Global war of ideas fuelling China-Africa Covid-19 diplomacy

Discernibly, Africa is caught up in a fierce global war of ideas pitting the United States as the established power against China as the rising power.

Covid-19 has become a double-edged sword in Sino-Africa relations. Besides deepening Africa-China diplomacy, the pandemic has strained superpower relations, weakened multilateralism and undermined unity and collective response to humanity’s threat.

Africa is a ‘battle space’ in the global war of ideas. Rival powers are strategically vying for access to its huge natural resources, to win the “hearts and minds” of the world’s most youthful population – the potential labour and consumer markets.

The “weapons” of choice in the Sino-American war of ideas in the ‘post-truth era’ are social media platforms, which have everywhere eclipsed traditional channels of diplomacy.

In the same vein, the twiterrati – avid users of the social media application Twitter – are the gun-toting cowboys in the new war of ideas.

The battle lines appear to be clearly marked. On the one front is President Donald Trump’s America atop a receding liberal international order.

The idea of America harks back to John Winthrop’s famous lecture on March 21, 1630 that proclaimed the new nation as a shining “City upon a Hill”.

Two centuries later, newspaper editor John O'Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” in 1845.

America morphed from an expansionist power, ‘ordained by God’ to occupy North America, to a “beacon of hope” and humanity’s progress.

IDENTITIES

John Gast’s 1872 painting, the American Progress as the emblem of America’s “manifest destiny”, also dramatised the racial bigotry and imperial hubris of the old “American dream”.

It depicts Columbia, an allegorical female figure, guiding and protecting early white settlers, carrying the elements of “civilisation” (railroads, telegraph wires and books) west and driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity.

More than a century later, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History (1992), declaring, rather prematurely, the triumph of Western liberal democracy.

Drawing upon the philosophies and ideologies of Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, Fukuyama deciphered the dissolution of the Soviet Union after the Cold War (1945–1991) as the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy.

But not everyone agreed with Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism. Fukuyama’s teacher, Samuel Huntington, responded by delivering the famous “Clash of Civilisations” lecture, later expanded into a book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).

Cultural and religious identities, he argued, would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.

However, Huntington’s thesis did not gain traction until after the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001.

SHARED DESTINY

China did not loom large as a threat to America in Huntington’s work. However, after Trump’s election in 2016, China shrilly replaced Islamism as a more potent threat to America.

Not surprisingly, on July 18, 2019, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, declared that relations between the United States and China have “elements of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations”.

As President Xi Jinping was ascending to power in 2013, China was effectively becoming the second front in the global war of ideas.

Xi dismissed the “clash of civilisations” as “dangerous” and “stupid”. Instead, he promoted the counter-idea of the world as a symphony of cultures in “a community of shared destiny for mankind”.

However, what has aroused the anger of Beijing’s pundits is Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” – the idea that the rivalry between an established power (America) and a rising one (China) often ends in war.

“The growth of Athenian power and the fear that this caused in Sparta” led to the Peloponnesian War (431-405 BC), he wrote.

China has repudiated Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” thesis at the highest political level. “The notion that a great power is bound to seek hegemony doesn’t apply to China, which lacks the gene that spawns such behaviour,” Xi said in 2013.

FOREIGN AID

In a speech in Seattle on September 24, 2015, he warned that “should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves”.

It is within the wider canvas of the “Thucydides Trap” that Sino-American tensions over the Covid-19 crisis have simmered.

On May 10, Beijing’s Foreign ministry published a comprehensive list of “24 lies coming out of US over Covid-19”, which it subsequently refuted.

Two of these are relevant to Africa. One is that China’s assistance to Africa, among other nations, is “political generosity”.

However, “China’s foreign aid for fighting against the pandemic is sent to countries that supported China during the early phase of the outbreak,” Beijing stated.

Two is the claim widely circulated in social media that “China’s Guangdong Province discriminated against African nationals”.

In response, Xi declared in a March 26, 2020 letter to the Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, himself from Africa, that epidemics like Covid-19 “do not respect borders, nor do they discriminate between races. They are a common enemy of humanity”.

AMERICA'S FAILURE

While vehemently refuting the idea of powers and cultures inevitability, Chinese intellectuals and policy pundits have warmed up to one idea from Harvard’s intellectual crowd.

In a January 9, 2017 article, professor Joseph Nye drew Trump’s attention to the “The Kindleberger Trap”.

In a gist, Charles Kindleberger, one of the architects of the Marshall Plan, argued that it was America’s failure to provide global public goods after it replaced Britain as the largest global power that resulted in the collapse of the global system into depression, genocide and world war in the 1930s.

Today, as Covid-19 destroys economies and communities globally, the million-dollar question is: will China help provide global public goods, particularly to developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

Professor Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute.