Africa

Coronavirus has aggravated pre-existing financial pressures, including a $12bn external debt load.

A selection of the week's best photos from across the continent.

A BBC journalist on the fears she has for her family in Ethiopia's Tigray region following an outbreak of fighting.

"Scores and probably hundreds" were hacked to death on Monday in the Tigray region, the group says.

The UN says nations must take decisive action to stem a "mounting loss of life in the Mediterranean".

The Berlaymont building in Brussels, headquarters of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union (EU). Credit EU.

By Joaquín Roy
Nov 12 2020 (IPS)

An anecdote tells, never sufficiently confirmed, that in the hardest moments of the Second World War when Stalin was dictating his orders of battle to his subordinates, he was told that perhaps it would be advisable to consult with the Pope. The Soviet dictator replied: “And how many armored divisions does the Pope have?”

The rationale of the question has been used in international relations theory and practice consistently to illustrate a vision of the realist school, in the company of classical interpretations such as those of Thucydides and von Clausewitz.

Stalin’s reflection has often been adduced to interpret the real level of influence of the European Union on the international scene since the middle of the last century.

It has never been easy to explain the birth and survival of Monnet and Schuman’s invention by means of a variant of realism.

One of the clichés about the soul of the EU is as an example of possessing a “soft power”, according to the founding arguments of Joseph Nye.

Joaquín Roy

It agrees with the birth of an entity whose initial leaders were mostly Christian Democrats, who based their logic on reconciliation and who promoted a new entity based on an unusual “declaration of interdependence.” While the bulk of the history of international relations exuded the phenomenon of war, the EU stubbornly justified its existence on the strategy of peace.

Citizens outside Europe tried to answer the question about the reason for the founding of the EU with strange answers such as competition with the United States, the improvement of the European economy, and the reinforcement of capitalism. The goal of making war “unthinkable, and materially impossible” was rarely alluded to.

Since then it has not been easy to understand the EU, because to do so, “one must be French or very intelligent” as Madeleine Albright once said. She rightly described the EU as extremely complex, especially if you insist on viewing it through the lens of “hard power.”

The funny thing is that its survival has been an enigma for more than 70 years, in an already long existence sown along with experiences as shocking as the Vietnam War, the end of the Cold War, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and now the questioning of the fundamentals of the United States.

Despite such impressive achievements as the adoption of the euro, the marked improvement in the standard of living of Europeans, their comparatively superior longevity, the pleasant feeling of being able to travel and reside throughout the EU, there is a certain discomfort and inner feeling, their survival is in doubt.

The explosion produced by Brexit, barely softening the effects of the 2008 economic crisis, while some of the evils of the past are reborn (nationalism, authoritarianism, racism), and the community territory is beset by uncontrolled immigration, has not helped to soften fears.

Inside and outside, the predictions of its disappearance are insistent. And specialists wonder why, while many voices disagree with these pessimistic predictions.

 

Anu Bradford, author of “The Brussels Effect” (Oxford University, 2020)

 

Anu Bradford, a law professor at Columbia University in New York, belongs to this sector. She is the author of a book that has been considered as the most influential of the decade in the field of international relations and the EU in particular.  Its title is The Brussels Effect (Oxford University, 2020), repeatedly reproduced as a term that is destined to be enthroned in the permanent vocabulary of the EU. The central thesis is that the EU, despite its lack of “hard power”, has achieved not only its survival, but a position of preeminence in the world theater.

But this nature of a global agent does not come from the traditional methods of imposing its interests, but simply through the use of a weapon of something as simple as law, developed in the design of a network of norms in the internal scene of the industry, business, the environment, agriculture, and protection against climate change.

But these norms are not imposed on the external territories, in a traditional imperialist way, but, exceptionally, they are self-adopted by the external businesses themselves, voluntarily.

How is this achieved, without the imposition of the hard power of the EU? Bradford’s answer is very simple: external actors, in the United States, Latin America, Asia, weigh between the cost of adding the standards of EU regulations or losing such a substantial market. They hesitate before being forced to adopt community standards or even be their goods rejected, once the process of entering the gigantic EU single market has begun.

They wisely choose to make the necessary investment and place the blue sticker with the twelve golden stars of the EU as a guarantee, a courtesy gift from the “pope” Ursula Von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The EU does not oblige anyone: it is the choice of external economic interests.

Joaquín Roy is Jean Monnet Professor and Director of the European Union Center at the University of Miami

 

The post The Armored Divisions of the European Union appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Uganda remain unbeaten in the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers with a narrow 1-0 win over South Sudan.

He led two coups, first in 1979 and then in 1981 and was an elected president from 1992 to 2001.

