacy or personal data collection (International Institute for Strategic Studies 2021). According to MayerSchonberger and Ramge (2018, p. 63), “data is the new grease for the wheels of the market … the most obvious difference between conventional markets and data-rich ones is the volume and variety of data that flows among market participants”. The importance of data markets is not just about matching buyers and sellers, but also about identifying the problems to be solved and how best to solve them. Challenges related to market information asymmetry in agriculture value chains, health care including modelling for future diseases, education constraints, delivery of public services through e-government, and responding to the effect of climate change on biodiversity, among others, are some of the candidates for Africa’s technology solutions. Innovators and entrepreneurs still need to overcome various hurdles on the African institutional setting. These include thin base of venture capital, a lack of a rich ecosystem of innovation that brings together universities, government, industry, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, reasonably high education levels and data skills, and governance frameworks to set rules of the game on the uses of personal data. Policies aimed at supporting the development of ICT as well as regulatory instruments for the digital economy remain poorly developed. As Sun (2017, p. 146) points out in discussing the case of M-Pesa, technological breakthroughs are not only an individual effort, or about corporate-level innovation, but also about broader institutional innovation—with all these elements interacting together. Mazzucato (2015, p. 30) underlines the importance of

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innovation as part of an ecosystem that is based on the symbiotic relationships between the public and the private sectors rather than parasitic ones. Further, she argues that policymaking should be focused on outcomes. Such outcomes can be achieved through collaboration between the public and the private sectors “on investing in solutions, having a long-run view, and governing the process [of collaboration] to make sure it is done in the public interest” (Mazzucato 2021). African governments will need to learn to work closely with the private sector—small and large—and take feedback from holders of capital such as venture capital. Such strategic positioning will help them to improve the investment climate, especially for tech-based investments.

Digital Transformation and Regional Integration Efforts Efforts toward deepening economic integration on the African continent, especially in the context of the AfCFTA will also need to make a push for greater investment in innovation. Africa’s public institutions and development agencies should work collaboratively in promoting thriving digital markets and in harmonizing regulatory frameworks for the digital economy. The urge should not be a defensive one, that is to regulate in a way that throttles the digital ecosystem, nor should it be laissez fare and ignore the risks that come with data-rich markets. The focus, rather, should be on co-creating the right regulatory framework through collaboration with market agents and learning from norm champions such as the EU. Further, beyond instruments of restraints such as data localization or risk assessment for cyber threats, public institutions and development agencies should create an enabling environment for tech entrepreneurs and large companies that want to invest in the digital ecosystem. Building a thriving digital economy alongside the quest to industrialize should be central to AfCFTA’s long-term efforts. The AfCFTA comprises 55 member states of the African Union and creates a market of over 1.2 billion people at the time the mechanism officially traded in January 2021. The single market had an estimated combined gross domestic product (GDP) of more than US$3.4 trillion at the time of its launch. Apart from promoting intra-regional trade and improving the structural profile of goods traded, this mechanism also aims at supporting infrastructure expansion and development of cross-border

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value chains. There is increasing emphasis on using the AfCFTA as an enabler for digital transformation on the African continent. Phase one of AfCFTA negotiations was largely focused on tariffs, rules of origin, trade facilitation, and trade in services. Phase 2 negotiations will need to factor the digital economy in its work program across the pillars of investment, intellectual property rights, digital trade, and women and youth in trade. This phase is yet to commence although preparatory work and appropriate structures had been set up in mid-2021. African countries have an opportunity to use phase two negotiations to shift the conversation about Africa’s digital future and the role of technology in promoting development. For regional integration to create meaningful and sustained outcomes, it should be located at the nexus of structural diversification and digital transformation. Failure to do this will see foreign direct investment, including private equity and its sub-component of venture capital, agglomerating in relatively developed regional poles such as Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, since clusters in relatively developed environments create network effects and attract more skills and capital. The various innovations that have trickled in the last decade suggest that the African continent has better prospects, if governments put in place critical success factors of institutional support and the right regulatory framework. Sims (2012) makes an important point that major innovative breakthroughs happen on the back of initiatives that are based on “little bets,” through a process of discovery, aimed at solving a defined set of problems. This should not be confused with a step-by-step structural change that follows Rostow’s pattern or the idea of moving to the next product space that Hausmann and Klinger propounded, and which we discussed in Chapter 7. These are little bets along technology curves rather than shifting from producing cotton to manufacturing a complete garment. Sims (2012, p. 8) notes that this idea of pushing knowledge through discovery “is based on the proposition that we can use a lot of little bets and certain creative methods to identify possibilities and build up to great outcomes … little bets are concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable” (Sims 2012, p. 8). Such ideas could be scalable. This will be more so if there is strong focus by African governments on making significant investments in innovation and public infrastructure, and in particular support market-creating innovations that Christensen et al. (2019) alluded to. Below I discuss some constraints and

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opportunities in leading regional countries in harvesting nascent digital infrastructure. I focus on Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa for their regional economic weight, reform trajectory, and as leaders in attracting investments in the digital economy.

Constraints to Africa’s Digital Transformation In Africa the role of digital technologies as drivers of socio-economic development tends to be constrained by regulation and policy, especially those that relate to radio communications and frequency spectrum. Even a country like Kenya which has been held up as an example for digital tools such as mobile banking and money transactions still suffers regulatory weaknesses that limit the telecoms sector’s potential to be fully used for e-commerce (World Bank 2020b). This throttles the development of rich digital markets. Further, data protection remains a weakness in many other African countries. Kenya also suffers market concentration in the interlinked telecoms and mobile money markets. As the World Bank (2020b) points out, Kenya’s digital sector start-ups are on the rise, but these require more government support to improve their success rate in reaching high growth stages. Regulatory barriers to doing business hobble these start-ups. Mentorship as well as training, and development of managerial skills are essential. Structural inequality in accessing digital products because of the inequitable provision of broadband infrastructure between the urban and the rural parts should be overcome if universal connectivity is to be achieved and if digital products are to be a source of development and inclusion. Kenya has received accolades because of the impressive developments in its digital economy and the contribution this has made to overall economic growth. Mobile telephony, rising internet usage and the uptake of e-commerce has propelled the country’s digital economy (World Bank 2020b, p. 26). As the World Bank points out, in 2019 the country had 47-million active mobile subscribers, with mobile penetration at 90%. About 46% of citizens were connected to the broadband by the end of 2018. Early adoption of digital payments and the unflagging entrepreneurial spirit lifted Kenya’s digital economy. As earlier pointed out, the digital payment platform has been a boon for users and improved the way consumers transact in the marketplace. This is one example of the kinds of market-creating innovations that Christensen et al. (2019) wrote

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about. This has helped to reduce poverty in Kenya—a testament to the role of digital markets in generating socio-economic benefits. The value of mobile transfers was 44.7% of the GDP in 2018 (World Bank 2020b, p. 28). The Kenyan government has committed to position the country as a hub for information and communication, e-commerce and digital services. This dynamic environment has attracted IBM African Research Lab, Google, and General Electric to set up headquarters there. According to the World Bank (2020b), digital transformation in subSaharan African countries can increase growth by nearly two percentage points per year, with poverty coming down one percentage point. Human capital development will be vital to reaping the gains of the digital shifts. As the World Bank points out, there are five key foundations for success in the digital economy: digital infrastructure; digital skills; digital platforms and services; digital financial services; and digital entrepreneurship (World Bank 2020b, p. 26). Developing these five foundations could position the African countries advantageously in the digital age. These foundational pillars are still missing in many African countries and should be a priority for governments both at the national and continental institutions. In 2015, the Nigeria Communications Commission developed an eight-point agenda aimed at supporting the transition of Nigeria to the digital economy through investment in digital infrastructure, facilitating broadband penetration, improving quality of service, maximizing usage and benefits of the spectrum, and promoting ICT innovation and investment opportunities in the country (World Bank 2019a, p. 11). In 2018 Nigeria launched a Presidential Initiative for Innovative Entrepreneurship focusing on supporting start-up and tech ecosystems. Nigeria ranks 152 out of 157 countries in the World Bank’s 2018 Human Capital Index. The country still has a low overall internet usage of 27.7% (International Telecommunications Union 2018). The Africa average is even lower at 22.1%, which means that connectivity is lacking in much of the continent, possibly exacerbated by deficiencies in energy infrastructure. At the end of 2018, Nigeria had a household penetration rate for broadband of 0.004%, with Africa’s average standing at 0.6% and the world average at 13.6 (International Telecommunications Union 2018). Further, digital divides exist along rural–urban and gender lines, something that is a common feature across the continent. The country faces difficulties such as the opaqueness of its regulatory system and overlapping and conflicting regulatory bodies. There are significant

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infrastructural challenges and market failures in the provision of broadband connectivity in rural areas, and this urban–rural divide undermines economic inclusion in African countries. Rwanda has made bets on the digital economy. The country sees the adoption of digital platforms as key to improving productivity across various sectors of the economy. Government partners with nonprofit and for-profit organizations to increase the country’s digital skills base. The uptake of digital tools, especially by the government, has improved public service delivery and the business climate. Rwanda has higher 3G network coverage at 93.5% than a regional average of 76%, but the internet penetration rate is low and with weak access to smartphones and 4Gcompatible devices. There is underutilization of the 4G network, mainly because the mobile phones with 4G capability are not affordable to most consumers. However, the country has tapped into international networks to build public–private partnerships with Korean Telecom to provide 4G network coverage. Like many other African countries, Rwanda has to overcome challenges related to digital skills and affordability of digital devices and services. In 2019 computer literacy in Rwanda was estimated at under 10%, making it harder for many to participate in any meaningful way in the digital economy. Building skills, widening internet access, and improving connectivity could go a long way in increasing participation, and these objectives are already built into the government’s programs. Government has been ramping up basic digital skills in partnership with the World Economic Forum and Digital Opportunities Trust. It will be hard for African countries to attract venture capital at scale if digital skills are deficient, and the tech ecosystem lacks government support. This is a key challenge for African governments if they are to leapfrog development stages and participate meaningfully in the increasingly digitized global value chains. South Africa still faces challenges in transitioning to a digital economy that promotes inclusiveness. There are still major policy and human capital bottlenecks that hinder meaningful participation of many citizens in the digital economy. According to the World Bank, the tech start-up sector remains “overwhelmingly white, male and middle class” (World Bank 2019b, p. xv). Initiatives such as Naspers Foundry are aimed at changing this profile. Some of the factors that hinder tech entrepreneurship highlighted by the World Bank report include policies related to intellectual property legislation, R&D tax incentive schemes, exchange controls, and

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labor legislation. Finance gaps are persistent throughout most of the lifecycle of digital start-ups, with “later stage funds lacking sufficient capacity, inclusiveness, and critical size to fund and facilitate rapid internationalization of South African digital businesses” (World Bank 2019b, p. xv). Data costs in South Africa are exceptionally high, according to the competition authorities. In 2019 South Africa’s Competition Commission found that South Africa’s mobile network operators charged consumers excessive data prices. The enquiry undertaken by competition authorities into data costs revealed evidence of monopolistic behavior. The report found that South Africans paid higher prices compared to other countries, including other African countries. Lower-income consumers were found to be “exploited to a far greater degree relative to wealthier consumers for mobile data prices” (Competition Commission 2020, p. 11). South Africa’s mobile telecommunications market is dominated by two operators, Vodacom and MTN, who command 78% of the market share (National Planning Commission 2020). The other two operators, Cell C and Telkom Mobile, have a subscriber market share estimated at 17% and 5%, respectively. According to a report by the National Planning Commission (2020): “The failure of the broadcast digital migration process and the debacle over the release of the high-demand spectrum are two of the more striking examples of what appears to be the institutional failure.” In December 2020 and at the beginning of 2021, the mobile network operators took the government to court to challenge aspects of the high-demand radio frequency spectrum auction process. There is also a lack of technical capacity at the policy institution and regulator. Slow progress on the part of the government in releasing high-demand spectrum due to delays in digital migration—from analogue to digital—a process that is now caught up in litigation, have left the mobile operators with both insufficient spectrum and a lack of access to favorable low-frequency bands. This potentially has a cost raising effect on the data the consumers use. When the spectrum is not made available, operators are forced to increase the volume of base stations, which pushes up their capital and operational costs that the operators then recoup through higher consumer prices. When digital migration finally happens, with low-frequency spectrum abundantly available, operators could use it for coverage in less populated areas in ways that could close the urban–rural digital divide and yield new digitally empowered businesses. Absence of economies of scale in rural areas is a reality that can be overcome by more systemic

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interventions. This is where market-creating innovations through public policy support, public–private partnership initiatives, skills development, and a range of incentives to attract private sector investment are required as they hold the promise to unleash prosperity. Christensen et al. (2019) argues that creation of new markets through innovation, especially in areas that are blighted by socio-economic challenges, yield new jobs and other economic activities. Africa is a fertile terrain for market-creating innovations, but government will need to play more of a visible role in making interventions that could uncover new opportunities. The delays on spectrum availability hinder the diffusion of the lowfrequency spectrum for rural and underserved areas. It also throttles the diffusion of innovation that could bolster delivery of critical public services and improve the ecosystem for entrepreneurship in these areas. Various other exciting and ICT-related services such as call centers could be expanded in rural economies on the back of more reliable internet connectivity. This could be an important mission-critical outcome for rural economic development. While telecommunications networks are relatively developed in the urban and semi-urban areas, there are still major gaps in rural areas. Another constraint is that of lack of skills. South Africa lacks sufficient skills for the digital economy. In 2017, South Africa had internet usage of more than 54%, with smartphone penetration rates at over 80%. The usage rate is below the profile of an aspirational middle-income country like South Africa that is an economic giant in sub-Saharan Africa. Of greater importance is the value that the digital economy could generate for the country’s socio-economic development. The government will need to direct its efforts toward narrowing the socio-economic divide that is also starkly reflected in the digital divide, especially between welloff suburbia and underserved townships, and between the urban centers and rural areas. Co-investing in building digital infrastructure in underserved areas and releasing the much-awaited spectrum are as important for socio-economic development as they are for commercial utility.

