Africa in multipolarity
Charles Onana, France
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Political scientist , journalist and essayist
The countries and peoples of Africa have experienced repeated attacks from the West and parts of the East throughout their history and cultural, political, and economic diversity
through colonial conquests. To address this reality, some sought to change the situation in the 1950s and 1960s by creating national liberation movements. However, many of these movements were crushed and repressed in bloodshed by or with the help of the colonial system.
As a result, some African leaders, believing they were protecting their regimes, chose to ally themselves with the West by signing economic and military agreements with European institutions, France, Great Britain, or the United States. During the Cold War, the world lived under the influence or domination of two major blocs: the West and the USSR. International politics revolved around these two poles for about four decades. Considering that this narrow view of the world could not accurately reflect the aspirations of peoples or their contribution to the management of world affairs, Africans and Asians began a major reflection process that led to the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955. At the time, there was a clear desire to lay the foundations for the creation of a
multipolar world, which would be called the “Non-Aligned Movement.” This movement was an innovation in international politics and its vision was broadly in line with the United Nations Charter signed in 1945, which in its first article called for “the development of friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.”
This was clearly a matter of applying the right to self-determination. This is very clearly about applying the right to self-determination. The Bandung meeting raised concerns among the Western establishment, which saw it above all as a threat to its hegemonic policy in both Africa and Asia. In contrast to the fears expressed in the West, in both Africa and Asia it was the thirst for freedom that prevailed. One of the main initiators of this conference, Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru, took a
more peaceful and serene position on this subject. There was no war against the West, but a need to work for the right to equality and self-determination for the peoples of Africa and Asia. In short, Bandung was simply the expression of a desire for political and economic independence among peoples who wanted to manage their own destiny, without outside interference.
Although this desire to create a multipolar world was somewhat neutralized or put on hold by the omnipotence of the United States and the emergence of a unipolar world after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it is reappearing today with the affirmation of the BRICS countries—China, Russia, India, South Africa, and Brazil—and their desire to break with unipolarity. All the world’s cultural, political, economic, and environmental wealth can be expressed and radiate more fully in this new context than within the narrow confines of a stifling unipolar space.
Thus, multipolarity now appears to be a global emergency, an intellectual obligation to rethink international relations, and an urgent duty for the states of Africa and Asia. It is also an extraordinary opportunity for the West to regenerate itself by discovering or rediscovering
parts of the world that it had ignored, neglected, or dispossessed. In this respect, multipolarity undoubtedly becomes a source of mutual enrichment and an opening towards new horizons for nations.