The former air force officer who first seized power in 1979 leaves a divided legacy.

Flour and fuel shortages are being reported in Tigray, where federal and regional forces are fighting.

A farmer in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Credit: UN Photo/Kibae Park

By Kyle Springer
PERTH, Australia, Nov 12 2020 (IPS)

This was the year that Vietnam was poised to make progress on its rise as a regional leader. Under the auspices of Vietnam’s ASEAN chairmanship, a breakthrough in global trade has been achieved despite rising protectionism and a global pandemic.

Assuming the chair of ASEAN in January, Vietnam’s diplomacy has proven adaptable amid the constraints of COVID-19. The successful completion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement under Vietnam’s watch this year will cement its claim to middle power leadership in the Indo-Pacific region.

The 2020 ASEAN Summit would have been easy to write off, but we have learned to expect a lot from a Vietnam-chaired year. Consider what Vietnam’s leadership has delivered in the past. When Vietnam chaired ASEAN in 2010, it inaugurated the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM) Plus, a defence dialogue of all ten ASEAN members and its eight dialogue partners, which includes the US and China.

When Vietnam convened the East Asia Summit (EAS) that same year, the US and Russia attended as Vietnam’s guests, paving the way for their official membership in the summit the following year. The ADMM Plus and the EAS are now key institutions in the political architecture of the Indo-Pacific.

And in the crisis year of 2020, Vietnam’s skillful diplomacy once again comes to the rescue. When Vietnam delivers RCEP during this November’s adjusted Summit process, it will be the most significant development in the global trade system since the establishment of the WTO in 1994.

Eight years in the making and spanning over thirty rounds of negotiations, RCEP promises to buttress the post-COVID-19 economic recovery of its fifteen members. Covering 29 percent of global GDP, its provisions spur the further development of regional value chains and greatly lower regulatory barriers to investment.

Vietnam’s leadership of RCEP marks its transformation to become one of the region’s fastest-growing and most internationally-engaged economies. Thirty years ago, Vietnam emerged from a period of war during which it had fought every permanent member of the UN Security Council except the then-Soviet Union. Vietnam had isolated itself from its Southeast Asian neighbours when it invaded Cambodia in 1978, and it suffered a bloody clash with China at its northern border in 1979.

On the economic front, matters were equally dim. Post-war reconstruction did nothing to boost Vietnam’s inflation-stricken economy. Five-year economic plans failed to stimulate growth and production in its agriculture-based economy. Trade and aid sanctions were placed against it by the US, Australia, and many of its other neighbours. With this context, no one could have foreseen the transformation that would later take place.

RCEP perhaps represents the apex of Vietnam’s efforts to integrate into the global economy starting in the mid-1990s. Coming on the back of its domestically-focused Doi Moi (renovation) economic reforms that began in 1986, Vietnam joined ASEAN in 1995 and acceded to the World Trade Organization in 2007. It eschewed protectionism and began pursuing a number of free trade agreements starting in 2005.

Today, it has signed a number of deals with advanced economies. Vietnam has emerged not only as a participant in multilateral trade efforts, but as a leading proponent of regional trade integration. It is a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The CPTPP’s predecessor, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), earned fame with US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US from the deal after long being promoted as a cornerstone of former President Barack Obama’s “rebalance” to the Asia-Pacific region.

A few months after the US left the agreement, the remaining TPP members met on the sidelines of the 2017 APEC trade ministers’ meeting, hosted by Vietnam. There the ministers reaffirmed the value of the TPP and discussed how to finalise it with the eleven of the original signatories.

Here Vietnam made the decision to stay in the agreement, despite losing market access to its most important trade partner – the US. Vietnam’s participation in the CPTPP makes Vietnam’s stance clear: it is committed to trade liberalisation even though the spirit of the time is decidedly protectionist.

RCEP continues Vietnam’s efforts, and Vietnam once again delivers an important new institution while it presides in its moment as ASEAN chair. RCEP is timely as well. It will put Vietnam and its Indo-Pacific partners in a good place to solve the economic problems pressuring the region, not the least the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit Southeast Asia particularly hard.

Here again, Vietnam looks like it will come out on top. With its domestic outbreak under control, Vietnam’s standing in the forecasts for economic growth are promising. Even under the most pessimistic modelling, Vietnam’s economy should maintain positive growth in 2020.

By the time Vietnam next takes the reins as ASEAN chair, presumably in 2030, its economy will be well on its way to becoming one of the world’s largest. RCEP will get a lot of credit for that progress.

Along with catalysing post-COVID-19 economic growth in the broader Indo-Pacific region, RCEP will further enhance Vietnam’s ability to attract the investment it needs to propel its economy in this promising direction.