Concluding Reflections The challenges discussed above are common to many African countries. In addition to cost factors, many rural communities lack internet speeds available in urban areas due to under-investment in broadband infrastructure. This is unacceptable, as it sustains apartheid geographies and

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throttles a country’s potential. As the Vice-President of Microsoft Brad Smith points out: “Broadband has become the electricity of the twentyfirst century. It’s fundamental to the way people work, live, and learn. The future of medicine [especially in rural areas] is telemedicine. The future of education is online education [or a blended mode]. And the future of agriculture is precision farming.” (Smith 2019, p. 156). Digital infrastructure and affordable internet connectivity could enable rural and poor communities in Africa to accelerate their economic progress. “Today, rural areas that lack broadband” Smith suggests, “are living in the twentieth century.” This is also the relative position of Africa in the global economy today. Making significant improvements in economic development and building momentum for digital transformation will be a crucial step in changing global perceptions about Africa; importantly, it will infuse the younger generation of Africans with self-confidence and a sense of pride for their continent. Growing digitization requires that that African governments nurture the digital ecosystem while also developing appropriate regulatory frameworks for data governance and technology partnerships with external partners.

References Christensen, Clayton, Efosa Ejomo, and Karen Dillon. 2019. The Prosperity Paradox. New York: Harper Business. Competition Commission. 2020. Competition in the Digital Economy (A Paper for Public Comments), September. Delle, Sangu. 2020. Making Futures: Young Entrepreneurs in a Dynamic Africa. Abuja: Cassava Republic. Ford, Martin. 2015. Rise of the Robots. New York: One World Publication. International Institute for Strategic Studies. 2021. Cyber Capabilities and National Power: A Net Assessment. https://www.iiss.org/blogs/researchpaper/2021/06/cyber-capabilities-national-power. International Telecommunications Union. 2018. Measuring the Information Society Report. Geneva: International Telecommunications Union. Isaacson, Walter. 2014. The Innovators. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lee, Kaifu. 2018. AI Superpowers. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Mamphiswana, Rendani, and Saurabh Sinha. 2020. Enhancing the South African System of Innovation: Perspectives and Implications (Unpublished Paper). Marwala, Tshilidzi. 2020. Closing the Gap. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan. Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor, and Thomas Ramge. 2018. Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data. New York: Basic Books.

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Mazzucato, Mariana. 2015. The Entrepreneurial State. New York: Public Affairs. Mazzucato, Mariana. 2021. Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. New York: Allen Lane. National Planning Commission. 2020. Digital Futures: South Africa’s Digital Readiness for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Draft). The Presidency, 16 July. Nsehe, Mfonobong. 2014. “Nigerian Billionaire Tony Elumelu Commits $100 Million to Create 10,000 African Entrepreneurs in 10 Years”. Forbes Magazine, 1 December. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mfonobongnsehe/ 2014/12/01/nigerian-billionaire-tony-elumelu-commits-100-million-to-cre ate-10000-african-entrepreneurs-in-10-years/#5d7f6da22d47. Accessed 1 March 2020. Partech. 2020. Africa Tech Venture Capital Report. https://partechpartners. com/2020-africa-tech-venture-capital-report/. Ridley, Matt. 2020. How Innovation Works. London: HarperCollins. Rodrik, Dani. 2017. Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Romer, Paul M. 1989. “Endogeneous Technological Change”. NBER Working Paper Series. No. 3210. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_p apers/w3210/w3210.pdf. Ross, Alec. 2016. The Industries of the Future. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sims, Peter. 2012. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. New York: Random House. Smith, Brad. 2019. Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age. New York: Hodder & Stoughton. Sun, Irene Yuan. 2017. The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. UNCTAD. 2019. Digital Economy Report 2019. Geneva: UNCTAD. Webb, Amy. 2019. The Big Nine. New York: Public Affairs. World Bank. 2019a. Nigeria: Digital Economy Diagnostic Report. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/ handle/10986/32743/Nigeria-Digital-Economy-Diagnostic-Report.pdf?seq uence=1&isAllowed=y. World Bank. 2019b. South Africa: Digital Economy Diagnostic. Washington, DC: The World Bank Group. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstr eam/handle/10986/33786/South-Africa-Digital-Economy-Diagnostic.pdf? sequence=1. Accessed 1 February 2020. World Bank. 2020b. Kenya Economic Update: Securing Future Growth—Policies to Support Kenya’s Digital Transformation. Edition No. 20. https://openkn owledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32792. Accessed 28 January 2020.

CHAPTER 9

US–China Tech Wars: Shaping Africa’s Agency

The domain of technology is ripening up to be a potent frontier of contestation between the United States and China, and it is in this area that African countries could yet find themselves pawns on a grand chessboard if they are passive clients. Growing digitalization and increasing use of AI tools in the economy, government, and society pose new risks about the uses and abuses of data and vulnerability of critical infrastructure to cyberattacks. Another menace could be in the form of technology partnerships structured for geopolitical purposes, and that that lock Africa into one mode of technology that is supplied by one of the major rival powers, China or the United States. This chapter maps the risks that lie at the nexus of geopolitics and technology shifts, and offers perspectives for African decision-makers on countering such risks while maximizing opportunities. I argue that African governments should strenuously safeguard their right to choose from the broadest possible range of foreign policy partners and technology options that suit their countries’ development needs. Further, they should insist on acquiring and developing new technologies like 5G based on objective criteria that serve their development needs rather than the interests of foreign powers. In the era of technological change, Africans should build a positive agency that is underpinned by appropriate institutions, fashioning governance frameworks that harness © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Qobo, The Political Economy of China–US Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1_9

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new technologies and data generated through them, and human capital for the digital age.

The Character of the Tech Wars US–China trade and tech wars intensified during the Trump administration. In July 2018, the US government invoked Section 301 investigations targeting China’s high-tech companies. The USTR initiated this investigation in August 2017 to determine whether the Chinese government was engaging in trade, investment and industrial policies that disadvantaged the United States through requirements for technology transfers by US companies to Chinese companies. The USTR investigation had adverse findings on China, concluding that the country engaged in unfair trade practices and that its industrial policies were harmful to US economic interests. What this meant is that the United States will not tolerate any serious challenger to its economic dominance, especially if such a challenger relies on state-support for its economic rise, as China is. Further, that the United States will in future watch closely, and counter, any form of state support—or industrial policies—implemented by its trading partners, more so when it deems these to be harmful to its economic interests. In relation to US punitive measures on China, the bulk of the goods that slated for tariff increases during the Trump administration were made up of high-tech and high-end manufacturing, underlining the critical areas of vulnerability in the United States. These tensions had not abated in the first year of the Biden administration. One of the reasons why this tension will continue for the foreseeable future is that it is based on structural factors and reflects a profound shift in global leadership, with a new challenger (China) determined to test America’s mettle (Allison 2017). By 2020, in the closing days of the Trump administration, the United States had imposed tariffs on $550bn worth of products from China. In turn, China retaliated with its own tariffs on $185bn worth of American imports. At the beginning of 2021, China upped the ante in its geopolitical tensions with the United States by signaling that it will limit rare earth minerals exports to the United States as a means to throttle the supply of this input for US defense contractors and to starve America’s advanced manufacturing sectors that rely on rare earth minerals (Yu and Sevastopulo 2021).

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Many of the Chinese sectors targeted by US tariffs during the Trump years included electronics, aviation, semiconductors, engineering, robotics and automated machine tools, aircraft and aircraft components, and materials used for hi-tec components. The Trump administration placed over 20 other Chinese companies on the entity list for exclusion in the US market. These include Beijing Cloud Mining Technology, Beijing Computational Science Research Center, Beijing Jincheng Huanyu Electronics, and Harbin Engineering University (Smith 2019). In a sense, America seeks to neuter China’s knowledge structure and undercut its rise as a tech superpower. It is worth noting that back in the 1980s, the United States engaged in similar practices, though not as intense and viscerally driven when it faced a surge of electronics imports from Japan. At the time, strategic trade conflicts were marked especially on high-tech, a development that saw US chipmakers such as Intel making a wholesale shift in their business models. The level of intensity in US–China standoff lends this tension a dimension of knowledge war. It is not a civilizational tension following Samuel Huntington’s conception, although it does have those shades, and reference is often made of different cultural and commercial systems. A few years after the end of the Cold War, the political scientist Samuel Huntington made a claim that in future global politics will be reconfigured along cultural or civilizational lines, and he mapped nine such civilizations—Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Bhudist, and Japanese (Huntington 1996). He had based his thesis on signs of rising nationalism as Soviet communism was headed for the sunset. Huntington pointed to tensions in cultural frictions in countries such as Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, and the assertion of nonWestern countries in international relations, among others as examples of this new cultural fault-line in global politics. While some may argue that there are elements of civilizational differences between the United States and China, this is far from a prominent factor; the contestations are largely about technological supremacy and the relative role of the state and markets in shaping the next industrial revolution. The battleground is less about history, identity, and culture, but mainly about who will dominate the world in new forms of technology and international trade. History is often instrumentalized, such as for example “China’s Century of Humiliation” to mobilize the country to achieve grand ambitions. In the case of the United States, Trump’s idea of “Making America Great Again” that draws on a sense of nostalgia

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about a mythical past of America’s greatness sought to achieve a similar purpose. This chapter focuses more on the tech part of the contestation and its implications for the African continent.

