Odd Arne Westad is a Norwegian scholar of modern international and global history, with a specialization in the history of Eastern Asia since the 18th century. He is the Elihu Professor of History at Yale. Westad has published sixteen books, most of which deal with twentieth century Asian and global history. Westad joined the faculty at Yale after teaching at the London School of Economics, where he was School Professor of International History, and at Harvard University, where he was the S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of several other national academies. He is also the co-author of The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform, which will be published on October 29th, 2024.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Abdulkadir: Your scholarship spans a lot of topics, different periods of time, and a number of different countries and contexts, including imperialism and Cold War tensions. Could you give an outline of what drew you to many of these different research topics and how you found that your scholarship interests have changed over the course of your career?
Professor Westad: It’s really hard to do that because there is no logic that developed from the very beginning with regard to this. I wouldn’t say that it’s totally accidental, but it certainly developed in ways that I would never have foreseen.
After I graduated from college, I spent some time working for different kinds of volunteer organizations. I did lots of work with refugees, and for part of that time, I was in Africa and South Asia. I think I got an interest during that period to try to understand why things from the ground — in the areas I was working with — looked the way they looked and were the way they were. When I was there and trying to deal with some of these issues that were highly complicated and quite difficult for the people who were involved, with large-scale refugee movements and disasters, maybe coming out of political [unknown word – organizations?].
So I got an interest in that, in terms of trying to explain why the world looks the way it does. I think that’s what moved me to become a historian, because I was interested in the past, so how our world today was created by decisions that were taken in some cases quite long ago, and people’s choices that were taken a considerate time in the past. So that I think was the general, kind of movement for me into becoming a historian and working on history.
Then I was always interested in languages, but that was sort of a different strain, with regards to this. I studied in China for a while when I was in college and studied a little bit of Chinese. Then, many years later, I came back to using some of those languages I’d acquired for some of my purposes as a historian. But there was no plan in all of this. There was no sort of, you know, you have to do this in order to achieve that. Some of it was just happenstance.
I got really lucky when it came to my interest in the Cold War because I had some of the necessary language skills to get into archives and collectives when they started to open up as the Cold War came to an end, in the late 80s and early 1990s. When we could access material that we’d never thought we’d be able to see before. In order to do that, you had to have, first and foremost, certain language skills in order to use these materials. I was lucky enough to have them. So, that in a way propelled me into writing more, or being able to write more in-depth about some of the issues I’d been preoccupied with since the very beginning, like the effect of the Cold War divisions on the Global South, why so many people on a global scale ended up first colonized and then even after decolonization, being under the predominance of other countries? So, you know, those were the kind of connections that were there.
Abdulkadir: That’s really interesting. I think it’s interesting, in general, how language has really shaped your historical interests. Did you find, especially when studying documents in different languages, that there were inherent changes, in terms of the effect of language on documenting history?
Professor Westad: That’s a really good question. Yeah, I think being able to read in the original, talks about how different concepts have been developed, getting more of an understanding of the links between them and links between different peoples and how they understood themselves and each other. Yes, I think that plays a role.
I was just advising a student for their senior essay earlier today, and she’s working on the history of China, a small era of China, during the early Reform Era. We were talking about how important the concepts that they used in Chinese were, how people understood them, and sometimes how the meaning of these concepts would change. You can’t be alert to that significance without knowing the language. You can’t do that with translation, however good and imaginative a historian or political scientist you are.
Sivakumar: So, correct me if I’m wrong, you studied in China in the mid-1970s?
Professor Westad: Yes, late 70s. I came there as a student in 1979.
Sivakumar: Would you say your firsthand experience witnessing such a pivotal period in Chinese history impacts your research and teaching today?
