Göran Therborn: Anti-imperialism and Global Inequality

⬤ What is your background and how did you become interested in global inequality?

Globality came first. I grew up in a farm family in southeastern Sweden, certainly not cosmopolitan, but my father was interested in world affairs. On my own, I became a life-long anti-imperialist. My first discussion of international politics with my father, at age nine, was on the Korean war. I had neither knowledge nor opinion of the origin and stakes of the war, but I was sceptical of the American right to intervene, and of their chances of success. By the time of the first Vietnam war and the siege of Dien-bien-phu in spring 1954 I was a convinced anti-colonialist, age twelve and a half, following the radio reports of the advance of the Vietnamese. I think it was the arrogance of imperialist and colonial power which struck me and angered me. The Algerian uprising and its ensuing war broke out in November 1954, and I followed it from the beginning, in Swedish radio and newspapers. Inequality was something I came to see as deriving from the power of empire and of the class of capital. In the 1950s- early 70s that power did not look invincible, on the contrary. Therefore, most important and most interesting was to study the forces of possible change, anti-imperialist movements, structures of class. That colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism were deeply and viciously unequal was self-evident. When the powers behind inequalities got to look more stable and fortified, the patterns of and the ways and means behind inequality became more salient.

A decisive intellectual influence was Amartya Sen’s 1988 lecture Equality of What?, which I came across a few years later.[1] Inequality mattered above all because it meant unequal capabilities to function fully as a human being. Seen in this way, inequality meant much more than the size of income differences. It meant violations of the most fundamental human rights.

⬤ What is global inequality?

Global inequality is the unequal distribution of human life chances in the world. It is multidimensional, but on a global scale today it is more than anything else inequality of power, of possibilities of self-determination. Inequality of resources to realize one’s hopes of a safe and healthy environment to grow up in and of never having to go hungry, of an education to learn what one would like to do, of getting a meaningful and supporting job, of choosing the partner one loves, of being able to criticize and to try to change what one finds wrong or unjust. The denial to the great majority of humankind of possibilities to realize their potential is the core of global inequality.

Inequality, local, national, and global, has three fundamental dimensions, which may be seen as reflecting the dimensions of what it means to be human.[2]

i.e. the socially determined distribution of hunger and malnutrition, of health and ill-health, of short and long life-spans.

Existential inequality refers to the conditions of existence of human persons or human selves. Their allocation of emotional security, support and encouragement, recognition and respect, self-confidence, ambitions, freedom, and of their opposites, insecurity and fear, neglect and discouragement, ignorance and humiliation, self-doubt and self-hatred, and existential confinement. Patriarchy, racism, caste, and class are the main manifestations of existential inequality.

Resource inequality is most often discussed in terms of income and wealth. But generally it also includes power, office, status, or violence, and social assets, whether “contacts” or membership of a community. In specific contexts, a wide variety of resources may be relevant.

The three dimensions are interdependent and interacting, but they are not reducible to each other, and they develop along different trajectories, as do the geographical referent of global and national.

Periods of international conjunctures have probably influenced me more than places. My early student years at Lund were much under the influence of Africa. 1960 was the year of mass independence in Africa, and of the beginning of the first neo-colonial reaction to it, the Congo crisis. I started to subscribe to several African newspapers, among them Accra Evening News, Le Solei from Dakar and The Daily Times from Lagos. By the mid-1960s, African independence had turned into disappointment and disillusion. I became increasingly interested in Latin America. I was invited to the Cultural Congress of Havana in January 1968, an inspiring worldwide gathering of anti-imperialist intellectuals. For a session there I drafted what became my first international article, From Petrograd to Saigon, explaining why the Vietnam war had such a different political impact than the Korean War.[3]

Then there was a period Swedish political engagement for a New Left, followed by scholarly devotion and intercontinental travel.[4] Meanwhile the Third World darkened, with the massacres in Indonesia, the wave of military dictatorships in Latin America and Africa, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and the Chinese attack on Vietnam.

In the 1980s, I was mostly in the Netherlands doing comparative public policy and welfare states, as a sociologist turned professor of political science. In the post-radical 1990s, I was back in Sweden. Europe was in the air, and I wrote a historical sociology of Europe, East and West. Towards the end of the decade globalization became the buzzword of social analysis. The national interdisciplinary research group I was chairing mutated from European to global studies.

