Chinese President Xi Jinping has long touted the East’s rise and the West’s decline, the kind of thinking that’s triggered his supporters to fantasize about a post-Western geopolitical order.
While it’s indisputable that U.S. and European countries, which represent the foundational pillars of the Western system, have seen their power diminish in the post-Cold War era, there’s little credible evidence of a full-blown collapse of Western influence.
Instead, King’s College scholar Samir Puri argues in his new book “Westlessness,” that the role of the West in the international system is changing and not going away.
Samir joins Eric & Cobus from London to discuss the emergence of a new, less Western global order.
Show Notes:
- Amazon.co.uk: Westlessness: The Great Global Rebalancing by Samir Puri
- Nikkei Asia: The West is no longer the center of global affairs by Samir Puri
- Observer Research Foundation: India readies itself for a less Western-dominated world by Samir Puri
About Samir Puri:
Samir Puri is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. He is also a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of War Studies and Associate at the Imperial War Museum. His most recent previous position was Senior Fellow at IISS-Asia based in Singapore (2020-22). Puri’s career combines academia and public service. In 2020 he advised Downing Street’s Race Commission on how imperial legacies influence Britain. In 2018-19 he was Assistant Head of Research at the Ministry of Defence’s think tank DCDC. In 2017 he was seconded to the Commonwealth Secretariat to author its strategy on countering violent extremism. Puri holds a PhD from Cambridge University, an MA in War Studies from King’s and a BA in History and Politics from Warwick University.
Transcript:
Eric Olander: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China Global South Podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m Eric Olander, and, as always, I’m joined by China Global South’s Managing Editor, Cobus van Staden, in Johannesburg, South Africa. A very good afternoon to you, Cobus.
Cobus van Staden: Good afternoon.
Eric: Cobus, today we’re going to step back from the news, which we’ve been covering intensely in the show for quite some time, and we’re going to step back and we’re going to look at the bigger themes shaping international affairs today in global relations, and something that you and I spend a lot of time talking about, which is the role of China, of Europe, of the West in this period of great power competition. Is it a cold war? Is it a great power rivalry? I don’t know what it is, but no one really knows what it is, but we’re in something, right? And it’s hard to define the moment that we’re in, and that’s kind of what we want to try and do today a little bit. Now, Cobus, I’m 54, I think you’re about my age. We are products of an earlier era.
We came of age in the Cold War. You came of age during apartheid. Very different obviously than the world that we live in today. But as an American, I was always raised with the idea that it was an American era, PAX Americana. And that the United States was central to the world order; that the United States was the governor, if you will, of that world order. In many ways, we, Americans, saw ourselves as a benign power, especially compared to the European powers that did formal colonies, even though the United States, of course, had some colonies around the world, Philippines being a good example of that. The sense in the United States was always that we were a benign superpower. We did not use the force that we had to occupy in the way that other empires had before. Now, you in Africa see this in very different terms.
I think you would see the Cold War as being much less than benign, particularly in Africa, but also in Southeast Asia where I live as well. But today, Cobus is that era is changing because the centrality of the United States and of Europe in the rules-based international order in the world order is changing because we have the rise of India, we have the rise of China. And as Fareed Zakaria says, it’s the rise of the rest. And that has been a difficult notion, I think, for a lot of people in places like Washington, London, Brussels, and even to some extent, I would say, even in places like Tokyo, to understand how the world has changed Today. You’ve talked about on many occasions this idea that China presents an example to global south countries about how a country can modernize without Westernizing.
And that is such a powerful example for other countries and something that, in many respects, the United States finds very threatening. I’d love to get your take on that.
Cobus: From my own perspective, I grew up outside of that sphere of the benign U.S. superpower. And also I experienced in my life, not only the passing from… I think I was a teenager when apartheid, it depends on when you formally date the ending of apartheid. I was teenager around the time when all of these systems shifted. And I was in my very early 20s, I think, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission started in South Africa. And that was a really big shift in which really one’s entire worldview, for my generation specifically, one’s entire worldview was essentially rearranged permanently. And so I feel like I kind of saw those things from both sides. And one of the things that I did see also from both sides in the process was the Cold War because obviously the Cold War was hot in Africa. I mean, the apartheid army and the Angolans, for example, it was a very long ongoing proxy war.
And specifically, it was part of the thinking of that time was realizing to which extent apartheid was a Western project serving Western capital, embedded in Western systems, thinking of itself as Western. And so that really complicated, I think in a pivotal moment of my own life, it complicated my own relation to that. And that has been ongoing because South Africa has really rearrange itself mentally, I think, around some of these issues, and what is now being seen, for example, in South Africa’s ongoing activism around Israel at the moment, around the Gaza crisis specifically, I mean. And the reaction that that activism that South Africa’s done around Israel, like raising the issue in the International Criminal Court, the action that that raised in Western capitals has been very indicative, I think, of these issues like how live these conflicts are.
