Some Christmas Cheers: Thomas Ekvall

The so-called Global North has domineered the world for the past several hundred years. The term developed world was changed to the West and the West was in turn changed to the Global North. How Australia and New Zealand fit into the Global North, both in the east and the south, is not clear, but semantics may not matter. The Global North's dominance is coming to an end.

How did the Global North establish this several-hundred-year-long global dominance? It was certainly not based on democracy and human rights; on the contrary, it was firmly based on military power, force, slavery, colonization, oppression, exploitation, and abuse. In view of these realities, from a global southern perspective, it may be both correct and overdue that the reign of the global north comes to an end. All attempts, in post-colonial times, to paper over abuses and atrocities with aid and in other ways have failed. Some vague apologies and minor compensations have not cut it. Compensation for slavery can not even be discussed. The Global North does not pull its weight in addressing climate change, even though the countries of the Global North are responsible for having caused it.

The Global North was respected due to its power, production capacity, and organizational skills. Less than a hundred thousand Brits controlled more than three hundred million Indians; the control of Africa, South America, and large parts of Southeast Asia followed similar ratios. The Global North, long after decolonization, was looked up to, not because of its democracy, but its capacity to produce anything fast and inexpensively from food, infrastructure, vehicles and aircraft to ships and weapons. Human rights and democracy have had little, if anything, to do with the power, wealth, and admiration of the Global North. Democracy and human rights may have been admired by some intellectuals in the Global South who were willing to ignore the obvious and often glaring flaws as well as the many hypocrisies and contradictions.

There are similarities between communism and democracy, as governance systems. Not only do both seem to be rather shortlived, but they are failing due to their built-in weaknesses. On the face of it, both democracy and communism are attractive. Who could be opposed to the governance: of the people, by the people, for the people? Or governance according to everyone's needs and everyone's capacity. Both worked well after WWII. The Soviet Union had double-digit GDP growth for decades after the war. Democracies in North America and Europe actually performed very well during the same period.

So what went wrong? Communism went down first, because it had too many inherent flaws and shortcomings and too few incentives for hard work and production. The communists recognized early on that the needs of the people far exceeded their ability to provide for them. While China may govern through a communist system, its economy has little to do with communism. The flaws in democracy are less obvious, even though Hitler came to power through a democratic process, but the flaws are now surfacing at a rapid pace. Pain must be avoided at all costs and on all levels. If the stock markets fall central banks step in and lower interest rates. Faced with a crisis, governments intervene and bail out everyone from banks and industries to individuals, even if it involves printing trillions of dollars. Governments get ever bigger, as do the national debts. Most democracies have a debt-to-GDP ratio that exceeds 100 percent. The government's share of the GDP has more than doubled, in most democracies, over the past 70 years. In some countries, it is already over 50 percent. Every country in the Eurozone has broken its own rules relating to debt and deficits. The US government has built up a 34 trillion (34,000,000,000,000) dollar debt pile, about 100,000 dollar per citizen. This can not be paid back in present dollars with historical interest rates. People are kept alive longer through costly medical interventions straining both healthcare and pension systems. These developments are unsustainable, particularly when considering the shrinking populations in many democracies. Anything that is not sustainable will come to an end. The only question is how and how quickly it will end.

Some right-wing governments have tried to address the problem by lowering taxes but lacked the courage to cut entitlements and lower expenditures. They made up the shortcuts by borrowing the balance, increasing the debt, and making the situation worse. Short-termism reigns. For most politicians in democracies, to be reelcted is more important, than addressing long-term problems that will hit hard after they are gone. Indeed a major shortcoming of democracy.

The politics of the Global North is in shambles from the US to the Netherlands to the EU. The US may elect an obnoxious, ignorant insurrectionist as president, the Netherlands may shortly have an openly racist prime minister, and the decision-making in the EU is held up by a corrupt, fascist leader of a poor, small, and unimportant country. Racist parties are on the rise all over the EU. The Economist's Intelligence Unit does not consider the US a full democracy any longer. Countries in the Global North that support and defend the murder of thousands of children in Gaza may find it difficult to lecture the Global South about human rights in the future. Chinese human rights issues fade in comparison.

The Global North's commitment to human rights is being challenged daily. Millions of migrants move across borders from the Global South to the North claiming asylum, a cornerstone of human rights. Turkey and Russia are not the only ones taking advantage of this process. Many leaders of the Global South gleefully observe the inability of the Global North to deal with the situation, while at the same time fueling the crisis by refusing to take back asylum seekers who are not granted refugee status. The situation causes political havoc in the North, which in turn gives rise to Fascist parties challenging the very foundation of democracy.

Countries, particularly in northern Europe, which have taken human and asylum rights very seriously over the past 30 years find themselves overwhelmed. Some countries have a ratio of three taxpaying workers supporting one working-age individual on welfare, with the majority of those on welfare being born outside the country. Thirty years ago that ratio was closer to six to one with the majority on welfare being born in the country. Such developments are unsustainable and drive voters into the welcoming arms of fascist parties.

A lot of manufacturing was outsourced from the Global North to China over the last 40 years. China became the workshop of the world. Manufacturing, one of the former strengths of the Global North has to a large extent been lost. The lower costs in China kept inflation down and allowed the West to borrow and spend with low inflation and no immediate negative consequences. The Global North moved into financial services channeling funds from savers to spenders with a handsome profit. This practice is quite similar to what rentiers in the extraction industries in the Global South are often accused of. During the 2007-09 financial crisis, the financial industry of the Global North brought the world to the brink. They failed at their own game due to greed, recklessness, and lack of oversight. Fortunately, China came to the rescue by stimulating its economy and restoring global growth and stability.

The COVID crisis may have been dealt with heavy-handedly by both China and India, but they weathered the crisis better than the Global North. Fewer people died.

The internal problems of countries of the Global North have put the Ukraine-Russia war on their back burner. This is not wise. Europe should be on a war footing, but putting Europe on a war footing would cause pain, and democracies don't do pain. Russia, playing the long game, seems to have a better understanding of the weaknesses of democracies than the democracies themselves. This is worrying. Everyone in Europe should be made to understand, by their politicians, the consequences of not stopping Russia. This is not happening. Sending doomsday messages does not get politicians reelected.

Observers in the Global South are taking note of developments. They could perhaps be forgiven for concluding that the China model might offer an attractive alternative to the North's democracy and human rights. Over the past 40 years, China has moved more people out of poverty faster than any other country ever. Such progress would not have been possible without competent governance, something too often lacking in the Global North. Adding China's dominance in the technologies of the future, electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and third-generation nuclear power, the Chinese option appears even more attractive. Looking back over the past couple of hundred years China has caused much less havoc in the world than the Global North, and China is on track to become the biggest economy in the world within years. Democracy has never really worked in the Global South, with the possible exception of India, and is now failing in the Global North. Human rights are so selectively applied by the Global North that they have become meaningless and merely a tool to denigrate the enemy.

On a positive note, a bipolar world led by China and India may not be bad for anyone. That this will happen at some point is inevitable given the sheer number of people, rapidly growing economies and their increasing technological prowess. Typically, such shifts in the centers of power occur through long and devastating wars. But there is an alternative. If the Global North chose to deal with the rest of the world with respect and on equal terms, the shift in power could occur gradually and without armed conflict. The ball is really in the court of the Global North.

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Thomas Ekvall can be contacted via: thomas.ekvall9435@gmail.com