Can Democracies Deliver? Thoughts Following the 2024 China-Africa Summit

It was disappointing to see so little in-depth discussion among the US national security community at the recent 2024 Forum On China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) outside of the usual circles of Africanists and China specialists. The summit meeting provides a crucial roadmap as to how relationships with the states of the African continent—and within the Global South more broadly—need to be conducted. For the rising and developing states of the Global South, the democracy-authoritarian axis is less critical than what might be termed the “prosperity-legitimacy equation”: that governments will be assessed positively or negatively to the extent that they are able to take steps to provide a more stable, middle-class lifestyle and at minimum guarantee a basic level of access to staples, consumer goods, and welfare services. China, of course, offers its system of party management of state and society to argue that a vanguard elite is best positioned to deliver positive outcomes—as Chinese President Xi Jinping laid out in his August 2021 address on “Boosting Common Prosperity” to the meeting of the Central Committee on Financial and Economic Affairs. This is why Nils Schmid, the foreign affairs spokesman for the Social Democrats in the Bundestag, stressed in his comments in the Winter 2022 issue of Orbis that “democracies and socially oriented market economies” had to demonstrate their capacity “to generate growth and equality, equal opportunities, and social cohesion.” The prosperity-legitimacy equation requires solving the “energy-food-water” trilemma.