Tensions in Commercial and Regulatory Systems One of the risks posed by the tech wars is the bifurcation of the digital landscape into a Chinese and an American system—or what some have referred to as the tech iron curtain (Schmidt and Cohen 2014; Smith 2019). Since global production and trade are driven through supply chains based on multi-country sourcing, most firms rely on technologies produced in other countries, both Western and non-Western, to power commerce. The US prohibition of Huawei will, no doubt, have severe implications on sourcing strategies of firms located in different parts of the world, and may affect the integrity of technology products that are sourced outside of the United States or US preferred partners. Huawei sources some of its components, especially microchips from US semiconductor companies. In August 2020, US Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, announced that a license would be required before any American company can sell microchips that were made using US software or equipment to Huawei. Huawei relies on semiconductor companies like Intel and Qualcomm for sourcing microchips to power its devices. In 2020 the Trump administration prohibited American companies from using Huawei kits, warning that such kits could be deployed for transmission of citizens’ information back to China. These allegations were never proven. Under these new security-driven regulations, the US government can simply label, even if arbitrarily, certain products or components as of “dual-use” and impose an export ban on them. The restrictions on electronics components suppliers (export ban) means that Huawei will not be able to source components from US firms. As a result, other countries may deem Huawei products to either have substandard components or weak security protocols. There is no sign that Biden will relax these tensions. He has instead doubled down on denouncing China’s human rights violations in a way that could deepen mistrust. In June 2021, Biden introduced through an Executive Order a welter of investment restrictions on Chinese defense and surveillance companies, thereby raising the total number of banned Chinese entities from 48 to 59, a number that may likely climb in future. The list includes affiliates of Aviation Industry Corporation of China, which manufactures military

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aircraft and financing arms of Huawei. According to the Executive Order, American companies are prohibited from investing in the companies that are on the updated list. According to Biden, these investment prohibition measures are aimed at curtailing China’s military-industrial complex and countering the use of Chinese surveillance technology out of China (White House 2021). Whereas Trump focused on restrictions on hardware and software, Biden extended prohibitions to the financial sector, in particular trading in securities of banned companies. During his first call with China’s Xi Jinping, Biden raised China’s questionable human rights record, especially the Chinese authorities’ crackdown in Hong Kong and human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Undoubtedly, China will test the US mettle under the Biden administration to adjust its posture accordingly as a challenger. Biden’s administration will not want to be seen as too soft on China, something that the Republicans will exploit to their advantage. There might be a détente through summitries between the two countries, but such initiatives will not reach the heights that were possible under the Bush administration. US–China relations may be less crude than what they were under Trump, but the differences will sharpen, nonetheless. The Trump administration framed its tensions with China as being about the distinction in systems, especially state-commerce relations in the Chinese economic system vis-à-vis supposedly free market and democratic regime in the United States. This distinction was necessary for the United States to push for a structural redefinition of commercial terms with China and extract economic concessions to rebalance the scales—both on the technology and trade front. China’s domestic regulatory conduct has given the United States strong reasons to undercut its technology companies. In the case of TikTok, America’s ban was not outright but conditional. The denial to Tiktok of the right to operate in the US market would inflict a financial loss estimated at $100bn, which would include debasement of the app’s future valuation. Biden has since put a pause on banning Tiktok and WeChat as the two companies instituted a legal action against the banks.

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Chinese Measures Against the United States In a retaliatory move, the Chinese authorities expanded its list of technologies that it would place under export restrictions to curb any potential sale of Chinese technologies to US companies. Such technologies included data-processing technologies, such as content-recommendation algorithms, text analysis, speech modelling, and voice-recognition (Xiao and Lin 2020). Tech firms such as Facebook, Twitter, and the movie platform Netflix had always been kept out of the Chinese market by authorities. In addition to filtering by Chinese authorities, China does not have an open internet. While the Chinese may consider themselves victims when the United States imposes restrictions on the operation of their social media platforms, it should be borne in mind that they have been practicing Internet nationalism for a long time. From the US perspective, this creates an asymmetry that needs to be corrected (Wu 2020). In early 2019 the Chinese Communist Party reportedly ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years through an approach that was dubbed as 3-5-2 approach (Yang and Liu 2019). The implementation was phased: the first phase was planned for 2020, with the substitution rate set at 30%. The second phase in 2021 would see a substitution rate of 50%, with the final phase in 2022. The Chinese government sets its sight on 100% local content on hardware and software by the end of 2022. This is akin to burning all the bridges to force innovation and import replacement. China does not intend to slow down or turn back its innovation march. US companies such as HP, Dell and Microsoft will feel the pain of this import replacement as purchase orders by the Chinese government decline. Whether it is a Republican or Democrat in office, there will be no holding back by the United States to overcome what it has always considered China’s unfair trade practices. Trump may have lost elections, but aspects of Trumpism will loom large in the national psyche, especially where it concerns trade relations with China. The next sections consider various theatres of tech contestation between the two countries and draw implications for Africa, starting with tensions over 5G.

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Competition Over 5G The new 5G technology brings a sense of optimism that some of the socio-economic ills afflicting African countries could be ameliorated. There are various institutional, policy, and regulatory interventions that will need to be addressed for technology to work in the service of development. I have covered many of these enabling requirements in Chapter 8. It suffices to point out that technology on its own will not make much of a difference if there is no institutional support or clear public policy purpose to harness it to create market opportunities while solving socio-economic ills. The US ban on Huawei—or any tech restrictions by either side—could scupper Africa’s acceleration to digital transformation. Digital transformation is a critical mission for many African countries since the solutions to complex social and economic challenges potentially lie with new technologies. African companies working with US companies on research and development and jointly producing technologies with them could be forced to adhere to these restrictions since the US ban extends to non-American companies that have joint research projects with American companies. This means that African firms that undertake joint research activities with American companies, especially in high-tech sectors, need to scrutinize the restrictive clauses on the uses of those technologies or knowledge. African leaders will need to be aware of the role of geopolitics in constraining or advancing developmental ends and should calibrate their diplomatic strategies to minimize the adverse effects of geopolitics. Importantly Africans should avoid over-reliance on either Western or Chinese technologies but choose from a diverse menu of options while gradually developing their own platforms. 5G and Africa The utility of 5G lies in its advanced performance, low latency communications, high reliability, and ability to support several connected devices or power what has come to be called the “Internet of Things” of connected devices. It is also a technology that enables convergence within ICT and between ICT and other sectors of the economy that were traditionally not digitized (Tyagi 2019, p. 84). In a sense, it is defined by the idea of “Everything as a Service,” acting as the backbone of the industries of the future, especially supercomputing that is required for AI processes such

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as machine learning and Big Data. This will become more important with the ubiquity of technologies such as mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. As Lee (2018) has pointed out, computing power and data are key to performing complex problem-solving through Artificial Intelligence. Such complex problems are not only found in sectors of the economy but also in the delivery of government services and in the broader society. The value of 5G as an enabler is that it potentially facilitates faster transmission of data in ways that can have significant social utility, for example, performing medical procedures remotely for those in remote rural areas (Marwala 2020, p. 108). For regions such as the Africa continent, 5G technologies could be an answer to narrowing the digital divide, promoting technological convergence between African countries and advanced industrial economies over time, and closing the rural–urban divide within African countries. For that to happen, public policy will need to define the social utility or public value, and decision-makers in government, sometimes working with the private sector, create new forms of regulation. The Trump administration framed Huawei’s 5G infrastructure as posing a national security threat and accused Huawei of violating Iran sanctions. African governments and companies must be mindful of these geopolitical tensions and their likely impact in enabling or undermining Africa’s choice of technologies. Consider, for example, the case of Kenya. The Kenyan government invited Huawei to be its partner in building the country’s 5G technology services. At the same time, Kenya has an unfinished business with America to conclude a Free Trade Agreement. If the US–China tech wars were to deepen, America would likely implore its trade partners to dissociate with China as it has done with countries such as Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. This could be more so under the Biden Executive Orders, where companies that are trading surveillance technology outside of China are blacklisted. A condition that African countries cannot do business with the United States while partnering with Chinese companies are restricted entities would certainly narrow the menu of options for those countries. Huawei has been constructing new undersea Internet cables and national data networks, and in marketing mobile phones on the African continent. The challenge for poor countries, and regions such as Africa, is that they have limited engineering or technological capabilities to build the digital infrastructure they can have full control over. This deficiency

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may compel many of these countries to source the requisite infrastructure for their digital economy from tech superpowers such as China and the United States. Schmidt and Cohen (2014, p. 111) have suggested that: “In the future, superpower supplier nations will look to create their spheres of online influence around specific protocols and products, so that their technologies form the backbone of a particular society and their client states come to rely on certain critical infrastructure that the superpower alone builds, services and controls.” Technology autarky—or what is sometimes referred to as splintered internet—is not an option. African countries must broaden technology choices and keep foreign policy preferences along pragmatic lines. Notably, African countries need to shore up their resources and participate actively in ICT global standard processes at the International Telecommunications Union, World Intellectual Property Organisation, International Electrotechnical Commission, and International Organisation for Standardisation, among others. Even if the continent was relatively self-sufficient, interdependence generates greater public value than tech nationalism. Participating in standard-setting processes internationally can stimulate innovation. The more immediate challenge for the continent, however, is to enrich the digital ecosystem, including building the digital infrastructure, upgrading digital skills, and broadening its citizens’ participation in the digital economy. For technologies related to industries of the future that may rely on the ubiquity of 5G, it is vital that the standard-setting platforms are consensus-driven, and that the African continent, which has over 1.2 billion people, is active in such key standard-setting processes. The EU has been promoting a process of cooperation on 5G vision, standards, and spectrum requirements (European Commission 2020). This process is informal and led on a bilateral basis by the EU and includes countries such as China, the US, India, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. In this fashion, the EU is burnishing itself as a champion of multilateral norms. It is important that African countries participate in standard-setting process that could help in knowledge diffusion and for introducing best practices, especially those that seek to strengthen multilateralism and promote equity. The continent will also need to gradually build its own regional standard-setting bodies and develop its technical capabilities, which could be further reinforced by the nature of partnerships that Africa forges on a diversified basis with more mature economies in the world.

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Cybersecurity and Regulation in the Era of AI The tensions between the United States and China are also fought out on the cyberspace. Cybersecurity threats are the underbelly of the digital economy. Blackwill and Harris (2016, p. 59), consider cyber to be “among the newest and most powerful geoeconomics instruments.” The former US National Security Advisor, Robert Gates, pointed out that the cyberspace is the fifth domain of warfare alongside land, sea, air, and space (cited in Schmidt and Cohen 2014, p. 109). The Chinese view it similarly. In 2015 the Chinese new military strategy declared that “outer space and cyber space have become new commanding heights of strategic competition between states” (People’s Republic of China 2015). Many countries are starting to make cybersecurity one of the important foreign policy and homeland securities. Cyberwar is defined as “actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption” (Schmidt and Cohen 2014, p. 103). Cyberattacks, broadly speaking, are driven not just by nation-states but also individuals or organizations and are directed at states, organizations, and individuals. Cyberattacks vary in degrees, from low-intensity criminality, data theft, espionage, to system’s disruptions aimed at stealing data from companies or governments. Just as criminality in the physical world ranges from pickpocketing to armed robbery to counterinsurgency, there are also gradations and varying types of attacks and different degrees of impact in cyberspace. There are also social media cybersecurity activities which include psychological warfare undertaken by states and non-state actors. Extensive research by Roger McNamee (2019) marshals compelling argument and evidence on the complicity of big tech firms in the subversion of democracy through social media. They have also allowed themselves to be used as instruments for psychological warfare on social media. Some of the cyberattacks that assumed a geopolitical dimension include Russia’s 2008 attack on Georgia’s internet infrastructure against the backdrop of tensions between the two countries over South Ossetia. There was also the coordinated United States and Israel cyberattack on Iran ostensibly to disrupt its nuclear weapons program, and Iran’s attacks on the US navy computers (Sanger 2012). Another worrying aspect of cybersecurity underlined by Blackwill and Harris (2016, p. 60) is that of geoeconomically directed cyberattacks, where governments target economic sectors or strategic firms in other countries. The typical targets

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are the banking sector, telecommunications, and smart energy grids. The aim is to weaken another country by undermining its critical economic and financial infrastructure. Since cyberwar is shaping up to be the new nuclear arsenal in the hands of major powers and rogue states, countries and firms that explicitly align themselves with one of the superpowers could find themselves under intense attack. Major powers sell their technologies for countering cyberthreats to various client states. If a state chooses to align itself with one of the major powers that are contending for tech supremacy, they may also be targeted by adversaries in a way that diminishes their economic and technological sovereignty and accentuates their dependence on major powers. Microsoft Vice-President, Brad Smith, has alluded to the idea of a Digital Geneva Convention modelled after the initiative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1949 to establish a Fourth Geneva Convention to protect civilians in times of war (Smith 2019, p. 113). Undoubtedly there is a need to introduce new governance norms on the use of cybersecurity tools to protect civilians and the critical infrastructure of countries. Because of the interconnectedness of mass social media platforms that generate cybersecurity threats through disinformation campaigns and the undermining of democracy or corporate reputation, it would make sense that a new multilateralism in this domain is not just driven by the state actors, but also involves non-state actors. As Moses Naim reminds us, power is no longer strictly hierarchically organized but is horizontally diffused, and with various actors able to spread influence—good or bad—on social media (Naim 2013). They are also able to act autonomously, and launch cyberattacks. These are all issues that political decision-makers need to think through, especially in a fluid global context characterized by rising geopolitical tensions. Some of the global firms such as Mastercard, Softbank and IBM have called on the G7 to create a new body, the Data and Technology Forum, that would coordinate governance of issues such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity (Venkataramakrishnan 2021). Having tech multilateralism will need to mirror the domestic imperative of generating solutions to cybersecurity threats through multi-stakeholder processes. In such processes, the state may need to play an essential coordinating and leadership role. This kind of multilateralism should not be framed narrowly to cast countries into rival boxes of axis of evil versus good countries but

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aim to strengthen international cooperation. Such international cooperation should include supporting greater diffusion of tech knowhow to benefit the developing world, especially African countries. As Smith points out, many in the US administration have resisted the idea of multilateral disciplines on cybersecurity, precisely because they prefer autonomy for deploying these instruments in ways that serve narrow US national interests. US tech companies have sought to develop their own global Cybersecurity Tech Accord that would commit them to a set of values that emphasize the need to protect citizens and consumers worldwide against cyberattacks and promote cybersecurity on a global basis (Smith 2019, p. 120). The problem that companies always face is that of collective action. Some companies prefer to work on their own and are reluctant to share information. While still tentative, the Cybersecurity Tech Accord has yielded a Charter of Trust, which was sponsored by Siemens; it aims to safeguard the security of small devices that make up the internet of things (Smith 2019, p. 122). The lone ranger character of American companies makes it harder to develop common interest and shared platform to create or maximize public value on a global scale. One of the grounds of contention over the creation of a common platform is the ideological inclination of some American tech firms. Since many rely on contracts from the Pentagon for their businesses, they often come under pressure to be in the US government’s service in collecting information on private citizens and enterprises that might be under investigation. They see themselves as America first before they are global corporate citizens. Microsoft provides technology to the US military and those it considers “allied governments where we are confident in democratic processes and fundamental sensitivities around human rights” (Smith 2019, p. 204). Yet the American government accuses Chinese companies of being too close to the state, including the military. Microsoft prefers to collaborate based on liberal-democratic ideals, widening the grounds of tension with China and other countries whose democratic credentials may not meet the ideal Western standard. In 2018, Microsoft employees protested the company’s contract with the US army to the tune of $479m for “Project Maven”, which would use artificial intelligence to improve computer vision for applications like drone targeting (Lapowsky 2019). The Pentagon sees Silicon Valley as a source of supply for critical AI-based technologies to enhance military capabilities, essentially to bolster US hard-power when the geopolitical

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tensions with countries like China are intensifying. Tech firms on the other hand feed off defense contracts. Amazon boasts a $10bn cloud computing contract for Pentagon—Jedi—and this socializes the company to national security logic, more pointedly to how the US government conceives of national security threats. Taking sides in geopolitical tensions based on categorizing states along rigid frames of values should be avoided by both companies and states. The risk of association is even more pronounced given that US companies such as Amazon, IBM, and Oracle provide cloud storage services to businesses across the borders and hold a vast trove of data in their cloud servers, with no clear boundaries on the future uses, ultimate ownership, or security of such data. The United States insists that information collected from within the country is stored in US-based cloud servers. There is nothing that stops the US government from forcing its own companies to hand over data collected in other countries as part of investigating what it may deem suspicious activities. Smaller states need to firmly push for multilateral disciplines on cybersecurity to avoid a new balkanization resulting from the geopolitically inspired tech iron curtain. Major Powers could also be tempted to unleash this new form of warfare on neighboring states that are deemed hostile to them; or may introduce rules and standards that are not favorable to smaller country’s long-term development in the same they have done with the global trading system. China sought to reduce its perceived vulnerability through “involving US companies in its cyber-security governance, including for national technical standards, allowing it some oversight of the use of US technology and its network” (IISS 2021, pp. 5–6). In September 2019, IBM and the Bank of China announced a partnership to work together to co-create new digital innovations for the financial industry. Global interdependence makes it hard to conceive of a bifurcated technology. Cybersecurity threats are a concern for governments, global leaders, and citizens. International law experts have cautioned that the cyberspace is international space and that countries should observe international law in their conduct in this space (O’Connell 2012, p. 190). It may well be that international law on cyberspace is not fully developed since this is a new terrain. Even if it were to be developed, powerful countries have a tendency of opting out of international treaties or multilateral processes that do not serve them. However, in the absence of a multilateral framework that guides the conduct of states it becomes difficult to discipline

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countries through international law rather than through deterrence by a form akin to mutually assured destruction that held the balance of power during the Cold War. Mutually assured destruction (or balance of threat) was the idea that major powers, in particular the United States and the USSR, possessed sufficient nuclear arsenal to annihilate an adversary, and that whoever makes the first strike might not wholly destroy an opponent’s power thereby inviting retaliation of equal measure. For realists such as Kenneth Waltz, mutually assured destruction made it too costly to use nuclear weapons, since the raison d’etre of states is not just maximization of power but also survival (Waltz 1959). In the case of nuclear weapons, holding these in balance was what guaranteed international peace. Following the Realist tradition of International Relations, it is possible that cybersecurity threats may lend themselves to the same logic of balance of power. Threats such as malware, distributed denial of services, data leakages, or massive disruption in critical infrastructure such as smart-grids could generate a great deal of inconvenience, financial loss, job losses, and functioning of complex procedures in hospitals and other vital services—but they are not perceived with the mortal fear that nuclear weapons induce. That is not to deny the dangers of cybersecurity but to underline a substantive difference in the perception—or degrees—of danger.

Cybersecurity Implications for Africa The African continent has been “among the fastest growing regions in terms of cybercrime activities” (Kshetri 2019, p. 77), and with few of these countries having developed national cybersecurity strategy. Weak cybersecurity system and vulnerable systems are the sources of growing cybersecurity attacks on the African continent, with Libya and Zimbabwe having the highest software piracy rates globally, thereby opening malware vulnerabilities that cannot benefit from updates and patches from manufacturers (Kshetri 2019, p. 78). Lack of digital literacy is another source of exposure to cyberattacks. Even with the growing penetration of cellphones on the African continent, if there is little awareness of the dangers of cybersecurity in the digital age, users may not be in the habit of updating their software to obtain security patches that protect against the latest malware. A joint report by the African Union and Symantec published cybercrime and cybersecurity trends in Africa. It pointed out that Africa’s

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growing digitization brings to bear new forms of risks associated with increased connectivity and shifting the volume of activities to digital platforms. According to the African Union/Symantec report: “As the African continent’s economy moves online, citizens, their computer systems, and the Continent’s information technology (IT) infrastructure become enticing targets for an increasingly professional cadre of cybercriminals” (African Union/Symantec 2016, p. 7). It is estimated that vulnerabilities will increase as connectivity widens and deepens with innovations associated with new technologies, with smartphones as preferred channels for cybercriminals. The growing number of smartphones in the hands of consumers may also represent explosive risks in the form of potential malware with personal data theft. The African Union adopted a Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection (Malabo Convention), named after the capital city of Equatorial Guinea where the AU 23rd Assembly of Heads of State and Government was held on 26–27 June 2014 and adopted the Convention. This Convention sought to establish a robust legal framework to criminalize and prevent cyberattacks and guarantee the territorial integrity and personal data. The Convention contains chapters on electronic transactions, personal data protection, and various provisions covering implementation, safeguard provisions, dispute settlement, ratification, and entry into force. The detailed sections on cybersecurity are discussed extensively in Article 26 to Article 31. Despite the calls by the AU Malabo Convention that each state should promote cybersecurity awareness among all its stakeholders, legislative architecture in many countries remains weak, yet vulnerabilities are growing. There are not many known best practices of multi-stakeholder process on cybersecurity as required by the Convention. Institutional capacities in many African countries are weak, making it harder to have any sound and credible framework for international cooperation when the practices at the domestic level are at odds with the goals stated in the Malabo Convention. Since the adoption of this convention, only Senegal, Mauritius, Namibia, Gambia, and Rwanda had ratified it by the end of 2020. The convention is non-operational since it requires a minimum of 15 ratifications before entering into force. There is only a handful of African countries that has cybersecurity legislative framework—Egypt, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa. Digital transformation brings with it opportunities and threats: deepening connectivity broadens the possibilities for cyber threats.

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In his foreword to Kenya’s cybersecurity strategy, President Uhuru Kenyatta underlined the risks posed by growing integration of the country into the cyberspace through government activities, commerce, and activities of its citizens. Kenya is the country that pioneered the mobile payment system, which is backed by Huawei infrastructure. Many banking services take place over the internet through cellphones. A largescale cyberattack aimed at the payment system infrastructure could have far-reaching implications for livelihood. Kenya’s vigilance is due to its constant battles with piracy and terrorism on its doorstep in Somalia, and it understands the importance of securing critical infrastructure. According to the cybersecurity policy framework, the Kenyan government has an explicit goal to achieve an e-Government capability. It also links the imperative of cybersecurity policy to economic growth and wellbeing of its citizens. The country is connected to the regional fiber-optic underwater cable. Government has mapped the worldwide increase in sophistication of cyberattacks from 1980 to 2014, from basic password guessing and self-replicating codes in the 1980s; to sweepers, stealth diagnostics, and automated scans in the 1990s; to blended attacks, phishing, cyber-based terrorism, nation-state cyberwarfare, and next-generation distributed denial of services in the 2000s. Kenya’s strategy anticipates these various types of cyberattacks and seeks to develop capabilities to respond to these new risks with vigor. The various mechanism the policy envisaged include the creation of special agencies, consumer protection, homeland security, national defense, and multi-stakeholder driven approaches both domestically and regionally. Kenya’s strategy sets out four goals that it aims to achieve: enhance national cybersecurity posture and protection of critical information infrastructure; building national capability as well creating greater awareness in society; fostering information sharing and collaboration, including through the development of a comprehensive governance framework for better coordination; and providing national leadership. The lead department is the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology as an expression of government’s understanding that this is not just about national security in classical security terms but encompasses various sectors of the economy. Nigeria published its National Security Policy in December 2014 under the office of the National Security Advisor. As with all countries that have articulated national security policies, Nigeria is responding

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to increasing penetration of the internet and growing digitalization of social and economic activities, as well as the growing use of digital solutions in government. The policy framework identifies specific threats it seeks to curb. These threats include cybercrime, cyber-espionage, cyber conflict, cyber-terrorism, and child online abuse and exploitation. Nigeria’s framework articulates a doctrine on cyberspace that locates it within the imperatives of state sovereignty, national security, and economic development, and with primacy placed on national security which explains why the main driver of the policy is the office of the National Security Advisor. Yet the Nigerian government recognizes the importance of interagency cooperation, which many countries, even the United States, have struggled to achieve. Interagency collaboration in Nigeria is anchored on the National Cybersecurity Coordination Center. Nigeria will need to build various capabilities, including those dealing with forensics, early warning systems, prevention, and capacity to prosecute cybercrimes. Further, digital skills tend to be deficient in government agencies. Security agencies still view security through traditional lenses, and with instruments that are no longer adequate for new threats. Lack of digital skills is not a challenge only for Nigeria but also for other African countries. Rwanda that has ambitions to become an ICT hub and formulated its national cybersecurity policy in 2015. The government-driven cybersecurity strategy covers consumer protection, data security, regulation of electronic certification service providers, cybercrime, and protection of personal information. This policy framework has not been updated to consider newer risks that are linked to 5G technology. Its emphasis is still on 4G LTE. It does not specify sectors that are likely to be under threat and to which greater priority needs to be accorded. The strategy is too broad on e-government system, national data center, energy infrastructure, and banking and finance system, and does not specify threats to each of these areas. Much of the policy framework is aspirational with respect to developing cybersecurity capabilities, cybersecurity contingency plan, critical infrastructure information protection, safeguarding of government information, building a cybersecurity industry, and fostering innovation through Research and Development. South Africa’s National Cybersecurity Framework has its origins in the intelligence community, having been gazetted under David Mahlobo, then Minister of State Security in December 2015. South Africa has suffered several cybersecurity attacks across finance, telecommunications,

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and services sectors, with the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC) suggesting that cyberattacks cost the South African economy R2.2bn annually. Government departments have also come under cybersecurity attacks, with the Presidency’s website hacked in 2018. Various other government websites were hacked in 2020. The growing incidents of cybersecurity attacks, especially inflicting harm on large private sector companies have revealed weaknesses in the country’s approach to combatting cybersecurity threats. South Africa has a sophisticated economy compared to its peers in the region. Further, the country has deep financial markets and is a magnet for multinational companies that view it as a gateway to the rest of the African continent. It has its homegrown multinational companies in the telecoms sector, financial services, media groups, and diversified companies, making it an attractive target for cyberattacks. South Africa’s cybersecurity policy is aspirational but characterized by institutional gridlocks. While there are various measures to overcome cyber threats that are set out in the national policy framework, these will not gain traction unless there are strong institutions and leadership that can implement. There are common problems that undermine many African countries’ ability to prepare themselves for a world in which cybersecurity will be common. These countries lack strong capabilities and a sound doctrine on cybersecurity and its meaning in a changing global environment. Weaknesses in state–society relations make it harder to build multi-stakeholder platforms based on trust and shared understanding. Yet the government alone cannot successfully fight cyberthreats, especially given the multidimensionality of these new risks. The private sector and civil society have important roles to play in lending technical capabilities and creating awareness in society about the dangers of cyberthreats.

