FRAGMENT 5: GOING GLOBAL
Thus far the focus has been on the fractured society of England/UK. But what price a social transformation of society in England and the UK if this is accomplished at the price of worsening living conditions in other countries? It should be noted that most people in the world are very poor, with the poorest 50%, nearly 4 billion people, living on less than $6.70 a day. If a person is living on $30 per day he or she belongs in the richest 15% of the world’s citizenry ($30 a day corresponds roughly to the poverty line set by high-income countries like the UK). The country presently with the lowest expectation of life at birth is the Central African Republic at 53 years (although it is now around 40 years in Gaza). In this fragment I stress that the Global North and Global South are intimately connected, typically to the disadvantage of the latter. Inter-state inequalities matter as much as intra-state inequalities. Globalisation and ‘connectivity’ have been features of the capitalist world for some time, but the combination of rentier capitalism, the climate crisis and the growing threat of spreading and potentially all-consuming warfare makes sociological analyses with global reach an urgent necessity.
Much of the Global South – most obviously the continent of Africa – comprises a mosaic of nation-state boundaries overwhelmingly drawn up from the eighteenth century onwards by the colonising powers of Europe, and particularly England, for their own economic and political convenience and benefit. They are boundaries that rode, and ride, roughshod over indigenous homelands, ways of living and decision-making. Whole regions of the Global South are the constructs of past imperial interests. In the Middle East, it was ‘Great’ Britain that planted the new state of Israel in Palestine. And successive British governments, whether Conservative or Labour, have been, and remain, collaborators in ever more expansive Israeli occupations and the genocide currently practiced by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Today’s maps, coalescing into the basic division between a largely exploitative Global North and a disproportionately exploited Global South, are the function of a brutal imperialist past, once exclusively territorial but now increasingly technological. It is a division that has given rise to the two outstanding issues facing us in the twenty-first century: climate change and a series of inter-state conflicts so perilous that the prospect of a Third World War cannot be taken lightly.
Climate Change
So insistent is the research on climate change that scientists have employed the term Anthropocene to refer to a new geological period in the Earth’s history characterised by human intervention. What we do and how we do it is now known to impact on the substance and trajectory of life on our planet. A key turning point was the significant surge in human activity captured most powerfully by the industrial phase of capitalism pioneered in England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Markers of the change have come to include the increasing consumption of fossil fuels, the greater use of nitrogen fertilisers and the corollaries of enhanced global trade. The ten warmest years since records were first kept nearly 150 years ago have occurred since 2010. And still temperatures are increasing. It is evident that the rate of future increases is dependent on how much carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases are omitted. Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – are the largest contributors to global climate change, accounting for over 75% of all CO2 omissions. As greenhouse gas emissions blanket the Earth, they trap the sun’s heat. This leads to global warming and climate change.
The dire consequences of climate change are not, and will not, just affect poorer and more exposed countries like Bangladesh in the Global South. It is calculated that in the absence of urgent remedial action, Europe too will experience significantly higher temperatures, droughts and wildfires, shortages of fresh water, floods, a rise in sea levels in coastal areas, soil erosion and widespread ecological disruption. Southern Mediterranean countries are already experiencing raised temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius and a spate of wildfires causing mass excavations and considerable infrastructural and economic damage. As sociologist Ulrich Beck anticipated, today’s ‘risks’ have expanded exponentially in their severity and reach. They are worldwide. They are no longer confined to people in what have been called the poorer peripheral and semi-peripheral countries of the world system (preponderantly in the Global South). They now display a ‘boomerang effect’, revisiting those responsible for generating them in the first place, namely those residing in the richer core countries of the world system (clustered in the Global North). Climate change is a classic instance. And notwithstanding repeated warnings of a ‘closing window of opportunity’ from the United Nations experts a succession of governments, including those of the UK, have substituted rhetoric for action. Only lip service has been paid to truly effective measures. Behind the scenes, confidential deals have been struck with the capital monopolists financing and controlling the world’s major oil companies that neutralise or cancel out the impact of mitigating actions. In stark contrast to this tranche of capital monopolists, those who protest this political hypocrisy in Starmer’s UK, like ‘Stop Oil’, are being criminalised and imprisoned. The jury is out of whether or not it is too late to protect our species from the severe and protracted heating of planet Earth.
War
Violent conflict has been an omnipresent feature of human societies, but the capacity for mass slaughter is being compounded by ever-newer technologies. While older ways of killing subsist, we are on the cusp of an era when Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, or robots ‘free to make their own decisions’, will be in serious play. War, in other words, has become multifaceted, long term and decentralised with the boundaries between military and civil strategies becoming blurred. The geopolitically dominant core countries of the Global North like the USA and the UK have not been reticent in fighting, precipitating, sponsoring and exporting war in all its guises. The attention of the Western powers may on the Russian incursion into Ukraine (the rationale for politically expedient Starmer’s warmongering); but major wars launched by the USA since 1945 are those in Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, to which should be added minor active engagements in the Bay of Pigs, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North-West Pakistan, Somalia and Northeastern Kenya, Libya, Syria and the Yemeni Civil War. As for the UK, few of its citizens appreciate that its military has used or threatened the use of force frequently in the postwar era. No fewer than 83 interventions in 47 different countries have been documented since 1945. These range from brutal colonial wars to covert operations to prop up favoured regimes or to deter civil unrest. The use of force for overt invasions or armed attempts to overthrown governments include British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1953, Egypt in the 1950s, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011. Britain postwar military history has been shaped by its longstanding role as a colonial and ‘hegemonic’ world power, which continues to cast a long and deep shadow over the present world system. This is not to excuse Putin’s assault on Ukraine, although the origins of this are more complex than ‘our’ propaganda allows for. But it is to lend perspective to the prevailing geopolitics of war.
Similarly to the threat of climate change, that of war is accelerating. The threat of the use of nuclear weapons is back following the end of the cold war. And the research is frightening, as well as illustrating Beck’s notion of the boomerang effect of the worldwide risks now facing us. A major nuclear exchange, scientists have suggested, could plunge the surface of the Global North into virtual darkness for up to six months and reduce the surface temperature in some areas by up to 40 degrees Celsius for a similar period. The destruction of the ozone layer by thermonuclear fireballs would let two or three times as much ultraviolet light reach the surface, causing lethal sunburn or blindness in exposed humans. Nor would this scenario of a nuclear winter be satisfied with a projected several hundred million lives. Many more lives would be sacrificed due to the famine and disease that would be its inevitable by-products.
One of the inevitable and entirely predictable results of the economic and political exploitation of the Global South by the Global North, climate change and the omnipresent threat of escalating conflict and the use of near-indescribable weaponry, apart from immiseration and panic, is mass out-migration from peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. One in 67 people worldwide is now displaced. But this constellation of major threats to poorer people in poorer nations is being met by indifference by governments like that in the UK. More than indifference in fact. There are ‘votes in racism’, Conservative and Labour Parties alike have deduced from their surveys and focus groups. ‘Stop the boats’ carrying desperate displaced people committed to a last-ditch hope of a better life in the UK is the cry. They are trying to ‘purge’ and ‘cleanse’ the English Channel to pull the rug from under the feet of Farage’s neo-fascist Reform Party by piggybacking on its explicitly racist appeal to the electorate. British people aspiring to a better society for all are disenfranchised.