Professor Westad: [Timestamp: 5:32] Yes, I think it does. I mean, in many different ways. First and foremost, I’ve been lucky enough to see how China has developed, from a dirt-poor and terrorized country as it was after the Cultural Revolution up to what it is today. So, that trajectory has been very important for me. I’m just publishing a book now this year with a colleague and friend of mine which is a history of that transformation in its early phases, it’s a history of China from the late sixties to mid-eighties. Interestingly enough, right in the middle of that, is the period when I first came to China, which of course is no accident, I wanted to find out more about that time period and what really happened.
But drawing that up to today, I think it’s really important that we think about when we think about China now, and many things that are wrong with China at the present time, and I’ve written quite a bit about some of these. But for the Chinese people, to be able to go through that transformation, from the generation that lived years ago, up until now, is, of course, seen by them as an enormous achievement, an enormous set of steps forward.
For almost everyone, not absolutely everyone, there are still people who have not been part of this, but for a very large group of people, particularly those who live in cities or near the eastern seaboard, where most families now live, this has been a huge transformation. Many Americans do not always realize that for the current regime in China, there’s that achievement of having gone from being very poor to moderately wealthy, where you can aspire things for your children and grandchildren. It’s important to bear that in mind. When we think of China today, that transformation should be the first thing that we think about.
Abdulkadir: Following up with that question, regarding your scholarship relating to Chinese history, how has your scholarship’s lenses focused on Chinese imperialism and the greater effects of imperialism on Asia shaped your perceptions of colonialism and imperialism overall? Especially in a comparative sense with the European case, which I think is focused on a lot more especially in the United States.
Professor Westad: (Timestamp: 8:15): Exactly. So, I think, when I teach that here at Yale, that’s one of the things I’m really interested in, is making those comparisons. I teach a class, an undergraduate seminar, on empires and imperialisms since the 1840s, and then that final “s” in imperialisms is very much a signal of how we teach this, because not all imperialisms are the same, or carried out in the same kind of way.
It’s also really important to focus on non-European empires. Obviously I think the Chinese empire is perhaps one of the most relevant today. But also say, other empires that have existed over time, going way back into history, we can look at lots of empires and imperial formations that are not European in origin, and I think that’s very significant.
So, that’s not the same thing as saying that you… It’s an instrument to figure out what’s at the core of many forms of European imperialism. It helps in understanding what is distinctive about European imperialism, in a comparative sense.
So, what’s distinctive to me about European imperialism as it came out of Europe [some additional words] and the nineteenth century is that it went from what I sometimes call the ‘smash and grab’ version of empire, meaning you take over someone’s country, you occupy it, and exploit the people and resources as best you can, making that the foundation of imperial foundations. There was still much of that coming into the 20th century as well, with European empires, but in addition to that, there were also these ideas about other forms of control and reform and improvement and race, to a very high extent, concepts of racial hierarchies and which countries and which peoples were able to achieve it. I mean, it was quite a new form of thinking about how empires were constructed. But I think you see that much more clearly if you compare non-European empires to European empires, and if you compare between countries. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do in some of my more recent work, is how some of those transformations took place.
Sivakumar: How do you think that the Cold War has informed what kind of empire the United States aspires to be?
Professor Westad: I think much of what the United States is today as an imperial formation comes out of the Cold War. it has deeper roots than that, it does go back, in my view, to the very start of the United States, it was born an empire, and most Americans would vigorously disagree with that. But it was born an empire because the whole idea was about expansion into territories that were not held by white Americans, or Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin mainly when this country was set up. It was based on the idea, that it was built into the promise of this new country, that it was eventually become a nation that had pre-dominance over others through westward expansion.
I think it’s very important to bear that in mind, the Cold War to me, is more or less synonymous with the period where the United States comes to global power, right, I tend to date the Cold War as an ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism going back to the very late nineteenth century.
So it sort of fits in, as you might have already guessed, with what I’d been saying earlier about the transformation of European imperialisms because what the United States then did is that it took over many of those new imperial concepts, including concepts of race and reform and improvement and controlling others, so that they themselves, the colonized peoples, became part of creating societies that were more similar to that of the United States. To me, the Cold War was very much about that.