My lifelong egalitarianism has never been rooted in close outrage or personal resentment. Stark economic inequality has for me largely been a visitor’s experience, in North Africa in 1963, in Mexico first time in 1974, in India from 1977, in West Africa, Brazil and Central America from 1978, in Los Angeles in 1991. From 2014 I worked in South Africa, the world’s most unequal country, a couple of weeks every year for four years.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

Let us first distinguish the timescape of inequality’s fundamental dimensions. Life expectancy, taken as a key indicator of vital inequality, seems to start differentiating, among classes as well as among countries, in the second half of the 18th century. It is then only that the longevity of English ducal families begin to surge above that of the general population.[5] On a global inter-country scale, substantial “health transitions” to a longer life began in Northwestern Europe in the last decades of the 18th century, led by Denmark, Sweden, and France (from a much lower level), followed by England & Wales in the l800s.[6] Better life-chances in some parts of the world first meant increasing inequality. Global inequality of longevity began to decline after 1950, as measured by comparing the UK with Brazil, China, Egypt, and India.[7]

Existential inequality, for instance patriarchy and racism, is ancient. All major civilizations were patriarchal, although to varying extent. The Christian European least, and the Indic and the Sinic most misogynous. Patriarchy, like slavery, began to be questioned by the European Enlightenment, but survived the Atlantic revolutions. The 19th century was contrast-ridden. On the one hand, the slave trade was banned, and in the end slavery itself, and the second half of the century saw some extensions of women’s rights, mainly in northwestern Europe and the overseas European settlements. On the other hand, this was also the time of overseas settler large-scale violence against Natives, of expansive European colonialism, and of its concomitant hardening of racist contempt and fear. The break came in 1945 with the discovery of Auschwitz and the defeat of its builders, which at least confined institutionalized racism to the US South and South Africa, and which opened up for a constitutionalization of de-patriarchalization. By 1500 C.E., the world began to be regionally differentiated in per capita resources, stark intra-societal inequality going back to the Bronze Age, at least. By 1500 Western Europe was in the lead in terms of per capita income, an advantage which accelerated from the early 19th century, reaching more or less of a plateau after 1950, and slightly bending down in the current century.[8] Global inequality today is a manifestation of a world system centered on European-cum-North American advantage and power. It derives from three clusters of causal forces.

One is a global shift of technological and intellectual centre. Intellectual curiosity and technological edge, military and other, started to tilt towards Western-Central Europe in the 14th century.[9] By 1500, maritime Western Europe was prepared for world conquest.

Secondly, the European colonial conquests provided extraordinary sources of accumulation, by American silver mining, by plantation slavery, and by captive industrial markets, as in India. After the genocidal impact of the conquest, the Americas also contained an abundance of land and provided an escape from poverty to millions of European. The rather minor Western European advance in 1500 made possible an enormous hoarding of global opportunities. With de-colonization and the independence of India and China the world began to change after 1950, with declining vital and existential inequality and a plateau of economic inequality with the re-start of economic growth In China and India.

A third reason of today’s global inequality is the weakness of the popular classes of the Global South, in a broad sense, from independent business and the petite-bourgeoisie to peasants and workers. It is most clearly manifested in the phenomenon of the “informal economy”, a rightsless area where about ninety per cent of Indians have to find their living, in Latin America about half of all workers. The leaders of the victorious anti-colonial movements have tended to reproduce the duality of privilege and subalternity, and the enclaves capitalism characteristic of colonial rule. Popular weakness also follows from the recent history and arbitrary boundaries of ex-colonial nations, easily divided by ethnicity, tribe, caste, religion.

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

The first is the recent increase of privilege and power in the upper classes, a worldwide tendency towards a concentration of wealth and income among the very most advantaged. Particularly noteworthy is the widening gap between the upper and the middle classes. India is a telling example. In 2000 the top tenth, on one side, and the middle and upper middle classes had an equal shares of national income, meaning that the former had four times the average middle class income. By 2015 the gap was ten times.[10] This means a fortification of inequality, reinforced by the new political business of running democracies. Secondly, there is the issue, highlighted by the pandemic, of “informal” work, outside contracts and rights, about sixty per cent of the global workforce (ILO), a persistent scope of disempowerment despite poverty reduction. Thirdly, there is the enduring extreme poverty of 400 million people in Africa. For the first two, policy instruments are well in sight, taxation and economic regulation, social and labour market policies. For the third, less so, and some inter-continental reshaping of the global political economy seems necessary. There is for the first time an Egalitarian Enlightenment, led by a phalanx of Nobel Laureates –Abijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, Ester Duflo, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz - and other distinguished economists, Thomas Piketty and his collaborators at the Paris School of Economics, for instance, and with some echo in small circles of enlightened bourgeoisie, e.g., the Financial Times, intellectually challenging existing inequalities.[11] It is not a challenge to the world system of unequal power. But the classical Enlightenment during the anciens régimes did inspire the Atlantic Revolutions.

