On Brexit and how limited free movement in the Commonwealth is a poor substitute for the EU

A couple of weeks ago at my blog, A Bit More Detail, I linked to an interesting article about the legacies of the First World War and the thin ties of the Commonwealth at The Conversation. There, James McConnel and Peter Stanley describe how a British-Australian dispute over commemorating a battle of the First World War, the Battle of Fromelles, brings our contemporary nationalisms into conflict with the imperial-era reality of a much closer and more complex British-Australian relationship of a century ago. There was no clear division between Briton and Australian.

Awareness of the historical context of the battle has clearly informed some British coverage of the decision by the Australian Department for Veterans Affairs to invite only the families of Australians to the memorial ceremony this year. Coverage in the UK has suggested that “banning” the relatives of the 1,547 British casualties of Fromelles, exclusively focuses on the Australian soldiers lost in light of the smaller, but still significant, British casualties.

In response, an Australian spokesman noted in The Times (paywall) that Britain’s own Somme commemoration of July 1 2016 will only be open to British citizens. It’s clear the war’s centenary is being shaped by modern national and state agendas.

But there is an anachronism at the very heart of this spat because – as the military historian Andrew Robertshaw said: “A surprisingly high proportion of the Australian Imperial Force were not actually born in Australia.”

Many of the Australian volunteers, the authors go on to explain, were themselves recent migrants from the United Kingdom, still feeling many loyalties to the country of their birth. At a time when the nationhood of Australia--arguably, like that of the other settler colonies of the British Empire--was far from established and issues of citizenship and identity were uncontestedly unsettled.

Among the names included under the headline “Australian casualties” in The (Melbourne) Argus of August 22 1916 was that of Private Charles Herbert Minter. He was just one of 5,513 soldiers of the AIF who had been killed, wounded, or captured during the bloody attack on Fromelles of July 1916.

Minter was born in Dover, in the English county of Kent, in 1888. He arrived in Australia in October 1910 at the age of 22 and enlisted less than five years later in the Australian Imperial Force in July 1915. In doing so, he was typical of many of the so-called “new chums” (as recent arrivals from Britain were colloquially called). One estimate suggests that 27% of the first AIF contingent were British born, with estimates for the war as a whole varying between 18% and 23%.

Australia was hardly unusual among the Dominions in this respect – 26% of the first contingent of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force were British born, while 64% of the first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force had been born in Britain. As one of these men commented years afterwards: “I felt I had to go back to England. I was an Englishman, and I thought they might need me.”

That Minter’s British descendants (his “sorrowing sister” posted a death notice in tribute to her “dear brother” in the Dover Express in August 1916) would not technically be eligible to attend the Fromelles commemoration highlights the way that the multi-layered identities of these British-born “diggers” (and “Kiwis”, and “Canucks”) have been rendered one-dimensional in the century since the guns fell silent.

My own personal background, and that of my native province of Prince Edward Island, is not nearly as closely tied to the United Kingdom. The last of my ancestors arrived on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean from Europe in the 1850s. The legacies of the British Empire, of the blood shared in common ancestry and spilled in wars, are still ubiquitous. Never mind the matter of ancestry, of Canada's domination by descendants of migrants from the British Isles, never mind even the great cenotaphs to the dead in the world wars. In Charlottetown, just around the corner from the provincial legislature and in front of the courts, stands a monument to the now forgotten Boer War battle of Paardeberg, waged in 1900. Only after I took a photo of this monument in 2008 did I learn about this battle, once so important to Prince Edward Islanders as to deserve a prominent memorial.

It's still up in 2014.



The British Empire was a reality. It is no longer. In the case of Canada, the repatriation of the Canadian constitution that was completed in 1982 definitely established Canada as a state fully independent from the United Kingdom. All of the other erstwhile colonies, whether destinations for British migrants or not, have gone through similar processes. The Commonwealth of Nations has some meaning, particularly inasmuch as our head of state is shared with more than a dozen other countries and as the organization that gives its name to a sporting event of some note, but that's it.



There are some who would like to change this, who would like to establish unfettered freedom of movement between at least some of the Commonwealth realms. In recent years, it has been the subject of some discussion, talked about in March 2015 at Marginal Revolution, and reported by Yahoo in November 2014.

Canadians who want to live or travel in the United Kingdom could be granted the ability to do so without the current shackles of visa requirements and limitations, should the British parliament heed the call of a British think-tank.

That call involves urging for the creation of a vast “bilateral mobility zone” that would give citizens of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada the ability to travel freely, without the need for work or travel visas, between those Commonwealth nations.

