Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;
Uma dessas mudanças repentinas nas relações internacionais, nos livros de história, na posição internacional da Finlândia, e provavelmente em breve da Suécia.
Finland’s Position Is One of the Big Surprises of the Ukraine Invasion
For decades, my country has had to walk a fine, fine line between USSR/Russia and Europe. How do we become a developed country and a part of Europe, without angering these guys on the eastern border that could just come back and invade us at any moment?
In the Cold War, that delicate dance gave us and the international media a new concept: Finlandization. It described how a nation gave up on a part of its sovereignty to maintain its independence. Kind of keeping it in name, but sacrificing all important decisions to what Khrushchev or the Politburo wanted. If we got a thumbs down, like we did in the Night Frost Crisis of 1958 or the Note Crisis of 1961, we retreated.
Our President Urho Kaleva Kekkonen was the leader in charge of Finlandizing our foreign policy, and he remained in power for 26 years, from 1956 to 1982. In my opinion, no president has fresh ideas to improve his country for a quarter cetruy, but at least he was on good terms with the Kremlin.
We’ve since implemented a two-term limit for the presidency and gotten rid of the electoral college, so I guess we can sort of thank Kekkonen for overstaying his welcome. And the truth is, had Finland not done what the USSR wanted in those days, we might not have been able to keep our country.
Things do sometimes change for the better, if you wait them out. In the Cold War decades, Finland went from a backward and largely rural country that had just lost a terrible war, to a prosperous Nordic welfare state. Inching closer to Europe, little by little.
After the Soviet Union disintegrated we were finally ready to make our new position official, and in 1995 we joined the EU.
But we’ve always remained on good terms with the Russians, careful to not anger our important trading partner who just might, you know, one day decide to invade us again.
Changing Positions
As long as I can remember, our NATO position has been an issue in every Finnish election. Political candidates have been asked about their opinions toward the organization — and toward Russia — but it still hasn’t been a topic people seriously considered.
Why? Because us Finns, like much of the rest of Europe, have spent the past couple of decades under the impression that Russia could somehow be managed or kept under control. That modern-day Russia isn’t the same as the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.
Well, that changed in a matter of days in February of this year.
I’ve personally always been against NATO membership, thinking it was unnecessary and wouldn’t really help if times truly got tough. I’m not sure I still think being part of the defensive alliance would help, but what’s become clear in these past two months is that Finns are now overwhelmingly in favor.
Even the Green Party, traditionally against expanding military spending, is now looking at the US-led military alliance for safety guarantees. All this is happening despite Russia’s dire warnings that it might cause the Kremlin to “rebalance the situation.”
Finnish decision-makers of all political colors have been under fire lately for their relationships with Russia. In a very “gotcha” way, reporters have been dragging out old statements from politicians, demanding answers about why they were so wrong.
President Tarja Halonen, a social democrat who maintained a friendship with Vladimir Putin, has been criticized for not evaluating the situation correctly, while former center-right PM Alexander Stubb has taken great pleasure in Finland’s new position.
Current PM Sanna Marin has lamented that Finland remains dependent on Russian gas and is forced to finance the war. The truth is that appeasing Russia is our long-standing policy. Many of us wanted to believe Putin could be dealt with. That Russia could become something different from what it has always been.
But guess who didn’t agree? The guy in his bunker, who doesn’t really care about our modern-day Finlandization.
How About a European Defense Alliance?
Another interesting thing about the last two months is that, thanks to the people of Ukraine, the EU is becoming popular again.
It’s no secret for anybody following European politics that there have long been important Euro-skeptic factions. This phenomenon is as old as the EU, and not just limited to Brexit.
Many consider the EU as unnecessary spending. Others, including the far-right, consider the intermission of a supranational entity in our affairs as a threat to our independence. “They’re trying to build a European Federation,” ultra-nationalist factions warned.
Um, so what? It’s not like Europe was always a continent with fifty independent states? Political and economic structures are never eternal. And, as a person born and raised in a borderless Europe, I can say the EU is pretty damn convenient.Especially for young people who want to travel and see other cultures.
