Is the Global South Revolting against Western Partiality?
Alexis Carré, “Is the Global South Revolting against Western Partiality?,” The Vital Center 2, no. 1 (Winter 2023): 25–29.
(To download the full issue, click here)
Our failure to act and to trust the judgement that motivates our action will not leave room for a globalization that spontaneously produces peace for the benefit of everyone; it is already producing a situation of chaos in which many will suffer. Engaging in a theatrical display of support on either side does not alleviate the responsibility we bear for the present situation. It is merely a polarized manifestation of the very same inaction, the fear of the very same question: What should we do?
Evening in Ukraine, painted by Konstantin Kryzhitsky, 1901. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
In the past four months, a wide range of experts and diplomats expressed concern about the West’s vocal support for Israel, claiming that it is undermining its efforts in the Global South to build support for Ukraine, and, beyond that, for a rules-based international order. They find paradoxical allies on the right in those who contend that loyalty to Israel is indeed incompatible with maintaining significant support for Ukraine while leaning in favor of the former. But loyalty is not the main foundation on which those experts and diplomats lay their claim. They mostly refrain from moral or political arguments in favor of either side of the conflict. Their wariness at supporting Israel is thus not an endorsement of Hamas or the Palestinian cause broadly understood, but a statement of priority and pragmatism. What they do suggest then, whether implicitly or explicitly, is that, had we condemned or distanced ourselves from Israel’s reaction to Hamas’s assault on its soil, we would have maintained our credibility with key partners and preserved our interest. One aspect of that claim, that sympathy for Israel should not entail undersigning whatever retaliatory action it might decide to carry out, seems fairly uncontroversial. It also speaks to the virtues of the “neutral and benevolent” observer, which probably explains some of its appeal. But it further implies that the West’s partiality in the case of Israel would be, or so the story goes, what prevents others from acting justly in the case of Ukraine. However reasonable that argument might appear on its face, the change of attitude it suggests, or the attitude it would have required us to adopt in the past months, betrays its failure to grasp the nature of the international situation today and the motivations of those who act or refuse to act on account of the West’s alleged hypocrisy.
Let us first note that support for Ukraine in the “Global South” was never strong, despite our best efforts. What is true was that some countries could be convinced to adopt a helpful but passive neutrality toward a war that remained outside the sphere of their most immediate concerns. Such an attitude was largely facilitated by the benefits several of those countries anticipated from trading with Europe and the US, particularly what the latter could no longer or were unwilling to obtain from Russia and China.
In the Middle East, the policy of Arab states was also not essentially determined by Western exemplarity. Rather, the situation in Palestine had been dormant for some time, and Arab states could now publicly present the argument that Iran’s claims to leadership in the region constituted a greater threat to them than Israel ever was or intended to be. As the Iranian nuclear deal indicated diminishing Western resolve for a hard containment, it became increasingly justifiable for Arab states to acknowledge that Israel was an objective and indispensable partner in their strategy against Tehran. As far as Ukraine was concerned, Israel itself had remained cautious in its support, and Arab countries were happy to provide the oil and gas Russia was no longer selling to Europe without antagonizing Moscow by taking a hard political stance on the heart of the issue. It is that very dynamic (which seemed to have stabilized the region) that Iran used to turn the reasons for peace against peace itself.
It would thus be a mistake to understand the reactions currently unfolding in what these experts call the Global South as the result of any attitude we should have refrained from adopting. These reactions served our enemies’ interest and were always part of their plan in enabling Hamas’ build up. Helping reactivate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict offered Iran and Russia an opportunity to force Ukraine’s allies onto the scene of another conflict where neutrality was known to be inconceivable for most of the populations of the Global South. Indeed, regardless of our actions, Israel is already considered a creation of Western powers by large swaths of those populations that do not recognize its right to exist. It is therefore doubtful that any level of moderation on our part, short of flatly siding with the attackers, would have preserved the credibility that is of such concern to those well-meaning realists. No degree of involvement “against” Israel, or “in favor” of the Palestinians, that was politically acceptable for Western societies, could conceivably match the expectations of the Global South regarding the end of this conflict. There is thus no scenario in which our attitude would not conflate, in the minds of many, both wars into a single manifestation of Western hypocrisy; from the standpoint of these populations, so long as it rejects the political conclusions of its professed sympathy for the sufferings of the Palestinians while accepting them in the case of Ukraine, the West will be deemed deceitful. Rather than restore our credibility in pursuing a shared goal, the type of moderation that the realists are calling for will be perceived as an expression of the West’s lack of commitment to its own goals when those happen to not align with the Global South. It will indeed confirm that the West needs to be deceitful—and speak empty phrases—because it is weak—or incapable of acting.
World map depicting the Global South in red and the Global North in blue.
The advocates of moderation overlook the obvious fact that, beyond this particular conflict, support for a rules-based international order had been collapsing for more than a decade. The series of coups in Africa, increasing Houthi activity in the Suez canal, Azerbaijan’s aggression of Armenia, and Venezuela’s increasingly bold claims on a sizeable part of Guyana, did not happen because the West was perceived to be on the wrong side of any conflict. They happened because cliques of ambitious men with the necessary means at their disposal thought now was the time to exploit Western powers’ incapacity to intervene, due to the diversion of their resources elsewhere and to the general perception that their societies altogether lacked the moral capacity, the courage if you will, to use force in the event that those resources would still be available.