Concluding Reflections African countries are still lagging on digital technologies. First movers tend to entrench their dominance and act as gatekeepers to key discoveries or uses of existing technologies. There are multiple uses of AI-driven technologies, ranging from those aimed at solving complex problems in society, to those that maximize commercial returns; there are also those that inflict damage on other countries or businesses, as we have seen with cyberattacks.

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Some aspects of new technologies may seem innocuous but could unleash psychological damage on individuals, undermine democracy, and generate risks that generate debilitating frictions in society. Such kinds of technologies are in the shape of social media. And these were unleashed virulently to influence voter behavior with respect to Brexit in 2015 and US elections in 2016. In other instances, they were used for sowing racial and other political tensions within countries. These threats underline the importance of sound regulatory frameworks within countries, but also the imperative of multilateral platforms to discipline their abuses. Importantly, African countries need to build robust digital infrastructure and upgrade human capital if they want to integrate meaningfully in the global economy. Political decision-makers and financing institutions must lead efforts to invest in innovation and be co-investors with venture capital firms that are increasingly drawn to the African continent. There is nothing that stops African governments from creating governmentbacked venture capital instruments. For mineral-rich countries, there is an opportunity to harness the windfalls from these resources toward creating sovereign wealth funds that are focused on building knowledge-driven economies on the African continent. Countries like Norway managed to use their natural resources to create a knowledge-driven economy and generate prosperity for their citizens. African countries cannot address these vast socio-economic challenges alone or pull themselves by their bootstraps in maximizing the digital economy for their development. External partners will always have a role to play. Such a relationship should move away from the old paternalistic mold and seek mutual benefit by adding value to Africa’s commodities, supporting investment toward human capital, and sharing technology. Crucially, African countries should avoid alignment with other countries based on geopolitics but should see those relationships through the lens of their own interests. To achieve this, African governments and institutions will need to coordinate better, aggregate their resources, and build a sound digital ecosystem that is open to partnerships with a variety of major powers. If African countries fail to work together, they will always fall prey to foreign players. The main obstacle that hinders Africa from making a digital leap and achieving prosperity is imagination.

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Epilogue

Leadership, Institutions, and Africa’s Future The African continent has a long way ahead to shedding the memories of its unfortunate history and the mental and structural shackles that retard its development. There is much promise and hope in the dynamism of Africa’s youth and emerging intellectuals and middle class. While it makes little sense to talk about Africa rise as an event that is here, prospects are brighter for the continent if Africans take seriously the importance of leadership and inclusive institutions. These are two powerful forces that can play a major role in charting a new course to the continent’s future. Today, more than ever before, it is urgent for Africans to consciously determine the best path to structural diversification, digital transformation, and ultimately beneficial integration into the global economy. Already African leaders have made important strides in forging ahead with the AfCFTA which gives effect to the objective of the AU Agenda 2063 to achieve continent-wide integration as an instrument for socioeconomic development. Undoubtedly, this mechanism will take years to realize its goal of a fully integrated and prosperous market, but as the famous Chinese proverb says, “the journey of a thousand miles begin with a single step,” and the AfCFTA is that step in the right direction. In the past African countries failed to take advantage of geopolitical tensions for their own development interests, this was especially the case © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Qobo, The Political Economy of China–US Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1

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during the Cold War. Africans need not fall into the same trap of taking sides today. The change of administration in the United States from the Republicans, and especially from the presidency of Donald Trump to the Democratic presidency of Joe Biden, will not bring about a sea change for Africa if the continent does not realize its agency in a changing world. Its fate is not in the hands of foreign powers, but in its people and leaders. It is important that African leaders approach relations with external powers from the standpoint of their own interests—to improve their economic profile and enable their countries to harness the benefits of external engagements. Relations with the United States or China will not deliver prosperity for Africa unless its leaders take seriously the continent’s development interests and gear up to achieve these. The next generation of leaders, especially the youth, who are not deeply invested in moribund ideologies and who are not too backward-looking in their gaze, hold greater promise for Africa’s future. No doubt, the old problems that afflicted Africa during and in the aftermath of colonialism still lurk on the horizon. African countries remain, by and large, underdeveloped. But Africans should avoid constructing their identities on the crust of historical injury, but on the positive energy of its youth, on institutions that are inclusive, and the promise of a better future, which the new digital technologies could enable. There are unavoidable challenges that Africans will need to confront head-on in order to make progress. Today, as in the past, the continent is viewed as an object of ridicule, with its leaders driven by short-term considerations and venality. The shadow of the Big Man still looms large on the African continent. It is not just outsiders that have undermined Africa’s development prospects. Those who have done the greatest damage are Africa’s own leaders who, for decades, presided over economic underperformance, poverty, and famine. Some of these leaders are still celebrated by Africans for bringing about liberation, despite the devastating damage they wrought on their economies, institutions, and human talent. Africans will have to break with this ancestry in their imagination, envision the future anew, and search for different models of leadership that are transformational and multigenerational, and that are bounded by inclusive institutions.

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The Future of International Relations The global environment remains fraught with tensions. There is growing fragmentation in trade and investment patterns. Protectionism has been on the rise, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic that first broke out in 2019 and intensified in 2020 with waves of lockdowns around the world, affecting supply chains and human movement. The world that may emerge after Covid-19 is likely to be characterized by deep fractures, trade protectionism, economic nationalism, and high levels of mistrust between leaders. Leaders will need to strengthen international cooperation and build bridges if this is to be reversed. The disruption in global supply chains in the wake of Covid-19 has driven many countries to become more inward-looking and use the blunt instrument of tariffs in their relations. This includes relocation of supply chains and vaccine nationalism. Domestication or regionalization of supply chains could bring about major changes in the structure of global production, with various countries shifting away from interdependence to self-sufficiency unless there is pressure on leaders to act in enlightened ways and to be aware of the implications of their actions today for future generations. There is an alternative vision that global leaders should champion. Normative convergence, balance of interests, cooperation, consensusbuilding, and shared leadership at the global level are more important today than ever before, especially in the face of Covid-19 and future uncertainties occasioned by geopolitical tensions. Even though the world is unlikely to have a single global leader, there is a window of opportunity to build international cooperation and interdependence based on shared interests and a broad set of values and support balanced economic development and system stability. This requires greater foresight among global leaders, especially from major powers such as the US, China, and the EU, all of which have bilateral relations with the African continent. Multilateral institutions need to reflect the multiplicity of actors or multipolarity and pursue equity. Developing countries, and African countries, will need to discover and assert their own agency in such a world rather than find themselves caught up in the spiral of geopolitics where they must choose one big power over another. While an element of hierarchical ordering will remain an essential part of the liberal world order in its reformed state, especially since states are unequal with respect to their economic, technological, and military

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strength, a renewed order should not be centered on a single power. At the time the Bretton Woods institutions were created at the end of the Second World War, African countries were under the colonial grip; they were on the margins long after decolonization, while northern countries had a sway over agenda-setting, primarily because of their structural power. Reforming the multilateral system should aim at producing outcomes that ensure equitable sharing of benefits, and that the global institutions should be recast in ways that are inclusive and sensitive to development concerns of developing countries.

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Index

0–9 3G network, 178 4G LTE, 199 4G capability, 178 4G-compatible devices, 178 4G network cover, 178 5G, 183, 188–191 5G technologies, 189, 190, 199 5G technology services, 190

A Abiy, Ahmed, 155 Acemoglu, Daron, 144, 149 Acheson, Dean, 9, 98, 99 Afghanistan, 15, 77, 125, 128 Africa, 3–8, 10–14, 20–26, 29–32, 36, 40, 41, 43–46, 58, 64, 69–71, 73–77, 79–87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96–106, 108–110, 113, 115, 117–127, 129–133, 137–139, 141–144, 146–149, 152–154, 156, 158, 159,

166–177, 179–181, 183, 188–191, 196, 199–201, 205, 206 Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), 117–123, 125, 130–132, 142, 148, 153 African/Africans, 24, 45, 86, 87, 89, 94, 103, 113, 120, 121, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 147, 152, 163, 169, 183, 185, 189, 201, 206 African American/African Americans, 8, 24, 25, 29, 30, 95, 96, 101, 104, 127 African American Corporation, 24 African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP), 40 African continent, 7, 13, 15, 19, 20, 25, 29, 31, 42, 46, 69, 70, 73–75, 80–82, 85–87, 89, 90, 93, 95–99, 101, 103, 105, 108–110, 113, 114, 118–121,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Qobo, The Political Economy of China–US Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86410-1

227

228

INDEX

123–125, 127, 129–131, 133, 137, 147–150, 165–169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 186, 190, 191, 196, 197, 200, 201, 205–207 African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), 76, 85, 150, 174, 175, 205 African countries, 4–7, 9, 11, 13–15, 17, 20, 21, 24–26, 29–32, 36–41, 43, 45, 46, 50–56, 58–60, 62, 63, 69, 70, 74, 75, 81–85, 87–90, 94, 97, 110, 118, 120–123, 126, 131–133, 137–139, 141, 142, 144, 146–150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 159, 163, 164, 166–170, 175–180, 183, 189–191, 194, 197, 199–201, 205–208 African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), 119 African firms, 189 African governments, 86, 140, 148, 167, 174, 175, 178, 181, 183, 190, 201 African leaders, 69, 75, 81, 83, 90, 118, 130, 132, 133, 150, 164, 189, 205, 206 African-led, 170 African Lions, 143 African National Congress, 97 African Union (AU), 156, 174, 196, 197 African venture capital, 169 Africa Rise/Africa Rising, 138, 143, 144, 159, 205 Africa’s data, 168 Africa’s decision-makers, 85, 133, 183 Africa’s development, 30, 32, 43–46, 83, 86, 99, 104, 137, 148, 158, 166, 206 Africa’s development pathways, 90, 133, 159

Africa’s development prospects, 206 Africa’s dualistic economies, 142 after Richard Nixon, 36 Agboola, Olugbenda, 170 ageing population, 168 agency, 6, 9, 14, 19, 31, 35, 51, 52, 64, 69, 75, 85, 88, 90, 110, 123, 133, 174, 183, 198, 199, 206, 207 Agreement on Agriculture, 50, 58, 60, 61 AI algorithm engineers, 168 AI-based, 172 AI-based technologies, 194 aid, 6, 54, 61, 82, 86, 104, 119, 126, 129, 132, 142 aid programs, 81 AI-driven, 168 AI-driven technologies, 166, 200 AI processes, 172, 189 Alabama, 100 Algeria, 97 Aliko Dangote, 148, 152 Alphabet, 82 al-Shabaab, 153 Amazon, 195 Amazon Web Services, 173 America, 3–10, 12, 20, 23, 25, 29–32, 36, 49, 59, 69, 71, 74, 76–80, 83, 88, 89, 93–95, 97–106, 108, 109, 113–119, 121, 123–132, 141, 168, 184, 185, 187, 190, 194 American/Americans, 3, 8, 10, 11, 21–25, 31, 33, 62, 78, 79, 88, 95, 96, 98, 100–102, 104–106, 108, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130, 184, 186, 194 American Colonization Society, 100 American companies, 106, 116, 186, 187, 189, 194