"We want to add distinct value to Commonwealth citizenship for those who wish to visit, work or study in the U.K.," reads the report released by the Commonwealth Exchange. "The Commonwealth matters to the U.K. because it represents not just the nation’s past but also its legacy in the present, and its expanded potential in the U.K.’s future."

The idea of easier mobility between Canada and some of its closest Commonwealth allies would be an exciting concept. There are currently 90,000 Canadian-born residents of the U.K., and another 34,000 living in Australia and New Zealand.

The Commonwealth Exchange report takes on the larger question of the U.K.’s place on the international stage, noting that while the economies of European Union members are struggling, the Commonwealth nations such as Australia and India are booming. Despite this, its connection to those countries is weakening.

This is an unlikely outcome. As the CBC noted in its reportage, there just is too much that is vague about the proposal, and from the Canadian perspective not enough to gain.

“I think it’s an intriguing proposal, but I think chances are it will be some years in the making if it’s ever to be realized,” said Emily Gilbert, an associate professor who teaches Canadian studies and geography at the University of Toronto.

“So I don’t know where the political will would be coming from to get this going.”

Gilbert said allowing greater mobility is a worthy goal, but much depends on the specifics of the agreement between the countries.

Would immigrants automatically gain permanent resident status or have full access to citizenship rights, for example, beyond simply having the right to work and stay indefinitely?

“If they were to move ahead with this, that is what would be worked out, and the devil is in the details,” she said.

Jeffrey Reitz, from the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, said the chance of seeing such an “eccentric” agreement between the four countries is effectively zero.

He said it’s unclear why Canada would pursue a proposal with New Zealand, Australia and U.K. instead of the U.S. and Mexico, countries that are already part of a free trade agreement. Or why not a proposal to loosen travel between all 53 Commonwealth countries?

The Commonwealth Freedom of Movement Association ranks highly on Google. In its blog, one author argues that expanding this four-country zone to include other candidates--like Jamaica, an Anglophone island nation not much different from New Zealand in size, or a South Africa that has as large a natively Anglophone population--would create the risk of too much migration. In all honesty, with the exception of the noteworthy migration of New Zealanders to Australia, I'm not sure that there are any especially significant ongoing flows of migrants between these four Commonwealth realms. Is there much of an untapped potential for migration? All four countries are already high-income countries with comparable standards of living. Is there any particular point to this?

There actually is, but it is not related to gains from migration. With this, we come back to what I talked about here in July 2012, about the idea of liberalized migration between certain Commonwealth realms serving as a supposed substitute for Britain's participation in the European Union's unified labour market. The idea of a Canadian migrant to some Britons would be substantially more appealing than the idea of a Polish migrants, partly because of the assumption of shared ancestry but also because such might be the first step towards Britain's ascent to non-European prominence. Nick Pearce's essay "After Brexit: the Eurosceptic vision of an Anglosphere future", published last month at Open Democracy, sets the stage for the Anglospheric dreams of many in the United Kingdom.

In the last couple of decades, eurosceptics have developed the idea that Britain’s future lies with a group of “Anglosphere” countries, not with a union of European states. At the core of this Anglosphere are the “five eyes” countries (so-called because of intelligence cooperation) of the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Each, it is argued, share a common history, language and political culture: liberal, protestant, free market, democratic and English-speaking. Sometimes the net is cast wider, to encompass Commonwealth countries and former British colonies, such as India, Singapore and Hong Kong. But the emotional and political heart of the project resides in the five eyes nations.

[. . .]

As Professor Michael Kenny and I set out in an essay for the New Statesman, the Anglosphere returned as a central concept in eurosceptic thinking in the 1980s, when Europhilia started to wane in the Conservative Party and Thatcherism was its ascendancy. On the right of the Conservative Party, we argued:

“…American ideas were a major influence, especially following the emergence of a powerful set of foundations, think tanks and intellectuals in the UK that propounded arguments and ideas that were associated with the fledgling “New Right”. In this climate, the Anglosphere came back to life as an alternative ambition, advanced by a powerful alliance of global media moguls (Conrad Black, in particular), outspoken politicians, well-known commentators and intellectual outriders, who all shared an insurgent ideological agenda and a strong sense of disgruntlement with the direction and character of mainstream conservatism.

[. . .]