The challenge for Vietnam’s leadership will be matching its regional ambitions with continued domestic economic reforms.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution

 

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The post Vietnam Takes the Lead on Indo-Pacific Economic Integration appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Kyle Springer is the Senior Analyst at the Perth US Asia Centre.

The post Vietnam Takes the Lead on Indo-Pacific Economic Integration appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The actual number of children at risk is not known due to a dearth of research on child deprivation and government responses in Zimbabwe. This 16-year-old boy sells sweets and popcorn to earn a living in downtown Harare. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS

By External Source
Nov 12 2020 (IPS)

The ability of Zimbabwean families to take care of children has been compromised by a collapsing economy, compounded by COVID-19. About 4.3 million people in rural communities, including children, are food insecure this year. The World Food Programme indicates that at least 60% of the population of Zimbabwe need food aid.

The Vendors Initiative for Social and Economic Transformation in Zimbabwe has estimated that over 20,000 children have turned to vending as a means of survival since the COVID-19 lockdown.

According to reports, child vendors in the city of Bulawayo are mostly selling fruit and vegetables. And in the capital, Harare, they sell a variety of goods from vegetables to used clothes and shoes.

The phenomenon of child vendors in Zimbabwe has been topical for some time. But the situation appears to be worsening.

When children spend hours of their day in the streets or at the market, they lose a portion of their childhood that will never be regained. They miss out on education, play opportunities and other childhood activities. This has far-reaching effects on their development

There are no statistics about how much income vendors make, due to the informal nature of this business and a lack of centralised coordination of their activities. Nevertheless, it’s clear that poverty is the reason children are on the streets. But in their efforts to help their families, they are exposed to risks such as exploitation, abuse and missing school.

The situation calls for a critical conversation about the capacity of families to protect and care for their children and the role of social protection policies in the country.

 

Policy to protect vulnerable children

A National Action Plan for Orphans and Vulnerable Children has been in place since 2004. The policy guides the provision of care for these children. My prior experience and observations as a social researcher suggest that the plan isn’t working in practice.

There are number of gaps.

The first is that there’s no clear definition of what the term “orphans and vulnerable children” means, especially in the current economic climate and increasing vulnerability of children in the country. There’s a danger that children will fall through the cracks and go unnoticed without any government support.

Secondly, there is a lack of good data. The actual number of children at risk is not known due to a dearth of research on child deprivation and government responses in Zimbabwe.

Thirdly, government interventions aren’t reaching those in need. The government’s National Action Plan for Orphans and Vulnerable Children is meant to be overseen by a multi-sectoral committee to mobilise resources. Under it poor households were to receive grants varying from US$10 (one person household) to US$25 (four person household) per month (paid bimonthly) through a cash transfer. The funds for this come from the Child Protection Fund.

The first phase of the plan was between 2005-2010 and the second phase between 2011-2015. The evaluations of these two phases showed several gaps in service provision and targeting of orphans and vulnerable children in the country.

Even by 2017 only 23,000 beneficiaries in eight districts had received the cash transfers. However, the number of families in need way surpasses the number that received it. According to social policy experts, the unconditional social cash transfer programmes don’t target all poor households. They only target those that in addition to being extremely poor, also suffer from severe social and economic vulnerability. This, however, is open to interpretation.

The current third phase of the plan was supposed to cover household economic security, basic social services and child protection. The fact that there appears to be a growing child vendor problem in the country in 2020 shows the plan is not reaching everyone in need.

 

Child vendors exposed to risks

The legal working age in Zimbabwe is 16, but children as young as 10 and 12 years old are selling goods on the streets.

Children aren’t being adequately protected from child labour and the risks they face, including exploitation and abuse.

When children spend hours of their day in the streets or at the market, they lose a portion of their childhood that will never be regained. They miss out on education, play opportunities and other childhood activities. This has far-reaching effects on their development.

According to the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, the third phase of the National Action Plan for Orphans and Vulnerable Children seeks the involvement of families and the community in child protection.

But the governnment’s ability to drive the plan is severely compromised because it doesn’t have the capacity in the Ministry of Social Services. This is due to a massive exodus of Zimbabweans from the country as a result of the economic crisis. As a result, the plan is heavily reliant on external assistance and development partners.

 

Going forward

So far, the government’s response has been to reunite children found in the streets with their families. The reality is that without alternatives for these families to earn an income and to feed their families, children will go back on the streets.

In addition, it’s proving difficult to change the mindsets of Zimbabweans on the role of children in the society. Culturally, the involvement of children in the family economy is generally regarded as acceptable. Parents feel that it’s a way of training the children to become more responsible adults.