I think South Africa famously sits on the cusp of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, right? The two oceans come together around Cape Town. And symbolically South Africa has always been looking east and looking west at the same time. It’s very, very hybrid in that respect. And at the moment, South Africa’s being pulled into the BRICS grouping, for example, and being such a strong partner for China is indicative of this larger shift in the world. And the polarity of the world economy moving to Asia, a lot of the newest ideas coming out of the Indian Ocean room and Asia, not from the Atlantic world anymore. And increasingly, notions of modernity and notions of what the future’s going to look like being fundamentally non-Western, while a lot of Western culture is backward-looking, not necessarily partly in the Donald Trump sense, but also in obsession about legacy that one sees still also on the left side of Western culture.
With all of that, it becomes this real kind of mixed up mess in some kind of ways, but also there’s a space for new things emerging, which I think is also, in its own way, very exciting.
Eric: Well it’s exciting to you but in many capitals in the West, in that Euro-Atlantic corridor, it’s quite discombobulating that they’re not always sure of what their role in the world is if they’re not atop the power pyramid. Well, there’s a new book that’s out, Westlessness: The Great Global Rebalancing, that tries to explain the trends in this moment that we’re in. It’s written by Samir Puri, who’s also the author of two other books, The Great Imperial Hangover and Russia’s Road to the War in Ukraine. Samir is a former British diplomat and also a former analyst at the U.S. Defense Think Tank, the RAND Corporation. And we are thrilled to have Samir on the show. Wonderful to speak with you again after you and I ran into each other in Singapore a couple of weeks ago.
And when you told me about your book, I was just thrilled and I said, “You must come on the show,” and here we are today. So, welcome Samir.
Samir Puri: Great to be with you. And as soon as I heard what we were talking about in Singapore, I thought you are probably going to quite like this book. So, it’s a real pleasure to be on here.
Eric: I didn’t like the book — I love the book, and I’m really hoping that people go out and read it because I think it’s very timely to understand this new world that we’re in today. I think before we get deep into the weeds on the themes that you raised in the book, it might be helpful for us to define a couple of terms here. The West is this weird concept, just like the same way that people are uncomfortable with the words global south, and we’ve talked about that on our program previously. It’s in our name. And it’s a complex term. The West is also a complex term. Can you maybe first. Before we get started into the thematics that you raise, what does the West mean to you? How do you define it?
Samir: Quite important early question if we’re talking about westlessness, we do need to know what it is that’s contracting. So, the west has evolved over the centuries, and it originates in Western Europe and what was old Christendom in Western Europe. And it has grown to expand to cover what became the British settler colonies of North America and Australasia, also briefly places like Rhodesia. We’re talking about Africa as well. Some settler colonies, of course, didn’t hold on. Others have persisted in some sort of form. But generally speaking, it’s North America, Western Europe, and Australasia. But also since the end of the Cold War, there’s been the Westernization of Eastern Europe with these countries, Romania, Hungary, Poland, others joining the European Union, joining NATO. Critically, and this is to round off this sort of definition, Samuel Huntington, who you might recall wrote the very famous Clash of Civilizations, he excluded South America, Latin America from his notion of the West.
This is a controversial point which is that South Americans clearly have their genealogy, many of them anyway, in the Europe. Catholicism spread from Europe. But there’s a geopolitical and cultural outline to what the West constitutes to be today. I think it really does center around this Euro-Atlantic world of North America and Europe. And Australasia, which, of course, laterally is very closely now tied to the security frameworks of the U.S. through all sorts of arrangements that they have. But I’ll just last thing to say on this is people may have their slightly different definitions of what the west is, and I think that’s okay because it’s not about being dogmatic, it is about seeing the evolution and the spread of Western European civilization, and peoples, over the last few centuries.
Eric: So, Japan is part of the G7, South Korea is part of the OECD, Singapore is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Are they Western in your definition?
Samir: Yeah, so again, you’ve got to use a few different phrases because you’re quite. I mean, yeah, arguably Japan doesn’t have an independent foreign policy. It’s so closely tied to the U.S. Ditto South Korea, it’s garrisoned by the large American force there that helps protect it. So the terms I would use, Eric, I would certainly say there’s the sort of the cultural west, but there’s also the non-geographic west. Bit of a mouthful, but I think it’s quite nice phrase to use because it definitely encompasses Japan and South Korea. And there’s one really crucial observation on that before we move on, which is the west used to be defined in racial terms, which was, to be very blunt, the West was white. And that was probably how it was defined for quite a long time.
And I think Japan’s inclusion in the post 1945 U.S.-led alliance system sort of show that the West could be a bit more inclusive. And that’s a really crucial theme because as the sort of the traditional Western countries lose a little bit of their dominance around the world, they’ve really got to attract more other countries to their camp. Japan is always this totemic example of what it can look like if you fully join the West geopolitically, but stay culturally apart. But as we all know, Japan joined in very unique circumstances in 1945. So, you have all these different terms, sort of the cultural west, the geographic west, the non-geographic west as well.
Cobus: So Samir, I was wondering, in related terms, how you think about Western power. Are there specific strands of power that one thinks of as particularly Western? But then also if you just think about how the West of projects its power in the world, what does that power look like?
Samir: Great question, Cobus, because the fun of writing this book was using lots of different metrics. So, many listeners would be familiar with the division between hard power and soft power. Hard power being military or economic or currency power. And soft power being about attracting others to your ways of doing things. I wanted to go a little bit further than that and I actually think there’s been a lot of westernization of people’s aspirations and identities around the world, all over the world. Of course, people learn those big four, five European languages, principally English, but also Spanish, French, Portuguese because they want to participate in the global commons. They want to be able to get educations that relate back to what were the richest and most advanced parts of the world.
So, there’s a whole set of different levels in which the West’s power and influence has been felt. There’s the obvious point of U.S. aircraft carriers or, before that, British imperial garrisons, French imperial garrisons. There’s obvious points about the power of the U.S. dollar, which I do talk about. But then I get into these softer themes about how the West has been very aspirational, and it’s actually pulled people towards its orbits, not by making them Western, but I suppose encouraging them to Westernize certain aspects of their tastes in films or music or certain aspects of their behaviors as being more western through their languages or their dress. And that’s not necessarily always insidious. I don’t say that’s a bad thing. I’m not saying that there’s a bad thing around Westernization. It’s not always done forcefully. Often it’s done because it’s sometimes because it’s attractive, other times because the power of staying aloof, you don’t have it. You’ve got to join in with the Western ways of doing things to make money, to get ahead, to get an education. It’s across the spectrum, all of these things, and it’s been really fun, as I say in the book, to compare apples and oranges to compare things that don’t always fit together, to almost audit the West’s power and influence as it’s developed over the centuries to where we are today.
Eric: I felt that after I read the book that it was a rebuttal to the polarized narratives that we see predominantly online but also in our politics, that it’s either us or them that bricks is going to mean the end of the dollar because they’re going to de-dollarize, and that’s the end of the West. Or conversely, we hear that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is fighting for the rules-based international order in order to defeat China’s undermining of that order. Again, very reductive binary, us versus them, good versus evil, order versus chaos type of narratives. We’re very clear in stating that you don’t like the phrase, the post-Western world, in fact, you said it’s a misnomer because it doesn’t capture the nuance that is required to understand what’s happening. So, you settled on the word ‘westlessness.’ And you said it’s not about the vanishing of the Western world, far from it, since the west is not going anywhere. Help us define what westlessness is.
Samir: That’s a really perceptive point you make, and it’s really the star point of this book. That’s the critical syllable in the title is less So, the West has had this outsized massive influence. It’s been, to use social media language, the West has been the key influencer all around the world. And I think what’s happening now is the arrival of other influencers, others who don’t necessarily want to stop the West from being the West, but they certainly want to protect their societies against further Westernization, and to modernize and move things forward in very different ways or to look to non-Western examples. So, this is what I mean by the global rebalancing. It’s quite a nuanced thing to get right because our tendencies are often to go binary, to say us and them. And there’s 101 books out there with pictures of eagles and dragons showing the U.S. versus China in some sort of like world defining competition.
I’m not saying that U.S.-China rivalry is not a critical, if not the critical single relationship in the world today. It’s just there’s so much else out there. There’s everybody else living in all the countries that we currently are sort of living in. As we’ve discussed, whether in Asia and South Africa, I’m sitting in the UK right now, it’s not only about the U.S.-China, and it’s definitely not going to be some kind of Cold War finale where you collapse the authoritarian states. Yes, you might say Russia, China, North Korea, Iran pose an increasingly collaborative threat to the Western liberal democracies. That’s a fine security question to pose. But I would then push back very strongly against that and say, “What are you actually expecting of the world? Are you expecting the world to fall in line with Westernized norms around politics and economics and society and other things? Or are you actually looking at an increasing diversification of the ways in which people do things?”
And then how do we settle on that? And the last observation on this, because I like the fact you mentioned Anthony Blinken, who is a very competent diplomat judging by his actions in a very difficult geopolitical environment. But there’s something very 1990s about Blinken as some of the Biden crowd where they almost act and speak as if not only the U.S.’s control, but also the West’s control of being the ultimate arbiter of global affairs is undiminished. But actually, it is diminishing. And there is more leeway for disobedient powers to move in their own directions or to take their own paths, or to either push back strongly against the West, or just to do their own thing and ignore the West. And in South Africa’s case, I think mentioned earlier in the introduction, to pick up a challenge against Israel, which is a very strongly Western-backed state, and push it through the very rules-based international order of the International Court of Justice to bring out that indictment against Israeli militaries actions in Gaza Strip, and for it to get a chorus of approval across different non-Western countries — very, very interesting things that I just do not think we’d have seen 30 years ago at all.
Cobus: Just to evoke another huge kind of umbrella term that a lot of people take issue with, in looking at the West as a block and as a very complicated entity, I was wondering what you made of the global south as an entity and how useful you find that concept as an alternative position from which to look at the West.
Samir: Well, that’s a wonderful point because it’s a term that’s gained a lot of currency. People keep talking about the global south. And I think it can be easier for Westerners who don’t have too much experience in the non-Western world to fall back on that. But I’m sure the pair of you will agree with me given where you’re from and where you’re living. Speaking personally, my heritage is Indian from Punjab pre-partition. My parents are actually born in East Africa, Kenya, Tanzania. And I was brought up in the UK, but I’ve been living in Singapore for the last four years. So, when I think of India, Kenya, Tanzania, or Singapore, countries I have direct experience or connections or family connections or ethnic connections to, they’re so different that there’s no way that you could sort of collaboratively push them together to this term global south.