Anyway, a European defense system would always have been out of the question when even the smallest concessions to the Union were seen as a threat to our sovereignty. Now, I don’t see it (or this interesting idea of an Eastern European one) as an impossible affair anymore. Especially if we don’t achieve NATO membership due to resistance by current members, such as Orbán’s Hungary, or we find it doesn't solve our problems when we need it.
Because right now, the threat to Finland and other countries bordering Russia is real, and we’re finally taking it seriously.
And because those brave, determined Ukrainians have shown us that what we have is worth it. That Europe is not just about convenient travel and work opportunities. It’s also about ideals, and freedom. Things Ukraine has been fighting for, non-stop, since Euromaidan. We owe them so much.
This is the opposite of Finlandization. It’s the end of appeasement. It’s a choice.
A specific breakdown of how the new systems will win.
The war is slipping out of Putin’s hands, and it’s never been more apparent.
Here’s the problem: Russia relies on siege-style warfare from the Soviet Era.
It has a simple formula. Stand outside enemy range. Bomb them to smithereens. Then send in infantry to clean up.
But now, that plan is backfiring. I’ll explain.
The terms of battle have changed
Javelins and drones still matter in a big way, but we are now in an artillery battle in Eastern Ukraine.
The US has sent anti-artillery radars that trace incoming artillery shells.
Every time Russia fires, they reverse engineer the trajectory of an incoming round and point to a map and say, “Aim here.”
Ukrainians are pairing fantastic intelligence with US howitzer cannons that have a range of 18 miles. Germany also sent 7 PZH 2000s cannons, which are the most powerful tube artillery in the world, with a range of 25 miles.
When going tit-for-tat, they can strike from well outside the range of Russian artillery.
Even further, Russia is in unfriendly territory. Every time they attempt to move, they are subject to ambushes. Citizens in nearby homes are calling intelligence in to Ukraine’s Armed forces.
Additionally, Russia’s equipment repositions much slower than Ukraine's. Russian forces move like a bloated and discoordinated barge.
Even worse, Russia cannot supplement its forces properly with air support.
Ukraine has an obscene amount of anti-aircraft weaponry at its disposal. Every day, more weapons flow across its border.
Ukraine Strikes Back
Howitzers can be quickly reloaded and adjusted.
It fires a single round that is accurate within 30 feet from 12 miles away, and its explosion has a kill radius of 50 meters (kill radius means 50% of people in that radius will be killed).
It can also be quickly repositioned before the enemy can reset and refire.
The US has sent 90 Howitzers alongside 72 transport units to reposition them quickly. Several Ukrainian squads have already flown to the US and been trained on this equipment and are now training other peers while using the cannons.
When artillery arrives in Ukraine, it is ready out of the box.
Russia’s problem(s): the tale of two logistics
What’s incredible is how fast the US delivers weapons systems, heavy artillery, and supplies into Ukraine. It is making Russia’s logistics look like amateur hour.
Russia’s mobile artillery is extremely fuel consuming, and they go through a huge volume of rounds that need to be carted in.
For context, the US also sent 180,000 rounds of artillery (a single round weighs 95 lbs — you can’t just throw 500 rounds in a bag).
Ukraine’s artillery is now hitting Russia’s supply routes with ruthless accuracy from miles outside of their range. This is part of what is stalling Russia’s efforts.
Allied intelligence and satellite imagery are painting a vivid picture of enemy movements in Ukraine and Russia. In many cases, Russian forces don’t know what hit them.
Ukraine is also striking fuel supplies just over the Russian border (though they refrain from directly admitting this).
There has also been a string of mysterious fires in Russia, either because of sabotaging or infiltrating soldiers.
Russians are getting mauled in the east
Ukraine is reclaiming territory, pushing 40 KM deeper into the Kharkiv region in the past week.
Any minor gains Russia claims are simply because Ukraine redirects forces with greater precision, applying pressure in thoughtful and strategic ways.
Russia’s attempts to push towards Odessa have stalled at Mykolaiv. Their desire to create a land bridge from Crimea to Moldova is doomed. Why?
You need good forward artillery spotters (including drones and other intelligence) to advance on defensive positions to then place shots properly and move forward.
This matters because most artillery battles use “shoot and scoot” tactics.
When you fire at the enemy, you can assume the enemy will roughly know where you are and return fire. Agility matters. Ukraine has it. Russia does not.
In an artillery battle, whoever can find and target enemy artillery the fastest, with the most accuracy, tends to be the one who wins.
Additionally, artillery is particularly vulnerable to ambush attacks with NLAWs and Javelins. Like tanks, artillery isn’t designed to fight alone, and Russia has done a piss poor job of protecting their equipment.
The final problem
Infantry combat is intimate and deadly. If your soldiers aren’t motivated and morale is down, you’ll have to use cow prodders to move them forward.
Russian losses are catastrophic. Seven (possibly 10) generals have been killed because they were in forward positions trying to motivate soldiers.
We’ve heard multiple hacked phone calls of soldiers complaining about morale and footage of Russian citizens firebombing recruiting stations to avoid conscription.
Russia’s advantages have turned into its weaknesses. They now face a better version of themselves in the east of Ukraine. Kamikaze drones are diving out of the sky at will. Ukrainian artillery is outperforming their own.
If your men don’t want to fight in infantry combat, and you can’t win in ranged combat, what are you left with? Threatening nuclear strikes.
You don’t threaten nuclear strikes when you are winning a war.
Every day that goes by results in Ukraine getting more equipment, training, intelligence, and funding to fight off Russia. It’s only a matter of time.
Nenhum país que se pauta pelo Direito Internacional pode aceitar fronteiras impostas pela força. Não se pode, portanto, aceitar a anexação de territórios tomados à força por uma potência invasora. NEM O BRASIL DO ESTADO NOVO ACEITOU O ESBULHO. Em 1939 e 1940, o Brasil não reconheceu a apropriação ILEGAL de territórios da Polônia e dos três países bálticos e pelas décadas seguintes NUNCA RECONHECEMOS a suserania soviética sobre os três bálticos. O caso da Polônia foi diferente, pois que ela foi "restaurada" como Estado "independente" em 1945, ainda que com governo transportado de Moscou e com fronteiras radicalmente transformadas, com sua parte oriental incorporada à Republica Federativa Socialista da Bielorússia (ou seja, império soviético), e com terras arrancadas a oeste da Alemanha (Prússia oriental, na RDA). O Brasil deveria ter emitido uma nota, em 2014, quando a Rússia incorporou a Crimeia ilegalmente, mas não o fez, pois Dilma Rousseff NÃO HONROU a tradição diplomática brasileira de pleno respeito ao direito internacional. Não pode agora o governo Bolsonaro reconhecer o esbulho de Putin de territórios ucranianos e sua incorporação à Rússia. Se o fizer, estará rasgando cláusulas constitucionais de relações internacionais e a adesão do Brasil à Carta da ONU.
Em 1939, o governo brasileiro não reconheceu conquistas efetuadas pela força, não reconhecendo, portanto, os territórios ocupados pela força pela Alemanha hitlerista e pela União Soviética stalinista, o que pode ser lido no Relatório do MRE de 1939, publicado em 1943, p. 4-5. Em 1943, o governo brasileiro declarava sua adesão à Declaração sobre o Não-Reconhecimento de Espoliações e Expropriações pelas Potências do Eixo em territórios ocupados pelo inimigo e seus aliados. O Brasil não mantinha relações com a União Soviética desde 1918.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
CONFLITO GLOBAL
G7 diz que não reconhecerá fronteiras impostas pela Rússia
há 14 hora
Ministros do Exterior dos sete países mais industrializados do mundo afirmam que apoiarão decisão de Kiev sobre Crimeia e prometem intensificar sanções contra Moscou, além de manter envio de armas à Ucrânia.
Deutsche Welle, 15/05/2022
O G7, grupo dos sete países mais industrializados do mundo, afirmou neste sábado (14/05) que jamais reconhecerá as fronteiras que a Rússia pretende impor à força com a guerra na Ucrânia e prometeu ampliar as sanções contra Moscou visando setores vitais da economia russa.
