The myopic ethnocentrism of G7
The ideological global North-South divide
The G7 Summit was held in the Italian southern region of Apulia on November 15-16, 2024. Attending the Summit were the presidents of the United States and France, Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron; German Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz; and the prime ministers of the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Italy, Rishi Sunak, Fumio Kishida, Justin Trudeau and Giorgia Meloni, who served as host. Among the guests were Pope Francis; the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres; and the leaders of Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Tunisia, Türkiye, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Jordan, Mauritania and India.
The Apulia G7 Leaders’ Communiqué reveals the ethnocentrism of those who hold political power in the G7 nations.
G7 wants China to follow the international trading rules, without engaging in “industrial targeting and comprehensive non-market policies,” such as subsidizing industries and requiring technology transfers in commercial transactions. G7 ignores the fact that for six decades the Global South has declared that developing nations must take decisive state action with respect to their economies in accordance with comprehensive economic plans, as a necessary precondition for socioeconomic development and for overcoming the economic legacy of colonialism. China is taking a leading role in demonstrating the positive results of this strategy for developing countries.
The Global South has called for a “dialogue of civilizations,” and it has established the foundation for the proposed dialogue in the declarations that it has authored with a consensual voice for six decades. But G7 believes it has no obligation to dialogue with nations that represent the majority of humanity in order to arrive to consensus concerning the rules that ought to govern world trade and other dimensions of the world order. G7 believes that it has the right to impose the rules on the world’s Great Majority.
G7 calls for an end to Russia’s “illegal war of aggression” against Ukraine and payment for damages caused. It makes no mention of the years of NATO expansionism toward the Russian frontier, nor the violence perpetuated against the population of Russian majority areas of Ukraine, which provoked protest from Moscow, the signing of agreements ignored by Kiev and the West, and ultimately the Russian military operation in Ukraine. G7 does not believe that Russia has a right to defend itself, and it does not seek a negotiated solution. To the contrary, G7 is developing structures for the permanent financing of Western arms to Ukraine, including the use of interest accumulating in frozen Russian bank assets in Europe and the United States as collateral for a $50 billion loan for military aid to Ukraine.
G7 maintains that Iran “must provide convincing assurances that its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful;” it expresses concern that Iran is not currently cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency. It does not reaffirm the principle that all nations have the sovereign right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. And it makes no mention of the fact that Iran has always declared that it is not developing and will never develop nuclear arms. Iran opened its nuclear energy facilities for inspection, and the world powers in the era of Obama were satisfied. The G7 sees no reason to mention that Iran does not believe that it is bound to the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal with the world powers following the withdrawal of the United States from the deal during the Trump administration.
G7 demands an end to harassment of opposition parties in Venezuela. It ignores the historic pattern of certain opposition parties to engage in undemocratic and divisive practices, and that Venezuela’s numerous elections have been certified as valid by credible international observers. It does not want to recognize that Venezuela is complying with the Barbados Agreement of October 2023, negotiated between the government and the opposition.
G7 makes no mention of Cuba or the six-decades of embargo and blockade against the Caribbean Island nation by the USA, or the intensification of the blockade since 2019, provoking shortages in medicines, medical services, and food. It does not note that these tactics of unconventional war have been applied against a nation that in 1979 and again in 2006 was elected chair of the Non-Aligned Movement and was elected president pro tempore for 2023 of G77, two international associations that represent the Great Majority of states.
G7 speaks of democratic values, respect for human rights, and democratic institutions and processes. It displays no awareness, even less understanding, of the new forms of democracy that have been developed by China and Cuba, among others, which are based on systems of direct and indirect elections and people’s assemblies. These new forms of democracy have attained political stability, while representative democracies are experiencing legitimation crises, as a result of their structural tendency to foster division and a legal form of corruption with money.
Above and beyond its myopic ethnocentrism, the G7 communiqué is hypocritical. It declares its desire to contribute to the development of the nations of the world through cooperation, diversification, and debt reduction. Yet the G7 governments sanction nations of the global East and South that pursue these goals, insofar as they do so in a form inconsistent with rules imposed by the G7. One finds in the communiqué no recognition of historic and contemporary patterns of interference in the internal affairs of nations by the Western powers, in pursuit of their own economic interests. It is beyond the capacities of the authors of the communiqué to suggest that Western imperialist policies are a principal cause of deepening underdevelopment in the nations of the South and the consequent emergence of a multidimensional world crisis.
The issue of the development of Africa, however, is not entirely hypocritical, taking into account that the Summit was held in Italy. Right-wing Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose political position has been strengthened by the surge of parties of the Right in Europe, favors increasing investment for development in Africa and a non-exploitative relation between Europe and Africa as a means of reducing migratory pressure on Europe. It appears that the promotion of African development has emerged as a cause of the Right in Europe, while the Left in Europe (and the USA) gives emphasis to a more limited project of humanitarian assistance to the desperate souls who arrive with nothing to their borders.
On the question of international migration, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed support for Meloni’s approach, saying that “we can’t have criminal gangs decide who comes to our countries.” Britain has arranged to deport some asylum seekers to Rwanda, but the flights have been blocked by human rights organizations.
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True leaders educate the people, who possess a spontaneous desire for liberty and justice, but who lack political maturity and consciousness. However, the political establishment of the G7 nations, unable to prevent the fall of their economies relative to the emerging economies of the Global East and South, have decided to turn to lies and omissions, seeking to take advantage of the limited political consciousness of their peoples.
There is no reason that the politicians who speak for the previously most powerful nations of the world-system ought to apologize for the sins of their precursors. We all ought to appreciate that European conquest, colonial domination, and peripheralization of the world, even though manifestly unjust, brought great economic and cultural advances to humanity. Such has been the way of humanity since the agricultural revolution more than five thousand years ago, in that the great civilizations and empires in human history have been created on a foundation of conquest. However, political leaders today must possess political consciousness of the fact that future human progress cannot be constructed on the basis of competition among imperialist powers, particularly imperialist powers in decline. The world of tomorrow must be built on cooperation and mutually beneficial trade among nations, and that necessary road can only be constructed on the basis of a dialogue of civilizations, as is discerned and proposed by leaders today in China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, among other nations.
The peoples of the North must move beyond rebellion. They must seek to replace myopic, ethnocentric politicians with leaders who understand the needs of the time. They must join in the great anti-imperialist movement forged by humanity in defense of itself.
In this task, the peoples must be led by intellectuals/leaders, because without leadership, the people, ill-at-ease in the face of the current challenges and distrustful of the political establishment, will turn to fascism. The rise of fascism today, as in the twentieth century, is a consequence of the failure of leftist intellectuals to accurately discern and patiently explain. We need today a creative ideological reconceptualization that rectifies historic errors in understanding and strategy of both the Left and the Right.
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