The government can prevent child vending through identifying families that are at risk of losing their livelihood. Social policy programmes need to be expanded to cover more people. This implies increasing the social protection budget to cater for growing numbers of families with children in need.

Policy makers and social service practitioners must consider adopting a bottom-up approach and work collaboratively with the affected and at-risk families. This can be done through participatory approaches such as workshops to hear from the community how best the issue of child labour can be tackled in this economy.

Dr Getrude Dadirai Gwenzi, Early Career Researcher in the Sociology of Child Welfare in Africa, Lingnan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post More Children in Zimbabwe Are Working to Survive: What’s Needed appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun tops a vote for the book award's 25th anniversary.

Children study in a Community Based Education class in Miirwais Meena, Kandahar province, Afghanistan. Credit: Fazel/UNICEF

By Guy Dinmore
LONDON, Nov 12 2020 (IPS)

As if four decades of war were not enough, then came the pandemic.

For each of the past five years, Afghanistan has been identified by the United Nations as the world’s deadliest country for children and, despite progress made in peace talks between the government and the Taliban, child and youth casualties from the ongoing conflict continue to mount in 2020.

Education itself has come under fire, with hundreds of attacks on schools and teachers. A 2018 joint report by the Afghanistan Ministry of Education and UNICEF, estimated that as many as 3.7 million children in Afghanistan were out of school, 60 per cent of them girls.

Against this backdrop, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the global fund launched at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit to deliver quality education for vulnerable children and youth in countries affected by armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate-induced disasters and protracted crises – selected Afghanistan as one of the first countries to roll out a Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP). The in-country Steering Committee formed to oversee implementation of the programme appointed management of the MYRP to UNICEF as a grantee.

Sarthak Pal, ECW project coordinator for UNICEF in Kabul, says Afghanistan’s MYRP was designed to focus on ‘out of school children’, by setting up community-based education (CBE) classes close to where they live. Classes are arranged mostly in private homes and sometimes in mosques for those who cannot make the long journey to the nearest school.

“Most of these out of school children live in remote, rural and hard to reach places,” Pal told IPS from Kabul. Pal explained that focusing on out of school children was a context-specific choice for Afghanistan, and may differ from MYRPs in other countries with their own unique contexts.

Children attend a Community Based Education class in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. Credit: Frank Dejongh/UNICEF

The first year of the MYRP – with teaching starting in May 2019 – saw some 3,600 classes established in nine of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. This required newly recruited teachers, 46 per cent of whom are women, to teach 122,000 children. Nearly 60 per cent of the enrolled children are girls.

“When Education Cannot Wait came to Afghanistan in 2018 there were 3.7 million out of school children. These were the children and youth left furthest behind. Today, results from our multi-year resilience investment in Afghanistan are among the most promising in our global investment portfolio, especially for girls’ access to education now reaching the target of 60 percent of our investment. This shows how we can achieve education outcomes for the most marginalized children and youth in complex crisis settings by bringing together humanitarian and development actors under the leadership of the Ministry of Education. The children and youth of Afghanistan, the Afghan girls, deserve no less,” said the ECW Director, Yasmine Sherif.

One new pupil in the classes is Khalid*, an eight-year-old boy with a permanent foot disability, who was displaced by conflict from Afghanistan’s Kunar province to Nangarhar province. Previously deprived of education by war and poverty, Khalid now attends a CBE class with access to free education and books. His teacher praises his enthusiasm and creativity and says Khalid has gone from being illiterate to learning how to read, write and draw.

The closest school is 4 kilometres away from where Khalid lives, too far for him to go, but now he has a classroom just 300 metres from his home. Both Khalid’s life, and the life of his family, have been transformed.

Khalid’s nine-year-old sister Hosna is able to attend an all-girls government school close-by. “In the evening, Khalid and I study together at home and help each other in our lessons,” she says, expressing how astonished she was by Khalid’s rapid improvement and capabilities. “Khalid is so intellectually improved and motivated.”

Bringing education closer to home helps secure the backing of both the community and the shuras (school councils), and is particularly effective in addressing barriers to girls’ education, such as long distances, a lack of female teachers and safety concerns. The role of School Management Shuras, or councils, has been important in building a sense of community ownership, although there are barriers to girls’ participation remains in some provinces.

UNICEF-Afghanistan staff visit the supported Zanogra Community Based Education cluster to distribute new school bags and notebooks as the school year begins in Surkhrod district, Nangarhar province. Credit: Marko Kokic/UNICEF

ECW classes also reach children in camps set up for those displaced by conflict. Feizia Salahuddin quietly recounts in an IPS video how three of her siblings were killed. The 12-year-old girl also lost her mother. “We face so many hardships here,” she says. But then a smile appears when she describes going to ECW-supported CBE classes in Herat. “I love to study. It makes me happy,” she says.

