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Africa 2000: Thinking about the African Future in the Modern World System
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 August 2021
Extract
Comprehension of most of the contemporary events and developments in sub-Saharan Africa requires that they be explained in the larger context of the modern world system. Specifically, conflict within and between African nations —often involving various kinds of outside aid, including the use of foreign troops—and racial conflict in Southern Africa could be better understood if they were treated under larger categories related to topics in international relations. Some of the categories would be: Africa’s strategic importance to the superpowers vis-à-vis the Indian Ocean and the Horn of Africa; the extension of support related to racial community; the importance of African natural resources; the dynamics of African internal politics and their aussenpolitic in relation to superpower ideologies; and various forms of development strategies utilized by African nations.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1978
References
Notes
1. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. I use the term “modern world system” following Wallerstein’s statement about his projected treatment of “the consolidation of [the] capitalist world-economy from . . . roughly 1850 ... to the present.” But I could just as well use such conventional terms as “the international system,” “international politics,” or “international relations”; in fact, at times I do use them interchangeably.
2. Lyons, Gene, Foreword, in Baldwin, David A., ed., America in an Interdependent World: Problems of United States Foreign Policy (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1976), p. xii Google Scholar.
3. David Baldwin, “Foreign Policy Problems, 1975-1980: Framework for Analysis,” in Baldwin, p. 5.
4. This is not to say that there have been and still are major differences between the Soviet Union’s and the United States’ influence in Africa. As a general proposition, the Soviets have fairly consistently supported the forces of national liberation, while the United States has backed colonial powers. For example, in Angola the United States maintained its economic and military links with Portugal while at the same time engaging in a proxy conflict against national liberation through the FLNA and UNITA. Moreover, it was only in the mid-1970s that Secretary of State Kissinger questioned the wisdom of active or passive support of white minority rule in Zimbabine, the Republic of South Africa and Namibia. It appears that the present Carter administration supports majority (black) rule.
5. Some argue that tribalism in Africa will dissolve at a faster rate than is generally expected. Its demisecould come as history is popularized, pointing to the common status of blacks as pawns in the world chess game since the beginning of the colonial era. To what extent such recognition will influence the formation of effective solidarity cannot be predicted.
6. While I argue that Africa must be seen in the context of the international order, and that superpower dominance of macropolitical and economic structures are dominated by them, others—especially those close to or on the African scene—seem to argue that the growing gap between the elite and the mass is the single most important development. Be that as it may, I regard such a development merely as the failure—for a variety of reasons—on the part of African government to foster wider distribution of goods, services, and status among their people.
7. For example, one thing governments can do to foster development is to consider reorganizing the rural sector along with eliminating the one-crop economy. Ghana, for instance, may never develop the economy it needs to support its people until it lessens its dependence on cacao. Would it not be more profitable for the African nations to develop in the field of light industry, which requires a much smaller amount of capital, than in heavy industry (advocated for example by the late Kwame Nkrumah), which has caused major financial problems in other developing countries?
8. Clearly many of these elites are local clients of superpower interests, so that exploitation and justice are par excellence constructions or “ideal types” that flow from theories or ideologies. Hence, whether a given elite is exploitative or just depends on the perspective of the evaluator, not on the acts of the elite.
9. That, of course, is a slight but important shift and it may seem to change the character of my analysis because I have not stressed sufficiently that internal political developments and prospects as the outcome of internal economic arrangements. Elites, of course, are an important outcome of certain economic arrangements. But in my analysis the state assumes primary importance for reasons elaborated upon in the body of the paper.
10. “The Defiant White Tribe,” Time. 110 (November 21, 1977, 62.
11. This is a strong claim. Many of the elites materially benefit because those Western or Eastern ideas are implemented and would be materially diminished if they were not. This fact is surely in the minds of those elites who are the premier local beneficiaries of western development policy.
12. I am mindful of the fact that a country may also sell its products for foreign exchange, not just for aid and arms. Moreover, commodity agreements, technology transfer, product diversification, and possibilities of different agricultural arrangements and outputs are also ways of dealing with the matter.
13. How the superpowers set prices is, of course, a complex affair. At least part of the price is set by demand in the major consumer market—truer for copper than for oil. Other parts of the pricing system depend on such factors as degrees of refining and elaboration.
14. “U.S. Cautions Soviet its Action in Africa May Hurt Relations,” The New York Times, Sunday, February 26, 1978, p. 1.
15. Sterling, Richard W., Macropolitics: International Relations in a Global Society (New York: Alfred A.|Knopf, 1974), p. 79 Google Scholar.