The Global South Knows the West Better Than the West Knows Itself
This past weekend a friend from Paris came to visit us in the north of England for an unusual reason. Though we were all happy to spend time together, the main purpose of his stay was to get away from the punishing heat wave that was due to hit Western Europe. We took advantage of the pleasantly warm weather to show him some of the local attractions, including a visit to Hadrian’s Wall, which 2,000 years ago marked the northern boundary of the Roman Empire.
I jokingly referred to him as our first “climate refugee,” a nod to the well-established trope of describing events in the West with the language and frameworks often used to depict the Global South. Recent months and years have offered no shortage of opportunities to deploy the gimmick, from the scandals that drove British Prime Minister Boris Johnson from office to the senseless gun violence plaguing the United States.
The flip side of this irony is the demeaning remarks often made by inhabitants of Western countries comparing developments in their own countries to an imagined “Third World” nation. Here, too, there has been no shortage of illustrative examples in recent years, from Texas’ inability to maintain a functioning 21st-century power grid to former President Donald Trump’s refusal to recognize the outcome of a free and fair election that removed him from office.
The people making these comments are perhaps well-meaning, but in many cases, judging from their roles in the media and policymaking community, they should know better. They can be forgiven to the extent that their ethnocentric myopia is nourished by a generalized failure in the West to see the world, and particularly the developing world, as it is—but also to see the West as it is. This failure, too, is understandable. To paraphrase and generalize a truism often used to describe Black Americans’ strategies for navigating the United States’ racist and racialized landscape, the West does not have to understand the Global South in order to survive. The converse is not true and never has been, and so the Global South in many ways knows the West better than the West knows itself.
The truth is that, as the Ecuadorean artist Patricio Palomeque told me when I had the good fortune to attend the Cuenca Biennial back in 1996, the term “Third World” can only ever describe economic relationships. It does not and cannot apply to the arts and literature, or to knowledge and experience more broadly.
This truth is lost on the West at its own peril. Yet, though it is lost in a variety of different ways, the historical constant is that it is lost. In 2007, in a speech in Senegal during his first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that “the African has not fully entered into history,” because African cultures sought harmony with nature and its repetitive cycles. “In this universe where nature commands everything,” he continued, “man escapes from the anguish of history that torments modern man, but he rests immobile in the center of an immutable order where everything seems to have been written beforehand.” In fairness, Sarkozy prefaced those remarks by acknowledging that African art, thought and culture are in no way inferior to the West. Nevertheless, the outrage the speech immediately provoked was such that it has become immortalized as “the Dakar address,” synonymous with ignorance and tactlessness.
Two years later, then-U.S. President Barack Obama gave a much better-received speech in Accra, Ghana, during his own first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa. In it, he hit all the right notes about partnering with African nations and civil society to promote democracy, good governance and prosperity. But in emphasizing Africa’s responsibility for its own future, he, too, felt obliged to include a “tough love” passage in discussing the challenges the continent faces: “Now, it’s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. … But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.”
At a time when the global order is in decomposition, the distinction between the center and the periphery is only becoming blurrier and harder to justify. In important ways, the center is now the periphery, and vice versa.
The danger is not just that these framings ignore the ways in which, to a lazy way of thinking, the “periphery”—as seen from the West—has in fact materialized in the center, whether in the form of political instability or vulnerability to climate events. Nor is it just that the periphery, as it emerged and evolved from the period of European colonization, is in many ways a construction of the center, and that the characteristics most often described as dysfunctional by Western observers—including Obama—are nourished and maintained in part by the neocolonial relationships that survived decolonization.
Both of these blind spots are important barriers to a more clear-sighted perception of both center and periphery, and the relationship between them today. But just as important is the recognition that, in an interconnected international order with global dimensions, the distinction between center and periphery has already become difficult to maintain, even as the balance of power between them shifted. At a time when that same global order is now in decomposition, the distinction is only becoming blurrier and harder to justify. In important ways, the center is now the periphery, and vice versa.
It is not just that crises are “contagious” in their ability to spill over borders, both natural and constructed, though they are. It is that the crises are now planetary, in both cause and effect, and therefore collective. The Middle East’s decade-long refugee crisis is in part the product of Western military interventions. More flagrantly, so, too, is the Ukrainian refugee crisis.
Similarly, heat waves are not unknown in Europe and the United States. Less familiar and less comfortable, however, is the idea that, for all their technological ability to shape and control the environment, Western populations remain vulnerable to the weather and the impact of climate change. No matter the numerous examples that immediately come to mind—Hurricane Katrina, for instance, or the Fukushima disaster—that should have disabused them of any illusions that they aren’t. No matter, too, the fact that it is the very technological capabilities we have developed to master and dominate nature that are now driving the current crisis. By Sarkozy’s definition of the African as inhabiting a universe where nature commands everything, we are all African.
Moreover, the trope by which the West’s problems are compared to those of the Global South, whether ironically or myopically, also obscures the degree to which a subject position from the periphery is now often a great advantage in making sense of the events and trends driving global developments, both in the center and the periphery. This has been on prominent display in recent years in the ways in which observers in the Global South have at times understood political developments in the West more lucidly than their Western counterparts. Latin American analysts familiar with the region’s long history of populist caudillos, for instance, understood Trump’s rise in ways that preempted and enriched the U.S. discourse. More recently, the Latin American feminist movement’s successes in expanding abortion rights has been held up as a model for U.S. activists in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
As such, it is time to stop thinking of the periphery as a source of problems in need of exported solutions, and to start thinking of it as a source of potential solutions to shared problems. Vast collections of valuable knowledge—in terms of both traditional folkways as well as innovative, contemporary intellectual and technological contributions—reside and are created in the periphery. If they are available, not to be “mined” and extracted, but to be supported and shared, the relationship in which that happens must be equitable and just.
In this effort, it is also important to recognize that the center has its own peripheries, and that the periphery extends beyond its centers. Ignoring that fact only feeds the divisions that create political stabilities in both. Anyone paying attention to political developments in Hungary and Eastern Europe over the past 15 years, for instance, will not have been surprised by the evolution of the U.S. religious-conservative-identarian coalition that fueled Trump’s rise.
Above all, it is time to recognize that we are all in the same boat, even if some still imagine themselves as crewing the coast-guard cutters tasked with keeping refugee-filled vessels out. Two thousand years ago, the Roman centurions manning Hadrian’s Wall guarded the empire against what they deemed to be the barbarians to the north. In retrospect it’s easy to see that it was the wall itself that defined who belonged to the “civilized” center and who to the “uncivilized” periphery. The same sort of thinking, like the foundations of that wall, have endured to this day. If we don’t get beyond the limits of that thinking, we’ll all be condemned to the same fate.
Judah Grunstein is the editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. You can follow him on Twitter at @Judah_Grunstein.