The idea of the Anglosphere as an alternative to the European Union gained ground amongst conservatives in their New Labour wildnerness years, when transatlantic dialogue and trips down under kept their hopes of ideological revival alive. It was given further oxygen by the neo-conservative coalition of the willing stitched together for the invasion of Iraq, which seemed to demonstrate the Anglosphere’s potency as an geo-political organizing ideal, in contrast to mainstream hostility to the war in Europe. By the time of the 2010 election, the Anglosphere had become common currency in conservative circles, name checked by leading centre-right thinkers like David Willetts, as well as eurosceptic luminaries, such as Dan Hannan MEP, who devoted a book and numerous blogs to the subject.

As Foreign Secretary, William Hague, sought to strengthen ties between the Anglosphere countries, despite the indifference shown by the Obama presidency to the idea. After leaving the cabinet, the leading eurosceptic Owen Patterson gave a lengthy speech in the US on the subject of an Anglospheric global alliance for free trade and security; he could expect a sympathetic hearing in Republican circles, if not the White House. And in its 2015 election Manifesto, UKIP praised the Anglosphere as a “global community” of which the UK was a key part.

I'll note now, just as I did four years ago, that all this is terribly unlikely, at least in Canada. I am personally unaware of any significant political group that would sign on to this particular structure. The Commonwealth unification movement is dead. Canada is an independent state with its own interests, many of which do not follow the patterns of pro-Brexit Anglospherists. Indeed, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has stated Canada's preference for a United Kingdom that remains engaged within the European Union. The United Kingdom could still liberalize its visa procedures with as many Commonwealth realms as its government might like within the European Union, what with the continued fragmentation of the European Union's migration policies. The United Kingdom could always have chosen to leave the doors to its erstwhile colonials open.Quite frankly, many Canadians might prefer the United Kingdom to remain within the European Union in the case of such a liberalization.

I'll also note my skepticism of the motives of many of the proponents. Why include New Zealand but not Jamaica within this scheme? Jamaicans, as a community and as individuals, are far more likely to benefit from this liberalization than New Zealanders? If some people within the United Kingdom want to radically shift immigration policy, why not perhaps try to replace Poles with Jamaicans? The answers are obvious, and unflattering. The chief one is that these people do not want many immigrants at all, perhaps particularly the "wrong" type of immigrants. The pro-Brexit Anglospherists who offer up the idea of free migration with the richest and whitest of the old colonies could be accused of bait-and-switch, of wanting to exit a European Union where migration is a substantial presence for a mini-Commonwealth where migration is, if not less of an issue, more politically difficult. (What immigration policies, I wonder, are Canada and Australia and New Zealand supposed to adopt?) I'd accuse some of these of having hidden motives, but then some of them are quite open about their plans.

On recent post-colonial immigration to Africa

The ever-interesting blog 3 Quarks Daily linked earlier today to another article by Jenni Marsh in the South China Morning Post Magazine, "The town that China built: tourism boom at Zambia's Victoria Falls thanks to Chinese makeover".

"My husband is the best Chinese chef in Zambia," says Liu Xiuyi, a former takeaway employee from Chongqing. "Whenever the president has Chinese guests in Lusaka, my husband is hired to cook for them."

Twenty years ago, with no savings or formal education, the couple emigrated to Zambia when Liu's husband was hired as a chef by a Chinese state-owned construction company contracted to build roads in dusty Lusaka.

Now in their 50s, the Lius have just built a 15 million kwacha (HK$18.3 million) three-star hotel and restaurant, called the Golden Chopsticks, in the former British colonial outpost of Livingstone. They also own property in the Zambian capital; employ about 100 staff, local and Chinese; and rub shoulders with presidents and diplomats.

The Lius are among the estimated 20,000 to 100,000 Chinese living in the copper-rich southern African nation - weak census practices mean precise figures are elusive - and were among the first wave of daring migrants who sought their fortune here.

This Chinese immigrant presence in Zambia is part of a much larger wave of Chinese migration towards Africa. Yoon Jung Park and Anna Ying Chen's recent article "Recent Chinese Migrants in small Towns of Post-apartheid South Africa" takes a look at this migration in connection to South Africa. Much more broadly, Chinese migration to Africa is explored at length in American journalist Howard French's excellent recent book China's Second Continent, excerpted at Quartz and reviewed in The Economist. Substantial Chinese investment has been accompanied by substantial Chinese migration.

For more than a decade, the Chinese government has invested hugely in Africa. The foundation for this partnership was laid in 1996, when President Jiang Zemin proposed the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in a speech at the Organization of African Unity headquarters in Addis Ababa. Four years later, FOCAC convened triumphantly for the first time, gathering leaders from forty-four African countries in Beijing. China pledged, among other things, to double assistant to the continent, create a $5 billion African development fund, cancel outstanding debt, build new facilities to house the OAU (later replaced by the AfricanUnion), create “trade and economic zones” around the continent, build 30 hospitals and 100 rural schools, and train 15,000 African professionals. Fitch Ratings estimated that China’s Export-Import Bank extended $67.2 billion in loans to sub-Saharan African countries between 2001 and 2010—$12.5 billion more than the World Bank.

