The Raging 2020s

by Alec Ross

  The inflection point for the two Korean states came half a century ago, but if there’s any region of the world that’s at a similarly high-stakes decision point right now it is sub-Saharan Africa. The fate of many African nations—and potentially their world power—will hinge on the decisions they make in the 2020s.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, democracy spread across Africa. Socialist regimes and military dictatorships across the continent gave way to representative governments. Elections replaced military coups as the way for leaders to assume office. Those leaders established institutions to promote the health, security, and well-being of their citizens. While the push toward democracy was by no means universal, the early 21st century saw many African countries rebuilding a social contract that had been undone by centuries of colonization, war, and regime change. Those efforts also enjoyed the financial and political support of Western democracies fresh off a victory in the Cold War.

  But over the last decade, a variety of familiar forces have chipped away at those reforms, destabilizing the continent’s precarious democracies.

  In many African countries, governments are reverting to old authoritarian tendencies. Leaders who came to power through the ballot box are exploiting their posts to remain in office. As of March 2020, seven of the world’s eleven longest-serving non-royal heads of state hailed from Africa. All but one—President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea—have retained power through general elections, though in most cases watchdogs questioned the legitimacy of the results.

  Yet the biggest change facing Africa today is the makeup of society itself. Today, Africa is home to some 1.3 billion people, making it the world’s second-most populous continent behind Asia. It’s also the world’s youngest continent. The median age is only twenty years old, which means children and teenagers make up more than half the population. As those young people start having children of their own, the continent is poised for a population boom unlike anything the world has ever seen.

  Over the next three decades, the United Nations expects the population of Africa to nearly double, reaching 2.5 billion. By the turn of the next century, the population will surpass 4.3 billion. In the year 2100, about 40 percent of all humans will live in Africa. Meanwhile, the share of the population living in the thirty-six OECD member countries will shrink from 17.3 percent to 12.4 percent. African leaders need to figure out a way to provide basic necessities to a population that is expected to triple over the next eighty years.

  If they fail to do so, the continent risks falling into chaos, and the world may follow. “If that youth bulge doesn’t have a social contract with its government that allows for good education, good jobs, good housing, good infrastructure, and good health care, then things will start to fray at the edges,” said Johnnie Carson, a former ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, who coached me through all my diplomatic projects in Africa while we worked together at the State Department.

  The population explosion is placing greater strain on the already rickety institutions established by African governments, exacerbating many of the problems countries are facing today. Terrorism and insurgency are on the rise in Africa, with extremist groups like Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab. High unemployment and weak social safety nets have proven the perfect recruitment tools for violent extremists, and when African governments are unable to provide their citizens with the basic necessities for a good life, people seek change not through ballot boxes but through bombs and the imposition of religious authoritarianism.

  At the same time, climate change is reshaping the face of the continent. Already, people in the Sahel region of West Africa are fleeing the increasingly infertile lands for more lush coastal areas or immigrating to Europe. By 2050, the World Bank estimates some eighty-four million sub-Saharan Africans will be forced to migrate due to climate change.

  The combination of explosive population growth, climate change, and weak social contracts could create a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions. In the first decades of the 21st century, the international community has struggled to handle the seventy million people displaced by conflict around the world. Imagine how countries would respond if the global refugee population grew tenfold.

  Still, that future is not set in stone. A growing population could just as easily lead to prosperity as chaos. It just depends on how the society is structured. Today, the dilemma for many African nations mirrors the dilemma of the world at large. They are teetering between two very different visions of the future.

  On one side of the spectrum, you have a handful of African nations that have embraced market democracy. In countries like Ghana, Senegal, Botswana, Mauritius, and Namibia, government institutions are mostly strong, and elected leaders tend to work to improve the lives of their citizens. Corruption is comparatively low, social programs are well funded, and there is mutual respect between government officials and citizens.

  On the other side, a number of countries have reverted to a more authoritarian model. Though countries like Uganda, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, and Burundi are all democracies on paper, in practice they operate much more like autocracies. And as these notionally democratic governments become more authoritarian in practice, their actions are being reinforced by a powerful geopolitical ally: China.

  Ambassador Carson sees the rise of China as one of the biggest threats to Africa’s fledgling democratic institutions. Would-be authoritarians are “encouraged by the success of what they see in China and discouraged by what they see as a fraying of the social contract in some democratic societies,” he told me.

  Moreover, the success of China’s “authoritarian capitalism” offers African governments a blueprint for building an economically prosperous society while keeping citizens under tight control. And China is supplying leaders with the tools to do both.

  Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China is investing tens of billions of dollars in building and refurbishing public infrastructure across Africa. State-of-the-art airport terminals funded by China have popped up, and Chinese companies are resurrecting dilapidated highways and railroads (some of which were laid more than a century ago by European colonists) to link rural outposts to seaports and metropolitan hubs. Even the headquarters of the African Union, a stunning glass-and-steel complex in the heart of Addis Ababa, was built through Chinese investment. As of September 2019, all but fourteen of Africa’s fifty-four countries were participating in Belt and Road in some form.

  “These are enormous infrastructure projects, things that they can’t get the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund to finance,” Ambassador Carson said. “They can’t get the EU to do them and they can’t get the US to do them, but they need them. And so they go to the Chinese.”

  The Belt and Road projects often come with strings attached. Much of the funding comes in the form of less-than-transparent loans, leaving African nations with bills they can’t afford to pay. This “debt-trap diplomacy” gives China outsized influence over the policies of African countries, which the Chinese use to their benefit.

  Sometimes these interests are economic. In 2017, the government of Guinea-Conakry granted China access to mineral reserves in exchange for a $20 billion loan to build roads, power lines, and a university. Chinese companies also flood Africa with inexpensive cell phones, cars, clothes, and other consumer goods, cornering a market largely ignored by Western retailers.

  In other cases, the interests are strategic. China constructed its first overseas naval base in Djibouti after spending years supplying the country with new railways, telecommunications infrastructure, and ports. The African Union headquarters was completed after the Chinese government “donated” $200 million for its construction. Employees later discovered the building’s IT systems had been transmitting confidential data to Shanghai every night.

  But while China has ramped up its investment in Africa, Western governments and companies have been more hesitant to do business on the continent. While the Americans and Europeans might balk at cutting a deal
with an oppressive government, Carson said the Chinese have no such qualms. Additionally, US companies are forbidden from bribing foreign officials to further their business interests, but in certain parts of Africa payoffs are standard practice. Again, according to Ambassador Carson, the Chinese are happy to buy their way into a deal.

  I recall being in Gabon for a summit of more than a dozen African heads of state and nine hundred African business leaders. I traveled there with a little group of economists and other thought leaders, and we were all being well paid to speak to the heads of state and business leaders. I came to realize that we were just a bit of side entertainment, like the soccer player hired to acrobatically juggle a soccer ball in front of the ballroom. The real business took place in hotel suites and the presidential palace, where a few dozen Chinese government and business representatives negotiated with the African leaders. When a deal was ready to be signed, a loud gong would indicate the beginning of a ceremony, complete with a light show, dramatic music, and foot-long ornamental pens with which the infrastructure deals were signed between the African governments and the Chinese representatives. When I asked one of the event organizers about it, he said the event organization itself obscured its real business, which was a cut of every deal that got signed. Since the business was incorporated in France, it was not subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

  China also does its part to help leaders maintain their grip on power. The governments of at least a dozen African countries—including Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa—employ artificial intelligence tools built by the Chinese to conduct surveillance on their citizens. In some cases, these systems feed information back to China to help developers improve their own surveillance capabilities.

  “The Chinese don’t care whether they’re dealing with a good government or bad government, they don’t care whether the leader is a democrat or autocrat, they don’t care whether he’s got human rights violations,” Ambassador Carson said. “We practice our political engagement, our diplomacy, with a higher degree of integrity and commitment to principles and values than they do.”

  As a result, many African countries looking to embrace democracy find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. With little support from the West and faced with rapidly changing economic, social, and environmental tides, governments teetering between democracy and authoritarianism may have no choice but to work with China. And as those ties grow closer, their social contracts may follow suit.

  Building a democratic Africa will require the US and other Western democracies to completely rethink their approach to the continent, Ambassador Carson said. Even if officials want to model their social contract after the United States or the Nordic countries, many still need help to build the trust and institutions that underlie an effective social contract. With sufficient support for democratic governments and social institutions, the forty-nine countries of sub-Saharan Africa could become important allies, lucrative trading partners, and proponents of human rights. Without it, African nations could fall under the Chinese sphere of influence and extend the reach of an authoritarian model of governance. Carson argues that Western democracies must recognize that investment in Africa isn’t just “a humanitarian gesture … but a strategic investment to build stronger partnerships in the future.”

  This same principle applies across other regions of the world, including the United States. There are deep humanitarian reasons to identify the holes in our social contract and commit all the resources we have at our disposal to solve them. There are also simple strategic reasons. The next decade will be defined by the rivalry between Western democracy and Chinese authoritarianism. To keep alive the very basic idea of a social contract that serves and reflects the goals of real people, we need to embody what that looks like even as the world continues to change. That means not just learning from the nations that have proven what’s possible, but also imagining new ways to combat the most vexing problems of the 2020s and beyond.

  During the Engels’ Pause in the 19th century, economic inequality and social unrest eventually gave rise to liberal democracy and a new social contract that lifted the economic prospects of the working class. It did so by introducing policy innovations like the minimum wage, child labor laws, the forty-hour workweek, pensions, and public education. As Western countries refine or rewrite their social contracts in the years ahead, they need to imagine similar innovations that will lead to a fairer future.

  CONCLUSION

  If nothing changes, rage will be the defining quality of the 2020s.

  It does not have to be that way. But one way or the other, come 2030 the world will look very different from the one we know now.

  Some things we know will happen regardless of our choices. Cities around the world will explode in population over the next decade. We will see spikes in migration as extreme storms and droughts become increasingly common. Artificial intelligence and surveillance technologies will grow more powerful. At work, either you will be telling a machine what to do or a machine will be telling you what to do.

  But whether and how we respond to these changes is unknown. The future can still be molded to the benefit of most of us—or it can wind up serving only a select few. It’s up to us what 2030 looks like.

  Picture a young family in a rural part of the Philippines looking for a new home after buckling down through one too many typhoons. If trends continue as they have, by 2030 that family will face some nasty choices about where to go. They can stay in the Philippines and move to the capital, where there will be an average of ninety thousand people living per square kilometer and where the five-day workweek they spent farming becomes a six-day workweek doing whatever low-level labor has not yet been automated. There won’t be any actual employers—or employer benefits—as the work will be managed through an app on whatever is the device of 2030.

  Deciding instead to leave, the family looks east to the United States, northwest to China, south to Australia, and west to Europe.

  If nothing changes, a move to the United States or Europe will not be as attractive or as easy as it was in prior generations. The rage and protest movements from both the political Right and Left will have grown larger, more violent, and more nativist. Because of continually more globalized capital, the race to the bottom on taxes will have all but eliminated corporate taxes and those for the very wealthy. This will have starved governments of the resources needed to rebuild infrastructure or strengthen safety nets. In order for Australia and the European countries to maintain the high level of social benefits they had at the beginning of the 2020s, they will have closed immigration to all but high-end knowledge workers. The US, by contrast, will have accelerated the individualization of its social contract and safety net, simultaneously surrendering to the logic of market forces and borrowing from China’s tech-enabled social scoring system. People will compete for health care, training, and unemployment coverage, with benefits apportioned to those who have put in the most hours of work and received the best reviews from employers on the app that manages their work. The algorithms will be programmed to discount the benefits for immigrant workers.

  But if we act to prevent this future, then 2030 could offer a very different reality. The automation made possible by AI and by-then 7G broadband networks will mean that we have enough wealth and well-being to share the benefits of the increased productivity broadly. Just as the six-day workweek of the agricultural age became a five-day workweek during the industrial age, the norm can evolve to a four-day workweek. Instead of competing for benefits in a sort of Mad Max–like competition, we could instead afford safety nets that are now more universally Nordic. This becomes possible, first and foremost, by a triumph of diplomacy—remaking the international system of taxation to rely on unitary taxation and formulary apportionment. This will ensure that every company and every person pays the taxes they ought to, which means that taxes for everyday workers will actually go down. At the same time, after decades of failing to live u
p to its promise, shareholder capitalism will have been relegated to the history books. Instead, governments will have enacted strong incentives—including in the tax system—for better wages, for employees to also be compensated in equity, and for stakeholders to be reflected in business’s bottom line. There will be plenty of available cash for wages and stock for distribution because stock buybacks will be illegal. In this vision of 2030, that Filipino family won’t find their options so stunted; they will be able to work hard and see that work amount to something. As a norm, compensation now comes with a small ownership stake in whichever company they are working for.

  Imagining again what 2030 will look like if things do not change, we can anticipate the spread of the controlled political model of China, Russia, and the Gulf. As inequality grows even more entrenched, violent unrest is likely to become more frequent and ferocious, drawing more citizens and their governments toward controlled and authoritarian versions of the social contract rather than attempting the messiness of democracy. We will see a broader embrace of Chinese-style mass surveillance, firewall policies, and forceful crackdowns on any hint of protest. And more nations will rely on Chinese aid to put these policies in place, further increasing China’s cultural and economic influence in the world while sidelining the United States and European democracies.

  After that Filipino family looks to the United States and Europe, and finds the doors closed or closing, it is conceivable that they could choose to immigrate to China instead. There, under tight control of the state, the economy will have continued to produce growth and therefore will need low-cost labor like that of climate migrants. The family might not have a full path to citizenship in China and might get stuck in an underclass, but there is work in China’s manufacturing hubs, education for their children, and security from the unrest in the messy, dysfunctional democracies. If they want just to work hard and keep their heads down, maybe China and the authoritarian dream are the way of the future.