Where I do think the term does have some benefit is that many of these so-called global south countries, which, by the way, are all at different stages of economic development. Clearly, Singapore is so far stratospheric ahead of somewhere like Tanzania. You couldn’t possibly put them together. I think they all gained independence mainly from European empires, but sometimes also from the U.S. like the Philippines around the same time. So, middle of the 20th century, 1960s, maybe sort of ’70s, ’80s thinking about Zimbabwe. And I think those shared experiences mean that sometimes when you get people from those countries interacting with each other, talking to each other, discussing world affairs with each other, even if they’re not talking about colonialism, they know that their countries are similarly aged as independent entities, have faced the challenges of the Cold War, problems exported from Europe to their doorsteps.
Have sort of followed in the footsteps of the Europeans and the U.S. in terms of economic advancement. Have sometimes been lectured to or censored by those western countries. And are now at the cusp of a very different era. But beyond those generalizations, honestly, I don’t think there’s a great deal you could clump together about the global south, I think.
Eric: Cobus, just to pick up on that, one of the themes that you said that binds the global south together is the shared trauma and subjugation of colonialism that they all experienced for the most part. That’s what unites them in many respects is this history of, as Samir said, of being lectured and being colonized and being occupied at one point in their history. And that is a very powerful unifying force.
Cobus: It is, but I mean, that narrative also informs the founding stories of the United States itself. For me, I think it’s that, but more specifically, the way that these countries, in the process of colonization, and, in the first place, how the process of colonization inserted them into certain structural positions in relation to the global economy, but also how it’s inserted them into a certain symbolic position in relation to development or under development. And for a lot of them, that meant simply semi-permanent long-term under development. But even in the case of Singapore, it’s still a situation of having been in that position and then having overcome it in some form of extremely successful like development project. So, that kind of positioning on the kind of the southern side of that binary opposition, I think that is one of the things that unites the global south.
Eric: So, Samir, I just want to pick up on what Cobus was saying and let’s see if we can put some definition and some shape to what westlessness actually looks like, and see if I fully understand the term here. One of the things that we’re seeing in Southeast Asia, and certainly not unique to Southeast Asia, Kenya’s also doing this as well, is effectively managing the various poles of power in the world. And I don’t even want to say it’s an east-west thing because Vietnam last year was the only country in the world that welcomed Xi Jinping, Joe Biden, and Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi from India went to Russia in a very dramatic display of autonomy to hug Putin. And that was very conscious theatrics that he did in such a way as to communicate to the West and communicate to the rest of the world that India will not be bound by these paradigms.
Kenya, for example, is now a non-NATO ally, and at the same time has an incredibly close relationship with China, and also a very close relationship with India. So, we see these countries that have not been in the polls of power, and traditionally have been aligned either with the West or in the Cold War with Russia and the Communist bloc, today exercising remarkable amounts of strategic autonomy and multipolarity. Is that what you mean by westlessness?
Samir: Geopolitically, yes. A great example with Vietnam by the way, of course, we must qualify that Biden, Xi Jinping, and Putin, they definitely didn’t visit at the same time. I’m sure they were-
Eric: No, of course, not. That would’ve been rather remarkable had they done, but it was in the space of a year, they did.
Samir: Yeah. Which does actually mean that your diary planning in your diplomacy becomes a really vital thing, doesn’t it? With Modi, great example you gave as well of the bear hug with Putin on his first trip to Moscow this year since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Modi was in Italy at the G7 Summit not too long before that. So again, you’ve got your diary planning that is a very visual embodiment of your leadership’s ability to speak to multiple parts of the world. On this bigger point, so geopolitically, so this westlessness term, I think, is one that I’m using to apply to everything from the hard power, geopolitics, pecking order side of the world, all the way down to how sort of social national identities are formed as well, which we can talk about a bit later on as well.
But sticking with the geopolitical point very quickly, one thing I really don’t like is a simplistic portrayal of world politics as kind of like a heroic good guy U.S.-led G7 bloc and a sort of nefarious nasty China-led BRICS bloc, which, of course, confuses the fact that India is in the BRICS, so well surely they’re not on the bad guy side. And it leaves the global south as this sort of open for pickings, open for being courted by either side, which is, as you are saying, resolutely not what they see themselves as being because there are several countries that, just to highlight these examples to bring this point home, who are sitting very comfortably straddling across various different relationships.
Turkey, which renamed itself Türkiye, shedding its Latinized name from a century ago, another interesting manifestation of westlessness. India, of course, Modi likes to call it Bharat, which is the Hindi name, even when he’s speaking in English. But going back to Turkey, they’re in NATO, but they have expressed, Erdoğan has expressed a desire to join the Shanghai Corporation Organization, the entity that involves China and Russia and the central Asian states. And they keep their channels open, Turkey with Russia as well. Saudi Arabia closed security partner with the U.S. with the UK as well, but it’s not sanctioning Russia over the war in Ukraine, and it’s very happy, the Gulf states in general are very happy to take Chinese investment in tech and other things.
So, this is really the world that we’re in. And I really feel, to round off my response to your question, is when people talk about blocs, I think they often reflect their low comfort levels with the complexity of what’s happening. There’s a desire to reduce this into a black and white situation — good guys, bad guys, us and them. And it’s just not the way the world is going to unfold over the century unless there is some gigantic cataclysm where China, Russia are both fighting side by side against the Western countries in some horrific scenario that we just hope never happens.
I suppose there would be some people cynically on the West who would actually find they’re validated in presenting the world as blocs, but part of the job of everyone involved in politics, geopolitics, diplomacy, and even educating people, talking about these themes, part of our job in this century is to make sure that this complex fungible multi-alignment world can actually, people have the breathing space to actually exist in this world without being forced into blocs.
Cobus: So as you point out in the book, so many of Western power’s foundational myths or the way that particularly also how those myths feed into how they see the world at present assume themselves in the middle and they assume themselves as kind of norm setters. And there seems to be very little preparation for what I think many people are predicting that, at some stage soon, the U.S. won’t be the number one economy in the world. What do you think Western power is going to look like once the U.S. is number two? How do you think Western power will react?
Samir: Really good question about the sort of the psychology of reacting to this and, of course, there’s no inevitability. The U.S. will become the number two in terms of nominal GDP. Everyone knows there’s two measures of GDP. There’s a purchasing power parity which are adjusts for local pricing that has placed China above the U.S. for about 10 years now, which is very symbolic. By the way, it’s not a triviality. But the nominal GDP measurement which uses the real value of currencies, the U.S. is still comfortably ahead. So, we don’t know if the U.S. itself will drop to number two. But the interesting thing is the westlessness argument does not depend on the U.S. becoming number two because overall market collective economic heft is dropping. And to answer your question, I think there’s going to be a lot of denial. I think Western countries, and obviously I’m from the UK, and it’s very well the UK is a long-diminished imperial power, but it loves to talk about itself.
It loves to see itself in light of its progeny, the USA, which it birthed from its own empire. It sees that as an extension of its own sort of the sense of ideology and mission of defending trade routes and power projecting military force to defend the world order, all the rest of it. It’s going to be a real stretch to imagine Westerners become as fascinated by non-Westerners as they should be. And I say that very strongly because I think non-westerners generally have had to be very fascinated by Westerners, European and North Americans, just to keep up with global trends, with fashions, with languages, with economic modernizations. We’ve talked about, especially the 20th century. And now where we’re at is we’re not a parity, we’re rebalancing, where there’s nothing that really makes the incumbent upon Westerners to start paying attention to India for its own sake or Indonesia as an up-and-coming country or South Africa.
But I think the association with those places has tended to be sunny holidays, poverty, aid handouts, all the rest of it. And depending on where you look, depending on the timeframes you are thinking about, that set of associations will probably start to change quite dramatically in the next 10, 20 years. So, a lot of this book, by the way, it’s very much forward-looking. I’m not saying that the West is all of the sudden in a position of having to treat everybody else as equals, the West can actually hold its head up perhaps still higher than many others or many metrics, but I just don’t think that that’s going to be sustainable over the next 10 or 20 years. And this, I think, it really is the answer to your question is there’s no time like the present to start preparing for the future especially if you are raising your kids for a world in which they’ll live in until 2100 or you’re training young people in other contexts in universities or schools, they’re all going to live to 2100.
I’m hoping to get to 2090, touchwood. And so you do have, I think, a strong expectation as you go through these themes that the world of the 2060s, 2070s is just not going to be like the world of today in terms of how powerful and influential the West singularly is in relation to everybody else.
Eric: But Samir, I genuinely don’t believe, and I think you’ll agree, that that notion has settled in in the West. We’ve had a season of elections in the United Kingdom, in Western Europe and in the United States where their role in the world has been absent from the discourse. It’s been so obsessively inward-looking on their own divisive, divided, bitter politics and not the curiosity about the rest of the world. Here in the United States, we’ve seen the interest in language study, particularly around Chinese, decline precipitously. And that is just absolutely tragic that people are turning inward at the very moment when these changes are taking place. With that in mind, I’d like to read a couple sections of your book just to talk about the role of Europe, China, and the United States. You said that the Western world with Europe, still heavily shielded by the US’s power, will not cede its privileges willingly.
That’s a really important theme and I’d like you to touch on that. you said about the role of China. China’s rise is not necessarily seen as a rallying call to unite behind Beijing, presumably from countries in the global south, but as opening up economic opportunities that also encourage fresh thinking about a world more independent of the West. And then on the United States, you say that we’ve lived through an era of U.S. global dominance. So it’s no surprise that the one thing uniting Biden and Trump and now, of course, Harris and Trump in their outlook was a dogged of determination to prevent China from becoming number one. And I can recount to you a conversation that I had with an analyst, a scholar at the Atlantic Council, and he explained to me in the most blunt terms.
He said, “Eric, our opposition to China is that they want to be number one and we want to prevent them from becoming number one because we want to stay number one.” And that was how this analyst at the Atlantic Council framed the competition. So with that in mind, you’re writing on Europe, China, and the U.S. and their respective roles in this new era of westlessness. Can you speak to those changes?
