Introduction
In the midst of a continuing economic crisis, the centres of global capitalism remain preoccupied with much that is predictable, if somewhat depressingly familiar: economies in crisis; unsustainable levels of national indebtedness; high and/or growing levels of unemployment; failures of the state; dangers of big government; austerity measures and programmes; popular protests, and so on. Readers of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) would be forgiven for thinking that this was Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than Europe in 2010. Reflecting on the spread of neoliberalism, Susan George has observed how:
In 1945 or 1950, if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today's standard neoliberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage at or sent off to the insane asylum. At least in the Western countries, at that time, everyone was a Keynesian, a social democrat or a social-Christian democrat or some shade of Marxist. The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions; the idea that the State should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather than more social protection – such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time. Even if someone actually agreed with these ideas, he or she would have hesitated to take such a position in public and would have had a hard time finding an audience. (George 1999)
the ideological and promotional work of the right [which] has been absolutely brilliant. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, but the result has been worth every penny to them because they have made neoliberalism seem as if it were the natural and normal condition of humankind. No matter how many disasters of all kinds the neoliberal system has visibly created, no matter what financial crises it may engender, no matter how many losers and outcasts it may create, it is still made to seem inevitable, like an act of God, the only possible economic and social order available to us. (George 1999)
Thus the leaders of Britain's new coalition government, among several others, are resorting to the now-familiar trope of an absence of political and economic alternatives, potentially viable or otherwise, to neoliberal austerity. Indeed, the widely reported denunciation of laissez-faire capitalism and unfettered markets by Vince Cable, UK Secretary of State for Business, also contained unambiguous support for a pro-market, pro-business agenda (The Guardian 2010), despite the sharp criticism it elicited from ‘The City, business leaders and economists’ (Treanor 2010). As Alex Callinicos (2010a) among others has observed, however, far from being anti-capitalist, Cable favours an alternative, regulated and more ethical form of capitalism, itself an aspiration which, according to Harvey (2010), would be to misunderstand the true nature and workings of capitalism.
Neoliberalism's African legacy
Some elements of the earlier experience in the world's most ‘adjusted’ continent are worth recalling, notably the zealotry which attended the promotion of the supremacy of a largely unbridled market, ‘free’ from the interventionist hand of the state and open to the forces of neoliberal globalisation. The state, divested of its welfare function and developmentalist role, was undermined, subdued and ‘rolled back’, even as production and exchange relations were increasingly informalised and public assets privatised. The question, it quickly became clear, was not whether economies needed ‘adjusting’, but how quickly reform could get under way and how completely economies could be made market friendly. Little wonder that Stoneman (2004) is convinced that the driving force behind neoliberal reform was ideological rather than technical, at least initially, while Olukoshi (2000) was struck not only by ‘the strong, one-sided anti-statism of structural adjustment on a continent where state-led development was prevalent’, but also the persistence or longevity of an intervention which ‘was initially seen and treated as a temporary diversion from the actual business of development’. And little wonder when, according to te Velde (2010), ‘Africa has … offered higher profits for multinationals than the rest of the world for more than a decade.’
Stories of the intended and unintended consequences of the ensuing neoliberal globalisation for individuals, groups and nature abound in ROAPE and elsewhere. These recall, against a backdrop of TINA's brooding presence, an assortment of local and other encounters with, experiences of, and reactions to multi-scale attempts to re/create the conditions necessary for the reproduction and expansion of capital – the globalisation of capital, in other words (Harvey 2010).
Thus John Briggs and Ian Yeboah (2001), for example, have argued using Tanzanian and Ghanaian case study material that a combination of economic peripheralisation and neoliberal globalisation have characterised Africa's incorporation into the world economy; that ‘many significant engagements with the global economy have tended to be [Structural Adjustment Programme] SAP experiences’ (p. 19); that the continent's engagements with adjustment have been most visibly played out in the form and structure of its growing (particularly ‘gateway’ capital) cities; that while ‘many aspects of SAPs have unequivocally pressurised urban livelihoods … many urban Africans, ironically perhaps, talk about the improvement of life chances that have come about as a result of SAPs’ (p. 24); and, finally, that increased economic activity aside, SAPs have contributed to ‘reinforc[ing] investment in exchange and consumption rather than in production’, with residential real estate benefiting at the expense of investment in industrial and commercial development (p. 24). And, away from cities, analysis of regional impacts of SAPs in Ghana's rural and regional production zones has revealed improvements in macroeconomic performance, but highlighted, too, that at the microeconomic level rural poverty in particular was still ‘alive and well’; and that adjustment may have exacerbated socio-economic and spatial inequalities, with undesirable consequences for ‘subsistence-oriented’ populations and regions existing alongside the more widely trumpeted positive effects on export-oriented areas and populations (Konadu-Agyemang 2000, Konadu-Agyemang and Adanu 2003). Indeed, Ghana's gold belt, export-oriented zone par excellence, is thought to exemplify a ‘development hyperspace’ in which a neoliberal strategy of ‘territorial restructuring’, involving powerful local, inter- and multi-national actors ‘assuming ever greater control over the places and spaces of production in order to guarantee the essential structural conditions that facilitate predatory corporate mining activities’, is redirecting ‘a very large sum of capital … towards large-scale gold mining operations at the direct expense of the local people and the environment’ (Armstrong 2008, p. 18).