"Não reconheceremos nunca as fronteiras que a Rússia está a tentando mudar por meio da agressão militar e mantermos nosso compromisso no apoio à soberania e integridade territorial da Ucrânia", afirmaram os ministros do Exterior do G7 numa declaração divulgada após o fim da reunião de três dias no norte da Alemanha.
Além da Alemanha, o Canadá, Estados Unidos, França, Itália, Japão e Reino Unido fazem parte do G7. A reunião contou ainda com a presença do chefe da diplomacia da União Europeia (UE), Josep Borrell, e os ministros do Exterior da Ucrânia e da Moldávia.
Na declaração em conjunta, os ministros prometeram ampliar as sanções contra Moscou para incluir setores do qual o país é dependente, além de continuar fornecendo armas à Ucrânia. "Reafirmamos nossa determinação de aumentar ainda mais a pressão econômica e política sobre a Rússia", destaca o texto.
Os chefes da diplomacia dos países do G7 se comprometeram em "acelerar os esforços" para "acabar com a dependência da energia russa". O grupo instou ainda a China a não "minar" essas medidas e pede que o país asiático não apoie à Rússia no ataque à Ucrânia. Na declaração, eles reiteraram o apelo a Belarus para que "pare de facilitar a intervenção da Rússia e respeite os seus compromissos internacionais".
Os ministros reiteraram também a exigência para que a Rússia "ponha fim à guerra que começou sem provocação (por parte da Ucrânia) e ao sofrimento trágico e a perda de vidas humanas que ela continua provocando". Na declaração, condenaram ainda "as ameaças irresponsáveis de utilização de armas químicas, biológicas ou nucleares" feitas pelo presidente russo, Vladimir Putin.
Anexação da Crimeia
Ao ser questionada se o grupo deseja que a Rússia devolva a Crimeia, anexada em 2014, para a Ucrânia, a ministra do Exterior da Alemanha, Annalena Baerbock, disse que essa decisão cabe a Kiev. "É território deles e vamos apoiar cada medida e cada passo que tomarem para garantir que o povo ucraniano possa viver como todos os outros na Europa: em paz, mas também em segurança e liberdade em seu próprio país", destacou.
Baerbock considerou que a resposta da comunidade internacional nesta altura "será decisiva para o futuro". A ministra alemã anunciou ainda que o G7 estabelecerá um mecanismo para desmascarar a propaganda russa que tenta culpar o Ocidente por problemas de abastecimento de alimentos no mundo devido às sanções impostas contra o país.
A ministra afirmou que o grupo trabalha para encontrar soluções para o escoamento de commodities que estão armazenadas na Ucrânia antes das próximas colheitas. O país é um dos grandes produtores de trigo do mundo. Cerca de 25 milhões de toneladas de grãos estão atualmente bloqueados nos portos ucranianos, causando restrições a milhões de pessoas no mundo, sobretudo na África e no Oriente Médio.
Os ministros do Exterior do G7 participaram de um encontro de três dias na cidade balneária de Weissenhaus, no norte da Alemanha, país que ocupa atualmente a presidência anual rotativa do grupo. No centro da agenda da reunião, estavam os problemas ligados à invasão russa na Ucrânia, como a segurança alimentar e energética.
Lançada em 24 de fevereiro, a ofensiva russa já deixou mais de 3 mil civis mortos, segundo a ONU, que alerta para a probabilidade de o número real ser muito maior. A guerra já obrigou mais de 13 milhões de ucranianos a deixarem suas casas. Destes, mais de 6 milhões buscaram refúgio no exterior. A invasão russa foi condenada pela comunidade internacional, que respondeu com o envio de armas para a Ucrânia e sanções econômicas e políticas contra Moscou.
Já se disse que quando a China despertaria novamente, o mundo estremeceria. Ou talvez se pudesse perguntar: quando a África estiver com todo o seu potencial demográfico, há chances de grandes mudanças na geopolítica mundial? Não tenho certeza.
Once you realize it’s scale, there is no global trend as dramatic today as the revolution in Africa’s demography.