Samir: Yes. And just to quickly comment on that observation, that’s probably the most honest depiction of the US’s perception of China that there is. And I honestly find a lot of the ways publicly presented is very euphemistic because it is about status anxiety. Of course, if you’re atop of the tree, you are looking over your shoulder. When someone very credibly looks like they’re going to… well, I think with China not even overtake the US because, as I say, that’s not a given. But just to be able to live in extraordinary success while ignoring the US’s ways of doing things, that in itself is an insult. I think with regards to the West, the West will be independently powerful and numerous enough to continue to be self-obsessed for the immediate future.
But I think some things will start to crack. I’ll give you one very concrete example, which is understandably the G7 and the Europeans in particular, but also the Biden administration has really tried to collapse the Russian economy and stop its invasion of Ukraine.
And as I think we all know, one of the big reasons the sanctions that are led by the G7 haven’t worked is that Russia can keep trading with India, with China, even with Indonesia, with Turkey, with others. And it’s interesting that the West itself just doesn’t occupy the same hold over the world economy. That’s a very material thing that will make people, I think, realize that if you pull those levers in the West in this day and age, you may not necessarily get the same outcomes as you might have done 20 or 30 years ago. But that’s quite, I think, still a quite elite foreign policy perspective.
Where I wonder the west might be permeated by non-Western influences is in some things around culture because the demography of the world is changing so that more people than ever, as a percentage, will be non-Western than they are Western. I go into the numbers on that in the book. But there are some interesting indicators already. They aren’t very big, but I would certainly say that it’s interesting that some of the most played mobile phone video games, free downloadable games are actually Chinese, most played around the world. And you do wonder whether there are certain ways in which, and obviously there’s TikTok as well, which I know as a platform, not the content, but there are certain things that are starting to come through the cracks of non-Western influencers seeping into the West.
South Korean popular culture, of course. Bollywood films have always been very popular in Asia, but there’s I think possibility that you might just find that the West’s monopoly on its own tastes starts to evolve a little bit just because to flip that over, most other parts of the world, people consume popular culture material. Some of it’s a bit western and a bit sort of glitzy, whether it was Michael Jackson in the ’80s or different incarnations of pop music, or whether it’s Hollywood films. But they juxtapose it with local language material as well. I actually think the local language material and the non-Western rivals and versions of things were just probably improving quality as the middle classes of other parts of the world start to become a bit richer.
And then eventually, you just have a situation where I think we’ll look back on the 20th century, early 21st century, in decades to come, and think, well, that was really strange that the West was so, so dominant that so many people looked up to and to the West. How the West reacts to that is, I think, very much to be seen. But I think the last completely observation I’d have is generationally it matters. So, in 10 years, most world leaders will be millennials. In 20, 25 years, there’ll be Gen Z world leaders and leaders in the west. They won’t be as steeped in tales of Cold War triumph as people like Anthony Blinken or David Cameron are. I don’t think that means they’ll reject the West’s own narratives of history. I just think they’ll grow up with a different set of global experiences, different ways in which Western people receive when they travel around the world, rather than being received sometimes as walking wallets or as gods as they may have been.
That’s, by the way, a quote from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography 80, 90 years ago… “The white people walking through South Africa were seen as gods by me when I was a child.” That’s to evoke just how far we’ve come from racialized connotations of power and influence. Thinking ahead 20, 30 years, I think we’ll just see a lot more evening out and possibly the emergence of other cultures and nationalities that have a prestige and a wealth and a and a sort of a glamor about them that may be aspirational totally apart from the West.
Cobus: All of this discussion is happening also in the context of the climate crisis, which I think is going to put a unique amount of stress on globally interconnected systems. Last week, a single computer security glitch took out airports and buses and trains and so on in numerous countries at the same time. And the climate crisis is that kind of dynamic written many times over much larger. So much of this kind of western unipolar moment that you’ve described in the book also happened in the context of a moment of technological interconnection. As that technological interconnection comes under more and more duress because of the climate crisis, what kind of system are you looking at in that case? Is it a form of kind of multipolarity on steroids essentially? Like, are we looking at the development of separate spheres of influence and a smaller, more localized in its own backyard kind of west, or that kind of global influence, how is it changing?
Samir: I’m glad you brought that up. And my book, actually, there’s three big sections where I do the analysis. One’s called People, the next one’s called Power, and the third one is called Planet. And I’m not an expert in the climate crisis or in the energy transition challenges facing countries, but I did want to present to the reader, I think, a point that becomes very obvious once you’ve written most of the book about this global power transition, which is the energy transition in which people are looking to countries and companies are looking to use more of renewable energy than fossil fuels is happening at the same time as the dawning of this less Western era.
And that in itself is just a correlation. That’s not a causation point. But I think it’s an important correlation because definitely the energy transition and the climate crisis is being approached from such contrasting start points in the West and the most developed economies compared to some of the Asian and African Middle Eastern countries who are often more exposed to the very visceral effects of climate change, but not exclusively, say, of course, forest fires in California and Spain, Portugal as well a couple of years ago. But I do think that there are two key takeaways from this. Because, of course, I don’t know what shape the systems that we will see that will emerge in the future. Obviously, I can’t predict, for example, the geopolitical alignment of Indonesia or India in 50 years from now, nor do I try to in the book.
