On January 30th, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Lula da Silva who had just been sworn in for the second time. It’s about a free trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union. And it’s about a climate club that is supposed to be effective globally, and particularly in the sensitive Amazon basin. A touching side comment welcomes Brazil’s return to the world stage. All these points are political consensus and hardly worth a headline. Things got exciting, however, when da Silva talks about the war in Ukraine. The fact that the well-known and deliberately vague rhetoric was not used here could have been due to the fact that da Silva did not know that the welcoming announcements would be followed by a public press briefing with questions from journalists. First he says that “there is no fight if only one wants it” and that “one must want peace”. Then he even wants to play a mediating role himself and together with China, India and Indonesia in the conflict, whose causes, he says, “are not so clear”. Some would think that the expansion of NATO is behind it. Brazil, he says, “is a peaceful country” and “has no interest in supplying Ukraine with munitions or getting indirectly involved in the war in any other way”. Yet at the same time, he maintains that Putin has made a grave mistake. Scholz is irritated. His advisor Jens Plötner is called on stage and disappears after a brief exchange. The rest of the conversation proceeds as one would expect from a meeting of two political heavyweights with extensive experience – the art of stripping words of all meaning. [1]
The incident is not terribly surprising. The two heads of government who Scholz had previously met in Argentina and Chile also avoided war involvement despite verbal encouragement. And Lula himself had already criticized the West in an interview with Time magazine in May 2022 [2]. Biden should have flown to Moscow he said and NATO should have ruled out Ukraine’s membership. Thus one had made oneself complicit. [3] In the West, many are disappointed with the position of the man who, after four years of right-wing populist self-isolation, was elevated to office with a lot of prepaid morality. Andreas Kluth writes “If Lula can’t wrap his mind around the moral geometry in Ukraine, Europe and the world, he doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.” For Chinese and Russian newspapers, the incident is a ready meal. One uses the opportunity to characterize U.S. imperialism as a failed project, while the other contrasts it with its own pacifism. After almost a year, everyone is probably familiar with the two lines of argumentation and has settled somewhere in between. I don’t want to add anything to this debate. I am missing the expertise for what would be necessary and the necessity for what I could offer – yet another assessment. However, I would like to point out one aspect that I feel is lacking.
The Global North once again Bears the Fate of the World
In 2021, the Heidelberg Conflict Barometer identifies 20 conflicts in 17 states where the level of destruction and the number of casualties meet the definition of a war. They all are located in the global South. [3] The Upsala Conflict Data Program counts a total of 1.1 million deaths from organized violence in the decade since 2011. 1.09 million of them in the Global South. [4] The internal Displacement Monitor Center records 38 million people forced into internal displacement by conflict and environmental disasters in 2021. 37.2 million of them in the Global South. [5] The distribution of the 9 million hunger deaths is even more lopsided. [6] These metrics of human suffering can be expanded at will, yet they will always point to one very simple fact: Human suffering correlates negatively with prosperity. And prosperity cannot be better captured by any distinction of the world than by the subdivision between Global North and Global South.
Despite the distinct nature of this distribution, the salvation of human dignity usually finds its epicenter in the global North. This structure is also followed in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The suffering of this region is omnipresent in global media and becomes the subject of nearly every diplomatic exchange. Even Brazil, which is far away, has to express itself to the various representatives, all of whom are keen to have their own point of view echoed. And Brazil? at best they risk political and economic cooperation with only one of the conflicting parties if they do finally commit themselves to a tangible position. Brazil is currently struggling with the aftermath of the corona-induced recession, a deep societal divide of periodically changing populist, conflict-induced supply chain collapses, and a steadily increasing number of climate-related natural disasters. Nevertheless, Da silva’s moral integrity, and thus the foundation of any cooperation, is measured against a distant conflict. And even if there was a moral geometry within Europe, which could be understood or not understood in the same way as the Pythagorean theorem, where is the global north’s understanding of conflicts elsewhere? Few people could find the democratic republic of Congo on an unlabeled map, yet alone grasp the complexity of the multi-faceted, multi-actor conflict. And geopolitically speaking: Why should they? The abuse of the Rohingya does not trigger technology embargoes against Russia, the conflict in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray does not cause gas prices in Germany to rise, and even the Congolese paramilitaries cannot endanger rare earth supply chains in the USA. Impacts of this magnitude are concentrated in the hands of the gloabl North’s political elite.
This paragraph could be read as if I wanted to say: “Human suffering doesn’t matter at all, in reality it’s all about geopolitics” – But I’ll go one step further: Of course it’s about geopolitics – The problem is that geopolitics is declared to be an object that cannot be separated from the global north. Anyones geopolitics has to consist of alignment, differentiation and interrelation with the north. To say that a conflict is far away and thus not interesting is an insult so unfamiliar to the political elite of the global north that it causes more confusion than anger. How can the Brazilian president let anything other than the Ukraine conflict define his international identity? And how can leaders of African states consider themselves anything other than NPCs in the global power game between East (North) and West (North)?
Political hegemony is not advanced with a quivering voice, eloquent arguments and mighty gestures – but with a “smurf-like grin” (Original: “Schlumpfiges Gegrinse” – A conservative politician coined the term in the 2021 presidential election for Scholz’s simple-hearted and small-minded appearance [7]). The hierarchy of the importance of one matter over another is not anymore spread through biblical excesses or racist science, it is passively assumed to be normal and thus actively normalized. As is so often the case, power resides in that which no longer needs to be said – in that which can claim global validity even when delivered with a smurf-like grin. If Olaf Scholz feels like a missionary or promoter in Brasília, it is only for the purpose of deciding between what could recently be simplistically called the East and West. The decision between north and south is not rejected, but unknown, and its sudden emergence reveals a terrain whose exploration requires the abandonment of all established paths of argumentation.
okay, now what?
Some readers may have already wondered where this argument is headed. May have wondered whose side I am on. And hopefully – should this have been the case – will have felt a little bad for it in the last paragraph. Because I’m not making an argument for or against Lula, nor for or against Putin, Zelenskyy, Biden, Scholz, or any other individual. My argument is much more about the unspoken premises without which this debate could not be understood. I am concerned with the self-importance with which the political elite of the global North elevates its affairs to universal prominence. These affairs have no intrinsic characteristics that make them deserving of this prominence. Rather, they are circle arguments – they are said to be important, and then they actually are. Those who claim that the conflict in Ukraine is less important than the far more deadly conflict in Yemen fail to recognize that it was the Russian invasion that shook commodity prices, economic indicators, and political regimes around the world. Conflicts become “important” when states agree to put their economic and political resources at their service. A conflict that is on the agenda of two countries that are not officially involved in the war has become a fundamental structural element of world politics. A structural element whose misuse or non-use comes with high political costs. With this threat, a large part of humanity is rendered into passive bystanders of history in the great process of this universalization.
Anyone who still thinks that this argumentation serves an opinion that is very much localized in the Ukraine conflict underestimates the unpredictable dynamics of the discourse that I am advocating. For example, the pursuit of the quickest possible end to the war could be forced by massive armament of Ukraine but also by support for Russia as well as by pressure applied to both countries to find civil solutions to the conflict.
Olaf Scholz has a clear interest in Ukraine and it is his right as a human being and as an elected official to choose his political priorities accordingly. My criticism only arises when he goes on tour with this list of priorities and expects to be met with a degree of knowledge and commitment to his concerns that he could never return in this way. And by the way, this is not an argument of democratic or multicultural romanticism. Brazil has replaced Russia as the 10th largest economy in 2023, according to the IMF. So even if we stick to GDP as a metric of importance, we should slowly get used to the idea that empathy and commitment will have to be traded symmetrically in the future.
[1] Federal Government of Germany; 2022; Press Conference between Federal Chancellor Scholz and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on January 30, 2023 in Brazil.
[2] Nugent, Ciara; 2022; Lula Talks to TIME About Ukraine, Bolsonaro, and Brazil’s Fragile Democracy.
[3] Frontini, Peter; 2022; Brazil’s Lula says Zelenskiy ‘as responsible as Putin’ for Ukraine war.
[4] Uppsala Conflict Data Program; 2022; Exploratory World Map – Fatalities View.
[5] Internal Dispalcement Monitoring Center; 2022; Children and Youth in Internal Displacement.
[6] Global Hunger Index; 2022; Food Systems Transformation and Local Government.
[7] Zips, Martin; 2021; Schlumpfiges Gegrinse.
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