Asia’s return to the center of the world economy dominates the headlines. But in the grand sweep of history that is a rebalancing or restoration not a revolution. Until the 18th century, the Pacific and Indian Oceans were the heart of sophisticated economic activity. That balance was grossly distorted in the “centuries of humiliation” by the rise of the West. Now, thanks to Asian economic growth, the centers of economic activity and population are realigning.
The same cannot be said for Africa. Despite optimism in recent years, the relative lack of economic growth in Africa is well-known. Less well-appreciated is the extraordinary historical novelty of it demographic development.
In 1914 according to the best estimates, Africa’s entire population was 124 million and that includes North Africa. Today it is 1.34 billion. Compared to Africa’s roughly elevenfold increase in population, Asia’s population increased by “only” between 3 and 4 times - China’s merely tripled and India’s increased by 4.5 times. Furthermore, whereas Asia’s population is beginning to stabilize - led by that of India and China - Africa’s population will, barring disasters, reach 2.4 billion by 2050 and will go on growing.
Longer term projections are hazardous, but a world with somewhere between 9 and 11 billion total population and close to 4 billion people living in Africa is what current trends would lead one to expect. That means that by 2100 the African share of global population will likely be between 35 and 40 percent. And in 2100 the population of several African countries - Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and South Sudan - is likely still to be growing.
That is something new under the sun. It means that in sheer quantitative terms Africa’s story increasingly drives world history.
As Edward Paice spells out in his excellent book Youth Quake which I reviewed yesterday in Foreign Policy, our long-range predictions for global population basically depend on the outlook for Africa. Variation in estimates for Africa drive variations in the global total. Spelled out in demographic statistics this is a point of universal significance.
Making those estimates is an uncertain and volatile business because so many large countries in Africa are bucking the pattern of rapid demographic transitions we have recently seen in Latin America and Asia.
One of the things I really appreciate about Paice’s book is the way that it renders the succession of demographic estimates and the discourse about African population as history. We see how estimates are made, how they have been criticized and why they have been modified over time. That debate continues every day in the pages of journals like The Lancet with teams of modelers arguing over assumptions and functional linkages between population, investment, education and fertility.
Through the lens of African demographic modeling Paice explores what to me is one of the most basic dilemmas of orientating ourselves in our turbulent contemporary world. We can’t live with our big quantitative indicators and statistical estimate. Numbers like GDP, global population 2100 etc. are endlessly frustrating in their crudity, their rough approximations, their entanglements with power. And so often they are just plain wrong and misleading. On the other hand we can’t live without those numbers either. Quantitative nihilism or all-encompassing skepticism, whether motivated by mere laziness or radical critique, is not a practical option either. We are much better off having some estimate of where the economy stands or where population will end up, or what the rate of exploitation is, than not. So we need to work hard at getting the numbers as right as we can, even if we doomed to get them wrong.
If it helps with motivation, think of it as a low-key statistical version of a tragic predicament. We have to keep rolling the ball up the hill. We have to keep training our judgement. We can learn to use the numbers intelligently, appreciating both what they cannot be made to say, and where confidence and certainty is growing.
In light of experience, some estimates for Africa’s future population have been adjusted downwards. But in the largest and most significant cases, as Paice shows, the tendency is in the opposite direction. In particular, confidence has grown around the estimate of a population for Africa of 2.4-2.5 billion by 2050. Why? Because of one quiet, but dramatic fact. A large number of the mothers whose children will drive growth to 2050 have already been born. And so, barring utterly unprecedented discontinuities in fertility behavior of which there is no sign in Africa, we can estimate the number of their children and their children’s children and so on.
What Paice’s treatment reveals is something I did not appreciate about contemporary history. In demographic terms, the last ten to twenty years in Africa were, in fact, decisive for global population history. We have been waiting for the demographic transition to arrive, as it has in Asia and Latin America. It has in many societies in North Africa and in South Africa and in some cases in East Africa, but not in many of the largest and most rapidly growing societies across central and West Africa. The sheer size of Ethiopia and Egypt and the momentum of Nigeria, DRC, Tanzania and a handful of others carries us to 2.4-5 billion by 2050 and to even higher numbers by later in the century.
One of the questions that Paice poses is: What is going on with our understanding of the demographic transition?
