Part Seven: Mr Worldwide To Infinity
I only realised yesterday Nationals was this weekend, not the next, but that’s okay - this resource has seen minimal uptake so far, but what’s important is that it can persist and be consulted for years into the future as speakers and other curious readers require. For any high school debaters especially, think of the info in these articles, and this in particular, as planting seeds of awareness for potential future motions. Debaters love to set motions to do with current events; if I mention simmering tensions in the Taiwan Straits here, they may erupt into conflict in ten months’ time and prove the subject of your next debate in twelve.
This article concludes all the background information on the politics of the world that you may wish to comb through, with my demonstration on a practice motion coming through promptly. Any brief summary of political trends and systems around the world necessarily involves massive generalisations. Take care when using these in your debates: always think about how to present something as a simple mechanism rather than a value judgement, and when necessary, to assume that somebody from that country is in the room listening.
However, don’t let this dissuade you from making claims: don’t outright lie, of course, but you’re typically unlikely to get specifically fact checked by another team if you use an example you’re only vaguely familiar with - just make sure that example is accessible for both teams to discuss. The final thing to say before getting into this is to consider also the implications for debates about international relations, trade, war, and other subjects of these trends and systems. How do different countries interact? How can one country’s domestic changes influence its behaviour towards another? Do that, and you’re well on your way to crossapplying your understanding of politics across the board.
7-2: North America
Starting off easy, I’m only going to touch on Canada, the USA and the Caribbean here. Justin Trudeau is the last of the Jacinda-Obama young charismatic progressive types and he’s very likely going to lose next year as the sheen has worn off. If Canada comes up in a debate, it’ll probably be to do with language and culture, like road signs in te reo; Quebec, a major region of Canada, largely speaks French and has its own political party and systems around being the French exception to the English rule.
The USA has set the roof on fire. The country has always been an unusual democracy - modelled on Europe but with a much more diverse population and the baggage of widespread slavery and segregation against black Americans - and those chickens have come home to roost with the rise of Trump and huge polarisation. Almost every American will never swap from voting either Republican (right-wing Trumpers) or Democrat (centre-left Bidenites).
As with Canada, the disruption of COVID and inflation will probably be enough to lose Biden the election - in particular, the public see him as too old and mentally out of it in a way Trump is not - but it’ll be close and messy either way: a second Biden win may see Republican anti-democratic agitation intensify, while a Trump comeback would make the Western international order look more uncertain than ever.
The Caribbean rarely factors into debating and is, by global standards, a pretty chill region with a lot in common with the Pacific: stereotyped as all beautiful beaches on which tourists can boogie oogie oggi, jiggle, wiggle and dance. There are challenges in these ocean regions as there are anywhere (particularly with storms) but the countries are generally small, peaceful postcolonial democracies (or still technically part of European empires but practically autonomous).
The two big exceptions to Caribbean chillness are in very different directions. Haiti is a deeply impoverished and unstable state currently ravaged by the rise of gangs and fall of central authority, and with a history of massive earthquakes and of disastrous mistreatment by UN “help”. Cuba remains a Cold War holdover dictatorship - on the one hand, they’ve focused on developing a good healthcare sector, but on the other, many Cuban refugees have fled by boat to Florida, where they agitate against communists and continue to influence America’s long-running adversarial relationship with Cuba.
7-3: Central and South America
Besides the Portuguese behemoth of Brazil, almost all of C&SA, best are former Spanish colonies and Catholicism (the classic Christianity, structured under the Pope in the Vatican City in Rome) dominates across this region, best known as Latin America. I know very little about this massive part of the world so apologies for even bigger generalisations than usual. I do, however, love the Panama Canal, which sits at the southern end of Central America and enables ships to simply go through the Americas rather than around all of South America. Pretty nifty!
