After Brexit, Africa should brace itself for an anarchic world

Without doubt, Britain’s vote to exit the European Union (EU) is a historic decision. It has immense potential not only to reshape the country's place in the world, but also to irreversibly fashion the future of global power in the coming decades.

A great deal of ink, nibbling and mapping of scenarios has gone into the implications of the vote for Africa. But whatever Brexit may mean for Africa, it was not the work of an angry gullible citizen who was lied to by ultra-right politicians to commit national suicide. On the contrary, it was a bold rational choice by the dominant national elite to seize their nation’s destiny in a manifestly anarchic world where the extant liberal international order is waning and the future of power increasingly uncertain.

Africa may be right to loath and lament the vote, but Brexit is an audacious strategy by the heirs of the now defunct British Empire to open up space for manoeuvre and to reposition the former superpower in the unfolding struggle to remake the world as the American Empire edges to its twilight.

Brexit has long been coming. This is the sense I got attending a powerful strategy conference on “the future of power by 2040” at the Wilton Park Conference Centre in the UK in January, 2014. As to who will wield global power in the coming three decades, one scenario caught my attention.

With the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, the decline of the American Empire and an ineffectual, weak, top-heavy European Union bureaucracy, nations would increasingly pivot towards the isolationist policy that shaped global politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

My immediate thought was that this new isolationism, the type that made colonisation possible, was not good for Africa. In this column, I argued that the emerging “anarchic world order threatens to push Africa deeper into the margins of global power”.

Brexit is not a jolt from the blues. Britain is neither riding the Lunatic Express – as the Kenya-Uganda Railway “to nowhere” used to be lampooned – nor has it reached the high noon of national madness. The choice must be appreciated within the larger canvas of shifts in global power – in which Africa has been a spectator and is just beginning to be assertive.

It would appear that the makers of modern Britain have been silently debating the referendum question whether their country should “remain a member of the European Union” or “leave the European Union”.

In an article published in The Telegraph in February, Margaret Thatcher’s authorised biographer Charles Moore reveals that while in power the icon of a “Britain unafraid” never said that Britain should exit Europe. But when she left office “she thought we should”.

The size and the reach of the EU’s “unelected” bureaucracy may have triggered Brexit. But more fundamentally, it was all about Britain’s sway and sovereignty in an increasingly uncertain world. It was also about the EU’s position on free migration.

In the past, British migrations into the periphery were – and still are – encouraged as beneficial to the empire, but today the specter of influx into Britain by Africans, Asians and other former subjects of the empire is a threat to national security and identity. That is the crux of the Brexit.

The immediate economic cost of Britain’s space for manoeuvre in global politics may be heavy. Indeed, Brexit is a mortal blow to the “United States of Europe” as a potential heir of the American Empire and new challenger to China. But the power gains – and long-term economic dividends – of Brexit seem tantalising.

Post-Brexit strategists have an array of options to augment Britain’s global clout. One is to deepen engagement with the Commonwealth – with its 53 members spanning Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific, which include some of the world’s richest and influential nations like Canada, Australia and South Africa.

Two is to position London as the power between America and Europe, a gap which neither Norway nor Switzerland has filled.

Three, while Britain remains a key player in the America-led North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the G-8 club, its diplomacy is likely to prioritise tightening its trans-Atlantic ties with America.
Four, Britain retains its place in the pantheon of veto-wielding powers in the United Nations Security Council. After Brexit, Britain has the “independence” enjoyed by other veto powers – America, China and Russia – except France to vote sovereignly without the strictures of the EU bureaucracy.

But Britain has cause to be very afraid. As the Economist magazine rightly argues, the triumph of Brexit signals the waning of the liberal international order celebrated by the American thinker, Francis Fukuyama, in his “End of History” tome. The defeat of fascism and collapse of Soviet communist left liberalism – democracy and the unfettered power of the markets – as the “last man standing” with no ideological challenger.

But the preponderance of the radical Islamic vision of global power after 9/11 and the return of the Chinese empire to the centre of the world order are real challenges to Western liberal hegemony. But it is the “enemy within” the Western world that is likely to bring the international liberal order to its knees.

Across Western democracies, disenchantment with globalisation’s failure to ensure that the wealth and prosperity its policies have helped create trickle down to the middle class is stoking anger now blamed for triumph of Brexit.

Ultra-right conservatives, from America’s Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen to Britain’s Boris Johnson, are riding this wave of popular anger and discontent to make unprecedented political gains.
The new crop of the West’s right-wing leaders is assuredly taking the place of Adolf Hitler, Benito Musolini and Joseph Stalin as liberalism’s most formidable enemies in the 21st century.

Paradoxically, liberal globalisation – signified by unfettered movement of goods, services and people in the proverbial “global village” – has become its own gravedigger.

Brexit, celebrated by Donald Trump, is a real challenge to liberalism. But as the wheel of history turns, yet again, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Africa must prepare for heady years ahead in the unfolding anarchic world order.

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the chief executive of the Africa Policy Institute.