Now, the United States was not the only one or only country behaving like that but it was by far the most powerful country behaving in that kind of manner. In that sense, you could say that at least for the first generation or so after the Cold War very little changed in terms of that American approach. The Cold War as a bipolar international system and ideological conflict more or less went away, it’s an open question of how we should see our open rivalry with China today. But, the basics of the US approach to the world did not change very much. So, in that sense, I think understanding the Cold War era is essential for understanding where the United States is today.
Abdulkadir: I think it’s very interesting that you discuss the US’ economic position post WWII informed the Cold War. How would you say, when twenty years later, we reached the decline of what some may call that ‘American hegemony,’ or the rise of multiple strong economies of the world, how would you say that idea of interstate competition especially in an economic sense fundamentally changed the sphere of diplomatic relations?
Professor Westad: So, it’s been very hard I think, for historians and social scientists to get into the transformations that happened as the Cold War came to an end and was being replaced by a set of international systems that we still don’t even know what to call, we call it the post-Cold War era, with the Cold War being gone now for much more than a generation. So, that in itself is a signal that we don’t quite understand how many of these connections are set up.
I’ve started to think that maybe in terms of historical understanding, we make a little bit of too much of the dividing line for the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was significant, significant for a lot of people in different parts of the world, including Americans, especially for Russians and Europeans and people in South Asia and South Africa and elsewhere. It had a massive impact, but if we think of that dividing line in terms of structural changes in the global economy, that didn’t happen then. That happened well before then, and I think for this the 1970s is the critical decade when American capitalism went global.
Much more happened, obviously, than that, but that’s at the core of what we later on started calling globalization. That takes place during the 1970s. It was a massive expansion of financial capital, on a global scale, and much of that was intimately connected to what happened in economic and international terms, in the United States.
Up until then, the United States in many ways had been a significant international economic power, but it hadn’t been a predominant economic power. After the 1970s, that changes, and in many ways, that’s the culmination to me, of a period of unique American predominance. That probably lasted up to, you know, the late 2000s.
Some people would say that the global financial crisis of the late 2000s (2008/2009), was the sort of dividing line, and after that, both because of the growth of China and what was happening domestically in the US, we are moving much more towards a multipolar terms, in economic, diplomatic, and political terms.
Broadly speaking, I agree with that, though it’s very hard to do immediate contemporary history because there are so many things that you don’t see. What is clear to me is that the process of moving from what could be seen as a unipolar kind of system, which if my interpretation here is correct, didn’t really last too long, overall to a more multipolar system, is now underway. We’re now at the end of that process here. It seems to me, very clearly, that we are moving in that direction.
Abdulkadir: Going along with that idea, of considering these concepts in the present and future, to what extent would you say the dispersal of economic strength and development globe is an inherent building block (or connects to) the idea of equal and non-exploitative international/diplomatic relations?
Professor Westad: That depends entirely on how the system will develop in the future. It’s not given that if you have, at the government or state level, more of an impact on other states and countries, most of which themselves also tend to be either former or current empires, you’ll have international economic development, or that will make it more diverse or democratic, in a sort of popular sense.
I think it’s important to note that states are not people. You can have a tremendous dispersal of economic power, which I think in some ways makes for an international system in which more people have more of a say, which is a good thing, but that’s still not the same thing as some sort of democratization of the system.
Because, the new countries, with China being a very good example of this, that seem to increase their economic power very dramatically also in many ways, certainly do not become more participatory or democratic. They’re sort of moving in the opposite direction. That’s a big question mark, and I think some of those who celebrate the transformation of the global economy in the direction of making it more multipolar, perhaps also more integrated, perhaps not in a globalization context but in a sort of sense of different kinds of supply chains being more involved, in many ways, on a global scale. They miss the point that this is not necessarily an enormous advantage for people who live in these countries.