Central America and northern South American states like Colombia generally have strong pull and push factors. On top of high levels of poverty and low economic opportunity, states are often unstable and have strong drug cartels and gangs, so with high levels of violent crime and sometimes oppression by militias and militaries, many choose to flee north for a better life in much richer America. Mexico is a great example if you ever need to talk about where clearly functional states still fail to control all of their territory with their long-running drug wars.
Historically, military juntas have predominated in the region, but their numbers have declined over the years. A common type of politics is a long-running struggle between left-wing and right-wing populists at the ballot box, who will often rematch over several elections and even sometimes through the generations, as we’ve seen with Castillo v. Fujimori in Peru and Lula v. Bolsonaro in Brazil. Basically, voters are usually presented with starker and bolder choices than in many other democracies, and their choices often have anti-democratic tendencies like a nostalgia for past regimes.
Javier Milei in Argentina is an excellent example if you need one for what a right-winger going all-out on reform can look like, in terms of how to get elected and what to do then. Finally, I couldn’t make it through writing a debating segment on South America without shouting out Venezuela, which has been a basket case for some time under a decrepit dictatorship. The world’s eyes haven’t been on Venezuela since 2019, when Trump sabre rattled towards the state and my own debating coach decided we urgently needed to understand its constitutional crisis and see it on a map, but I mention it not because of domestic oppression or its notorious economic hyperinflation, but because of its border with Guyana. Guyana is having extraordinary success lately with tapping into 300 billion barrels of oil, and Venezuela are threatening claims on the country. Fingers crossed it’ll all come to nothing, but this is worth keeping your eye on as a potential ‘20s equivalent of Saddam Hussein in the 90s - particularly because who knows what President Trump might do in response.
7-4: Europe
Before I say anything about Europe as it is generally understood, I’ll note the exception of the Caucasus, which I’ll lump in with Europe - these mountain states between Russia and the Middle East are poor and plagued by border conflicts. In particular, Azerbaijan is finally gaining the upper hand in their long-running stop-start duel to the death against Armenia, which may in the coming years set off a crisis if anything remotely resembling a second Armenian Genocide looms.
Europe is generally the richest and best-educated region of the world and arguably the stablest, not to mention very homogenous - it’s largely white and when pretty much everybody’s a Christian or an atheist, Catholic or Protestant doesn’t matter so much anymore. A deficit of cross-pressures has bred a culture of a political establishment with its hands firmly on the tiller. The NATO alliance with the USA kept communism out of Western Europe, Eastern Europe (though significantly poorer) has been welcomed into the fold after the fall of communism and is part of the EU (a huge economic-political confederation), and while some European democracies like Italy and Belgium see protracted coalition negotiations and frequent collapses due to many small parties thriving, the centre holds. Extremism and war seemed a thing of the past.
That has gradually declined. Russia is a belligerent menace in the east, invading Georgia then starting a slow burn encroachment into Ukraine’s territory and politics that has erupted. (Ukraine is not a peachy-clean full democracy that never oppressed anybody, but against Russia’s violent dictatorship it’s pretty easy to see why they’re still the favourable party as a flawed democracy on the defence against aggression.) This, in turn, has destabilised supply chains worldwide, from Russian gas to Ukrainian grain, driving up prices. If Russia gets their way, they may next threaten the Baltic states or even Finland, but their membership in NATO would set off an international crisis - with, again, a big concern being whether President Trump would come to their defence.
Meanwhile, the 2010s saw the European migrant crisis, still staggeringly underrated in historical narratives of the 21st century, where Europe largely failed to meet the challenge of how to care for millions of arrivals fleeing conflict in the Middle East. Germany took in huge numbers, but for the most part Europeans instead turned to voting for far-right parties with the most enthusiasm since before the Second World War.
These parties are dangers to democracy, they’re opposed to the EU, and they’re typically pro-Russia and otherwise sympathetic to dictatorships elsewhere, contributing to Europe’s growing reluctance to keep sending aid alongside America’s to Ukraine. The German election next year will be a key test of their success, while the biggest implication is that Marine LePen might conceivably win the 2027 French election and rip the heart out of the EU.
