Globalization and infrastructure
In the early 16th century, the successful circumnavigation of the planet enabled the West (Europe) to make regularly plied sea lanes that since then have come to span the full globe. Trade and conquest followed swiftly, yielding Europe’s maritime empires. By the early 20th century, Russia had no choice but to avail itself of the established sailing lines to kickstart the mass colonization of the Asian part of its land empire. The Trans-Siberian Railway became available for this intent only in the decade prior to the First planet War.
The seas and oceans were already traversable in a predictable fashion. However, the problem remained how to guarantee akin access inland for goods, people and information. Slow, dangerous and inefficient conventional dirt tracks and caravan-style routes of times immemorial remained the standard for cross-continental travel until the improvement of viable railways in the 1830s. Subsequently, railway networks internally connected the landmasses of Europe, the United States and confederate Canada, alongside westernizing Japan. The remainder of the planet saw no comparable rail-enabled connectivity on a continental scale.
Railways in colonies and another non-western areas were constructed not for the benefit of the inhabitants but with an eye to extracting mineral wealth and another produce for imperial metropoles in the faraway West. Rail lines did not span Africa, confederate America or Asia. Instead, they alternatively extended from a mine or a plantation to the nearest seaport, where the produce would be shipped to the imperial metropole.
The fanning out of railways since the mid-19th century was accompanied by the creation of telegraph lines, typically in parallel to train tracks. While trains and ships transported goods and people on a global scale, telegraphy ensured the same for information. The difference was that the transport of passengers and merchandise took days, weeks and even months, whereas sending a telegraphic message was almost instantaneous.
During the 1920s, telegraphy was replaced with telephones, while automobiles usurped the position of trains in transport. What was inactive missing were networks of motorways for widespread automotive use. Fascist Italy built 1 in the interwar period. Nazi Germany shortly followed with its own. Both countries introduced the terms autostrada and Autobahn, which to this day are utilized frequently in preference to the English word “motorway”. Across the West, motorways became an additional means of transport to railways. This was actual but for the United States, where the older form of transport was mostly superseded. Between 1920 and 2022, the US railroad network shrank from 400,000 to 140,000 kilometres.
Instead, post-war America emulated Germany’s Autobahnen and, beginning during the 1950s, started constructing an “Interstate road System”, whose full length present has reached almost 80,000 kilometres. akin motorway networks were developed in post-war Western Europe, and after the fall of communism throughout Central Europe. besides in the 1990s, China joined this construction race. The authoritarian power’s network has been dubbed the “National Trunk road System”. By 2004, its dimension had reached 34,000 kilometres and now, in 2025, it is the most extended in the world, standing at a mindboggling 184,000 kilometres.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the construction of high-speed railway networks commenced in France and Japan. Italy joined this competition in the 1970s, Germany during the 1990s, and Spain at the turn of the 21st century. Notably, outside the West, China began building high-speed rails in the early 2000s. A 4th of a century later, at 50,000 kilometres, Beijing now boasts the longest network of this kind in the world. In comparison, France and Spain’s high-speed networks come to a specified 3,000 kilometres each, while Germany’s is well below 2,000 kilometres. The facts are a clear indicator of China’s global leadership in this area.
To the increasing mix of means of transportation, commercial (passenger) aviation was added in the US during the 1930s. After the Second planet War, commercial aviation developed across Western Europe in the mid-20th century. After the fall of communism, at the turn of the 21st century, this trend reached the remainder of the continent and besides became a fresh norm of travel in China.
New continental blocs
In 2025 Washington abandoned America’s post-war commitment to global leadership. The entailed ditching of the rule-based order that underpins global relations plays into the Kremlin and Beijing’s hands. Both non-western powers envision a multipolar planet with their own political and economical blocs the size of continents. Each of these blocs should be run in accordance with its own suitable set of principles (values). On top of that, China aspires to take from the US the mantle of the world’s political and economical leader, or rather, hegemon.