An additional hammer blow to education this year came not from bombs or landmines but COVID-19. The government ordered all schools closed in March 2020, and CBE classes could only start reopening recently. Children affected by the impact of COVID-19 school closures now also faced increased vulnerability to recruitment by parties to the conflict, particularly boys. The crisis also exacerbated existing vulnerabilities of girls to child marriage and teenage pregnancy.

Dave Mariano, Head of Communications for Afghanistan for Save the Children International, an implementing partner for ECW, said the government had initially decided CBE classes could continue, but subsequently said teaching would have to continue via radio, television and internet, to which millions of children do not have access. Fortunately, classes eventually started to reopen with appropriate COVID-19 safety measures.

“The reopening of CBEs required a lot of coordination to ensure that necessary provisions were in place to safely reopen, such as the availability of PPE, sanitisers, and even general public awareness on how to mitigate COVID risks through basic hygiene and other practices,” Mariano told IPS.

Despite the challenges, UNICEF is already looking ahead to extend the MYRP, supported in this goal by the Ministry of Education and donors. Sweden is the largest in-country donor in Afghanistan, closely followed by Switzerland. However, UNICEF says the MYRP remains “grossly under-funded” with a 70 per cent funding gap across three years.

“We are advocating that three years of MYRP is not enough. The primary school cycle in Afghanistan is six years. We can’t leave the children half-way through. That is our main advocacy agenda now,” said Pal.

ECW has given priority in Afghanistan to improving education for girls with a focus on female teacher recruitment. This is being achieved in Herat, where 97 per cent of teachers are women and 83 per cent of students in accelerated learning classes are girls.

For girls like Feizia Salahuddin, this means a chance to start rebuilding lives shattered by conflict and displacement, giving a sense that through a classroom and her textbooks, she is once more part of a community.

“I get nervous when I get called to the blackboard, but my teachers and classmates support me,” Feizia says. “That is why I like them. They cooperate with me and teach me.”

*Names have been changed in accordance with child safeguarding and communications policies.

 

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The post Despite Conflict and COVID-19, Children Still Dream to Continue Their Education in Afghanistan appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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President Donald Trump at the UN Security Council (UNSC) when the US held the rotating Presidency of the Council. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 11 2020 (IPS)

Now it is clear that Joe Biden is the new president of the United States. It is unlikely that Donald Trump’s legal manoeuvring will change the election results, as when a conservative Supreme Court in 2000 decided in favour of George Bush over Al Gore, who lost by 535 votes.

Even this Supreme Court, where Trump has six sympathetic members (three appointed by him, quite a record), and only three unsympathetic, will dare to change a result coming from too many states.

Trump is gone, but it is sad to say, Trumpism is here to stay. But is that a specific situation of the United States, or is it a more general phenomenon? We think that, in an era of globalisation, we should attempt a global analysis.

This will leave out a zillion of facts, events and analysis, but this is now the destiny of journalism. Anyone can add what they think is relevant and decide what has been left out. This will be a big improvement over this abridged analysis.

But let us start with the United States first. Biden’s victory comes from the unusually high participation in the election, where it attracted 67% of the voters. In American elections, participation rarely exceeds 50%, although the largest participation was in 1900, when 73% of the population votes.

Remember that in the US, voting is defined as a privilege, not a duty. To vote, you have to register, and many states make that a demanding task, automatically excluding the more fragile part of the population.

Biden won the largest popular vote in US history: 71.4 million compared with the 69.4 million obtained by Barack Obama. Nevertheless Trump gathered 68.3 million votes, nearly four million more than in 2016, in spite of a pandemic which, until now, has left more than 230.000 dead, with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and after four years of confrontations, some massive, like Black Lives matter.

Trump has now lost his Teflon, and he is a loser. But he has 68 million followers on Twitter, and he is probably going to open his own TV channel. He is going to be a serious problem for the Republican Party. He is going to cultivate the myth of stolen elections and keep his followers in a state of confrontation. Trump is gone, but Trumpism remains

He doubled the votes of the LGBT community, he obtained 18% of Afro-American votes, white woman increased their vote for him by 6%, and he won Florida thanks to the Latino votes (Cubans, Venezuelans and to a lesser extent Puerto Ricans).

The United States is going through a demographic transformation, which will further exacerbate the polarisation. The Census Bureau estimates that this year the majority of the country’s 74 million children will not be white. And in the decade of the 2040s, the white population will be under 49% with the other 51% made up of Latinos, blacks, Asians and other minorities.

The genesis of the United States differs from that of Europe. It was created by an immigration of English religious radicals, who wanted to create a new world, a “town shining on a hill”, where the secularism and moral corruption of their country would be left behind. Following their arrival, they had to fight against indigenous people who were considered barbarians, without a true religion (very much like the Spanish conquest did in Latin America).

The war of independence from England reinforced the moral value of their action: freedom from tyranny, And, with the Industrial Revolution, wave after wave of immigrants arrived, all escaping Europe because of poverty or oppression They were also uneducated and obliged to integrate into an already existing strong society, which defined itself a ‘WASP’ (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) society.

To do this, the US invented mass media as an instrument for the melting pot (until then in Europe newspapers had small circulations for the elites), and two myths: American Exceptionalism and the American Dream.

The conquest of the west was a national saga, with the cinema as the other instrument for the melting pot. Children of different immigrants reacted with joy to the sound of the trumpet announcing the cavalry charge which would wipe out hordes of attacking Indians.

And beside media and cinema, a strong advertising industry shaped tastes and consumption patterns. An abundance of natural resources, and a permanent arrival of immigrants, fuelled continuous growth. Here the two myths become uncontested truth. America exceptionalism, the fact that US has a different destiny form all other countries, became a staple of public discourse.

In 1850, President James Monroe emitted a declaration, by which no European country was any longer allowed to intervene in Latin America. And still today, a large part of the population thinks that US has the right to intervene in the world, because US is the keeper of order and law in a chaotic world.

To become an American citizen, you have to swear that you forget your origins, because you are born a new man. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty, which was what millions of immigrants saw first after a long journey, bears an inscription which symbolises the myth well:

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries the Statue with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The second myth, the American Dream, was another powerful tool for patience and hard work. It was part of the Protestant founding legacy. Anybody who works hard will become affluent or rich. If you do not become rich, it is because you did not try hard enough.

This is the myth that evangelical church has adopted: God rewards the hardworking faithful, and not the lazy. As a result, poverty is not contemplated by God. And the evangelical church has achieved a remarkable result (not only in the US, but everywhere, from Brazil to Guatemala): having the poor voting to the right.

US exceptionalism is evident when you look at other English colonies. Australia, for example, was the destination of prostitutes, thieves and bankrupt British citizens. It would never be thinkable that the prime minister of Australia speak on behalf of Australia and Humankind, as the US president routinely does. Nor does the PM of Canada ever speak in the name of God or say that God loves Canada. The US is the only country in the world that does not accept its military personnel being judged by a foreign court.

Roberto Savio

And the US saw confirmation of its exceptionalism, and its role as defender of the humankind, with the Second World War. Despite the enormous loss of Russian troops and civilians (27 million, compared with 419,000 Americans), the clear victor against the evils of Nazism and Fascism was the United States of America. It was able to win the war because of its astonishing military production (one ship in three days), and the construction of the atomic bomb. So, the US entered our contemporary era with all its myths reinforced.

And the Marshall Plan, which resurrected Europe from its ruins, was a measure of containment against the new evil, Communism, but it also become final proof of its superiority and solidarity.

The US also created the United Nations as an institution which would avoid the repetition of the horrors of the war. It was intended to bring all counties together under the same roof, and take decisions trough debates and agreements, not war.

But the world did not freeze, because the American vision of the world became a straitjacket for the US. It preached freedom of trade and investments. Of course, it was by far the strongest country, and so the winner of an American World Order, with the Soviet threat under containment, the strategy formulated by American diplomat George F. Kennan in 1947.

But once the UN expands from the original 50 countries to 187, and you insist on free competition and trade, you become a victim of your rhetoric. Those countries, in a democratic institution, all have a vote. In 1973, the General Assembly unanimously voted for a New World Economic Order, based on international solidarity and the transfer of wealth from the rich countries to the poor for world development.

The United States voted with the General Assembly. But then came Ronald Reagan, an admirer of John Wayne and in many ways a precursor of Trump. Shortly after his election, Reagan went to the North-South Summit of Head of States in Cancun, Mexico, in 1981, to announce that US no longer accepted being a country like all others, and that it would pursue foreign policy that was more convenient to its interests.

Reagan had also a vision of a radical change at home. He believed strongly that the values of social justice, solidarity and fiscal equity, had become a brake on the economy and society. He was the first to introduce the idea that the state (the “beast”) was bloated, costly and inefficient, and the enemy of business and corporations, which should be left untouched to allow all their creativity to be freed.