If Germany and France are key to the EU and Russia is Europe’s worst nightmare then the last of the four big European players is the UK, which we just found out will be having an election in six weeks! The Tories have stumbled on for fourteen years now and are nigh guaranteed to lose in a landslide. Keir Starmer and his Labour Party promise to be relentlessly centrist after their win, complementing France’s centre-right Emmanuel Macron (though France overall leans centre-left) and Germany’s centre-left coalition under Olaf Scholz. While a footnote right now, in the coming decades Northern Ireland (a region in the UK) may conceivably initiate a referendum on whether to join Ireland. Scottish independence, on the other hand, looks like a dead dream.
Finally, returning to Eastern Europe, we should take note of a few blinking amber signs. While the Balkans have found their chill in the 21st century, they remain the poorest part of Europe, and after the devastating Yugoslav Wars and genocide of the 90s, you can never count out the resurgence of nationalism and trouble there. (In other parts of Europe like Northern Ireland and Catalonia in Spain, violence has largely been replaced by non-violent political initiatives for secession, and odds are lower yet that violence would return.)
A lot of these Eastern European democracies are weak, flawed and corrupt. Greece has been an economic basket case for some time and threatened to drag down the Euro (the national currency across much of Europe) with it, Serbia plays buddies with Russia, Poland is fiercely anti-Russia but eroding their democracy, and worst of all is Hungary, where the Orbán regime has done serious damage to democracy and pursued anti-Semitism and other ends, not to mention being Russia’s ally within the EU. If trouble is coming for the EU or for the concept that every country west of Belarus is a democracy, it lies in Hungary.
7-5: Africa
S tier don’t @ me
Africa is typically the least-known continent to most people, written off as poor, unstable and violent, and while I hope to shed more light than that there’s no disagreeing with the point that Africa is relatively worse off. Life in countries that are hard to geographically classify within Africa, like the Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea, has often been some of the worst on modern Earth: geographically isolated and inhospitable, poor infrastructure and public services, few economic opportunities, and brutal regimes and militias.
However, I’d have to bracket it: I’d say, to generalise a generalisation, the continent is at its most stable and well off in North Africa, then East Africa, then West Africa, then Southern Africa. Can’t say South Africa because…that’s taken. Please guys just change your name to Mzansi or Azania or something already. I know it may unfairly privilege one language over another but a) South Africa already does that with English and b) Southern Africa is so awkward to have to say every time.
Also, the actual most real generalisation with Africa is to simply draw a horizontal line right above the continent’s “armpit” in West Africa: north of that line are mostly Muslims, while south of that line are mostly Christians. The fakest generalisation is that being black automatically means you’re exactly the same as every other black person. Don’t do this, team. Just like everywhere else on earth, there are multitudes of ethnic groups and identities, and where people can find Pan-African solidarity that’s cool and great and all, but there’s no disputing that the historical human tendency has often been for politicians and militias to exploit potential divides between ethnic groups and Africa is no exception to the human condition.
North Africa has a lot in common with the Middle East: populations are mostly Arab and Berber Muslims living under monarchies and autocratic regimes, and most people are decently well off. Tunisia got democracy during the Arab Spring but that’s been on the backslide. The region very rarely comes up in debating, but I of course have to shout out 1) Libya, which has been in a devastating civil war since the Arab Spring, and 2) Egypt, which is a decently important world player as a high-population crossroads between Africa and the Middle East that controls the Suez Canal between Europe and the Indian Ocean.
East Africa was mostly under British rule and is a bit of a weird one because every country here feels either extremely normal (Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Djibouti) or utterly off the wall in its own unique way. Uganda is the global flagship of homophobia. Rwanda’s genocide was so quick and such an astonishing failure of protection from the international community that humanity still hasn’t fully processed how that many people died that fast in a way we’ve never seen before or since, but ever since it’s been a stable dictatorship taking strides economically.
Somalia is only technically a state; total anarchy and civil war makes the Somalian government effectively a handful of suits in a room, which leads to the famous piracy problem preying on Suez shipping. (Shipping in general is a big story in this region, with China and others looking to build or invest in ports in countries like Djibouti.) Ethiopia sometimes finds a way to get into internal or external wars despite being one of Africa’s giants. Eritrea is the North Korea that nobody talks about, it’s really freaky and maybe the most glaring country of all 190+ to fly entirely under the international community’s radar reputation-wise. I never expect East Africa to come up in debates, but if you want to be that person who has the unbelievably specific IR examples to share with the class, I’d suggest that this is where you should start.
West Africa still shows the signs of being predominantly ruled by France: to this day, France maintains tight relationships with many countries in the region, extracting resources and sending thousands of military personnel to help combat Boko Haram over the past several years. (They have gradually declined, but are a good example to turn to in a debate about terrorism.) These ties have been gradually weakening, though, and West Africa leads the way in growing partnerships with Russia and its mercenaries.
Honestly not a lot to say about this region, other than that there are a lot of military juntas and coups and that Nigeria is the giant here, but if you’d like to read more some time, this author has predominantly written about West Africa. He’s a smidge less reliable as I am, i.e not very, but he writes well and any impressions from on the ground level are a good start. (The Côte d'Ivoire and El Salvador articles are IMO his finest bangers.)
Southern Africa my beloved is unfortunately not a great place to be. This is where a lot of countries struggle with high unemployment, economic mismanagement, starvation and so forth. The troubles in this region are especially dominated by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a behemoth of land and resources ravaged by its own militias, coups, and invasions from everybody from Rwanda to Zimbabwe getting to basically ignore its borders to come pillage diamonds and so on.
Southern Africa is also notable because, whereas almost everywhere else in Africa besides Algeria won independence peacefully, Angola, Mozambique (both Portuguese), Zimbabwe (the British settlers went rogue for 15 years - sadly it’s not internationally relevant enough to justify a deep dive here, but if you need an example of hyperinflation or of dictators getting way too old it’s a classic) and Namibia+South Africa all saw protracted, violent struggles. Peace predominates in the region today, but the allocation of resources to war and its traumas and costs must go some of the way to explaining relative deprivation down here.
South Africa (and Namibia, which wrestled away from it) is a weird case: like Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, it was already an independent, white-dominated state, but whereas MK largely failed as a violent insurgency and state violence usually carried the day, peaceful methods working in concert brought apartheid to its knees. Doom and gloom from the white diaspora aside, it remains one of Africa’s relative success stories, a democracy with strong guardrails and continued prosperity despite widespread poverty and failing services. (Also in this vein is Botswana, which you never hear about in the news and for good reason.) South Africa are holding an election in a week’s time; the ANC (Mandela’s crew) will very likely hold onto their nonstop majority, but do keep an eye out if you’re curious.
7-7: Asia
The big one. Most people live here and the sheer range of countries reflects that; there’s nothing I can say to describe Asia overall, so let’s just jump right into it.
The Middle East is almost all Arab and Muslim. Israel is the weird exception we don’t have the space to unpack here, but suffice to say that large-scale Jewish migration into a mostly hostile region has meant that Israel’s existence has come at the end of the barrel of a gun and at the expense of Palestinians, and the latest flareup in the conflict shows how precarious life is in Palestine; the Gaza Strip especially is very small and concerningly barren of resources, particularly water when you consider Earth is going into a drier, warmer future. (Also, it’s an open secret that Israel has nukes, they just never like to say it out loud. This sounds like conspiracy theorist stuff if you don’t know it but I’m being for real with you right now.)
Israel had been making strides to warm up relations with America’s allies but all that may be dust now with its marked PR deterioration over the past several months. America’s allies can be defined by three simple characteristics: they’re all monarchies, almost all of them make most of their state’s wealth off of huge oil reserves, and because their Arab populations are then provided for by that wealth, most of them have massively remade their populations by bringing in enormous numbers of Indian and Pakistani workers to do all the manual labour and so on in exploitative conditions. Saudi Arabia is the peak of this, one of the Middle East’s giants, and if you ever hear about Dubai, that’s in the UAE, a leading example of the “Gulf States” that tick all three of these boxes.
The Middle East’s other giant is Iran, which, like Israel, is a really weird wildcard country. Israel at least strongly resembles a Western state internally in terms of stability, wealth, and democracy (even down to the endless elections-coalitions cycle), but Iran is like little else: an authoritarian regime where the President can crash and die and that matters little, because true power is held by the clergy. They just don’t make them like this anymore.
Iran’s leadership, cautious long-term players, were forged by the decades of revolution and wars the country endured - Persepolis (2007) is a great shout if you want to learn more about these travails, beautiful animated movie with heart and quite funny at times, Marji is an all time GOAT protagonist - but younger ones even more steeped in religious dogma and ready to go on the offence are coming up the ranks, and Iran’s long-desired goal of building a nuclear bomb is closer than ever.
Iran is perceived through such adversarial eyes not only because they’ve been a nemesis of the USA (and, by extension, of their media) for decades, but because Iran plays the counterweight to Saudi Arabia in the region. Whereas SA and most other Muslim countries mainly follow Sunni Islam, Iran subscribes to Shia Islam. This is by no means the only cause of the conflict, a lot of this is cynical power plays and scrambles for resources, but it’s important to understand that Saudi Arabia holds itself up as the Guardians of the Holy Cities (Mecca and Medina) and Iran are their chief opponent, giving them centre stage in Islam’s internecine strife.
That’s been just one angle alongside ethnic and political divides that has played out by Iran, SA, Russia, America and others interfering by supporting militias and sending bombing runs and materiel in what I’ll call the “war states”, Syria, Iraq and Yemen (honorary mention to Lebanon), all of which have been ravaged by violence and terrorism. They have largely slipped out of the global consciousness since the heat of the Iraq War and the Arab Spring leading into the Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIS.
Like the Balkans but much more so, this is one of those regions you have to keep your eye on: on top of the ongoing carnage in Yemen and the continued degradation in Syria (where the dictator holds on) and Iraq (where American democracy theoretically prevailed but is realistically deteriorating), Israel and Iran’s latest moves put the region under greater stress than ever. But hey, at least the oil money has made a lot of people very well off.
Central Asia is a region I have practically nothing to say about. It was all part of the Soviet Union with Russia (along with some of Eastern Europe) and now it’s not anymore, but Russia still holds hegemonic control here. They’re all dictatorships with Muslim populations. There’s a lot of oil and gas. The big exception to all of these is Afghanistan, where the Taliban have at long last booted out the Americans and their allies. The international community is generally trying not to remember that they exist, but Afghanistan’s deep deprivation coupled with Taliban oppression make this another of the world’s pariahs.
Now we get to the two engine rooms of humanity, the first of which is South Asia. India has a long slog ahead before it can convert its gigantic population into global economic mastery but it’s taking great strides. The trouble is that, whereas India’s political leadership did a great job in the post-independence decades holding the country together and uniting not only the many ethnic groups but Hindus and Muslims alike, Modi’s BJP reign has seen an era of increasingly defining India as a country for Hindus, and, by extension, against Muslims and other minorities. India has the third most Muslims of any country in the world and, with the BJP likely to win another term when the election concludes in a week and a half, it’s a worrying sign.
Pakistan has the second most but, whereas India for all its erosion and troubled times remains a stable democracy, Pakistan goes through a lot of military coups. Another global pressure point - India and Pakistan sometimes scrap despite both having nukes, particularly over the disputed region of Kashmir. Bangladesh is chill but Sri Lanka has been going through economic crisis and is viewed as a leading candidate in China’s ambitions to find states they can exploit for money and reach.
Speaking of which, the other engine room of humanity is East Asia, which I’m gonna split into two categories by lumping in mainland Southeast Asia. While this can be overstated - China, for instance, is not simply all one Chinese ethnic group - East Asia is relatively homogenous by global standards and the religious divisions and cultural influences we identify elsewhere often take more of a backseat here.
The one kind are the Asian Tigers - Japan, Taiwan, Korea etc. - which are on the bleeding edge of humanity in their technological innovation and economic productivity, not to mention fitting snugly in the American umbrella and enjoying thriving, stable democracies, yet their populations are burning out under onerous work expectations and birth rates are plummeting. Also, Japan’s a bit weird in that they keep reelecting the same party, which is normally the province of post-colonial states like South Africa rewarding the main party to lead them to independence. Why does Japan do this? I don’t know!
The other kind are the “communist” holdovers - China, Vietnam etc. - which, with the very obvious exception of North Korea (always a wild card, but IMO they’re calculating enough that any supposed NK crisis will probably never come to anything), are still ruled by communist parties yet have embraced much of capitalism combined with their state’s influence to fuel enormous economic growth. China has made colossal strides; the concern is that dictator Xi Jinping is too nationalist and belligerent to let China peacefully take the W over time, and will force the issue on everything from spreading Chinese resource extraction and basing across Africa and so on to trying to conquer Taiwan, a long-lasting goal of the CCCP.
I have very little to say on Southeast Asia otherwise. Thailand has military coups often. Indonesia is easily the biggest “submarine” country in the world in that it’s absolutely enormous (275 million people!!! And the most Muslims in the world, so long as we’re counting that) but it’s rare anybody has anything to say about it other than mentioning Bali. Really, the big thing to identify here, in this region that hodgepodges all kind of states but tends towards either always-regime or flawed democracy, is that the South China Sea is an absolute stew of tensions between China and the various countries who resent China’s claims and artificial islands there. Another classic IR frontline to be aware of.
7-8: Pacific
And that leads us into the last of our regions, where the biggest storyline from this global perspective is the competition for influence and allies between the US and China in the space between them. I already touched on the Pacific earlier but, to bounce off that Caribbean comparison, the Pacific’s own “un-chill” countries are Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia (the last of which is still a French possession).
All three have significant ethnic divides; Fiji is known for coups and remains under a regime, while the Solomon Islands has seen riots and international peacekeeping in the past (as well as Bougainville’s rebellion within Papua New Guinea), and most of New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanaks will continue pushing for independence in the coming years, potentially becoming the newest of our not-so-near kinda-neighbours. Samoa has also had tremors of a constitutional crisis in recent years, and sometimes chiefs and even a king in Tonga also wield significant power in their states.
At long last, then, we come to our last two countries. Australia, compared to us, is richer but less politically stable - a full democracy, of course, but they’re known for a coup culture amongst their parties and generally a more venal political class than ours. They’ve pretty definitively thrown their lot in with the Americans and against China by now; we’ll see if that course continues. And for us, we remain a little drop of paradise at the bottom of the world.
While we can command outsized respect in the UN and other international forums (playing a big part in the CPTPP trade deal, for instance), for the most part the international questions that face us are about playing catch up and how to stay onside with both teams. We’re perceived as the weak link in the West’s Five Eyes network, we’re excluded from alliances like AUKUS in part because of past bickering with the US over everything from the Vietnam and Iraq Wars to our anti-nuclear policy, and we have incidents with China’s spies from time to time. The right in New Zealand tend to lean a bit more towards America and Winston favours them, whereas the left prefer not to, which sometimes translates to a slight preference for China. Overall, we shall see if we manage to continue to navigate neutrality. And that’s the state of the entire world, I guess!
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