Although there are no official figures, evidence suggests that at least a million private Chinese citizens have arrived on African soil since 2001, many entirely of their own initiative, not by way of any state plan. This “human factor” has done as much as any government action to shape China’s image in Africa and condition its tics to the continent. By the timeI met Hao, in early 2011, merchants in Malawi, Namibia, Senegal, and Tanzania were protesting the influx of Chinese traders. In the gold-producing regions of southern Ghana, government officials were expelling Chinese wildcat miners. And in Zambia, where recent Chinese arrivals had established themselves in almost every lucrative sector of the economy, their presence had become a contentious issue in national elections.

As we left the capital, we passed the new national stadium, nearing completion by Chinese work crews at the edge of town. Built to support the country’s bid to host the 2013 continent-wide Africa Cup of Nations, it was a showcase gift from the Chinese government,intended as a statement of generosity and solidarity. China has become an avid practitioner of this kind of prestige-project diplomacy. I asked Hao whether a $65 million stadium was the best sort of gift for Mozambique, one of the ten poorest countries in the world.

“Chinese government projects in Mozambique have all failed,” he said. “That’s because the Chinese ganbu [bureaucrats] don’t know how to communicate on the same level with the blacks.” He shook his head and wagged a stubby index finger excitedly.

I asked him about his early days in the country. A prior attempt to do business overseas,in Dubai, had gone bad. Chinese agricultural experts there who had been on African aid missions planted a very powerful idea in his mind: Go to Africa, where you can acquire good land cheaply. He had flown to Maputo alone, and no one had greeted him at the airport. “I didn’t understand a fucking word thatwas being said to me.” On his own, he made his way into town and found a flophouse. Making little headway—he spoke neither Portuguese nor English—he soon gave in to the temptation to call up some fellow Chinese he had found online while still in China.

Post-colonial migration to Africa is not a new phenomenon. Even immediately after decolonization, large French communities grew in the politically stable and closely France-linked Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon, as did British immigration to South Africa. Elsewhere in Africa, Ghana came to host a relatively large community of African-Americans, attracted to Ghana by that country's early self-positioning as a home for the African diaspora.

More recently, European immigration to Africa has grown sharply, propelled by hard times in southern Europe as much as by African prosperity. Portuguese migration to oil-rich Angola and even Mozambique exploded after the beginning of the Great Recession. Most recently, there has even been migration south across the Strait of Gibraltar, from a recession-prone Spain to a Morocco that is at least experiencing some growth.

Morocco may seem like a strange preference for a Spaniard. With its GDP one-sixth of Spain’s and an unemployment rate estimated at 30 percent, “Morocco is in a deeper crisis than Spain,” says Mehdi Lahlou, an economics professor at Morocco’s National Institute for Statistics and Applied Economics. Still, Mr. Lahlou says it makes sense that Spaniards would consider moving to Morocco for work.

Spaniards do not need a visa to enter Morocco for a stay of up to three months, and only need to step on Spanish soil – which includes Spanish enclaves in Morocco, such as Ceuta and Melilla – to renew their stay. (Moroccans, on the other hand, must receive a visa to legally enter Spain.)

Plus, with the euro to Moroccan dirham exchange rate currently at 10 to 1, Lahlou says Spaniards who work for European companies in Morocco or come with savings from home can “live like kings” in the country. These advantages, he says, allow Spaniards to easily move back and forth between continents looking for work wherever it may arise.

Moving to Morocco was his best opportunity for employment, according to Martinez. But it has come at a price.

Martinez’s family has lived in Galicia, a region of northwest Spain, for generations. Rubbing his thumb on the heel of his hand, Martinez says Galicia is like a stain on the skin. “Moriña,” he said, a Galician word that means an intense longing for one's homeland. No matter where you go in the world you will always be Galician, says Martinez.

Though Tangier is only eight miles away from Spain, Morocco is “a world away,” says Martinez. From the call to prayer projected over loudspeakers five times per day to the disapproval of alcohol consumption, Martinez says Morocco feels very different from Spain.