So, this idea that other countries, especially countries in the global South, are less exploitative towards the working class and young people who come into an open setting as first generation, that is something I don’t believe in very much. I’ve seen enough of how tremendously exploitative the Chinese economic transformation was in the 1980s and 1990s.
Sivakumar: Do you think that the upcoming 2024 US presidential election will impact American hegemony or the shift towards a more multipolar world?
Professor Westad: (Timestamp, About 21:00) It’s reasonable, I think, to believe that it will impact that transformation. I think the overall framework, with regards to the nation, with the kinds of debates you have in this country leading up to the election, including the positions of the leading candidates themselves, will certainly in the minds of people of the world, foster this idea that the United States, relatively speaking, is in decline. I think you can already see that.
This country has had a tremendous ability to re-invigorate and transform itself, though it’s very hard to see how that can happen being led by octogenarian presidents who do not really seem to have many new ideas about how the transformation of the United States should take place.
There are interesting elements in it, I’ve often thought about this, and that the Trump phenomenon has many interesting and scary substances. One that is not often dwelled upon is the movement towards much more limitations in terms of the use of American power, that Trump at least rhetorically stands for. I think that’s an interesting sort of line of development. Much of the critique of the American role in the world, in a broader sense, and the American overextension in terms of its involvement in the world, has traditionally come from the left, particularly in the latter part of the Cold War. It was perhaps a little bit different during the 1940s and the early 1950s. Now it’s coming back in full force from the right, and that’s an interesting sort of juxtaposition.
It seems to me that many people who are skeptical of the idea that the United States should operate as a sort of world police on a broad scale, in statist terms, are not willing enough to engage with some of the issues that come out of the Trumpist rhetoric with regards to this. Maybe because they don’t believe that the candidates actually represent those kinds of values, which would be fair enough, but it’s a little bit too easy to say that. Because, I do think that people who voted for Trump, many of them do have quite seriously in mind, where they are worried about lack of attention to what is going on at home, and an overextension of US power into the world overall. I regret that former president Trump has become the mouthpiece for these kinds of issues, but that;s not the same thing as saying I don’t think these are issues that should be discussed. They are important issues.
Abdulkadir: That’s very interesting. Moving back to the idea of the Cold War, the ideology of Cold War politics is often associated with this idea of ‘moral absolutism,’ or the notion that one side believed they had a correct ideology, with the other side’s ideology being evil or completely incorrect. Would you say, in your research across various periods, that there are other periods of global history or more narrow events that reflect a similar relationship between the ideas of morality and politics?
Professor Westad: I think it’s not uncommon that you have links between, in ideological terms, morality and politics. I think it was particularly strongly expressed during the Cold War. The way I explain that, is that it is mainly because both of the two major powers during the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union, both sort of built this into the version of modernity that they wanted to present to the world, that they were modern, hyper-modern some people would say, and standing for transformation in global societies. But on a kind of, righteous, morally correct ground, you know. So, what they both tried to promise to the world, in slightly different ways, is that you could be modern and just at the same time. You could have a morally satisfactory framework for not just society but for human existence in general, and at the same time become rich and strong. Which is a very alluring promise.
Now, you have had this before. British imperialism, I think back in the 19th century had some of those same ideas connected to it. But, they were carried out, at least to begin with, in a very different kind of way, in the sense that the idea was not to have that kind of option open for everyone, because there was a very sternly held idea that these kinds of transformations in groups and peoples that were subject to British power would take time, several generations, if at all.
The US and Soviet models promised almost instantaneous transformations of societies if these societies were willing to adhere to the critical and moral standards that these two countries set forth. In almost all cases, this turned out to be a false promise, but you can see how people were attracted to it. I think that gave much of the Cold War competition its power, but also, with regard to nuclear weapons, there were a number of incredible dangers present during the Cold War. Because, when presented in this kind of way, the issues of societal transformation, the stakes become very, very high. Not just for people living in the United States and Soviet Union, but for anyone who adhered to the ideas of one or the other of these political superpowers, in one direction, or the other.