Thus, even though it was (and remains largely) founded on an insistence on a lack of serious policy alternatives, notwithstanding the examples of China and parts of Latin America, among others (James 2003, Munck 2003), the reality of neoliberalism-as-adjustment in Africa:
does not quite match the panacea that [World] Bank economists envisioned. Instead, countries in the region have been compelled by SAPs to engage in a ‘race to the bottom’ as they compete to lower labor, social, and environmental costs for the TNCs. As a result, the region's poor majority has been forced to endure a devastating downward spiral of underdevelopment — persistent and growing poverty, inequality, hunger, disease, economic stagnation or decline, indebtedness, falling real wages, unemployment, and ecological degradation. (Armstrong 2008, p. 6)
Instead, given the often spectacular malfunctioning of market capitalism, as well as its direct and indirect contribution to undermining the capacity of states to undertake progressive redistributive intervention or promote sustainable livelihoods, the institutionalisation of palliative measures such as the Social Dimensions of Adjustment (SDA) Programme in Africa with minimal potential for ‘bucking the market’ became a favoured policy option (World Bank 1990). Other poverty alleviation interventions designed to ‘give adjustment a human face’ operated via the market or the so-called third or charity sector, which became a major beneficiary of ‘outsourced’ service provision functions which were formerly the purview of the state. Welfare provision was thus partly privatised and, by means of poverty reduction strategies (PRSs) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ultimately globalised. Indeed, the formalisation and adoption of the MDGs was itself an acknowledgement of the limits of a market-based economy in responding to the needs of the world's poorest countries and communities. As the MDG Africa Steering Group put it (2008, p. 1):
[I]f fully achieved, [they] will allow African communities and countries to raise productivity and compete successfully in world markets to increase economic growth. Investing in the MDGs and promoting the private sector are critical steps in charting a course towards stability and sustained economic growth that will build capital, attract foreign investment and overcome Africa's current need for external assistance.
Like the major European and American banks during the recent financial crisis, then, MDGs are considered central to the survival of neoliberal globalisation, as shown by the convening of, the arrangements for, and the deliberations at the just-concluded UN 2010 MDG summit (20–22 September). Indeed, a potent reminder of this, if one were needed, was provided by Jeffery Sachs's (2010) observation that:
The MDG summit took place in the same days that Sweden saw a far-right, anti-immigrant party take seats in parliament. France is harassing the Roma for local political gain. The US is in the throes of anti-Islamic fever, a right-wing Tea Party challenge and anti-immigrant fervour. High unemployment, economic uncertainty and political manipulation of the public by various interests threaten our very social stability. For many, Africa is a target of racism and opprobrium, not partnership.
Beyond orthodox neoliberalism?
But could any of the foregoing have been otherwise, given that society appears to exercise only a tenuous mastery over the market? Or, indeed, when the current debate in Western policy circles is polarised between what Walden Bello (2010) describes as the ‘pro-spending people’ and ‘anti-deficit people’, one in which ‘reason has taken a back seat to ideology, interests, and politics’? In Africa's long experience with neoliberal adjustment, the market fundamentalists won what became a long, drawn-out battle of attrition, while pro-state spenders had to settle for SDA- and MDG-type interventions; subsequent concessions have been extremely hard won, and the nature, pace and direction of ‘development’ remains heavily circumscribed by the inordinate influence of the continent's development partners. As with the current wave of popular and other protests against proposed deficit reduction measures in the advanced capitalist economies, the legitimacy of neoliberal globalisation was called into question from the very beginning, with initiatives like the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) (UNECA 1980) and African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes (AAF-SAP), among others, being suggested as possible (structuralist and Keynesian) alternatives during the 1980s and 1990s (Adedeji 2002).
TINA as an ideology did in fact have to contend with widespread and often sustained contestation from popular forces (Callinicos 2010b, Harvey 2010), much of which was routinely deflected as either misguided (‘the continental crisis would have been a lot worse without reform’) or wrongly targeted (‘limitations and failures of reform were due to wrong, partial or non-implementation rather than faulty or inappropriate design’) or just overly hopeful (‘expectations were unrealistically high’) (World Bank 1994, Olukoshi 2002). Furthermore, African academics debated its limitations endlessly and activists of all kinds worked tirelessly to highlight (and attempt to counter) its most pernicious effects. Indeed, the recognition of the need to (re)focus on poverty reduction, and an acknowledgement of the necessity to confront questions of ‘ownership’ of adjustment programmes, were in part concessions to this pressure which fell far short of fundamental challenges to the structure or functioning of neoliberal adjustment to which the continent's development partners were (and remain) inextricably wedded.