INDEX

American firms, 141 American foreign policy, 103 American tech companies, 83 American tech firms, 194 America’s foreign aid to Africa, 126 America’s foreign policy, 95, 98, 101, 109, 116, 124, 125 Amin, Samir, 75, 138, 139, 143 Anderson, Perry, 11 and voice-recognition, 188 Anglo-American Corporation, 23 Angola, 81, 82, 86, 94, 97, 105, 107–109, 125 anti-black racism, 100, 106 anti-capitalism, 94 anti-colonial, 9, 19 anti-colonialism, 43, 94 anti-dumping tariffs, 122 anti-immigrant, 100 anti-imperialism, 43 Apple, 82, 83 Argentina, 20, 117 artificial intelligence (AI), 72, 73, 147, 154, 165, 168, 170, 173, 183, 190, 193, 194 As Borstelmann, 5, 7–9, 19, 21, 23, 93, 96, 97, 100 Asia, 6, 20, 25, 41, 94, 96, 105, 109, 116, 128 Asian financial crisis, 37 Asian tigers, 143 Asia Pacific, 4, 128 Asia Pacific countries, 128 Asia Pivot, 128 Atlantic Charter, 4, 30, 96 AU Agenda 2063, 205 Australia, 23, 55, 190 axis of evil, 193

B banking sector, 42, 171, 193

229

Beijing, 71, 78, 82, 86, 87 Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI), 85, 87–89 Biden administration, 15, 77, 88, 123, 184, 187 Biden, Joe, 15, 64, 73, 88, 123, 128, 153, 186, 187, 206 Big Data, 168, 190 Big Man, 42, 206 big tech firms, 192 Big Ten Emerging Markets, 116, 117 bilateral free trade agreement (FTA), 153 biodiversity, 172, 173 black Americans, 8, 95, 96, 102 Black Lives Matter, 94 Black Lives Matter Movement, 95 black nationalism, 106 black-owned technology start-ups, 171 Bolton, John, 88 Botha, P.W., 106 Botswana, 119, 148 Brandt Commission, 44, 45 Brandt, Willy, 44 Brazil, 22, 85, 117, 191 Bretton Woods arrangement, 37, 54 Bretton Woods conference, 3, 6, 20, 21, 39 Bretton Woods institutions, 14, 21, 22, 25, 36, 41, 46, 208 Bretton Woods system, 34–37, 46 Brexit, 18, 115, 201 BRICS mechanism, 85 British, 3, 21, 33, 41, 99, 156 British colonial system, 19, 31 British constitutional framework, 41 British Empire, 23, 32 British institutions, 41 broadband infrastructure, 176, 180 Brown, Ron, 116 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 95

230

INDEX

Buhari, Muhammadu, 152 Bureau of African Affairs, 103 Bush administration, 17, 79, 124–127, 187 Bush, George H.W., 46, 76–79, 117, 123, 125–127, 129, 130, 132 C Cabo Delgado, 156 Caetano, Marcello, 107 Cameroon, 125 Campbell, Kurt, 128 Canada, 23, 38, 52, 55, 59, 69, 116 Cape Town, 130 Caribbean, 94 Carter, Jimmy, 108, 110 Cell C, 179 central planning, 140 Chad, 124, 125 Charter, Algiers, 40 Charter of Trust, 194 child online abuse and exploitation, 199 China, 5–7, 15, 16, 20, 22, 31, 49, 64, 70–74, 76–90, 107, 108, 115–117, 121, 123, 126, 128–130, 140, 141, 144, 151, 163, 168, 172, 183–188, 191, 192, 194, 195, 206, 207 China-Africa Research Initiative, 86 China Development Bank, 88 China’s high-tech companies, 184 Chinese, 10, 15, 16, 34, 72, 73, 78–84, 89, 107, 116, 131, 140, 142, 154, 185–188, 192, 205 Chinese Communist Party, 188 Chinese companies, 184, 185, 190, 194 Chinese economic system, 187 Chinese entrepreneurs, 120, 148 Chinese FDI, 83, 89 Chinese foreign direct investment, 83

Chinese government, 16, 72, 73, 80–82, 87, 164, 184, 188 Chinese loans, 88 Chinese technologies, 89, 188, 189 Chinny Ogunro, 170 Chi, Peng-Fei, 107 Christensen, Clayton, 139, 164, 169, 175, 176, 180 Churchill, Randolph, 21 CIA, 108 city of Kaduna, 82 Civil Rights Act of 1957, 103 civil society, 129, 171, 200 Clinton Administration, 77 Clinton, Bill, 77, 110, 113, 115–120, 123, 125 Clinton, Hilary, 128–130 Clintonian vision, 115 cloud servers, 195 cloud-storage firms, 168 cloud storage services, 195 Cold War, 8, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 38, 41, 58, 69, 70, 75, 77, 78, 80, 85, 93–96, 98, 102, 104, 106, 109, 110, 118, 119, 124, 125, 141, 185, 196, 206 colonial, 4–6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 20, 23, 25, 29, 32, 39, 41, 51, 54, 57, 75, 82, 93, 94, 96, 109, 208 colonial era, 19, 32, 45, 85, 93, 137 Colonialism, 4, 5, 14, 29, 30, 32, 39, 41, 42, 75, 85, 87, 93, 94, 99, 101, 103, 104, 108, 113, 114, 137, 149, 206 colonial practices, 98 Colonization of Free People of Color of America, 100 Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa, 124 Committee of Twenty, 34, 35 commodity dependence, 149

INDEX

Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 59, 61 communism, 5, 19, 29, 30, 32, 94, 96–98, 104, 109, 113, 114, 124, 128, 139, 185 Competition Commission, 179 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, 106 computer literacy, 178 computing power, 168, 190 Confucius, 10 Congo, 7, 86, 94, 97, 98, 107 Congo-Zaire, 107 consumer protection, 198, 199 content-recommendation algorithm, 188 Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection, 197 corporate-level innovation, 173 corruption, 42, 126, 129, 132, 144, 151 counterinsurgency, 192 Covid-19, 147, 152, 156, 207 Covid-19 pandemic, 37, 44, 131, 138, 152–154, 156, 158, 207 critical infrastructure, 183, 191, 193, 196, 198, 199 critical public policy, 144 Crocker, Chester, 109 Cuba, 22, 107 Cubans, 107, 108 cyberattacks, 183, 192–194, 196–198, 200 cyber-based terrorism, 198 cyber conflict, 199 cybercrime, 196, 199 cyber-espionage, 199 cybersecurity, 192–200 cybersecurity contingency plan, 199 Cybersecurity Tech Accord, 194 cybersecurity tools, 193 cyberspace, 192, 195, 198, 199

231

cyber-terrorism, 199 cyber threats, 174, 193, 197, 200 cyberwar, 192, 193 cyberwarfare, 16, 17, 198

D Dar es Salaam, 81 data, 132, 147, 166–168, 171–174, 179, 183, 184, 190, 192, 195–197, 199 Data and Technology Forum, 193 data governance, 166, 173, 181 data markets, 168, 173 data ownership, 173 data-processing technologies, 188 data protection, 176, 197 data sharing, 173 data skills, 173 data storage, 147, 168 David Mahlobo, 199 “debt diplomacy”, 88 decolonization, 4, 5, 7, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30, 38, 41, 69, 94, 100, 105, 208 deep learning, 168 Del Este, Punta, 60 Dell, 82, 116, 188 Delle, Sangu, 169, 170 democracy, 7, 11, 12, 15, 25, 29, 30, 83, 84, 96, 110, 114, 115, 118, 125, 129, 150, 155, 158, 171, 192, 193, 201 Democrat, 188 democratic, 8, 36, 40, 84, 94, 108, 109, 125, 130, 145, 150, 157–159, 194, 206 democratic deficit, 82, 158 democratic institutions, 130, 145 democratic participation, 42, 51, 132 democratic regime, 187 Department of Defense, 125

232

INDEX

Dependency theory, 143 Detroit, 94, 102 developing countries, 3, 5, 8, 13, 14, 18–22, 25, 26, 29–31, 33–40, 45, 46, 49–52, 54–64, 70, 75, 79, 81, 87–89, 104, 113, 120, 141, 143, 146, 167, 208 development aid, 17, 34, 40, 80, 82, 85, 104, 125, 167 development paths, 26, 75, 143, 150, 167 development trajectory, 150 digital age, 177, 184, 196 digital banking, 169, 170 digital devices, 178 digital economy, 14, 26, 147, 148, 165–167, 169, 170, 173–178, 180, 191, 192, 201 digital ecosystem, 171, 174, 181, 191, 201 digital entrepreneurship, 177 digital era, 163 digital futures, 163, 175 Digital Geneva Convention, 193 digital infrastructure, 145, 151, 165, 167, 176, 177, 180, 181, 190, 191, 201 digitalizing, 167 digital leap/digital leaps, 159, 201 digital literacy, 196 Digital Opportunities Trust, 178 digital payment, 176 digital platforms, 73, 177, 178, 197 digital services, 177 digital skills, 148, 177, 178, 191, 199 digital technologies, 148, 167, 170, 176, 200, 206 digital transformations, 73, 80, 89, 138, 148, 165, 166, 168, 170, 174–177, 181, 189, 197, 205 digitized global value chains, 178 disruption, 74, 164, 192, 196, 207

disruptive companies, 139 distributed denial of services, 196, 198 Djibouti, 124 Dodge Plan, 5, 12 Doha Development Agenda, 58, 64 Doha Round, 54, 56, 62, 63 Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, 50 Donald Trump’s administration, 49, 52, 61, 63, 71, 77, 79, 80, 88, 123, 128, 129, 131, 184–187, 190 double consciousness, 163 double movement, 8, 115 Du Bois, W.E.B., 8, 30, 94, 98, 99, 163 “Dutch Disease”, 148

E East Africa, 81, 120, 124, 170 East Asia, 10, 58 East Asian, 141, 146, 149 East Asian countries, 141, 172 e-commerce, 64, 166, 167, 171, 176, 177, 187 economic development, 13, 24, 41, 45, 61–63, 73, 75, 118, 140, 144, 150, 151, 157, 180, 181, 199, 207 economic nationalism, 18, 207 economic recession, 36, 149 e-Government, 173, 198, 199 Egypt, 20, 21, 33, 81, 142, 197 Eisenhower, 102–104 elder-care robotics, 168 elite engineers, 168, 172 El Salvador, 131 Elumelu, Tony, 171 Equatorial, 86 Equatorial Guinea, 86, 125, 197

INDEX

equity, 11, 57, 63, 118, 175, 191, 207 Ethiopia, 20, 21, 81, 82, 109, 118, 126, 131, 142, 147, 148, 154, 155 Ethiopian government, 154, 155 Europe, 4–8, 10, 12, 18, 19, 21–25, 30–32, 36, 40, 51–53, 59, 61, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 103, 109, 115, 117, 128, 133, 139 European, 4, 5, 7, 9–12, 19, 23–25, 29–31, 59, 61, 62, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 103, 115 European capitals, 127 European common market, 61 European countries, 4, 6, 20, 21, 33, 35, 51, 58, 59, 102, 118, 121 European powers, 32, 99 European Union (EU), 40, 55, 61, 118, 172, 174, 191, 207 Everything as a Service, 189 extreme weather shocks, 147 F Facebook, 188 fiber-optic underwater cable, 198 Financial Action Task Force, 124 financial infrastructure, 193 Financial Intelligence Units, 124 Finley, Robert, 100 fintech, 169–171 First World War, 7, 9, 21, 23, 30, 94, 98, 102 Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, 80, 81 Flutterwave, 170 FNLA, 107, 108 food production systems, 173 food security, 129, 130 Ford, 116 Ford, Gerard, 108, 109 foreign aid, 24, 45, 81, 126

233

foreign policy, 9, 10, 70, 80, 89, 94, 103–105, 108, 110, 118, 123, 125–127, 129–131, 183, 191, 192 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), 81, 82, 85–87, 121, 126 Fourth Geneva Convention, 193 France, 4, 7, 14, 35, 36, 38, 69 free trade agreement, 122, 123, 131, 153, 190 Fukuyama, Francis, 113–115, 138 future of labor, 165 future of work, 147, 165 G G7, 36, 38, 69, 77, 193 G20, 77 G77, 39–41, 70 G77 Plus China, 40 Gacaca, 157 Gambia, 197 Garten, Jeffrey, 116 Garveyism movement, 101 Garvey, Marcus, 30, 94, 101 Gates, Robert, 8, 9, 95, 125–127, 192 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), 12, 13, 50–56, 58–60 General Electric, 79, 177 Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), 55, 120 generation of leaders, 206 Geneva Round of multilateral trade negotiations, 50 geoeconomics, 71, 75, 76, 90, 192 geopolitical tensions, 44, 71, 75, 184, 190, 193, 195, 205, 207 geopolitical tussles, 15, 64 geopolitics, 71, 75, 183, 189, 201, 207

234

INDEX

George, Lloyd, 21 Georgia, 100, 122, 192 Germany, 7, 35, 38, 44, 69, 124 Ghana, 103, 119, 129, 130, 170 global capitalism, 114 global corporate citizens, 194 global economy, 13, 26, 31, 37, 43, 75, 79, 85, 87, 90, 110, 118, 120, 127, 131, 146, 167, 169, 181, 201, 205 global financial crisis, 37, 76, 79, 114, 115, 128–130, 138, 151, 153 global governance, 14, 15, 38, 46, 70 global hegemon, 16 global institutions, 6, 13, 15, 18, 26, 31, 38, 64, 208 Globalism, 115, 117 globalization, 113–116 global leaders, 21, 96, 195, 207 Global Mckinsey Institute, 147 global power structures, 14 global supply chain, 141, 146, 154, 207 global value chains, 84, 146, 147 gold standard, 35, 36 Google, 173, 177 Google LLC, 82 green transition, 148 Group of 77, 41 Group of Ten, 33, 34 Guinea Bissau, 97 Gulf of Guinea, 125 Gurr, Ted Robert, 119

H Haberler, Gottfried, 54 Habermas, Jürgen, 138 Haiti, 4, 25, 131 Hausmann, Ricardo, 145, 175 health, 62, 83, 84, 86, 122, 123, 125, 126, 129, 157, 171, 173

health sector, 126, 127, 129, 130 heavily indebted poor countries, 86 hegemonic incorporation, 34, 76, 78–80, 141 heterodox policies, 164 HIV/AIDS, 127, 130 Hong Kong, 16, 187 Hoover, Herbert, 23 Horn of Africa, 155 HP, 188 Huawei, 73, 173, 186, 187, 189, 190, 198 Huawei’s 5G infrastructure, 190 Hujian Group, 154 Hu Jintao, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86 human rights, 8, 10, 25, 39, 77, 82, 83, 88, 96, 99, 118, 125, 126, 129, 155, 158, 186, 187, 194 Human Rights Convention, 96 human rights record, 187 Huntington, Samuel, 185 hyperglobalization, 115

I IBM, 116, 193, 195 IBM African Research Lab, 177 ICT global standard processes, 191 ICT innovation, 177 ICT-related services, 180 Ikenberry, John, 11, 17, 18 imagination, 137, 141, 146, 148, 163, 168, 201, 206 IMF’s decision-making system, 34 IMF’s Executive Board, 34 IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes, 45 inclusive institutions, 83, 84, 138, 140, 144, 155, 156, 158, 205, 206 India, 20, 31, 85, 117, 170, 191 indigenous knowledge structures, 172

INDEX

Indonesia, 117, 128 industrialization, 6, 21, 62, 121, 140, 142, 144, 146, 170 industrial policy/industrial policy, 71, 72, 157, 164, 184 industrial robotics/industrial robots, 147, 154, 165 inflation, 37, 44 infrastructure development, 174 innovation/innovations, 29, 45, 72, 85, 114, 116, 121, 139–142, 144, 146, 148, 149, 158, 159, 164–170, 172–175, 180, 188, 191, 195, 197, 199, 201 innovation-led, 144 innovation-led growth, 148, 164 innovation systems, 172 institutional capabilities, 85, 148 institutional innovation, 7, 173 institutional quality, 75, 168 institutional reforms, 25, 138 institution/institutions, 6, 11–15, 18, 20–22, 24, 30, 31, 41–43, 45, 46, 53, 71, 76, 77, 95, 133, 140, 142, 144, 148–150, 158, 159, 163–165, 167, 177, 179, 183, 200, 201, 206 Inter-American Bank, 21 interdependence, 191, 195, 207 Intergovernmental Action Group Against Money Laundering in West Africa (GIABA), 124 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 12 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 193 international cooperation, 3, 7, 12, 194, 197, 207 international division of labor, 44, 45, 51, 53, 143, 146 international economic system, 6, 10, 24

235

International Electrotechnical Commission, 191 international law, 195, 196 International law experts, 195 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 12, 13, 31, 33–35, 37, 43, 84, 88, 142, 152, 153, 158 international monetary stability, 5, 30, 36 international monetary system, 5, 26, 33–35, 37, 38, 70 International Organisation for Standardisation, 191 international peace, 96, 196 international relations, 10, 17, 18, 20, 49, 70, 73, 80, 93, 116, 185, 196, 207 international system, 8, 17, 69, 70, 73, 76, 77 International Telecommunications Union, 177, 191 international trade, 37, 40, 51, 52, 59–61, 114, 123, 185 International Trade Organisation, 53 internet infrastructure, 192 Internet of Things, 189, 194 Iraq, 17, 20, 77, 125, 128 Islamic State (ISIS), 156 Italy, 4, 38, 69 J Jacques, Martin, 16 Jamaica, 32 Japan, 4–7, 10, 12, 30, 32, 35, 36, 38, 51, 52, 55, 59, 69, 71, 77, 103, 117, 121, 128, 140, 141, 168, 172, 185, 190, 191 Japanese government, 168 Jedi, 195 Jefferson, Thomas, 100 Jiang, Zemin, 78, 81 Jimmy Carter’s Administration, 110

236

INDEX

Joe Biden administration, 132 Johnson, Lyndon, 8, 37, 100, 103, 105, 113, 140 J Pierpont Morgan and Company, 23 Jumia, 171 K Kagame, Paul, 157–159 Karl-i-Bond, Nguza, 107 Kennan, George, 9 Kennedy, John F., 70, 97, 103–105 Kennedy Round, 59 Kenyan, 127, 153, 171 Kenyan government, 153, 177, 190, 198 Kenya’s, 131, 153, 169, 176, 198 Kenya’s digital economy, 176 Kenya’s strategy, 198 Kenyatta, Uhuru, 131, 198 Keohane, Robert, 17 Keynesian demand management, 139 Keynes, John Maynard, 3, 7, 20–22 Khrushchev, Nikita, 80, 105 Kindleberger, Charles, 17 Kissinger, Henry, 11, 70, 105, 116 Klinger, Bailey, 145, 175 knowledge-driven economy, 201 Korean Telecom, 178 Kupchan, Charles, 18 Kyoto Protocol, 77 L labor displacement, 165 Lancaster Agreement, 108 Latin America, 4, 6, 12, 20, 21, 41, 105, 116, 185 leadership, 3, 10, 15, 16, 18, 25, 31, 36, 41, 79, 84, 87, 94, 95, 116, 117, 129, 130, 144, 145, 149, 157, 159, 163, 184, 193, 198, 200, 205, 206

League of Nations, 10, 98 leapfrog technologies, 168 leaps of innovation, 165 Lee, Kai-Fu, 72, 168, 172, 190 Le, Keqiang, 72 Lesotho, 121, 142, 148 Lewis, William Arthur, 142 liberal-democratic ideals, 194 liberal internationalism, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 19, 24, 76, 80 liberal internationalist, 80 liberal internationalist ideology, 11 liberal internationalist norms, 15 liberalization, 8, 12, 50, 51, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 79, 117, 126 liberal world order, 14, 16, 18, 19, 38, 78, 207 Liberia, 20, 21, 100, 101, 118, 125 Libya, 77, 196 Lincoln, Abraham, 100 linear paths, 137, 138, 141, 164, 172 little bets, 164, 175 Lomé Convention, 40 Louisiana, 100 low latency communications, 189 Lusaka, 81 Lusaka conference, 39 M machine learning, 190 Made in China 2025, 72, 164 ‘Made in Rwanda’, 157 Madison, James, 100 “Make America Great Again”, 100 Malabo Convention, 197 Mali, 81, 124 malware vulnerabilities, 196 Mao, Zedong, 70, 80, 107 market-creating innovation/market-creating innovations, 139, 164, 165, 175, 176, 180

INDEX

Marrakech ministerial Decision, 62 Marshall Plan, 5, 12, 22, 44, 59, 88, 133, 139 Marwala, Tshilidzi, 147, 166, 190 Mastercard, 193 Mauritius, 121, 148, 197 Mazrui, Ali, 149 Mazzucato, Mariana, 146, 164, 165, 173, 174 Mboya, Tom, 149 McNamee, Roger, 192 Memmi, 41, 42 Mexico, 22, 116, 117, 141 microchips, 145, 186 Microsoft, 82, 173, 181, 188, 193, 194 middle class, 42, 153, 178, 205 Middle East, 12, 109, 130 Middle Eastern, 20, 125 military capabilities, 194 military coups, 43, 137 mineral-rich countries, 201 mission-critical outcomes, 147, 180 Mississippi, 100 Mociamboa da Praia, 156 modernity, 44, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145, 158, 159 modernization, 140–142, 147, 170 modernization theory, 140 Mokolo Wa Mompombo, 107 Mongolia, 16 Monroe, James, 100 Morgenthau, 22 most-favored, 53 most-favored nation (MFN), 53, 56, 59, 63, 77, 78, 116 Mozambique, 82, 94, 97, 105, 107, 109, 155, 156 M-Pesa, 169, 173 MPLA, 107, 108 MTN, 171, 179

237

multilateral, 4, 11, 12, 19, 25, 29, 31, 32, 50, 58, 63, 76, 79, 118, 191, 194, 195, 201 multilateral institution/multilateral institutions, 3, 5–10, 13, 19, 20, 24, 25, 29–32, 45, 46, 49, 64, 69, 95, 99, 131, 155, 207 multilateralism, 9, 12, 13, 15, 19, 29, 31, 32, 38, 52, 58–61, 63, 128, 191, 193 multilateral system, 10, 63, 120, 208 multilateral trade, 5, 33, 50 multilateral trade negotiations, 53, 63, 113, 116, 133 multilateral trading system, 5, 46, 49–53, 55–58, 62–64, 70, 78, 79, 120 multipolarity, 13, 207 Mutually assured destruction, 196 Myrdal, Gunnar, 8, 46, 95 N Naim, Moses, 17, 193 Namibia, 81, 109, 110, 197 Nasdaq Stock Market, 79 Naspers, 171 Naspers Foundry, 171, 178 National Cybersecurity Coordination Center, 199 national cybersecurity policy, 199 national data networks, 190 national interests, 15, 16, 53, 82, 118, 125 nationalist leaders, 43, 96, 110 National Planning Commission, 179 National Security Advisor under Trump, 88 natural resources, 24, 74, 82, 83, 87, 89, 90, 108, 148, 149, 151, 173, 201 Neoclassical, 149 neo-colonial, 41

238

INDEX

Netflix, 188 Neto, Augustinho, 107 new international economic order (NIEO), 8, 25, 39, 40, 45 Newmont Mining Corporation, 23 New Zealand, 23, 190 Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, 64, 149 Nigeria, 81, 82, 125, 126, 142, 144, 147–149, 151, 152, 170, 175–177, 197–199 Nigeria Communications Commission, 177 Nigerian government, 151, 199 Nixon, Richard, 36, 70, 99, 103, 105, 106, 108–110, 113 Nkrumah, Kwame, 103 Nokia, 145 non-aligned movement (NAM), 39–41 nonconsumption, 169 non-European, 23 non-oil sector, 151, 152 non-Western world, 140 North Africa, 14, 81, 170 North America, 94 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 5, 12, 97 North Carolina, 100 North, Douglas, 149 North-South, 44, 45, 60 Norway, 131, 149, 201 nuclear weapons, 192, 196

O Obama administration, 73, 122, 123, 128 Obama, Barack, 73, 122, 123, 127–130 Obama’s secretary of state, 128 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 151 OECD, 33

oil crisis in 1973, 36 Oklahoma, 100 Okolloh, Ory, 171 One-Belt-One Road (OBOR), 87 One-party rule, 43 on multi-country sourcing, 186 Opec, 37 open internet, 188 Oppenheimer, Ernest, 23, 24 Oracle, 195 Organisation of African Unity (OAU), 118 P Pan-African, 76, 94, 171 Pan-Africanism, 25, 30 Pan Africanist, 94, 101 Paulson, Hank, 78, 79 Pentagon, 194, 195 People’s Liberation Front in Tigray, 155 Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, 116 Persian Gulf, 125 plurilaterals, 58 Political instability, 43 populist nationalism, 114, 115 Portuguese, 107 postcolonial, 22, 41, 42, 44, 45, 70, 75, 85, 137, 150 postcolonial elites, 41, 42, 44, 45, 69, 137, 150 postcolonial leaders, 44, 103, 149, 164 postwar, 3–6, 8–11, 14, 21, 22, 29, 31, 41, 44, 59, 76, 139 post-World War Two, 7, 29, 32, 51, 88, 98 Power Africa, 130 Power Africa program, 129, 153 President’s Emergency Programme for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), 126

INDEX

Presidential Initiative for Innovative Entrepreneurship, 177 product spaces, 145, 148, 150, 163, 175 protectionism, 44, 61, 207 public institutions, 174, 188 public investment, 144, 153, 154, 157, 164–166 public investment in innovation, 145–148, 167, 168 public value, 165, 190, 191, 194

239

Q quantum computing, 190

Roosevelt, Franklin, 4, 10, 21, 102 Rooseveltian, 117 Roosevelt, Theodore, 22, 23, 97 Ross, Wilbur, 168, 186 Rostow, 141, 164, 175 Rotberg, Robert, 149 rural areas, 62, 96, 178–181, 190 rural economies, 180 rural enterprises, 173 Russia, 22, 70, 80, 85, 104, 107, 192 Rwanda, 83, 119, 120, 157, 158, 176, 178, 197, 199 Rwanda’s National Strategy for Transformation, 157 Rwanda Vision 2050, 157

R race, 4, 7–10, 16, 21, 23–25, 42, 73, 93–99, 101, 103, 105, 108–110, 114, 127 racial attitudes, 8 racial equality, 10 racial segregation, 101–103 racial superiority, 9, 101 racial supremacist thinking, 20 racism, 39, 95, 99, 102 R&D tax incentive schemes, 178 Reagan, Ronald, 97, 99, 106, 108, 109 Realist theory, 73 Reconstruction Era, 8 regional integration, 120, 175 regionalization of supply chains, 207 regional pivots, 144 regional powers, 20, 150 remittance flows, 169 Renamo, 156 Republican/Republicans, 187, 188, 206 Roberto, Holden, 107, 108 Robinson, James, 144, 149 Rodney, Walter, 5, 143

S Sahel, 124 Samsung, 145 Sao Tome, 125 Scandinavian countries, 149 Second World War, 4–6, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 30, 95, 102, 121, 140, 208 Section 301, 184 Seko, Mobutu Sese, 81, 98, 107 self-determination, 10, 21, 29, 30, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 107 self-determination in Africa, 19 self-sufficiency, 94, 207 semiconductor/semiconductors, 167, 185 semiconductor companies, 186 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 88 Senegal, 119, 197 shale gas deposits, 130 Shandong, 7, 10 shared leadership, 207 “shithole” countries, 131 Shubin, 107, 108

240

INDEX

Siemens, 194 Silicon Valley, 194 Silk Road, 87 Singapore, 83, 144, 163 Single Undertaking, 56 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 125 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 12, 13 smallholder farmers, 170, 171 smart energy grids, 193 Smith, Brad, 181, 193 Smuts, Jan, 21, 98 social Darwinist, 23 social enterprise initiatives, 171 “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, 140 social media, 188, 192, 193, 201 socio-economic development, 167, 176, 180, 205 Softbank, 193 soft power, 16, 127 Somalia, 119, 124, 198 Sorensen, Ted, 104 South, 16, 40, 46, 81, 95, 100–102, 105 South Africa, 7, 9, 20, 21, 23, 24, 85, 86, 94, 97–99, 105–107, 109, 110, 117, 119, 121–123, 126, 130, 142, 144, 147, 156, 171, 175, 176, 178–180, 197, 199, 200 South Africa’s National Cybersecurity Framework, 199 South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC), 200 South Africans, 23, 32, 97, 107, 122, 123, 171, 179, 200 Southern Africa, 14, 32, 94, 97, 99, 106, 108–110, 120, 124, 170 Southern African, 106–108 South Korea, 117, 128, 144, 163, 172, 191

South-South, 40 Soviet empire, 129 Soviet-style dirigisme, 139 Soviet Union, 8, 10, 16, 32, 38, 43, 59, 70, 80, 94, 96, 97, 102, 104, 105, 107–109, 114, 117 special and differential treatment, 25, 50, 52, 56–58, 60, 62–64 Special Drawing Rights (SDR), 34, 35, 37 special economic zone (SEZ), 120, 148, 154, 157 special industrial zones, 151 spectrum requirements, 191 speech modelling, 188 Stalin, Joseph, 10, 80 standard-setting bodies, 191 standard-setting processes, 13, 132, 191 Stanley, Henry Morton, 23 start-up and tech ecosystems, 177 state capabilities, 14, 147 State Department, 125 state-owned enterprises, 72, 78, 132, 151 strategic economic dialogues, 78, 79 structural adjustment, 38 structural adjustment programs, 43 structural diversification, 75, 76, 133, 144, 145, 152, 159, 175, 205 structural transformation, 74, 80, 120, 121, 137, 142, 146, 147, 150, 154, 157, 159, 167, 170 sub-Saharan Africa, 84–86, 98, 117, 121, 123, 125, 129, 130, 154, 158, 169, 180 sub-Saharan African, 41, 103, 177 Sudan, 81, 82, 125, 126, 155 Sun, Irene Yuan, 120, 126, 141–144, 146, 147, 173 super computers, 167

INDEX

supply chains, 82, 147, 148, 167, 186, 207 Swiss National Bank, 33 Symantec, 196, 197

T Taiwan, 16, 163, 191 Tanzania, 119 tariff escalation, 57, 58, 60, 120 Taylor, Charles, 125 tech entrepreneurs, 169–171, 174 tech entrepreneurship, 178 tech firms, 82, 173, 188, 195 tech multilateralism, 193 tech nationalism, 191 technological breakthroughs, 146, 150, 168, 172, 173 technological change, 164, 165, 183 technological leaps, 163 technology autarky, 191 technology diffusion, 51, 133, 140, 141, 148, 164 tech start-up/tech start-ups, 168–171, 178 tech supremacy, 193 tech wars, 73, 183, 184, 186 telecommunications, 132, 151, 167, 171, 179, 180, 193, 199 Telkom, 171 Telkom Mobile, 179 Terrorism, 124, 125, 147, 198 Tesla, 82 text analysis, 188 the Board of Governors of the IMF, 34 The liberal internationalist order, 3–6, 11, 13, 25, 38, 50, 77, 99 the World Bank, 12, 13, 31, 43, 45, 88, 153, 154, 158, 167, 176–179 Third World, 9, 12, 41, 88, 99, 108 Third World nationalism, 25

241

Tibet, 16 Tiktok, 73, 187 Tokyo Round, 54, 56, 59 trade, 6, 8, 12, 13, 16, 18, 25, 34, 37, 40, 41, 44, 45, 50–60, 62–64, 69, 73, 74, 76–78, 81, 83, 85–90, 97, 101, 113, 116–123, 127–132, 142–144, 151–153, 158, 174, 175, 184–188, 190, 207 trade wars, 78 transformational, 206 transformational public investment, 164 transformative leadership, 168 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 128 Treaty of Versailles, 7, 10, 98 Trump, Donald, 15, 74, 77–79, 95, 100, 110, 115, 128, 131, 185, 187, 188, 206 Trumpism, 188 Turing, Alan, 172 Turing test, 172 Turkey, 117 twentieth century, 23, 101, 114, 181 Twitter, 188 U Uganda, 119 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 40, 41, 45, 55, 167 United Nations Security Council, 13 United Nations (UN), 12, 39, 96, 98, 99, 126 United States International Development Aid, 104 United States Trade Representative, 78, 117 United States (US), 3–12, 14–24, 29, 30, 32–36, 38, 44, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 58–60, 64, 70–73,

242

INDEX

76–81, 85–89, 93–109, 113, 116–131, 133, 148, 153, 183–188, 190–192, 195, 196, 199, 206 urban-rural digital divide, 179 urban-rural divide, 178 Uruguay Round Agreement, 58 Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, 50, 113, 116 US administration, 29, 49, 93, 106, 109, 110, 124, 194 US-Africa, 103 US-Africa foreign, 103 US-Africa relations, 90, 110 USAID, 129 US aid, 12, 125 US and Israel cyberattack on Iran, 192 US-based cloud servers, 195 US-China, 74, 85, 184, 190 US-China geopolitical tens, 71 US-China hostilities, 80 US-China relations, 78, 187 US-China rivalry/US-China rivalries, 16, 74, 85 US-China tech war/US-China tech wars, 183, 190 US-China trade and tech wars, 184 US companies, 79, 116, 127, 130, 184, 188, 189, 195 US Congress, 31, 119, 121 US Exim-Import Bank, 106 US foreign aid, 126 US foreign policy, 15, 16, 19, 20, 32, 70, 94, 95, 98, 100, 104, 105, 116, 123, 125, 128 US government, 8, 94, 96, 99, 123, 184, 186, 194, 195 US hard-power, 194 US-Kenya FTA, 131 US-led liberal international order, 13 US-led liberal order, 12

US military, 124, 194 US national interests, 104, 123, 125, 194 US navy computers, 192 US Power Africa, 153 USTR, 64, 184 V vaccine nationalism, 207 value chains, 74, 82, 121, 127, 141, 148, 154, 157, 167, 170, 173, 175 values, 4, 6–8, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 23–25, 29, 31, 45, 60, 62, 63, 71, 76, 79, 80, 83–87, 90, 93, 95, 102, 106, 117, 129, 130, 140, 147, 148, 151, 157, 165, 177, 180, 190, 194, 195, 201, 207 venture capital, 171, 173–175, 178, 201 venture capitalists, 173 Versailles, 7, 10, 98 Vietnam, 32, 37, 113, 141 Virginia, 100 W Waltz, Kenneth, 196 war on terror, 123 Warren, Christopher, 117 WeChat, 73, 187 Wefarm, 170 West, 5, 10, 13, 14, 23, 24, 26, 40, 46, 72, 80, 82, 84, 89, 97, 109, 114, 115, 119, 131, 140, 142, 144, 163, 172 West Africa, 81, 120, 124, 170 Western civilization, 97, 99 Western countries, 11, 18, 32, 33, 82, 93, 146, 163, 185 Western Europe, 5, 7, 69

INDEX

Western powers, 7, 20, 24, 30, 31, 63, 69, 70 Western world, 12, 18, 114, 127, 133, 163 Westinghouse Electric, 79 Westphalian, 16, 76 white, 4, 6, 7, 9, 15, 21–23, 94, 97–99, 105–110, 113, 127, 147, 178 white America, 101 White Americans, 8, 95, 97 White, Harry Dexter, 3, 20 White House, 127, 131, 187 white South Africa, 98, 99, 109 white South Africans, 97, 106 white supremacist, 9, 23, 96, 99–102 Wiafe-Amoako, Francis, 149 Wilsonian, 7, 8, 94, 117, 118 Wilson, Woodrow, 4, 7–10, 21, 23, 30, 98, 102 World Economic Forum, 72, 178 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index, 152 World Intellectual Property Organisation, 191

243

World Trade Organisation (WTO), 13, 49, 51–53, 55, 57, 60, 62–64, 77, 78, 116, 120 World War Two, 3, 32, 77 WTO reform, 64 X Xi Jinping, 15, 72, 86, 87, 140, 187 Xinjiang, 16, 187 Y Yemen, 124 Yew, Lee Kuan, 145 Young African Leaders Initiative, 130 Young, Crawford, 43, 150 Z Zaibatsu, 140 Zambia, 82, 86, 131 Zhou Enlai, 70, 81, 107 Zhu, Rongji, 78 Zimbabwe, 81, 82, 94, 105, 108–110, 119, 173, 196 Zoellick, Robert, 78, 117