You could come to the conclusion that if someone tried to hijack or change your modernization project, threatening them with absolute destruction, annihilation, and the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction would be justified because the stakes were so high. It was not just about yourself, but about the future of the world. And that, to me, is one of the scary aspects of the Cold War, is what people felt they were justified to do or plan for because of the correctness and the righteousness of their ideas.
END TIMESTAMP: 28:45
Sivakumar: Is the current rivalry between China and the United States less ideological?
Professor Westad: Yes, I think it is less ideological in the sense that there is no fundamental disagreement about how the economy and human societies that come out of that economy should be organized. There are variations, I mean, clear variations in terms of the significance and role of the government, in terms of directing the markets, directing the capitalist development that takes place. There is the fundamental disagreement about whether economic development should be driven by markets or not. I think the Chinese government, whatever else it thinks about in terms of its own power, does not believe like the Soviets believed, that you had to destroy the global markets, you had to destroy capitalism, in order for the country to be successful. So in that sense, it is less immediately ideological.
There are ideological elements in it. And of course, in political terms, if you make a sort of transition, ideology is always in the eyes of the beholder. I can see how it’s possible now in this country, or elsewhere, to present China as being tremendously ideologically different. It’s led by a Communist Party, echoes of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and a Communist Party that quite consistently over the last decade at least, has seen the United States as enemy number one, so you can see how those kinds of connections can be improved. But I think this is a very different kind of setup from what you see during the Cold War.
I think the main reason for me saying that it’s not so much ideology, I think that matters, but more multipolarity. I think that the Cold War, certainly at its peak, was relentlessly bipolar, both ideologically and in terms of state competition. We’re not moving in a more bipolar direction. Now with regard to the United States and China, I think over the last few years, maybe especially over the last year, people have come to realize that more. I mean, I think, up to relatively recently, a lot of people, particularly those who don’t spend much time thinking about history, were sort of thinking that the United States and China would be the two poles of development within a new global system. Now, I think that has become a much more difficult position to hold because what is actually happening, certainly, in terms of the global economy at the moment, is not as many people believe that China and the United States both at once… you have the United States advancing more than China. On the contrary, it seems to me that both of them are certainly, with regard to some of the key economic issues, falling behind other countries that are developing faster. We look at India, and Southeast Asia, which are much more centers of development now than, in my view, both China and the United States. And I don’t think that trend is going to change for the next generation. So we have to get used to that.
There is a danger. There is a built-in idea in the human mind that we compare to what sort of immediately went before us, right, and very often see a kind of continuation from what went before. And of course, there are elements of that. So we started talking about how there are elements of the Cold War that created the world we live in today. I think that’s absolutely true. But today’s world will not be a repeat of the Cold War. I mean, that’s a historical fallacy to believe that that’s how things work. This is why history as an object of study is actually quite helpful because it alerts us to the fact that there were developments going on on a global scale well before we were born, so outside their own experience, and that some of those might have more in common with what we see today than what the experienced past have.
So I think, for instance, that today’s world, in terms of how it’s developing, not least diplomatically, sort of internationally, has more in common with the late 19th century than what it has with the Cold War. I think that’s tremendously important because then we have to learn how to handle a very different kind of setup than what was the case during the Cold War. And you have to learn that fast because the outcome of the experience from the late 19th century was not a particularly happy one. So we need to take some of the lessons coming out of that time period and try to apply them today.
Abdulkadir: I think it’s very interesting that you mentioned the way that the late 19th century perhaps informs or is less focused on and how it informs the present. I guess I would be interested in hearing more about what has led you to draw that conclusion. Also, with regards to the case of Chinese history, how do you think that its history of domination by other foreign powers or foreign occupation informed the formation of the People’s Republic, and also informs Chinese history today? And do you think that idea holds with regard to Chinese history in terms of the influence of the late 19th century?