The chaos now unfolding confronts us with the vacuity of the longstanding hope that entire regions could be stabilized through peaceful means like negotiations, foreign aid, and sanctions, without exposing Western powers to the need for costly and demanding political action. The policy based on those means consisted (with more or less success) in convincing the ruling class of these countries that they would be better off following the rules of the international order than opting for violent and authoritarian means. As history is once again on the move, these tools’ capacity to influence the conduct of these countries is vanishing at a surprising pace. The appearance of order, which claimed these instruments as evidence of its credibility, now reveals itself to have been, if not entirely fictitious, at least incredibly more fragile than we thought. The reality that such an order concealed, or that hostile actors felt they could see through the veil of discourse, was that the West, with all its wealth and might, could still help or hinder the action of others, but that it was itself paralyzed. Political deliberation differs from physical causation. Words, even very convincing ones, can fail to produce the effect they were supposed to produce if no one takes responsibility for them. When not followed by action, even words of reason or moderation sometimes trigger the very chaos they were aimed at preventing. Justifications, even very convincing ones, may still fail if they do not motivate anyone to act.
Given the present situation, let us acknowledge that the apostles of violence and authoritarianism never intended to judge our conduct, or our justifications, in a spirit of fairness. Determining what should be done based on the premise that they will be fair is therefore unlikely to produce the intended results. Instead, they have used and abused the rhetoric of Western injustice and hypocrisy regardless of circumstances, not least because it lent credibility to their claim to act so ruthlessly in the service of their country. In Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali, military officers justified their takeovers in part by claiming that the French presence was the only thing preventing local armed forces from defeating the terrorist groups, of which some went so far as to claim France was actually the hidden cause. Terrorist activity in fact increased after the withdrawal of French forces, and so did the military violence against political oppositions and ethnic minorities, which had been somewhat contained by the Western presence. The portion of the ruling class in those areas that knew Western support to be in the best interest of their countries also knew it to be conditioned by a certain degree of integration into the international order. What their local enemies knew was that this support offered these rulers no effective protection and that the arguments of foreign aid or Western indignation would be powerless if they decided to take over.
The point is of course not to provide a blank check to political adventurism. But one does not need to embrace passivity as a virtue in order to identify lack of restraint or imprudence as the vices they are. Let us ask ourselves this: How many just causes or meaningful reforms of the international order have been effected by what we would like to call our moderation? How many unjust actions and breaches of that order have been authorized by the lack of action it is now manifested as? And has the balance of those two things increased or damaged the credibility of the rules-based international order?
The rules-based international order is not coming apart at the seams primarily because the West is perceived as unjust and hypocritical, after all it could be all that and still be strong enough to force obedience; it is coming apart because hostile forces are seeing our continuous lack of resolve in defending such an order as an opportunity to use authoritarian and violent means to achieve their objectives without fear of consequences. What people call the “Global South” is hardly united around a common conception of justice, or of an alternative to the current international order. What China, Russia, Iran, Hamas, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, and the juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger do share are the conclusions they draw (in the pursuit of entirely different ends) from Western inaction. It is therefore entirely unclear how our moderation would have not appeared, to those who feel empowered by our fear of violence, as yet another show of what they take to be our moral and political decline. What is true is that given the present state of affairs, none of the options at our disposal will resolve the current tensions to everyone’s satisfaction and without contentious and divisive domestic debates.
The goal of subversive warfare, the kind waged on us, is to leave no option to the adversary that cannot be framed as a defeat. Used by an adversary that cannot obtain material superiority, its goal is to suppress its enemy’s moral capacity to act: his resolve and credibility. If Western powers do nothing, they will confirm their weakness and vindicate the gamble of the aggressors and of those who aspire to emulate them; if they do something, they will be said to be “alienating” the Global South and appear in the eyes of many to side with injustice. The alternative we are given is either to retreat or to lose our integrity. But that false dilemma which paralyses us only seems to leave us no options we can live with because of the inaction that precedes it and on which it is largely based. By presenting us with two evils that we (or a sufficient number of us) have reasons to fear or reject, they either make us unable to choose, or (similarly) divide our societies into two camps, each opting for one of these mutually exclusive options. But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that selecting victims and insulting fellow countrymen we so clearly do not care to persuade is a sign of commitment and a serious attempt at collective action. By doing so, we simply make ourselves comfortable in the passive seats that aggressive powers have happily reserved for us before a stage on which they plan to make their scene. “Since we did nothing there is nothing to be done”—we then cry at the end of the play, feeling sorry for ourselves and others. As a result of this show, because the West has been made weaker and more divided, material support for Ukraine has indeed been wavering, allowing Russia to make progress that will cost more lives to undo.
Rather than the excesses of a strong, unjust, and hypocritical West, let us reckon with the fact that it is our own lack of action toward Iran, Russia, and others in the last ten years that is at least partly at fault for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis today. The same fear of consequences that led us to seek appeasement with Iran a decade ago is today the very force allowing Iran to trap us in a dilemma, forcing either paralysis or division—a dilemma of Iran’s own making at a time of its own choosing. Moderation, on its own, will not serve us or others if we do not overcome the pathological fear of our own action, which has handed over all initiative to our enemies, nor will it alleviate the fate of the victims on either side.
If we care about them, it should no longer be possible, indeed it should no longer be permissible, to console ourselves about that fear in the hope that the world itself would provide the guidance we no longer feel we can find with our own judgement. Moderation is hardly a virtue if it merely means adapting our conduct based on the will of others as a means to escape a question we no longer feel in our power to answer: What should we do? Let us not forget that true moderation would require us to have a clear goal and an energetic desire to reach it. Where are we to find such a goal and such a desire in need of tempering in the West today? Talks of moderation comfort us simply because we are unsure of our purpose and fearful of taking responsibility for defining one. But do we have a choice? Our failure to act and to trust the judgement that motivates our action will not leave room for a globalization that spontaneously produces peace for the benefit of everyone; it is already producing a situation of chaos in which many will suffer. Engaging in a theatrical display of support on either side does not alleviate the responsibility we bear for the present situation. It is merely a polarized manifestation of the very same inaction, the fear of the very same question: What should we do?
