Africa in a Multilateral World

Afropolitan Dilemmas

Albert Kasanda, Marek Hrubec, Albert Kasanda, Marek Hrubec

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000415964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book analyses how Africans and Africa relate to other parts of the multilateral world, and to the world in general, and how these relations stem from local, national and regional interactions in different parts of Africa, as well as Africa as a whole.

The first part focuses on the assumptions that are necessary to understand the role of Africa on the global stage, especially from the perspectives of political philosophy and global and international studies. The second part of the book looks at both Afropolitan trends and the limits of Afropolitanism. In the third part the authors focus on specific African global tendencies stemming from the local conditions in several case studies. Traditional and modern politics is connected, problematically, with the current Jihadist organisations in the local African conditions related to unilateralism and global war on terror, for example. The fourth part deals with the relevance of the language ambivalence in relation to global interactions. It examines various views of African philosophy and lays bare the perception of earlier colonial languages in view of their current strength of global action.

This book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, political philosophy, politics and global studies.

Part 1

Preconditions of Africa’s participation in the multilateral world

1Towards Africa’s model in a polylateral world

The chronology and foreign power interactions

Marek Hrubec

The relevance of Africa has recently grown in the world. Africans have the potential for advancement according to their own kinds of recognition of needs, interests and values, and they are developing mutual relations with their partners from other parts of the world. Internally, an improvement in standards of living and development has been the focus, supported also by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. So far the continent is relatively internally fragmented politically and economically, and is exposed to relatively strong global influences. The role of African countries and the African Union in the world has increased mainly in economic and political terms. BRICS and several other countries, which have been on an economic upswing within a plurality of modernities and civilisations over recent decades, have cooperated in the development of African countries in the multilateral context and as part of South–South cooperation. Also ongoing local and global security concerns in Africa have been at the centre of attention, whether these be state or non-state agents. The major Western powers have been aware of these relevant internal and external trends, and have already partly reformulated and intensified their relations with African countries as well (Westad, 2005; Abidde, 2018).

In this text, I focus on the problems and tendencies of advancement in Africa, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, in order to indicate a potential model for the social, political, economic and cultural arrangement of relations of recognition among people in Africa in a polylateral world.¹ In the first part, I focus on a differentiation of the historical phases of African trajectories in the global context from independence to the present day, mainly because most researchers underestimate this starting point of the analyses. I explain how to understand the historical trajectories from colonialism and anti-colonialism to post-colonialism, unilateralism, multilateralism, and, finally, polylateralism. In the second part, I focus on the relations of African countries and the whole of Africa to the influential major macro-regions of other parts of the world, mainly to the contemporary major powers of the EU, the US, Russia and India. In the third part, I concentrate on Africa’s relations with China, which of late and currently represent the most intensive strategic interactions for most of African countries.

At the end, I focus on the current emerging tendencies of the possible advancement of a future African institutional model, which could be based on internal African sources.² It is understandable that the focus has to start from below, to be indigenously Afrocentric, in order to address issues from the local to larger (continental, etc.) levels that can be solved both internally in line with traditional and modern African approaches, and also in the cooperation of these approaches with others, if and when the latter enlarge their perspectives by opening up a global polylateral point of view. Some of these issues are distinctive because they are shaped by the various African and pan-African contexts (Soyinka et al., 2015), be they countries, modernities, cultures or civilisations. As for cosmopolitan relations, of these issues some have certain common universal characteristics and some particular ones (Wiredu, 1997; Beck, 2017; Kasanda, 2018).

From a theoretical point of view, I offer a chronological and territorial analysis from an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective of global studies based on social and political philosophy. It stems from the local-global specification of a critical social and political concept of time and space. I follow African social and political philosophers and social scientists who analyse intersubjective relations within a community as a basis for a critique of injustice and struggles for justice, dealing with class, status, citizenship, race, gender, generation and other factors (Mbiti, 1990; Gyekye, 2004; An-Na’im, 2002). Such community-based progressive intersubjective relations can be a normative source of participation, solidarity and justice. Participation is a base of activities from below, i.e. from indigenous African contexts. It makes it possible to develop collective and individual rights and duties addressing solidarity and justice. It is important to analyse attempts to overcome misrecognition at several levels: among social and ethnic groups, countries, regions, macro-regions, modernities, trans-modernities, cultures and civilisations, from local to global interactions. Doing that, I also follow European, Latin American, Chinese and other authors who are developing analyses of mutual relations of recognition among people in communities (Dussel, 2008; Wei, 2010; Honneth, 2015), including intercultural ones. An analysis in this chapter is a development of my social and political theory, which I base on my methodology of a trichotomy of critique, explanation, and normativity (Hrubec, 2012). It includes a trichotomic differentiation of the reality to which social agents relate. I specify this differentiation as follows: a practical critique of the problematic reality, an explanation of the positive reality (positive fragments and progressive trends of the reality), and a development of positive fragments into normative standards proposed in practice.

Addressing the above-mentioned issues requires theoretical and empirical analyses of Africa in relations to influential macro-regions of the world. In the contemporary era of a global capitalism (Robinson, 2014; Harris, 2016; Sklair 2016), most small- and medium-sized countries can hardly be considered fully sovereign and influential. This is an even bigger problem for most of developing countries that have fought both in the past and the present not to be just quasi-states (states de jure but not de facto), due to both foreign control and marginalisation. Today the important entities are mainly the EU with its major countries, and large countries such as the US and the BRICS countries, with big populations and the political and economic power to deal with the forces of transnational capital. These macro-regions are multiple modernities, and in some cases long-term historical civilisations: mainly in Europe, China, India (Eisenstadt, 2002; Arnason, 2003; Merawi, 2017, pp. 98–99). The interactions of these macro-regions of the world create many global opportunities and risks with local interactions (Hrubec, 2016a; Beck, 2017).

An analysis of this complex theme is highly demanding; in fact it requires a conceptual (re)imagination of Africa and the world. In this chapter, I analyse only part of this in a modest way. I focus on institutionalised interactions between Africa and the macro-regions with their major powers even if, of course, there are also other institutionalised relations. Because I cannot cover everything within this text, I leave aside also various relationships that are not yet institutionalised, which are also important but are the subject of analysis in other texts (Bayart, 2009) or the subject of practice under classified documents. This focus on institutionalised interactions with relevant macro-regions is also due to the fact that it makes it possible to indicate the potential development of the interactions with their normative dimensions and, thus, overcome the usual sceptical focus on Africa mainly as a place of turmoil and clashes.

Historical phases in Africa since independence

Not only in political practice but also in theoretical analyses, there are often misunderstandings due to vague or inaccurate identification of the different chronological phases. Therefore, I would first like to differentiate the various phases of the historical trajectory in Africa. It is a point of many disputes in Europe, the US and some other places. My aim on this issue is to make the period from the fall of colonialism to the present more transparent. First, to differentiate the post-colonial period into experiments with capitalism, experiments with socialism and the Non-aligned Movement; secondly, to specify the period of endeavours for global unilateralism; thirdly, a period in an increasingly multilateral world, primarily in relation to the Chinese model; and, ultimately, fourthly, to indicate the coming future period pointing towards African models within global polylateral cooperation. Of course, these periods partly overlap. The main aim is an explanation of the dominant tendency within each of these periods of time while acknowledging that other tendencies exist in parallel in different strengths at the same time.