All I can try to do is to present the trend lines that we can see arching out into the next two, three decades from where we’re standing now and locate those in a world in which the West becomes a little bit less dominant, maybe very much diminished in some areas. To answer your question very squarely with the energy transition in mind, what I think has happened is that there is a new moral and material yield for intellectual leadership, which is to show responsible leadership in the world by encouraging the energy transition in your own country and potentially to build your international relationships, trading and diplomatic, with others on the basis of how collaboratively you are working or how much you’re assisting maybe poorer countries than you.
And in that regard, it is impossible to write China out from its credibility as a interlocutor and as a trading partner providing copious amounts of solar panels and other things. To many of the other non-Western countries. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that China is the key investor in Indonesia when it comes to nickel mining and potentially in the future EV electronic vehicle, electric vehicle construction. And it just makes me wonder where the West will fit into all of this because the west has got these very ambitious net zero targets for 2030. I think Japan and South Korea may have them too as well, but I just wonder whether the West will actually not have the credibility and the material, sort of ability to actually help many of these other countries in the northwestern world, and actually whether the solutions for those countries are going to come from others in the northwestern world principally. But again, we don’t know yet. We have to wait and see. But I think it’s important to ask these questions.
Eric: Samir, you wrote in the book, “One way or another, get ready for change.” And I think that is the big takeaway from your book Westlessness: The Great Global Rebalancing. It is on sale now. So, you can go to Amazon, Blackwell’s, Bookshop.org, Foyles, any number of places where you get your books. You can get an audiobook, an eBook, or one of those old-fashioned paper books. It went on sale back on July 25th. Samir, thank you so much for joining us today. Congratulations on the book. It was music to our ears, and we hope that lots of other people engage in these fascinating ideas that you’ve laid out.
Samir: Thank you so much for having me, and I really felt the conversation became a symphony of, I think, great exchanges on this really important topic. So thank you.
Eric: Cobus, this book for us, and certainly for me was very refreshing because again, it’s part of what you and I have been trying to do in this discourse about China and Africa and China and the global south, which is to resist those binary, reductive, polarized narratives. And I like what Samir is saying is that the West is not going to go away as much as the Twitter bots and the extremists on all sides would like to say that the other is going to prevail over their rival. That’s not going to happen. I think that’s very, very clear. We’re going into an era of great complexity. It’s not going to be one or two powers rule them all. The question is, will the United States and Europe and, to some extent, Japan cede the ground to these other powers? We’ve seen with old men who are at the top of power, Paul Biya in Cameroon is an example, Joe Biden in the United States — old men don’t like to give up power.
People don’t like to give up power. So while the rest is rising and multipolarity is emerging, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the United States, Europe, and the incumbent powers are going to cede that ground willingly.
Cobus: No, I don’t think so. And for me, Japan is only part of that group to an extent. Once one gets into how Japanese academia, for example, see these connections, one realizes that Japan finds itself excluded from the center of Western power in many, many ways. And the kind of cultural role Japan plays in Western power is also extremely complicated. And it’s too much to unpack here, but that kind of like hard kernel of Western power, that kind of Euro-Atlantic center of Western power, I don’t think it’s going to give up without a fight. I think it’s too essentialist in the way that it thinks about its role in the world. And so I think Western power is going to be, I think, quite disruptive on its way out. And I think it’s going to depend, I think, on the rest of the world a lot on how they react to the kind of convulsions that’s going to happen in Western capitals as Western power declines. I think we don’t have a clear view of what that’s going to look like yet.
Eric: Well, let me tell you a story, and I think I’ve already told this anecdote on the show, so some of you may remember it, but a few years ago, I live in Vietnam and I live in Ho Chi Minh City, and I went to dinner, a number of U.S. diplomats. We started talking about these questions of great power competition and things like that. And one of the diplomats said, and this is not an uncommon view in many parts of the United States — “So what if China becomes number one? Who cares? Yeah, we’ll be number two, but we’ll still have the strongest military in the world. We’ll still be a very strong power. Who cares?” And the only point that I brought up, which is that if the past 400 years of economic history are any guide that the largest economy in the world historically gets to set the rules for everybody else. They become the norm-setting standard.
That was the case with the British, which is why many people speak English around the world, why we have units of measurements that are based on the British standards. We have a number of things that emerged from Pax Britannica. Then the Americans became the largest economy in the world and they set the rules for everybody else. That’s why we have the IMF, the World Bank, the Bretton Woods institutions, any number of standards set by the United States. And so the Chinese, if they do emerge as the largest economy in the world, which is, by the way, a very big question mark, because if you take purchasing power parody as a measurement off the table, as Samir pointed out, if you use it, if you measure it in other ways, it’s not entirely clear that they will be. But this question of norm setting, Cobus, this is something you’ve focused on for many, many years, and the power of norm-setting, that is what many people in the United States find very threatening about China, particularly as it relates to things like EVs, Huawei, technology standards, 5G, all of these things. It’s about norm setting. Talk to us about that fear and that anxiety that exists in the West about China becoming a norm-setting power.