The model of the demographic transition is a low-profile, but essential building block in our “kitchen sink” models of modernization.
Death rates fall as societies modernize and develop economically. So population growth accelerates. Then, at some point, fertility declines, so population growth slows down. Eventually, it may even go negative as fertility falls below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.
It is a heuristic that has served us well as a device for organizing demographic history. It is a mechanism that has seemed to be speeding up, in Latin America, Southern Europe, North Africa and Asia. The discovery of the last few decades is that in many African societies it is operating far, far more slowly and that is what dictates the future.
This isn’t uniform. Paice is excellent in refusing to treat “Africa” as a block and constantly differentiating between regions and countries, between town and countryside and, even, between different cities. Addis in Ethiopia, for instance, where family sizes are shrinking rapidly has a demographic trajectory different from the rest of a huge country. The strength of the latest generation of population predictions lies in the fact that they are not based on generalizations about the entire continent, but on case by case estimates for each country and region.
Why then is the demographic transition not taking place? In part it is due to the failure to achieve the necessary preconditions for transition above all female education and empowerment. But as Paice tells it, it goes beyond that. African women and African men, in very unequal ways, appear to be making choices to have large families in a way that is unusual by international comparative standards.
This is highly contentious terrain. Theories of power are engaged. Sexist, racist and colonial stereotypes lurk everywhere. I was actually asked to correct a line in the original FP piece by one of the magazine’s regular Africa contributors. We did make a change, but only to state more clearly what Paice has to say on pages 177 and 178. Choice matters. All the evidence suggests that men and women in Nigeria are making different choices about fertility than men and women in Thailand, for instance.
I take the point being made by Paice to be analytical. We thought we had a solid understanding of accelerating demographic transition. This was based on data from Europe, Latin America and Asia fitted into a schematic model. That model is itself so influential that it shapes policy by guiding development policy. In Africa what we are seeing is that that model is not working as expected so we have to dig deeper into the data to understand better what is going on. This leads us to the recalcitrant but undeniable conclusion that choices matter, choices being made by large groups of people. The point is one about choices and agency and the contingency and analytical puzzlement they create. Of course, that agency in fertility choices is exercised is circumstances constrained by hierarchies of power, poverty etc. But the element of agency remains.
The next question is how we can track and gain a better understanding of the choices being made. One of the things I learned from Paice is how much data we actually have about men and women’s fertility and contraceptive choices around the world. The Demographic and Health Survey - the Nigerian 2018 report is available here - is an absolutely remarkable resource, which collects data on astonishing range of intimate details across large population samples that can be broken down by gender, region, income level, occupation, education level etc. It tracks not just social facts but also attitudes and preferences.
It tells us, for instance, that in a sampled population of 12955 Nigerian women of fertile age with no formal education, 94.8 percent were using no contraceptive methods, either traditional or modern and that in a sample of 2788 Nigerian women with more than secondary education the share using contraception rises. But even with higher education 66.7 percent of Nigerian women in 2018 used no contraception. One is tempted to add “still used”, but that is precisely the question. How relevant are the teleological assumptions of modernization theory? If you divide the population in terms of wealth quintiles it follows a similar gradient. Urbanization appears to make a difference. Amongst Nigerian women in Lagos, across all social categories, the share using no contraception falls to 50 percent.
Why do Nigerian women use so little contraception? There are no doubt many constraining factors but the clear message of the DHS data is that they use little contraception, because they want large families and they are, in their own way, quite successful at matching actual fertility to desired fertility.
As the desired total fertility has gradually fallen between 1990 and 2018 the gap between actual and desired fertility has somewhat widened, but not by a huge amount. It was barely larger in 2018 than it was in 2003.
I would love to know more about the compilation of DHS data. They cover an astonishing range of issues from malaria incidents to domestic violence in remarkable breadth and detail. Taken at face value the DHS data are an astonishing resource for tracking global social change. I am sure they are open to question and argument in many way, but they are a monument to the effort to track and understand our collective development.
