Rich people don’t grasp that they have a warped perspective on the world. Which is why, for instance, climate activists (who skew very heavily to the rich end of town — just look at the Teals, or the blazer-wearing private school luvvies “striking for climate”) just don’t get that their “great moral challenge” is very much a boutique obsession for the idle rich.
No wonder they were so enraged by Bill Leak’s cartoon depicting poverty-stricken Indian villagers’ annoyed reaction to being sent solar panels instead of food.
Similarly, much of the wealthy West doesn’t grasp that its other supposed Great Moral Challenge, the Ukraine war, is all a bit of a yawneroo for a great deal of the world. Even worse for The Current Thing crowd, more than a few of their beloved Global South see the whole thing in a quite different light.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made headlines over the weekend when his claim the Ukraine war was ‘launched against’ Russia provoked laughter from the audience during a forum in India.
But I was in the room and can report he also received applause and indifference. Understanding why can help explain the differences in views on the war between developing countries and the West.
Tellingly, Lavrov was speaking at the Raisina Dialogue, India’s premier geopolitical forum. Among the 30-plus foreign ministers and current and former heads of state, the “global south” was heavily represented. Many were inclined to either doze through the whole Ukraine thing or — shock, horror! — be more inclined to take Russia’s side.
One of the European experts I spoke to posed the question starkly: why doesn’t the global south care more about the war?
Like the war itself, much of it is a legacy of the Cold War. Back then, the Soviet Union strategically supported anti-colonial movements around the world. Sure, their motivations were as mercenary as any American regime change, but the fact remains that many of these countries remember that it was Russia that supplied them with guns and money.
This is most evident for India, but also for others such as Vietnam and Laos. They may have bonds of affection with Russia or more tangible links, such as a reliance on Russian arms.
These three countries were among 32 that abstained from voting on a resolution at the UN General Assembly last week—alongside China, South Africa and others—calling for an end to the war and demanding Russia leave Ukraine’s territory.
More pointedly, if some of us in the West have noticed the glaring hypocrisy of our leaders hyperventilating about an illegal Russian war, hot on the heels of two decades of illegal wars of our own, even more of the global south is onto them.
And some countries in the global south are repulsed by what they see as Western hypocrisy and double standards. Lavrov received audience applause, for example, when he criticised the US-led invasion of Iraq and other Western transgressions.
He also tried hard to paint the flow-on effects of the war—such as the impact of the Ukraine war on grain supplies to developing countries—as the fault of the West.
Which is not entirely unreasonable. The global shortage of natural gas, and fertilisers derived from it, is in no small part due to the fact that Western countries smugly demolished their own gas extraction industries, assuming they could rely on Russian imports. When Germany and Britain are scrambling to find gas to heat their homes and keep the lights on, that’s so much less fertiliser to grow food with.
Finally, more than a few just don’t give a shit about a squabble between two corrupt former Soviet provinces in the boonies of Eastern Europe. After all, what’s a war on the other side of the world to them, when they’ve got war a’plenty in their own backyards. Many might ask why they should “Stand With Ukraine”, when no one gave a shit about them. There’s not exactly a wave of social media users adopting dinky little Congolese flags on their profiles.
Even without a war of their own, they’ve got plenty of other rather more pressing concerns to worry about.
These include equitable access to healthcare, climate adaptation, insufficient digital infrastructure, terrorism, lack of development finance, food and fuel insecurity, the debt crisis and the overriding imperative of sustainable growth […]
This drives home an important point that Western leaders should keep top of mind: if the West wants developing countries to care about its concerns, it needs to care about the issues that matter to the developing world.
The Strategist
So, wealthy Teals and Greens voters in Double Bay, Grey Lynn and Ponsonby, stop finger-wagging people in poor countries about “climate change”. They’re too busy trying to get food on the table, and electricity to their village, to give a shit.