Migration isn't simply a matter of people moving from poor countries to rich countries. It bears noting that migration in fact involves individuals who move from one area of the world to another in pursuit of opportunities. There's absolutely no reason why a stable Africa might not offer people with useful skills or experience more lucrative opportunities than in their homelands. Does Africa has a skills deficit? There may be plenty of people living around the world who would have these skills. Back in 2012, Hein de Haas wrote about what this migration, a reversal of the direction of migration we're used to, means.

This portrayal of "Africa = misery" is misleading in the first place, and goes back straight to colonial times, when Europeans fabricated stereotypes about African "backwardness", tribalism, chaos and poverty as a justification for their "civilizing" colonial mission.

Although violence and poverty have frequently occurred in several places and regions, other parts of Africa have been relatively prosperous and peaceful, and have in fact attracted migrants.

What many people ignore on top of that, is that some African economies are growing fast, and can nowadays offer better opportunities to skilled, entrepreneurial Europeans than the stagnating economies of Southern and European Europe. In addition, many African economies have been sheltered from the worst effects of the Global Economic Crisis because their banking sectors are less liberalized and therefore better protected.

It is impossible to predict what the future holds. Of course, if European economies pick up again, it is likely that emigration will fall and immigration increases again - Although it remains a question to what extent and when economic recovery occurs, as the current crisis seems to be a protracted one, and may last for many more years. It would also be dangerous to exaggerate African growth and to deny that many Africans continue to live in conditions of extreme poverty insecurity. And it would also be naive to think that Africans will stop migrating themselves.

However, it is important to go beyond colonial stereotypes of Africa as a continent of misery and to stop thinking that the whole world wants to come to Europe. In fact, this hardly concealing the idea the Europeans are superior.

On Zimbabwe's declining HIV infection rate

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern Africa is something this blog has dealt with before, though mainly specifically relating to South Africa. Back in September 2006, Edward Hugh identified South Africa as having a very unusual mortality pattern--elevated mortality in younger cohorts--that wouldn't help its future. Zimbabwe hasn't featured, even though it was once the second industrial economy of southern Africa and a regional leader in apartheid, even though the impact of the epidemic on the country's population was horrible. With a prevalence of 27% concentrated in the working-age demographics, this deficit worsened by mass emigration to stabler and wealthier countries like South Africa or Botswana or even the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe's badly off.

Things have gotten better, surprisingly enough. Kate Kellers' Reuters article observes that there has been a steep decline.

British researchers said Zimbabwe’s epidemic was one of the biggest in the world until the rate of people infected with HIV almost halved, from 29 per cent of the population in 1997 to 16 per cent in 2007.

Their findings show that Zimbabweans have primarily been motivated to change their sexual behaviour because of increased awareness about AIDS deaths which heightened their fears of catching the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes it.

[. . .]

The United Nations AIDS program said last year that young people in Africa were starting to lead a “revolution” in HIV prevention and driving down rates of the disease by having safer sex and fewer sexual partners.

The Imperial College researchers found that in Zimbabwe, a change in attitudes towards numbers of sexual partners was helped by HIV/AIDS prevention programs, which were reinforced through mass media, church leaders and employers.

The poor economic situation in Zimbabwe from the early 2000s would also have driven down the number of concurrent partners a man could have, due to constraints on his wallet, they said.

The study in question goes into more detail, suggesting that exposure--through education and through personal experiences with the suffering and dying--was key.

During the 1990s, a wide range of prevention and information programs were implemented utilizing the national media along with school-, workplace-, and church-based activities, peer education, and other inter-personal communication interventions. Community-based activities were intensified following establishment of the National AIDS Council in the late 1990s. This range of broader HIV education and prevention programming could have had impact. Focus group and interview participants mentioned a number of prevention programs and awareness/education efforts and many reported that the “B” part of “ABC” was promoted by churches in particular and was “heard” by many community members yet no specific intervention was cited consistently.

One question arising from this review is why similarly high AIDS mortality and extensive coverage of HIV prevention programs (resulting in similarly high levels of reported condom use, early and large reductions in STI incidence, etc.) in several other countries in the region have not yet led to substantial declines in HIV prevalence (or multiple sexual partnerships). Our comparative analysis of eight southern African countries revealed few patterns of association. The HIV epidemic in Zimbabwe is somewhat older than in some other countries in the region, yet HIV prevalence has been declining markedly for over a decade now, which has not occurred to nearly the same extent, for example, in Malawi and Zambia (where HIV arrived even earlier). In addition to the severe economic decline, where Zimbabwe does stand out is in having high levels of both secondary education and marriage, especially in urban men, among whom the greatest level of behavior change evidently has occurred. It appears that this unique combination helped facilitate: 1) a clearer understanding and acceptance of how HIV is sexually transmitted (once such information became widely available through various AIDS education and prevention programs commencing in the early 1990s), as some studies of schooling levels and HIV determinants have suggested and 2) a greater ability to act upon “be faithful” messages, given the stronger marriage pattern in Zimbabwe than that in neighboring countries also having relatively well-educated populations, such as Botswana and South Africa.

In addition, national survey data suggest that between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, Zimbabweans increasingly received information about AIDS from their friends, churches, and other inter-personal (as compared to official media) sources. A similar pattern has been linked to behavior change in Uganda. Furthermore, the Zimbabwean government's early adoption of a home-based care policy may inadvertently have accelerated the process of behavior change. It has been hypothesized that, when people die at home, this direct confrontation with AIDS mortality is more likely to result in a tangible fear of death among family and friends than when patients are primarily cared for in clinical facilities, such as in Botswana.

Certainly HIV transmission in North American queer male communities halted altogether in the late 1980s when the mass dying of the infected began.

On South Africa's wasted human capital

A post on Egypt's population is coming up, I assure you all. The importance of the subject merits doing it right. For now Suffice it to say that Egypt's key to the future of the regions of Nasser's Three Circles, the Arab world, Africa, and wider Islamic civilization.

In the meantime, let's take a look at South Africa, the other middle-income African country of global import. South Africa's invitation and eventual admission to the BRIC organization was perplexing.

[T]he man who coined the BRIC acronym, economist Jim O’Neill from Goldman Sachs, even interrupted his holiday to write a head-scratching note to investors about this development.

“While this is clearly good news for South Africa, it is not entirely obvious to me as to why the BRIC countries should have agreed,” O’Neill wrote. To give a sense of scale: South Africa’s economy is only a quarter of the size of Russia’s, the next-smallest of the group.

South Africa has a relatively small population of about 50 million, an economy worth $286 billion and growth of only about 3 percent last year — far from scorching. There are many other emerging markets that would better fit the BRIC grouping, O’Neill wrote, including South Korea, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia, all of which have GDPs that are two or three times bigger than that of South Africa, and much larger populations.

“How can South Africa be regarded as a big economy? And, by the way, they happen to be struggling as well,” O’Neill told a recent investment summit.

I'd have invited Indonesia, myself. (It's difficult for me to understand how South Korea could possibly be an emerging market when it's richer per capita than Spain or Italy.) South Africa's admission to the BRIC group seems to be a matter of geographic parity, of having the group of the world's expected future world powers have representation from the African continent and South Africa's relative wealth and stability making it a much more attractive than the only other possibility of Nigeria. Whether or not the rest of Africa wants to be represented by South Africa is another question, notwithstanding the South African suggestion that their country is a suitable proxy for the continent. South Africa may be a more suitable proxy for the Southern African Development Community--ironically, founded during the apartment era to provide alternatives to trade with South Africa---but despite South Africa's economic weight its population is only a sixth of the 233 million-odd SADC residents, and the SADC itself is not very integrated.

Still, South Africa is going to have to bet its future on its ties to the rest of the continent: the country's population is expected to start shrinking after 2030, according to a local think tank.

By 2030 South Africa’s population will be 53.81 million. The population will then decrease to 53.74 million by 2035, and to 53.28 million by 2040, according to data from the Institute of Futures Research at the University of Stellenbosch cited in the Survey.

One of the main reasons for this is the long term impact of HIV/AIDS.

In South Africa, the number of deaths in a year is making up an increasingly higher proportion of the number of births. In 1985, deaths were 25% of births. This was expected by the Actuarial Society of South Africa to increase to 87% of births by 2021.

Thuthukani Ndebele, a researcher at the Institute, said, ‘If this trend continues, there will soon be more deaths than births in South Africa. It is evident that the HIV/AIDS pandemic has resulted in an increasing number of deaths. These deaths are mostly among people in the child-bearing age group, which will result in decreasing numbers of births.’

However, a lower fertility rate will also contribute to population shrinkage. Between 2001 and 2010, South Africa’s fertility rate decreased from 2.86 to 2.38 births per woman.

By 2040, the fertility rate will have dropped to 1.98 births per woman. This is lower than the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman, which is needed for the population to reproduce itself.

Ndebele said, ‘Lower fertility rates are related to an increase in access to education and contraceptives, which results in women having fewer children.

‘A combination of increasing deaths as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, as well as lower fertility rates will result in population shrinkage after 2030. This can be positive as there will be less strain on resources in South Africa. However, it will also be negative, as there will be fewer people to contribute to the economy and its internal consumer markets.’