Cobus: What comes with that, I think, is the way that norms make the world understandable to us. So, if someone outside of the West starts setting norms or has the power to set norms, then the world becomes considerably less understandable to the West. So that becomes very disruptive. And of course, like Western power is universalist. It comes from, as Samir was pointing out, it comes from Christianity, a lot of it. And Christianity is a way of thinking that a, thinks of itself as the only real truth and has a mission to insert the entire world into that truth. So, once there is an alternative truth, then that really shakes that kind of Christian-centric way of thinking, particularly to the core. And a lot of the values-driven foreign policy, like liberalism that we’ve seen promoted by, for example, the Biden administration is a newer secularized version of that same universalism. It’s like these are universal truths. These have to be true for everyone.
As long as they’re not true for everyone, we are living in imperfect world. Once they become true for everyone, then the world has been perfected, right? That’s the underlying logic of liberalism. And coming up against, and I just read a great book called China Incorporated by Kerry Brown. Where he makes that point, he said it comes up, a Chinese way of thinking, which is inherently hybrid, inherently straddling different thought systems, like living comfortably with contradiction between, for example, thinking of themselves both as Marxist-Leninists and highly capitalist at the same time. It makes sense in the Chinese context. It doesn’t make sense in the Western context. And the West has been maddened by these contradictions that China bring to the table. So, this is going to be bumpy. I think it’s going to be interesting to see, once that norm-setting power goes, it’s going to be very disruptive, I think.
Eric: Well, because there’s this idea in the West that democracy is the only way that you can develop economically and China is proving that you don’t need to be a democracy in order to become a major economic power. Vietnam is trying to prove that as well. In many respects, Singapore and Japan have long been single-party states, if you will, that have democratic tendencies. The liberal democratic party in Japan ruled for many years, effectively unchallenged, and rose to power that way and became an economic superpower as well. And so I think it breaks down some of these assumptions that drive a lot of the thinking, even to this day in Washington and elsewhere, about democracy is good, non-democracies are questionable if not bad, right?
Cobus: Yeah, absolutely. And what that kind of ends up also creating in western culture is that because western culture is so articulate at criticizing itself, for example, like white supremacy as an ideology is obviously fundamentally Western, but so much of the critique of white supremacism, some of the anti-racist critique, so much of that work also happened in the context of western power. It happened in Western universities, frequently by migrants into a Western system. So, one could be extremely anti-Western, very, very critical about Western power, and still find yourself fully located within a western sphere of thinking, right? So, that is part of the kind of contradiction of Western powers. It speaks with so many voices, seemingly contradictory, but it is inherently linked. And so people who really do come from outside of that sphere, not living in the kind of divisions that we understand, left right divisions, for example, that have made our world understandable to us within a very broad but still Western way of thinking of the world —
People who come from a Chinese system or an Indian system or so that’s fully outside of that system, we still have very little conversation between people inside the West and outside of the West. Frequently the conversation in the West is actually the West speaking to itself about itself. And there’s ways to go there. In a lot of ways, there’s not even the beginnings of a dialogue happening. So yeah, I think we are up for interesting times, I think.
Eric: We are indeed up for interesting times. We’re living in them. What’s the cliché? May you be cursed to live in interesting times. I think that is our curse of the day.
Cobus: Yeah.
Eric: Okay, let’s leave the conversation there. We’re back on our regular schedule for those of you who subscribe to the Global South feed. And we apologize, we took a few weeks off because we went to Washington, and we were quite busy over those past few weeks, but we’re now getting back in the rhythm as you can see on the Global South feed. Of course, if you love these issues as much as we do and you find them fascinating, again, what Samir talked about, the lack of curiosity in the West towards the global south is endemic. And the service that we provide is meant to challenge that, is meant to provide information, understanding context, and analysis about what China’s doing in the global South to exactly counter this ignorance that is so prevalent.
And so if you’d like to try out what we’re doing, go to chinaglobalsouth.com/subscribe. We’ve got editors in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, unlike a lot of the other China-focused services that are out there, who are predominantly being produced in global north countries. The people who produce our work all live and are from the global south. And that is something that’s very important is that you’re getting a different non-Western point of view. Again, like what Samir is saying, it’s not binary, but you need to have these other points of view, particularly from the impacted countries. And that’s the service that we offer. Once again, chinaglobalsouth.coms. If you are a student or a teacher and would like to join us, so we have a discount, 50% off. Email me, eric@chinaglobalsouth.com, and I’d be happy to send you those links to get those discounted subscription offers.
So that’ll do it for this edition of the China Global South Podcast. Cobus and I will be back again next week with another episode. Until then, for Cobus van Staden in Johannesburg, I’m Eric Olander — thank you so much for listening.
Outro: The discussion continues online. Follow the China Global South Project on Twitter @ChinaGSProject and share your thoughts on today’s show, or head over to our website at chinaglobalsouth.com where you can subscribe to receive full access to more than 5,000 articles and podcasts. Once again, that’s chinaglobalsouth.com.