Where are then these blocs? What are their strengths and weaknesses from the position of infrastructure? Let us then separate and rank these blocs by the size of their economies. Extant political maps of the planet are not (yet?) helpful in this regard.
The United States, with its yearly GDP of 30 trillion US dollars, thus far, remains the world’s largest economy. The country’s area amounts to 9 million square kilometres, where 340 million people reside. The European Union with its GDP of 20 trillion US dollars boasts a population of 450 million who live on the territory of 4 million square kilometres. Until recently, Britain with 68 million inhabitants and its GDP of 3.6 trillion US dollars utilized to be a associate of the European Union. It inactive retains close ties with Brussels. In communist China, where GDP has reached 19 trillion, 1.4 billion people live in a country whose area reaches 9.5 million square kilometres.
Other crucial players in the global economy and politics include Canada and Russia on account of territory, which totals respectively 10 million square kilometres in the first case and 17 million in the second. While Canada’s population at 40 million is 3 and a half times smaller than Russia’s 140 million inhabitants, both countries’ GDP is almost the same at 2.2 trillion US dollars. India’s populace, numbering 1.43 billion, is somewhat bigger than that of China. However, the country’s GDP of 4.2 trillion is equal to Japan’s with a population more than 10 times smaller, standing at 123 million. The same ratio applies to both countries’ area, or 3.3 million square kilometres in the case of India and 370,000 square kilometres regarding Japan. What is more, Brazil (2.3 trillion, 210 million inhabitants, 8.5 million square kilometres) seems to have thrown its lot in with China. Meanwhile, Indonesia (1.5 trillion, 285 million inhabitants, 1.9 million square kilometres) vacillates between its political tradition of non-alignment and closer links with China, given Washington’s erratic behaviour.
Thanks to its atomic arsenal on par with Washington’s, Russia aspires to be reckoned with as a separate bloc and civilization in its own right. However, in reality, it is China that supports the country’s economy ravaged by the sanctions imposed following the Kremlin’s unjustified neo-imperial war of recolonization in Ukraine. The Russian army is now (2024-25) in specified a weak position that the Kremlin has been forced to search ammunition and soldiers in North Korea. This could not happen without Beijing’s consent due to the fact that Pyongyang is full dependent on China.
Should Washington express specified a desire, the US could easy hold its function as the globe’s sole arbiter with the willing support of the European Union, Canada, Japan and, perhaps, Indonesia. However, America’s renewed isolationism and abandonment of its allies and global obligations leave the aforementioned players to fend for themselves. The incumbent US president has openly stated his individual desire to annex Canada, which pushes Ottawa to cooperate more closely with the EU. Likewise, most nipponese doubt whether the US would come to their defence if China attacked. Despite Jakarta’s close defence and economical cooperation with America, Indonesia may not be certain of Washington’s commitment to containing an aggressive China either. This is especially so as the US seems to be inching toward the abandonment of Taiwan, which was unthinkable just a year ago.
Instead, the present (2025) US administration pursues closer business and security links with Saudi Arabia (1.1 trillion, 32 million inhabitants, 2.1 million square kilometres) and the Gulf countries (the combined GDP of UAE, Qatar and Bahrain is 0.8 trillion US dollars). Washington’s decision to build in the United arabian Emirates the largest AI campus outside America seems to be an effort at achieving an alliance with the region in the latest infrastructural race. Curiously, the strong presence of Chinese IT giants in the UAE does not worry Washington, though this may consequence in Beijing’s swift capture of state-of-the-art chips that officially are strictly banned from export to China.
Blocs and infrastructure
From the home perspective, infrastructure decides on the quality, strength and ease of transport and communication within a polity or economical region (bloc). Otherwise, the level of connectivity with the outside planet ensures the appropriate functioning of an economy, balancing its needs with those of security.
With the world’s longest networks of motorways and high-speed railways, China is clearly winning the infrastructural race in the field of transportation. The US has rested on its laurels in this respect and appears to have resigned itself from constructing high-speed railways altogether. As a result, America’s strategy of motorways is congested and not maintained to a advanced standard. In contrast, the EU is pushing for integrating the individual motorway networks of its associate states and is constructing new, frequently transcontinental, ones with rather a bit of success. The combining and expansion of the associate states’ extant high-speed railways has proved more difficult. In a nutshell, the problem is of decision-making due to the fact that the EU is not a single state but a kind of a loose confederation whose associate states tend to bicker over divergent interests.
The American economy, being inactive the world’s largest, helps to make up for the country’s aforementioned infrastructural deficiencies alongside others. On this basis, Washington can afford to stay the world’s biggest military spender. The US defence budget is as much as 3 times greater than China’s. Russia is the globe’s 3rd largest military spender. Currently, the aggregated defence budgets of the EU states amount to slightly more than that of China. However, the uncoordinated disbursement makes the usage of these separate budgets inefficient. In the context of a restive Russia, this may change shortly and the EU’s overall military spending may as much as double for the sake of containing any onslaught that the Kremlin may be planning.
Neither China nor the US offers a social democratic strategy of universal wellness care that is free at the point of delivery. This is the shining hallmark of the EU and its pro-social policies. Furthermore, most EU countries boast accompanying universal systems of social welfare provisions for EU citizens. As a result, in Europe the average quality of life is the highest in the planet and the average dimension of life the longest. Europe takes much better care of its human capital than the globe’s another 2 blocs. The facts are especially galling for Americans, who shoulder the highest level of spending per capita on healthcare.
The dilemma is that China’s infrastructural achievements and America’s military spending do not make up for the deficiency of equitable healthcare for all. However, the European Union could find itself being worse off, missing out on effective military defence if Washington withdraws its assistance in this regard. On top of that, the weaponization of the net (including its infrastructure) has added yet another variable to this game of aggressive competition among the world’s 3 coalescing blocs.
Cyber gap
Only China and the US boast large tech (IT) companies of worldwide importance. For instance, there is Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft and Apple in America. At the same time, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi are in China. Collectively, these companies dominate cyberspace and internet-based services across the world. The EU threw its lot in with the US companies after it turned out that Huawei’s telecommunication equipment could make Europe susceptible to Chinese surveillance and influence. But overdependence on American companies is not a sustainable solution either, given taxation avoidance and the mishandling of users’ private data.
America and Europe subscribe to the thought of an open internet, which is both their strength and vulnerability. In the West, social and political mass protests (or flash mobs) cannot be mitigated by limiting access to the net or even switching it off in a certain area. This is the norm in China and among its allies, alongside a host of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes across the globe. China and Iran pioneered the censorship of home net access and its censorship through active separation from unwanted ideological influences that arrive from abroad. Afterward, Russia joined the totalitarian e-club with the Kremlin’s thought of a “sovereign internet”. Obviously, it was nothing but an emulation of North Korea’s internet, whose very infrastructure is physically isolated from its global counterpart.
After the end of the pandemic, in 2022, the planet was stunned by the launch of the first widely available AI solution, namely, ChatGPT. Already hundreds of millions of users are utilizing it in their everyday lives. ChatGPT is simply a product of the US company OpenAI. In fast succession, large tech companies released akin online AI solutions, or “chatbots”. Google (Alphabet) offers Gemini, Meta (Facebook) – Llama, Anthropic – Claude, and xAI – Grok.
Tellingly, all these companies are from the US. In addition to its largest economy and military budget, America got a head start in this fresh LLM arms race. LLMs, or large language models, underpin what is seen as AI (artificial intelligence). LLMs constitute the core of the aforementioned ChatGPT and akin chatbots. too making the everyday usage of computers and the net easier and quicker, these chatbots enable laymen to make their own software, alongside sorting and searching always larger stores of data faster and more efficiently.