Professor Westad: Both of these are good questions. On the first one, with regard to similarities between the late 19th century and now, there are many that come to mind. One is multipolarity. That was, in reality, the last time when we had a multipolar international system where there were not two hegemonic powers that developed independently of each other, but with the sub-summation of everything else and everyone else within the framework. The other similarities, so exactly the one that your second question points to, within that international system, there was one power that grew, up to a point at least, much more quickly than what others did.
Back in the 19th century, that was Germany, and imperial Germany, and up to quite recently in our time it’s been China. So one of the big problems, I think, for everyone, whatever angle you have to this, in the late 19th century was figuring out, you know, how do you integrate? In Germany in economic terms? Into a world of already established powers? Most of which were European. Right? So how do you actually do that? And is it possible to find a way in which you can integrate a rapidly rising power into an already existing system so that that power, elites get the impression that they at least have a fighting chance of being respected as an equal power?
That was a huge problem in the late 19th century. A substantial reason, in my view, why the First World War happened, and what happened the way it happened, right, is that the German elites, which were increasingly a significant part of the population, because Germany went through some form of pluralism and democratization. Towards the end of its existence as an imperial state, these groups felt that they were never integrated into the global economy on an equal basis. I think a lot of people on the Chinese side today, even people outside the Communist Party, feel that that is also true for China. China has had, and we started talking about this, enormous breakthroughs but hasn’t really gotten to the point of power or respect or influence, internationally, that goes with that new power position.
Now, I sort of hoped that in the 100, 150 years since we saw that development taking place, mainly in Europe, and mainly among European imperial powers, we would have learned something about how we can avoid those kinds of situations. But it seems to me now that we have learned very little. The state of conflict between the United States and China doesn’t seem to me to draw in any meaningful sense on the experiences of the late 19th century. Understand how incredibly important it is to keep China integrated to make it more integrated in many ways into the global economy. In order to forestall the kind of sense that the country will forever be left on the outside and forever will be seen as a threat and as a challenger.
That goes back to how we understand Chinese history. I think there are two things that are very important but we have to distinguish between them. The first one is that you know, China itself was an empire to begin with. Some people would say that China is an empire today. I probably agree with that, broadly speaking. It is an empire with a very large majority population that I would normally call Chinese, but now often call themselves Han. But it’s still an empire in the sense that its borders look very much like the borders of the Qing Empire. It includes a lot of people who are not Chinese in terms of origin. Maybe not large groups numerically but still significant groups of people. Now, what’s interesting is that the current regime in China keeps referring to this period of national humiliation when the last Chinese Empire, the Qing Empire, lost out to other more powerful empires elsewhere. It’s understandable that that will seem, you know, a period of decline and humiliation. On the other hand, you know, for a lot of ordinary Chinese, getting away from their own empire was seen, you know, the Qing Empire, was seen as a bit of liberation. At the time, they didn’t want more state power, they probably wanted less of it. And for non-Chinese Peoples within the Qing empire, there’s probably even more. So I think what has to qualify this idea for China’s humiliation by saying that, you know, this was one empire in conflict with other empires. They lost out, and then it led to a lot of dislocation and difficulties for China as a state. It was reconstructed under communist leadership in ways that I think most Chinese at least at the time welcomed, because, by that time, they were sick and tired of chaos and, of foreign predominance and influence.
But we have to be careful buying that whole package, this idea that China today, somehow, you know, has broken free of its imperial past, and that humiliation was a specific humiliation of Chinese by foreigners. I think that’s the problem with that kind of account. For many people inside China, that wasn’t exactly the way it looked like. But, you know, you can understand, in sort of propaganda terms, how significant this is, right, and how you can set out that we were weak, now we are strong. We were downtrodden by others and now we are equal status with them. Again, it reminds me a little bit of the German Imperial merit in the late 19th century, I mean, that has some of the same elements to it. Not so much the interwar period, I mean, the Nazi period. That’s, I think, profoundly different. But if you think about this in a 19th-century context, there are some very striking similarities.
Sivakumar: Do you think that China’s experience as a rising power bears any lessons for other developing states, especially those in South and Southeast Asia?
Professor Westad: I think it does. I mean, I think one of the key issues to pick up, which is China’s biggest problem today, is to figure out how you can make your country more pluralistic while you are going through economic change. I mean, this Chinese idea, Chinese communist idea, of waiting, if you interpret this charitably, waiting with political reform, political change, until the economic transformation has actually taken place, doesn’t seem to me to be a very good idea. Because what you do is that you just put a lid on a lot of tensions within the country, not East Coast-based tensions, in my view, that do not have any meaningful outlet. And that’s not a good thing, you know, for any society. So I think, you know, this is one of the biggest questions, I think, in our time in terms of economic growth, not to learn the wrong lessons from the Chinese experience.
And it seems to me that maybe the jury is out, though, when I think about India, not even so sure about that. Or this issue of understanding that it is a strength for a country to celebrate this pluralism at the same time as it goes through economic transformation, and not move more in the direction of autocracy. Because you think that will deliver economic reform? I don’t think that was even true in China. I don’t think that there is a connection between China being a political dictatorship and its economic success. I think it depends on the people who are in power and how they want to carry out the kinds of reforms that are there. But this idea that political participation and democracy are somehow not possible under no circumstances or political or economic change or government reform. I think that’s misguided. There’s no historical evidence for that.
Abdulkadir: Discussing more the link between the Chinese development case and developing countries today, do you have any observations about the emerging dynamics between China and a lot of sub-Saharan African nations, especially I think a lot of their economic relations that are developing relating to debt and resource exchange?
Professor Westad: Yes. So I think one has to look again at different aspects of this. So at the outset, I think it is, it’s good for Africa that there is no longer just one game in town in terms of economic development, which is Western-based capitalist development. So the fact is, especially with regard to credit and technology, to some extent, that China is now more active with regard to Africa, in many ways should be welcomed. Of course, not from a US strategic perspective. But if you look at it from an African perspective, I think that’s, that’s in many ways a clear advantage.
But all of this depends on how it is being carried out. And that depends much more in my view on the African countries than what it depends on China because China’s modus operandi here is, is very much based on its own economic interest. I mean, not in a sort of cohesive Chinese strategies sense always, but certainly with regard to the very big Chinese companies that are involved with regard to this. These companies, whether they are Chinese state-owned or not, doesn’t matter very much, have their own, you know, financial interests, economic interests, that are invested in the relationship with Africa, especially in terms of resource extraction of various sorts. So all the African countries have to do is to regulate the access that these companies like any company, whether it’s Chinese or American or European have to their market and the circumstances under which this happens, to avoid what Africa has suffered so often from in the past, forms of neo-imperialist exploitation.
That’s not a bad term for it, I mean, basically means that foreigners who have held political power in Africa before now continue to have economic power, because they have a monopoly position in terms of resource trade or resource extraction, and one has to avoid moving in the direction that happens with Chinese companies or Chinese interests. Most African countries, in my view, have both the capability and the resources and intellectual wherewithal to handle that. They also understand, I think, sometimes much more acutely than the Chinese do, that sovereignty, trumps economic interest. So the idea that if an African country takes even substantial loans from China, that would mean that as a country the whole future will be beholden to China. That’s not necessarily true. But of course, it depends on the degree.
If you do make the serious mistake of making your country’s economy entirely dependent on Chinese markets or on Chinese loans, then of course, you put yourself in a difficult position. My impression is that most African countries, not all, most African countries, and their leaderships have learned from earlier experience with Western dependency, that they will not put themselves in that position again. If they do, then the existence of competing interests in terms of getting access to African raw materials and provinces probably would be a good idea. We also say about Africa, that what I think is often misunderstood about Africa is just how high in many countries in Africa’s own rate of development is.