Among others, he wanted to shut down the Ministry of Education, because he believed that education could be done better by the private system. He was a very good communicator, and a specialist in finding easy answers to very complicated issues, banalising the real issue – an example on environment: industries do not pollute, trees pollute. By his time, the US had reached an impressive level of research and teaching (for a few), as shown by the large numbers of Nobel Prizes.

Reagan was also the first to openly challenge the elites, speaking on behalf of ordinary citizens: the people. And it is here that US story lose its individual identity and starts to merge with the world. Reagan had a counterpart in Europe, Margaret Thatcher, who shared the same vision, and went to fight trade unions, cut state spending, privatised railways, airports and whatever else possible. She famously declared that ”society does not exist, only individuals”. Together they launched what was called neoliberal globalisation and they withdrew from UNESCO. The main basis was that the market and no longer man, was the basis of the economy and society. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that globalisation was the new name for American Domination.

All this was reinforced by three historical events:

1. The fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 which eliminated the threat of communism and gave capitalism total freedom for manoeuvring.
2. The Washington Consensus, established by the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Consensus ordered worldwide that social costs were unproductive, that any national barrier should be abolished for allowing investments and free trade to prosper and privatise as much as possible.
3. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ theory according to which, because it was impossible to halt globalisation, it would be best for the Left to ride it and become its human face. So, for two decades, under American influence, neoliberal globalisation became the norm of governance, both at national and international level. According to its apologists, it would lift all boats.

But then in 2008, an earthquake shook Wall Street. In 1999, under Bill Clinton, the Steagall-Glass regulation, adopted after the crash of 1929, was abolished. That regulation kept investment banks separate from traditional commercial banks. A giant tsunami hit investments, i.e. speculation.

Free of any control and international control (the banking sector is the only one in the world without any regulator or comptroller), the banking system took on a life of its own, leaving the real economy. And it went into more and more speculative operations until, in 2008, the American banks went practically bankrupt.

That crisis expanded worldwide, and in Europe in 2009 banks also went into bankruptcy. According to OECD estimates, to rescue the banking system, the world had to invest two trillion dollars. That comes to 267 dollar per person in a world in which nearly 2 billion people then lived on less than two dollars a day.

The crisis of 2008-9, and the consequent uncertainty and fear, obliged a critical examination of neoliberal theory, For nearly three decades, citizens, media, civil society, economists, sociologists and statisticians had been denouncing that globalisation in fact exacerbated social injustice, dispossessed many people of their income through delocalisation of companies to cheaper places, created unequal growth between towns and rural area and heavy damage to the planet, and that it was urgent to counter those abuses.

After 8 years of George W. Bush, wars and lack of attention to the social problems of the country, in 2009 America elected a man with a message of hope, integration and peace: Barack Obama. But if Obama really wanted to unravel a system that had been established for 20 years, it was beyond his reach. In 2015, the US Senate passed into the hands of Republicans, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocked every possible move by the Obama administration.

In 2017, he refused to even consider Obama’s proposal for the Supreme Court, because there would be elections in ten months (the same Mitch McConnell who, in just three weeks, obtained the appointment of Catholic integralist and traditionalist Amy Coney Barrett on the eve of the just-held elections).

While the dreams evoked by Obama started to fade, the crisis of 2009 brought some unprecedented political developments. Uncertainty and fear were also exasperated by the flow of immigrants from countries destabilised by the interventions of the US and Europe in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and those escaping dictatorial regimes and hunger.

All over the world, that led to a flourishing of nationalism and xenophobia, with so-called ‘sovranist’ parties being established in every country of Europe, and progressively all over the world. They all based themselves on xenophobia against migrants, denunciation of world and regional institutions as illegitimate and enemies of national interests, and speaking on behalf of the people who were victims of globalisation: workers of factories that had closed due to delocalisation, calls to a glorious past (Brexit, 2016), people from rural areas left behind by the faster development of towns (the Yellow Jackets in France in 2018), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brutal annexing of Kashmir to India in 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s astonishing elimination of protection of the Amazon in 2019, Xi annexing of Hong Kong 2020.

So, it would be a mistake to single out Trump, when we are facing a much more serious problem. Trump, of course, now leaves the others naked. Maybe this is the beginning of a new political cycle … but the system is now broken, and it is nearly impossible to fix it.

The coronavirus pandemic has put another nail in the coffin. The negationist wave is another symptom of how the crisis of trust has eroded our society. And, by the way, we have now two proponents of the Qanon theory of conspiracy elected in the House of Representatives. The Qanon theory is that Hillary Clinton and several other important figures, from Bill Gates to George Soros, gather to drink the blood of young boys in the cellar of a pizzeria in New York. Trump is supposed to be the saviour. The fact that the pizzeria in question has no cellar is irrelevant.

To return to the United States, the myths of exceptionalism and the American Dream have now evaporated in the United States. Trump did surprisingly well if you look at the situation with the eyes of a cultivated guy. He is the first president of the United States who never spoke on behalf of the people: on the contrary, he portrayed those who did not vote for him as un-American.

In his government, he had very few Cabinet meetings and he governed through tweets, rarely consulting his staff. He mobilised the fears of the white population against immigrants and other minorities; he proclaimed law and order against any mobilisation, demonising the participants.

He is the quintessence of narcissism, he loves only himself, he does not care about anybody else, and he does not trust anyone. He is an example of misogynism, he paid his taxes in China, but not in the US. He has inaugurated the post-truth era, by making several false affirmations every day.

He has used the public administration as his personal staff, changing public servants continuously and putting people who share his views in their jobs. The Minister of Education does not believe in the public school. The Minister of Justice believes that the president has power over the judiciary. The person responsible for the environment is against clean energy. It looks as if vampires are in charge of blood banks!

It is useless to list all Trump’s disasters in international affairs as they are well known. He has withdrawn from the idea of international cooperation, from the Paris agreement on climate, from the World Health Organization, he has jeopardised the World Trade Organization (a US creation), shown preferences for dictators like Putin and Kim Il Jong, and banalised the NATO alliance (another US creation), and we could go on and on.

He represents classical American isolationism: let is withdraw from a world in chaos, which does not appreciate us, but just wants to exploit us. But we are now living in a multipolar world and globalisation is being played by many hands. By 2035, China will have surpassed the US as the world’s strongest power.

Yet, Trump has drawn votes form all the sick strata of American society. The whites that feel threatened; the rural people who feel left behind; the workers from factories that closed because of delocalisation; the affluent middle class of the suburbs who felt threatened by the poor people encroaching on their properties; the blacks who become middle class and looked with horror to the miseries of the majority of Afro-Americans; the evangelicals who were happy with a Supreme Court becoming right wing and having a vice-president, Mike Pence, and a Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who are evangelicals; those who keep the myth of the Far West, its individualism, its macho value and its weapons; all those who look at the state, the public, as an enemy of freedom; the policemen who found their impunity under judgement; those who decided that women, gays, abortion and human rights were tilting America into the opposite of its founding values.

All those people exist, they were united by Trump, but they survive him. And in a country where there is now hate and opponents have become enemies, in a country plagued by the opioids epidemy, where one American under six has psychological problems, where more people die each year because of weapons than in the Vietnam War, creating unity is a very, very difficult task.

Democrats thought that to put up an elderly and civilised candidate, Joe Biden, would bring back empathy and dialogue as a rallying factor. In fact, it looks more like Trump has lost the elections than that Biden has won them.

Progressives look at him as an epitome of the establishment and will keep pressing him to become freer from the system. We will only know on January 6th if the Republican Party holds on to the Senate, as is likely, and if the Senate returns under the control of Mitch McConnell the blockage it placed in front of Obama will look like gentle times.

Biden will be able to undo many of Trump’s executive orders but, for example, he will be unable to change the composition of the Supreme Court, which will last for at least a couple of decades. He will not be able to increase health coverage.

The chance of increasing the minimum wage and increasing taxation on the very rich will be near to zero. Republicans will now again become the guardians of fiscal austerity, after having left Trump increase the national deficit to an unprecedented level. And the increasingly powerful left-wing of the Democratic Party will try to condition and push Biden, who they elected just to get rid of Trump.

Trump has now lost his Teflon, and he is a loser. But he has 68 million followers on Twitter, and he is probably going to open his own TV channel. He is going to be a serious problem for the Republican Party. He is going to cultivate the myth of stolen elections and keep his followers in a state of confrontation. Trump is gone, but Trumpism remains.

And this is true for the world. Until we eliminate neoliberal globalisation, the Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Viktor Orbans and so on of this world will be just be the visible part of the iceberg. But what is going to do that? We have a ray of hope from civil society. Climate drama has brought young people back to acting. And then there are the other two world mobilisations, Me Too for the dignity of women dignity and Black Lives Matter for combatting racism (which is not just an American phenomena), which have brought together millions of people worldwide.

We are in a period of transition. It is not clear to what, but we can only hope that it will be without blood. In the end, it will depend on men and women all over the world, on the ability to find common values in our diversities for establishing relations of peace and creating social justice, solidarity and participation as global bridges. Controlling climate change and saving our planet is an immediate and urgent task. This will depend on each one of us, and we must make this the first bridge to walk, with all humankind.

 

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

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