As people in the comments there noted, these projections don't seem to take into account the possibility of new treatments for HIV/AIDS, or the near-certainty of continued immigration from South Africa's hinterland: high levels of income inequality in relatively wealthy Botswana and Namibia, never mind very low incomes elsewhere in southern Africa, practically ensure a continued economic incentive for migrants. Assuming that the South African population will start to age significantly over the next three decades is a safe bet, even if it mightn't be wise to bet in favour of a contracting population.

This projection has implications for the country's economic growth. With an aging population shifting towards rapid aging and below-replacement fertility, South Africa's continued economic growth in aggregate would require increased consumption per capita and productivity. The former is possible; the latter, with the historical record, may not be a good bet. The country's dependence on high-skills but capital-intensive industrial and service sectors and low-skills and low-productivity primary sectors, not to mention the profound disconnect between the formal and informal segments of the economy, does not bode well.

South Africa's economic growth record certainly hasn't been impressive, a recent news report placing the country's growth in GDP per capita at 0.6% per annum from 1970 to 2008. (This compares to 5.9% in Botswana, 7.9% in China, 3.6% in India, 4.3% in Indonesia, 3.5% in Ireland, and 1.9% in both the United Kingdom and the United States). South Africa has slid rapidly down world tables: A quick glance at the Penn World Tables and Wikipedia, comparing GDP per capita and HDIs in South Africa relative to the four founding BRIC members in Indonesia, suggests that Brazil and China have nearly caught up, with Russia staying in the lead and the remaining two countries making progress. South Africa's lead over the rest of the non-North Atlantic world has vanished.

Why? South Africa's population history--more precisely, the reaction of South African whites to their country's population history--is to blame. Apartheid did terrible things, especially (from the demographic perspective) the systematic destruction of cultural capital and sustained efforts at disdevelopment among the non-white majority. Left-wing miners early in the 20th century opposing black employment; the country had a public education systems that provided much more funding for white students than for black students (who, it should be noted, were discouraged from being professionals); the scandalously poor public health system that let tuberculosis run rampant with (according to Laurie Garrett in The Coming Plague) official claims that South African non-whites suffered so badly from tuberculosis not because of horrible living standards because they were genetically predisposed to catch the illness. The South African apartheid state even stripped most non-blacks of South African citizenship, creating a nightmare world of overpopulated rural slums, ill-serviced urban slums, and a tradition of oscillatory labour that helped HIV/AIDS spread so rapidly. In its 1994 Human Development Report, the UN observed that while South African whites enjoyed the human development indices of Spain, despite their country's wealth South African blacks suffered the levels of human development found in Congo-Brazzaville.

The sheer wastage of human capital over generations, all pursued in the name of a protectionist labour policy, is a tragedy. Botswana, at the time of apartheid's inception much less developed than its larger neighbour, went on to surpass South Africa in terms of GDP per capita and human development, even with its more severe HIV/AIDS epidemic. If--if, granted--South Africa's government hadn't decide to protect the living standards of a minority at the expense of everyone else, and had abandoned anti-non-white labour protectionism and disdevelopment for more rational policies, given South Africa's relatively higher level of development immediately after the Second World War than the BRICs it's easy to imagine a South Africa where many more people would have been able to exercise their talents for the betterment of all. The improvements in life chances in South Africa and its neighbourhood are scarcely imaginable. Such a South Africa--richer, less unequal, more developed broadly-- would have a significantly stronger claim to BRIC membership. As things stand now, South Africa is caught up in a desperate race to improve its human capital stock, to give more people chances, before its already-attenuated demographic sweet spot disappears.

Some thoughts on the Dutch-Afrikaner connections

During the World Cup, The Nation's Aaron Ross had an interesting examination of the tenuous and contested relationship of South Africa's Afrikaners to the Dutch, divided as much as united by elements of a shared historical, cultural, political and religious heritage, in his "A World Cup Final in the Shadows of History". Some people have said that the final games of the World Cup were almost home games for the Dutch, especially but not only when the Dutch team was playing in the Cape Town founded by the Dutch and where the descendants (of all races) of the Dutch colonial enterprise still predominate. Ethnicity and nationality, as are their wont in events like this, became highly (and annoyingly) contingent.