I firmly believe that over the next generation, probably two generations, the continent in which we will see the highest growth rates will be Africa. There is one obvious reason for that. This year, all of the world’s natural population increase happens in Africa, there is not a single country outside of the African continent that has a natural increase in its population. Population still goes up sometimes, but the population growth rate goes down in all countries, except in Africa. It’s hard when you think about this as a historian not to see this as an enormous advantage. I mean, if you are in countries that have, what I would call a natural population growth rate, you have a population where young people are increasingly better educated, better fed, and more knowledgeable than what was the case in the past. And in competitive terms, particularly when everyone else seemed to be either on a catastrophic demographic decline, like in China, or a sliding demographic decline as in a few other countries. Many African countries, if they manage this well, have enormous development advantages that you don’t find elsewhere.
Sivakumar: What kind of foreign policy do you think is necessary for the United States to counter both Chinese and Russian influence in Africa?
Professor Westad: Keeping up regular trade, regular investments with African countries, making sure that African countries in terms of their production get access to the very attractive American and American-related markets overall, on equal terms, which has not always been the case in the past. That is the secret with regard to this. This idea that the United States is there for military and security purposes, and China is there for economic purposes, is a kind of equation that the United States is going to lose out on because economic development to most countries in Africa is far more important than the security aspects.
Security is important as well, particularly if you’re in a coup situation, but not very many African countries are. The overall security situation with a few exceptions, as we know with the African continent, is actually reasonably good. So what the United States needs to do is to put much more emphasis on the economic aspect of this, which also, interestingly, given what they said about demographic developments, will also be to the US’s advantage, in many ways.
Abdulkadir: Yeah, it’s interesting talking now about the sub-Saharan African case, because you’ve talked a lot about how the unification or rise of new states like Germany and China has sort of shifted the political sphere. Do you think that we are going to see similar dynamic changes today? Or we’re already seeing them in terms of the challenge of integrating a lot of the new developing nations? Or giving them the integration that they’ve long been denied in terms of the global political sphere?
Professor Westad: That’s again, a very, very good question. I think we are in the middle of trying to handle that process now. In my view, it’s not always being handled well. This again goes to the learning aspect that we talked about with regard to China, you know, the lessons coming out of the 19th and early 20th century. It seems to me that when it comes to the rest of the post-colonial world, some of those same mistakes are being repeated. Again, we already talked about the economic aspects of this, which are not all that dissimilar from Africa. With regard to the rest of the Global South, Africa of course is in a particular position, because it needs economic development more than almost anywhere else, in part because of the population increases. But it’s true sort of all over. Much of this has to do with the rest of the world getting, you know, a fair say in terms of how the global economy is handled. That’s the problem.
Some people would say, well, that’s a problem inherent to a capitalist economic system. To some degree, I would agree with that. But at the same time, we do have international institutions and organizations that over now at least three generations have ameliorated and fashioned how the global economy works. The problem is that over the past half-generation or so, some of these international multinational organizations have become less and less powerful and less than less influential. So the kind of gradual integration of equal terms, or newly developing economies is something that in many ways is harder now than it was a generation ago.
That’s a big question for me. That’s a big worry because I think a lot of the political and diplomatic clashes and conflicts that we have seen come out of these perceptions of injustice in economic and social terms. We’ve seen that again and again. We saw it during the colonial era, we saw it in the immediate post-colonial era, and I think we’re seeing it again today in this sense, not just in terms of actual immediate economic changes but in terms of the overall system, that it’s unfair, and that it works on behalf of the West, and it doesn’t really work that well for the rest of the world. Not being able to bridge those kinds of perceptions is really very dangerous in the modern world, not only because of conflict but also because it leads to the perception of a kind of disequilibrium, in terms of the global economy, and that’s not good for people who want to, if you think about it in capitalist terms, people who want to invest on equal terms. If you think that the whole global economic system is sort of rigged, in a way with regard to this, that’s not what you’re going to do.
Image courtesy of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington