For many years, the global “rules-based order” was presented as a benign system of global governance established by the West. True, its origins went back to the colonial world and many of its systems reflected colonial racial inequalities, but it was held up as the harbinger of global prosperity and order. In it, the West had magically transformed from a colonial villain to a saviour.

But for much of the Global South, the era looked very different. It was experienced as genocide, plunder and displacement. Across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, colonial administrations disrupted and suppressed local systems and industries, engineered cash-crop economies vulnerable to global price shocks, and redrew political authority to prioritise imperial control.

Eventually, demands grew for a more accurate accounting of the catastrophe the West inflicted on the rest, for acknowledgment of its historic crimes from extermination to enslavement, and for recompense. That coincided with a reordering of global power that left the West increasingly unsure of itself – no longer the saviours of us, the good guys of history they had long pretended to be.

There was some mealy-mouthed acknowledgment of this. In Kenya’s case, revelations of the existence of British torture camps during the 1950s fight for independence produced expressions of regret without apology from the British government, and penny-pinching compensation.

Similarly, Germany accepted that it committed a genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in Namibia in the first decade of the 20th century, but continues to refuse to pay........

© Al Jazeera