Now, with the game approaching, the Netherlands stood poised to claim its first-ever World Cup title and to do it on South African soil. It wasn’t quite France about to triumph in Algeria, but for a country in which the memory of apartheid remains so raw, the political subtext has been inescapable. When the Dutch team arrived in South Africa a little over a month ago, the national press had been fixated since March on the controversy surrounding Julius Malema, leader of the African National Congress Youth League, who had revived an apartheid-era song featuring the lyrics, “Kill the Boer”—“Boer” an often derogatory term for Afrikaners.

But for many black South Africans, politics did not harden them to the Dutch fans’ renowned charms. When it comes to the world’s biggest sporting events, the Dutch are the guests at the party that everyone wants to have a drink with. The Afrikaner population accounted for much of the local support in South Africa, but Dutch fever transcended racial barriers. When the Netherlands played Uruguay in the semifinals in Cape Town, an orange monsoon swept through the coastal city, as South Africans and Dutch visitors alike sported orange garments of every variety. Politics was a distant afterthought. At Madiba too, I met Afrikaners supporting Spain and black South Africans supporting the Netherlands for no other reason than they liked the way their favored team plays.

The political element was not completely absent from the equation, though. Tassha Ngolela, a black South African visiting New York from Pretoria, cited South Africa’s historical links to the Netherlands as one of the biggest reasons she was cheering for the Dutch in the final. “We speak Dutch,” she explained to me, before going on to clarify that Afrikaans, the Afrikaner language now spoken by South Africans of all races, is not exactly the same thing as its linguistic forebear.

Other black South Africans have been less enamored by their compatriots’ apparent embrace of their colonial past. The Netherlands’ semifinal victory in Cape Town prompted widespread invocations in the local media of an old Afrikaans slogan, “Die Kaap is weer Hollands” (“The Cape is Dutch again”), to which a friend from Cape Town complained, “I don't have a problem with enjoying the soccer for what it's worth but when so many are using terms that relate to colonization to now support and to indicate Dutch favor, that to me is not only a matter of discourse!”

In reality, the ties between the modern Dutch and Afrikaners are thin. The biggest wave of Afrikaner immigration—which included Germans and French as well—occurred between the 1650s and 1790s. Today, most South Africans, Afrikaner and otherwise, don’t perceive any real relationship between the Afrikaners and Dutch. Stephen Ellis, a member of the African Studies Centre in Leiden, The Netherlands, observed that Afrikaners view the Netherlands as a foreign nation, although some derive great amusement when you speak Dutch to them, as it “sounds very old fashioned and archaic.”

The Netherlands also had one of the strongest track records on apartheid among Western nations. After some initial displays of solidarity with the Nationalist government in the 1950s, the Netherlands became one of its most vocal European critics beginning in the 1960s. The antiapartheid movement was especially strong, with some young Dutch people even joining the underground liberation struggle. [. . .]

Still, after centuries of insisting upon their “Africanness” to justify their claims to the land, Afrikaners’ newfound kinship with the Dutch can rankle. Another friend in South Africa reported someone at his gym saying before the semifinal that he was going to support his “distant white cousins.” Despite the Netherlands’ mostly clean hands in South Africa’s racist history, even its merely symbolic ties with that past, from apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd’s Dutch descent to Afrikaans’ Dutch roots, are enough to leave a bad taste in the mouths of many blacks.

The connections with the Netherlands are more substantial than that. After the definitive loss of the Cape Colony at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Dutch regained an interest in South Africa only in the 1870s, consequence of an interest in the religious and linguistic offshoot of the Netherlands in South Africa along with a certain imperialism-associated interest in the South African republics as a potential market. A certain migration to South Africa from the Netherlands continued up to the 1970s, when Dutch economic success and the growing problems of South Africa made migration unattractive. Even after the development of Afrikaans as a language distinct from Dutch, cultural ties remained, for instances in regards to the Calvinism shared by some Dutch and most Afrikaners, and certain language linkages remain (Afrikaansophones work quite well for call centres marketed towards the Netherlands and Flanders).

The odd thing? Despite this vast and irregularly maintained web of connections, and despite the transformations of the white population that reduced its share to perhaps a tenth of the 2010 South African population owing to South African whites' relatively earlier and more complete demographic transition and the post-apartheid white emigration of perhaps a million people that's as much brain drain to the North as white flight, there seem to be hardly any Afrikaners--or any South Africans--living in the Netherlands. Wikipedia's Afrikaner article quotes figures of twenty-five thousand Afrikaners in the Netherlands and another fifteen thousand in Belgium, and presumably there are other South Africans, but yet there doesn't seem to be a significant concentration of South Africans in Netherlandophone Europe. I wonder why this is the case. Is Britain a more natural European destination? Have there just not been any substantive human links formed?

Thoughts?