⬤ What is global inequality?

Global inequality is the unequal distribution of human life chances in the world. It is multidimensional, but on a global scale today it is more than anything else inequality of power, of possibilities of self-determination. Inequality of resources to realize one’s hopes of a safe and healthy environment to grow up in and of never having to go hungry, of an education to learn what one would like to do, of getting a meaningful and supporting job, of choosing the partner one loves, of being able to criticize and to try to change what one finds wrong or unjust. The denial to the great majority of humankind of possibilities to realize their potential is the core of global inequality.

Inequality, local, national, and global, has three fundamental dimensions, which may be seen as reflecting the dimensions of what it means to be human.[2]

i.e. the socially determined distribution of hunger and malnutrition, of health and ill-health, of short and long life-spans.

Existential inequality refers to the conditions of existence of human persons or human selves. Their allocation of emotional security, support and encouragement, recognition and respect, self-confidence, ambitions, freedom, and of their opposites, insecurity and fear, neglect and discouragement, ignorance and humiliation, self-doubt and self-hatred, and existential confinement. Patriarchy, racism, caste, and class are the main manifestations of existential inequality.

Resource inequality is most often discussed in terms of income and wealth. But generally it also includes power, office, status, or violence, and social assets, whether “contacts” or membership of a community. In specific contexts, a wide variety of resources may be relevant.

The three dimensions are interdependent and interacting, but they are not reducible to each other, and they develop along different trajectories, as do the geographical referent of global and national.

Periods of international conjunctures have probably influenced me more than places. My early student years at Lund were much under the influence of Africa. 1960 was the year of mass independence in Africa, and of the beginning of the first neo-colonial reaction to it, the Congo crisis. I started to subscribe to several African newspapers, among them Accra Evening News, Le Solei from Dakar and The Daily Times from Lagos. By the mid-1960s, African independence had turned into disappointment and disillusion. I became increasingly interested in Latin America. I was invited to the Cultural Congress of Havana in January 1968, an inspiring worldwide gathering of anti-imperialist intellectuals. For a session there I drafted what became my first international article, From Petrograd to Saigon, explaining why the Vietnam war had such a different political impact than the Korean War.[3]

Then there was a period Swedish political engagement for a New Left, followed by scholarly devotion and intercontinental travel.[4] Meanwhile the Third World darkened, with the massacres in Indonesia, the wave of military dictatorships in Latin America and Africa, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and the Chinese attack on Vietnam.

In the 1980s, I was mostly in the Netherlands doing comparative public policy and welfare states, as a sociologist turned professor of political science. In the post-radical 1990s, I was back in Sweden. Europe was in the air, and I wrote a historical sociology of Europe, East and West. Towards the end of the decade globalization became the buzzword of social analysis. The national interdisciplinary research group I was chairing mutated from European to global studies.

My lifelong egalitarianism has never been rooted in close outrage or personal resentment. Stark economic inequality has for me largely been a visitor’s experience, in North Africa in 1963, in Mexico first time in 1974, in India from 1977, in West Africa, Brazil and Central America from 1978, in Los Angeles in 1991. From 2014 I worked in South Africa, the world’s most unequal country, a couple of weeks every year for four years.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

The first is the recent increase of privilege and power in the upper classes, a worldwide tendency towards a concentration of wealth and income among the very most advantaged. Particularly noteworthy is the widening gap between the upper and the middle classes. India is a telling example. In 2000 the top tenth, on one side, and the middle and upper middle classes had an equal shares of national income, meaning that the former had four times the average middle class income. By 2015 the gap was ten times.[10] This means a fortification of inequality, reinforced by the new political business of running democracies. Secondly, there is the issue, highlighted by the pandemic, of “informal” work, outside contracts and rights, about sixty per cent of the global workforce (ILO), a persistent scope of disempowerment despite poverty reduction. Thirdly, there is the enduring extreme poverty of 400 million people in Africa. For the first two, policy instruments are well in sight, taxation and economic regulation, social and labour market policies. For the third, less so, and some inter-continental reshaping of the global political economy seems necessary. There is for the first time an Egalitarian Enlightenment, led by a phalanx of Nobel Laureates –Abijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, Ester Duflo, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz - and other distinguished economists, Thomas Piketty and his collaborators at the Paris School of Economics, for instance, and with some echo in small circles of enlightened bourgeoisie, e.g., the Financial Times, intellectually challenging existing inequalities.[11] It is not a challenge to the world system of unequal power. But the classical Enlightenment during the anciens régimes did inspire the Atlantic Revolutions.