The sheer scale of Africa’s demographic acceleration makes it a vastly significant megatrend, which will relativize the dominance of Asia by the mid-century. But it is all the more significant because of the questions it begs about economic development and attendant on that about environmental sustainability.
Given the huge strides in economic development across Asia and the rapid slowdown in population growth notably in India, it is tempting to think of the problem of absolute poverty and its remediation as a residual. India, like other once poor countries, is progressively rolling out basic services to its entire population. In a perverse way, even the COVID epidemic confirmed that. India did a comprehensive lockdown, as did Pakistan and Bangladesh. And India, by way of the Serum institute, was key to the global vaccination effort. At the risk of complacency, across much of Asia, escape from the most extreme forms of poverty seems a matter of time and will become easier as population growth slows.
The same cannot be said for much of Africa. It is the combination of fitful and intermittent economic development with the huge dynamic of demographic growth that make the situation so dramatic. In world-historic shift, Nigeria in 2019 counted more absolutely poor citizens than India. COVID temporarily reversed that but the trend is unmistakeable.
This is the graph of Nigeria’s growth in gdp per capita from Chartbook #10tells the story.
It is the combination, which was once common to large parts of the world but is now increasingly unique to Africa, of very large-scale demographic growth combined with continued mass poverty that gives extreme urgency to calls for infrastructure spending and human development through education.
A recent report on basic skills that are essential for economic growth from the IMF paints a stark picture.
In the podcast, Cameron and I discussed repeated European efforts to launch development programs that seem to be spinning their wheels. The global sustainable development goals of 2015 take on their real urgency when you imagine Nigeria or DRC as the challenge.
****
Speaking in medias res, you may wonder whether as a middle-aged white guy who has only been to Africa twice and has no claim to expertise I feel comfortable writing about the contraceptive choices of young African women. No - let me reassure you - I do not! Clearly it is not my place, or anyone like me, to be either authoritative or prescriptive. So what I am doing here is simply to relay and amplify the message.
That, of course, begs another question. Is it coincidental that it is me, middle-aged white guy who is in a position to do that relaying? No it is not! Should it be African voices and African women’s voices addressing this topic? Evidently yes. They speak with far more power and authority, but also at the risk of having the topic pigeon-holed as a matter of particular interest to them, as Africans, as women, whereas, the point that Paice so convincingly makes is precisely that African demography is a matter of truly universal importance. We should all care about the nitty gritty of that DHS data! And that is something it is useful for someone like myself to say.
For me what is at stake is what this remarkable demographic development implies for our understanding of world history. On quantitative grounds alone - let alone qualitative - 21st century history is going to look completely unlike any previous epoch. Africa and Africans will be at the heart of the story.
In this transition, the role that folks like me can perhaps usefully serve is to convey a message that goes something like this:
“African issues, which I suspect you, like me, may previously have not had squarely at the center of your picture of the world, are actually huge and getting huger. When someone comes along who really seems to know their stuff on this topic, pay attention. If you want to have a view of what the world as a whole is going to look like and what, retrospectively, that reveals about our recent past, we are going to have to wrap our minds around this!”
I conclude the FP piece quoting Howard W. French.
“How Africa’s population evolves, and how the continent’s economies develop, will affect everything people near and far assume about their lives today.”a passage from.
That is surely right.
===================
Review
It’s Africa’s Century—for Better or Worse
Asia gets the attention, but the real economic revolution is the inevitable growth of an overlooked continent.
By Adam Tooze, a columnist at Foreign Policy and director of the European Institute at Columbia University.
In the coming decades, we face a revolutionary shift in the balance of world affairs—and it is likely not the one you are thinking of.
Since the 1990s, the idea that we might be entering an “Asian century” has preoccupied and disorientated the West. However, once we take in view the long sweep of history, the return of China and India to the center stage of world affairs is less a revolution than a restoration.
For most of the last 2,000 years, the great Chinese and Indian empires were the center of world trade and home to the most sophisticated civilizations. Their growing influence in the world today is the rectification of the anomaly that arose in the 1700s as a result of the yawning divergence in per capita income between “the West” and “the rest.” Successive industrial revolutions and waves of colonial conquest created a world in which economic and military power was radically misaligned with population.