Table 1.1 The phases of the historical trajectory in Africa

(A) Post-colonial era	Symbolically since 1963
(B) Unilateral era	After the Cold War, from the 1990s
(C) Multilateral era	The tendencies from 2000s
(D) Polylateral era with Africa’s model	The coming period

At the beginning, I would clarify that after the pre-colonial era with African state and non-state formations characterised many times by advanced institutional structures in mutual interactions and in interactions with neighbouring territories and the wider world, the subsequent colonial and anti-colonial period should be named properly with these two adjectives, since the use of merely the first of these would ignore the resistance to brutal colonialism, including racism and slavery. Under colonialism, there was a strong opposition to the colonisers in the everyday struggles for survival and recognition of basic needs, as well as the organised resistance in these struggles (Fanon, 2008). Especially in the last period of colonialism there was systematic liberation pressure on the agents and on the system of colonial repression. Africans suffered under the repression of European powers seeking profits through the labour and sale of slaves and the acquisition of materials in the conquered countries, and then, mainly following the “Scramble for Africa” after 1885, through systemic colonisation. Then, understandably, the period of time that followed colonialism and anti-colonialism is called post-colonial in this chapter.

To clarify other terms, multilateralism here is considered to be the cooperation of set of countries or organisations of countries in international and supranational interactions. It includes several kinds of cooperation: mainly classic long-term cooperation between countries, multilateral organisations, and temporary coalitions. In their standard form, they are organised legally, but they can also maintain political or economic institutionalised forms. While multipolarism includes several poles only, i.e. several superpowers, multilateralism is a more inclusive and collaborative term which is based in cooperation of more countries and macro-regions.

By contrast to multilateralism, unilateralism “refers to a tendency to opt out of a multilateral framework (whether existing or proposed) or to act alone in addressing a particular global or regional challenge rather than choosing to participate in collective action” (Malone, Khong, 2003, p. 3). A country chooses to act unilaterally because it does not want to subject itself to binding multilateral rules, in order to pursue its own nationalist approach (Ruggie, 1993; Kondoh, 2019). It includes not only a unilateral approach as such, but also the weakening of multilateral institutions by a unilateral, selective or inconsistent participation in them that tries to pursue a unilateral agenda. Therefore, it focuses on unilateral tendencies.

In order to distinguish contemporary multilateral tendencies from the future fully multilateral global cooperation based in many places locally, the term “polylateral” is used for the latter in this chapter (Wiseman, 1999). Polylateralism means that multilateral tendencies are fully developed and include just multiple interactions in the world that are also based in justice in local, regional, and macro-regional communities. The concept of polylateral interactions stresses recognition of the particular conditions and needs of developing countries and previously marginalised macro-regions, their sustainable development, and their equal relations in the world.

To start analysing the individual particular periods, first, the post-colonial period begins, of course, with the gradual collapse of colonial rule, in individual countries that have become independent. As is well known, an important symbolic year for Africa was 1963 when colonialism fell in many countries there. However, other countries gained independence earlier or later, as colonialism faded. The independence of African countries opened up new possibilities for emancipation and advancement. A better health care system, advanced education, including female education, the building of infrastructure, etc., increased standards of living in many countries. It was linked also to population growth, which started to gather pace then. However, some countries turned to trajectories with armed conflicts in the global cold war (Westad, 2005; Drachewych, 2019).

Individual African countries did not follow the same path after the collapse of colonialism, with some having greater, others less choice. In principle, their paths can be divided into three trajectories: (1) experiments with socialism, (2) experiments with capitalism and (3) experiments with a kind of neutrality, especially within the Non-Aligned Movement. These three routes were not mutually exclusive and sometimes partially overlapped. The interconnection of these experiments in the so-called bipolar world had varying degrees of intensity of cooperation with the former Soviet Union, and/or China on the one hand, and the US and the other former colonial powers, on the other. But of course, other Eastern and Western countries were also involved in a complex network of cold war interactions (Muehlenbeck, 2016).

A more subtle differentiation should take into account that the experiments took different forms depending on which versions of socialism and capitalism the African countries cooperated with. African countries implemented mainly state-led development, including land r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: African dilemmas of a multilateral and cosmopolitan world
• Part 1 Preconditions of Africa’s participation in the multilateral world
• Part 2 Afropolitan trends and limits
• Part 3 The specific global African tendencies and potentials
• Part 4 African genre and language ambivalences in the global interactions
• Index