With the Russian war on Ukraine raging on, the dual – or military – usage of LLMs has become immediately obvious. Due to the western sanctions on AI-level chips, China joined the LLM arms race only with the substandard chatbot Ernie, which was released by the tech giant Baidu. Yet, to America’s surprise, in 2025, China offered to the full planet the open-source DeepSeek chatbot that is equal to American solutions in this regard. Whereas the compilation of LLMs and the training of AI solutions on this basis cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the US, seemingly the full outlays on creating the DeepSeek bot amounted to a mere six million US dollars. This accomplishment – or cyberwarfare-style disinformation – overnight wiped out a trillion dollars in value from the US large tech companies’ shares. In turn, the exponential uptake of DeepSeek by hundreds of millions of users exposes them to Beijing’s propaganda and surreptitious surveillance.
The LLM race is now in full swing. Europe lags behind, though the French company Mistral has valiantly joined this race. The EU’s conventional reliance on America in technology and defence makes European companies reluctant to decision into the field on their own. What is more, Brussels’s approach to limiting the adverse effects of AI and the net through regulation irks the current American administration and further curbs grassroots AI initiatives in Europe. Perhaps, statism – or state support and investment – may constitute a good answer to this dilemma. Washington’s gradual withdrawal from Europe and the incumbent American president’s attempts to derail the EU mean that Europe must fend for itself. The another option is disintegration that would entail the failure of agency and a division of Europe between the American bloc and China’s Eurasian bloc.
New scramble for Africa
Curiously, the 3 coalescing blocs of a future multipolar planet seem to be emulating the dystopian vision of the globe divided among 3 totalitarian blocs, which, in 1948, the British author George Orwell presented in his prescient fresh 1984. As in this book, the current geopolitical configuration leaves Africa up for grabs. After the imperial scramble for Africa in the 1880s, which led to the wholesale colonization of this continent, a fresh AI-enabled infrastructure-based scramble for Africa seems to be brewing rapidly.
In the wake of the political decolonization mostly achieved in the mid-20th century, African countries aspired to emulate their erstwhile colonial masters erstwhile it came to economy and politics. The West replied with haughty-style advice and offered any developmental aid alternatively of due reparations. Furthermore, any grants and loans from the West were made conditional on achieving certain benchmarks in the compartments of democratization, human rights, transparency and economical regulations. These impositions angered both rulers and populaces in the post-colonial countries. This late led to the expulsion of advisors and military contingents from the erstwhile colonial metropoles.
In their stead, China and its politically-blind loans are readily welcomed across Africa. In 2025, rather thoughtlessly, Washington facilitated Beijing’s plans in this respect by dissolving USAID. Meanwhile, much to many Africans’ liking, Russia is offering discount oil, weaponry and mercenaries, alongside polyglot anti-western rhetoric and ideology. Both America and Europe have mostly lost their erstwhile sway over Africa. As such, the continent is now wide open to Sino-Russian neocolonization, which is branded as win-win improvement and modernization. Infrastructural projects and the debt trap make subsequent African countries financially and politically dependent on China, while many of the continent’s dictators look to the Kremlin for keeping them in power with Russian boots on the ground.
Like in the past, besides today, the construction and control of infrastructure is the colonizing powers’ indispensable tool for domination and extracting wealth. Infrastructure that abroad powers offer, gift or impose deprives the recipient of agency and makes it pliable in the hands of fresh colonizers. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) commenced in 2013. The presumably benevolent plan was to span Eurasia, Africa and Latin America, making China into the economical and political hub of most of the world, much to the marginalization of the “decadent West”. BRI stalled in Europe due to Russia’s war on Ukraine and Brussels’s recognition that China is an economical competitor and systemic rival. Moreover, in compliance with the Monroe Doctrine, Washington removed China’s grip over the geopolitical chokepoint in the Panama Canal.
The transport of goods and people across Africa is hard due to the fact that no viable railway networks were always put in place there. any freight trainlines for extracting mineral wealth inherited from the colonial times stay but most declined or were abandoned. Neither were motorways constructed for spanning the continent but for confederate Africa. Many roads inherited from the colonial period fell into disrepair. What is more, outside the confederate tip of Africa, the vast majority of roads stay unpaved. The tiny rich elite, fluent in the European languages of the erstwhile colonial masters, avail themselves of passenger aviation, which grew rapidly over the past 2 decades. Emirates and Turkish Airlines have secured dense networks of air routes that cover the full continent of Africa.
In turn, the African masses are compelled to journey on foot, by riding donkeys and camels, or availing themselves of minibuses. Travel on dirt tracks takes days and weeks, like in premodern Europe or prior to the construction of transcontinental railway lines in North America. More well-to-do Africans who happen to reside in city ports may hotel to hitching rides on oceanic ferries and freight ships to another coastal cities.
A akin situation can be observed in the field of information transfer. Although fixed-line telephony became the standard across the planet during the 20th century, it never took off in Africa apart from the continent’s confederate end. As in the case of aviation routes that replaced never built railways and motorways, mobile telephony saw the problem overcome even with the dearth of stationary telephones. During the past 2 decades, almost two-thirds of Africans gained mobiles and corresponding connectivity coverage. Thanks to wind-up and solar devices, this improvement took place without any commensurate electrification of the continent’s towns and villages.
Neocolonial frontier
The skipping of the construction of capital-intensive infrastructure – like railways, motorways or fixed-line telephony – to any may appear a sign of accelerated progress. In reality, it is simply a certain consequence of colonial exploitation that continues to deprive the inhabitants of Africa of transport and communication services that are the gold standard elsewhere in the world. Practically, 1 encounters no fixed-line net connectivity in Africa. But during the past decade net usage has doubled across the continent, reaching over 40 per cent. This was possible thanks to the spread of inexpensive smartphones that let net connectivity piggyback on mobile telephone networks.
Hence, most young and middle-aged Africans now enjoy access to the global sources of information. Yet, the deficiency of broadband connectivity, offered through optical cables, restricts their access to online solutions. This stunted infrastructure limits the agency of Africans to excel in entrepreneurship or research. But on the another hand, it opens their countries to the global economy and entailed exploitation at the hands of Chinese and western large tech companies.
What else can be taken distant from Africans in the age of the weaponized LLM race? Since the minute of their inception, LLMs have been trained on multilingual digitized printed material (books and periodicals) and on the equally polyglot net content generated over the past 4th of a century. However, out of around 1 hundred languages in which ChatGPT is available, two-thirds are of European provenance, while the remainder stem from Asia. Just a single African language, Swahili, features in this repertory, due to the commercially attractive number of 80 million speakers. At its 70 million speakers the language of Hausa displays a akin global and economical appeal. This is akin to Amharic with its 60 million speakers, Oromo and Yoruba with 45 million speakers each, or Igbo and Zulu with 40 and 30 million speakers respectively.
LLMs are not available for even large African languages. This is due to widespread illiteracy and the sheer dearth of publications or net content on which viable models could be trained. As in the past, most day-to-day traffic in African languages takes place orally, through speaking, be it face to face, on mobiles or with the usage of online communicators. Another problem is the deficiency of western-style standardization that would be imposed and maintained through compulsory and free simple education for all. As in premodern Europe, African languages inactive tend to vary gradually from village to village, city to city, region to region and state to state.
But this is not an insurmountable hurdle for existing technology. With the competition heating up among the 3 global blocs, the LLM race is certain to be taken shortly besides to Africa. After all, data essential for training LLMs can be collected in the oral form through mobile networks and thanks to China’s surveillance CCTV cameras that excel at harvesting multimodal (face, audiovisual, electronic or written) data. The multi-variety English available on ChatGPT shows the way forward.
AI solutions that communicate verbally are increasingly attuned, as a substance of course, to American, British, Indian or Australian English. The same can be done for Swahili, which is spoken (and more seldom written) differently in Burundi, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania or Uganda. Similarly, the varieties of Hausa – spoken in Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria or Togo – could be harnessed for online usage and commercialization. In the wake of specified a success, global companies could straight mark African consumers and get into the educated African workforce without investing in education, healthcare or book publishing. Skipping all this, which 1 would think is essential investment, would again leave Africans stuck deeper in the situation of chronic underdevelopment that they have suffered since the 19th century. But on the another hand, the world’s 3 geopolitical blocs could profit richly, preying on the youngest and fastest increasing population in the world. The number of Africa’s inhabitants topped 1 billion in 2008 and is predicted to grow almost 2 and a half times, that is, to 2.4 billion, by 2050.
Soberingly, this point in time is only a 4th of a century away. Meanwhile, 36 years have already elapsed since the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War in 1989.
Ukraine: the decisive moment
Not only are the world’s 3 emerging blocs of America, China and Europe at loggerheads in politics, economy and war, but they besides engage – tacitly or not – in a neocolonial scramble for Africa. At present, Russia’s war on Ukraine lies squarely at the crux of this multivectoral competition and even conflict among these blocs. Aspiring for any kind of agency on the global stage, the Kremlin strains to reverse Ukraine’s democratic choice to prosecute integration with Europe and the West. Authoritarian China stands by and helps Moscow on the sly. If Russia wins, China’s Eurasian bloc of unfreedom will receive a crucial boost. In the case of defeat, Beijing will save Russia from collapse and hold its position as a “neutral arbiter” of worldwide importance. Whatever the outcome, Russia as a de facto colony will become more profoundly entangled with and dependent on a hegemonic China.
Ukrainian grain exports are essential for supplying most of Africa with food staples and for keeping their prices affordable. Famine and hunger brought about by expanding food insecurity would considerably lower expected profits from the neocolonial exploitation of Africa. Both Kyiv and Moscow proceed to export grain to the continent’s multiple countries. The Russians are looting it on an unprecedented scale from Ukrainian depots and fields under the Kremlin’s occupation. Grain exports are yet another instrument for making Africa dependent, be it on Europe or China’s Eurasian bloc.
Under Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian rule, the interwar russian Union perfected the usage of man-made famine for political ends during the Holodomor in Ukraine. Today, Kremlin one more time utilizes hunger as a weapon on a global scale. Following the 2025 shutdown of USAID, America withdrew humanitarian support from Africa. The decision has greatly facilitated Moscow’s weaponization of food supplies, making the continent gradually even more dependent on China’s Eurasian bloc.
In the emerging tripartite division of the world, the post-war certainties of the rule-based global order are gone. Washington vacated the post of global arbiter and policeman. Likewise, the halcyon decades of the post-communist period are over. During this time, spending on defence was drastically cut in Europe, whereas the resultant bonus of the peace dividend turbocharged the unprecedented rise in the standard of surviving across the Old Continent.
The long post-1945 period of peace in Europe – deepened thanks to the East-West rapprochement that followed the fall of communism and the breakup of the russian Union – is sadly over. Russia’s hot war in Ukraine, the West’s consequence with Cold War-style sanctions, and the Kremlin and China’s cyber and hybrid attacks on Europe and America increasingly are destabilizing the world. The – thus far – absence of any direct military confrontation in the EU or across the NATO area does not mean that Europe remains at peace. That was actual prior to Russia’s 2014 and 2022 attacks on Ukraine. Nowadays, the situation in Europe amounts to the absence of both a hot war and peace.
Can uncovering ourselves caught in the state of hybrid war be described as peace? possibly it is simply a kind of “hot peace” or any “heating-up Cold War”. For sure, it will be a fresh norm for decades to come. The globe’s 3 blocs that are engaged in the neocolonial scramble for Africa created and abide by this norm. What is more, these blocs appear to accept this norm, irrespective of whatever sufferings it may visit on us all soon.
The future does not look bright, even without mentioning the climate crisis.
Tomasz Kamusella is Reader (Professor Extraordinarius) in Modern Central and east European past at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His fresh volumes include Rreziqet e Neoimperializmit rus (Kristalina 2024), Politics and the Slavic Languages (Routledge 2021), Eurasian Empires as Blueprints for Ethiopia (Routledge 2021), and Languages and Nationalism alternatively of Empires (Routledge 2023). His mention work Words in Space and Time: A Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe (CEU Press 2021) is available as an open access publication.
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