But where does all of this leave the prospects for neoliberalism's ‘marginalised’ in Africa, those who currently struggle to survive under conditions of persistent and growing inequality in the context of an economic downturn, volatile food prices, reduced aid, and migrant remittances, among other challenges to individual and group survival? And why, given the malfunctioning of market capitalism recently, is there so little in the way of discussions about alternatives to capitalism, despite renewed interest in Marxist explanations of the crisis (cf., for example, Callinicos 2010b, Harvey 2010, and Kothari and Kuruvilla 2010)? In Europe, as in the US, mainstream debates are about the merits and demerits of alternative capitalisms and their associated state regulatory mechanisms, particularly financial market regulation. The main UK political parties appear reconciled to significant deficit reduction and are largely embroiled in arguments about how deep and how fast such cuts should be, and which sections of the public service should bear the brunt of the cuts. Similarly, in the US, the Obama administration has neither ‘advance[d] an aggressive anti-neoliberal narrative to explain [the crisis]’ nor presented its proposed measures for tackling the latter as ‘elements of a broader program of social reform aimed at democratising control and management of the economy’ (Bello 2010).
It is precisely the opportunity to explore such democratisation in the management of society, economy and nature – what Olukoshi has called ‘developmental democracy’ – which Africans have sought throughout the era of adjustment (and its ‘successor regimes’):
The formulation of a renewed developmentalist agenda would, inevitably, involve a well-thought strategy for bringing the state back into the policy formulation and implementation process. After some decades of neoliberal demonisation of the state, this would seem to be a point on which there is increasing consensus but it is important to stress that within the framework of the developmental democracy which is being proposed, the role of the state in the development process is treated as a legitimate one by definition. It is also a role that goes beyond the simple creation of an ‘enabling environment’ as the Bank frequently suggests. Beyond any regulatory and enabling functions, the objective need exists economically, socially and politically for the state to take a leading role in the development process of African countries. Given the profound damage which has been done to the state in Africa over the last two decades of structural adjustment, its reinstatement as a central development player will necessarily involve an investment in rebuilding its capacity for effective policy formulation and implementation. In a sense, effective policy capacity is integral to the rehabilitation of the state as a legitimate organiser of the development process. (Olukoshi 2001)
In this issue, David Williams analyses the World Bank's policy interventions in one of the ‘showcase’ African states: Ghana. By detailing the ways in which policies are funded, advocated, and (at least in part) designed by the Bank, Williams shows how liberal interventions are realised. In effect, the state is pushed between a ‘scissors movement’ of both rollback and disciplining, and enabling and capacity building. The underlying dynamic here is a need for external agencies both to remain hostile towards ‘big’ government, but also to rely upon the state to audit and reform society, and to facilitate market expansion.
The kind of ‘liberal imaginary’ that Williams avers also relies on a certain kind of civil society which both complements and restrains the state. This expected relation seems especially absurd in the context of many African countries – an absurdity that is a clear symptom of the continued ideological imperialism of Western intellectuals concerned with development. In this issue, we have articles that reveal the more intricate, nationally specific – politically fraught – interactions between states and socio-political organisations. Lene Bull Christiansen considers the ways in which ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe has elaborated a discourse in which it has positioned itself as the protector of women. In doing so, it has portrayed women as a metaphor for Zimbabwe's nationhood and represented the opposition movement as undermining or even threatening women's/Zimbabwe's integrity or wellbeing. Bashir Ali then analyses the struggles of citizen-based organisations in the face of an increasingly authoritarian state Islam under the National Islamic Front in Sudan.
This edition also carries two articles on Africa's relations with India. Amrita Narlikar sets out a context of renewed (but not entirely novel) interest in East Africa on the part of India. Gerard McCann looks at a specific country case study – Kenya – to tease out some of the more fine-grained aspects of the political economy of Indian involvement in East Africa. Starting with a recognition of the history of Indian involvement in the region – a product of British colonialism, McCann highlights the ways in which different forms of investment have been realised in Kenya through attitudes towards ethnicity and connections to the state.
Finally, Cyril Obi meticulously examines the various ‘resource curse’ approaches to conflict in Africa, and more specifically in the Niger Delta region. Pointing towards a kind of fetishisation of oil, he offers a more historically embedded political economy reminiscent of Gauteng's concept of structural violence.