For more than half a century, developing countries in Africa and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have been told to “catch up” by looking West. The West was the model, the teacher, the gatekeeper, and the judge. It set the metrics, wrote the textbooks, designed the reforms, and graded the exams. And yet, after decades of prescriptions and promises, the results are brutally clear: dependency, fragility, and frustration.
Perhaps the problem is not that these countries failed to follow the Western model. Perhaps the problem is that the Western model was never designed for them to succeed on their own terms.
Today, at a moment of historic global realignment, the most radical and rational act for developing nations in Africa and MENA may be to look East—and to look inward. Not as vassals searching for a new patron, but as autonomous actors in a genuinely multipolar world. Looking East is not about trading one master for another; it is about breaking the mental and structural grip of Western superiority and reclaiming the right to define development for oneself.
The West’s mirror and the colonial hangover
The West has long invited the rest of the world to gaze into its mirror. In that mirror, Europe and North America appear as the pinnacle of economic sophistication, political maturity, and cultural modernity. Africa and MENA, by contrast, are cast as always “behind”: late, fragile, corrupt, unstable, and in need of guidance.
This is not a neutral narrative. It is an extension of imperial ideology.
Colonialism did not simply redraw borders and loot resources; it also rewired imaginations. It made Western approval the highest currency. It turned Western universities into pilgrimage sites and Western aid agencies into secular priesthoods. Entire ministries in African and MENA capitals were reorganized around producing documents for Western donors and ratings agencies, rather than serving their own citizens.
The result is a development discourse in which Western solutions are assumed to be universal, while all other experiences are treated as local, contingent, or exotic. Western economists dictate what “sound” policy looks like. Western institutions determine what counts as “good governance.” Western experts define acceptable reforms. Domestic leaders, even when they resist, often internalize this hierarchy.
This superiority complex is not only insulting. It is expensive. It has locked countries into an asymmetric relationship in which they are perpetual students—even when the teacher’s own record is underwhelming and the classroom is on fire.
The record: structural adjustment and structural stagnation
After independence, many African and MENA states experimented with ambitious development strategies: state-led industrialization, public investment in infrastructure, national projects. Some were clumsy or corrupt, but they were at least oriented toward building domestic capacity. Then came the debt crises of the 1980s and the rise of structural adjustment.
The message from Washington and European capitals was simple and brutal: liberalize, privatize, and shrink the state. Slash subsidies, open your markets, deregulate finance, and trust that “the market” will deliver growth and efficiency. Industrial policy—used extensively by Western countries in their own rise—was recast as a dangerous heresy. The state’s role was reduced to “creating an enabling environment,” whatever that meant in a context of collapsing public investment and high unemployment.
The consequences are visible from Cairo to Lagos:
- Deindustrialization or stalled industrialization, as infant industries were exposed prematurely to global competition they could not survive.
- Entrenchment of commodity dependence, as countries were nudged to focus on what they “naturally” export—oil, minerals, cash crops—while importing finished goods and technology.
- Persistent balance-of-payments vulnerability, as export baskets remained narrow and subject to volatile prices.
- Weak manufacturing bases and jobless growth, fueling social resentment and migration pressures.
Meanwhile, Western aid and loans arrived with a dense web of conditions—macroeconomic targets, governance benchmarks, political alignment requirements. Assistance was framed as generosity, but it functioned as leverage. Policy space shrank. Democratic choices were bounded by the preferences of creditors and donors.
After decades, the verdict on this Western-led model is damning: It created islands of stability and wealth for narrow elites, but it did not deliver broad-based transformation. It disciplined governments more than it empowered societies.
The world has changed. The mental map has not.
While African and MENA elites were being lectured about fiscal prudence and “doing their homework,” the global economy was quietly reconfigured. The world’s industrial heartlands shifted East. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, later China and Southeast Asian economies, pursued paths that looked suspiciously like the strategies Western institutions were preaching against elsewhere.
They protected infant industries, directed credit, managed trade, and used the state as a strategic investor rather than a night watchman. They broke many of the orthodox rules the West insisted were sacrosanct for others.
At the same time, emerging powers in Asia and across the Global South began offering alternative sources of finance, technology, and markets. South–South trade soared. Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Gulf, and Southeast Asian firms became major players in infrastructure, telecommunications, logistics, and energy across Africa and MENA.
Yet, in many policy circles in African and Arab capitals, the West still occupies the central mental space: the primary benchmark, the core reference point, the imaginary destination. Reform is often still about satisfying Western “confidence,” attracting Western investment, or climbing Western-designed indices.
This is the paradox: the material center of gravity in the global economy has shifted, but the mental map in many postcolonial states remains oriented toward the old metropole.
Looking East: not a romantic pivot, but a strategic one
To “look East” is not to romanticize Beijing, Delhi, Ankara, Seoul, or Jakarta. Eastern powers have their own interests, their own asymmetries, their own capacity to exploit. Anyone who believes they are benevolent saviors is repeating the same mistake made with the West.
The point is not that the East is morally superior. The point is that it offers:
- Different examples of successful late development that do not fit the Western script.
- Different structures of financing and trade that may be more aligned with large-scale infrastructure and industrial projects.
- A more plural set of partners, which can dilute the leverage of any one creditor or sponsor.
When an African government negotiates with China, India, Japan, Korea, the Gulf, and Western institutions simultaneously, its bargaining power increases. When a MENA country links its logistics hubs not only to Europe but also to Asia and Africa, it hedges against shocks and political whims in any one region.
Looking East also means taking seriously developmental state lessons from East Asia: focused industrial strategy, reciprocal discipline between state and business, and relentless upgrading in chosen sectors. It means asking why industrial parks flourish in Vietnam while similar efforts stall in North Africa, and adjusting institutions accordingly.
But most importantly, looking East should break the illusion that the Western path is the only path. Once that illusion falls, genuine strategic choice becomes possible.
Beyond “pivoting”: looking inward and South–South
There is a danger in talking about looking East as if the choice were simply West vs. East, as if the region’s destiny were to be a satellite orbiting one or another great power. That is just a different geometry of dependency.
The more profound shift is to look inward and sideways:
- Inward, to build productive capacity, invest in people, and strengthen institutions that serve citizens rather than external patrons.
- Sideways, to deepen regional and South–South integration, from the African Continental Free Trade Area to renewed efforts at economic cooperation within MENA and between the two regions.
The real scandal of the current global system is not only North–South inequality but also the astonishingly low level of trade and production links among countries of the South themselves. African countries trade more with Europe and Asia than with each other. Arab economies remain shockingly fragmented, their regional institutions hollowed out or militarized.
Imagine instead:
- African mineral exporters partnering with regional manufacturers to process resources locally, using Asian technology but African capital and labor.
- MENA economies leveraging their geographic position to become true bridges—logistically, digitally, and financially—between Africa and Asia, not just pipelines for oil and gas.
- Joint industrial strategies where countries coordinate specialization—one focuses on petrochemicals, another on green tech components, another on food processing—rather than all chasing the same shallow niches.
Looking East, in this deeper sense, is about plugging into a changing global economy on one’s own terms, while simultaneously strengthening regional and South–South ties. It is about making the West one partner among many, not the axis around which everything must revolve.
Breaking the spell of Western approval
Ultimately, the hardest shift is psychological. It is to stop seeking Western approval as a precondition for domestic legitimacy. It is to accept that being called “responsible” or “reformist” in a European think tank report is not a development strategy. It is to recognize that the same voices that praise “stability” often mean stability for investors, not justice or opportunity for citizens.
This does not mean shutting out the West. It means shedding the inferiority complex and negotiating from a position of self-respect. It means being willing to say no: no to deals that entrench raw commodity exports, no to reforms that gut social protection, no to security partnerships that turn entire regions into laboratories for surveillance and counterinsurgency.
At the same time, it means being willing to say yes—to tough domestic reforms that build tax capacity, strengthen local entrepreneurship, challenge entrenched oligarchies, and invest heavily in education, health, and research. A different relationship with the outside world is empty if the internal social contract remains extractive and unequal.
The future is multipolar—or not ours at all
We are entering a century in which no single power will dominate as the United States did after the Cold War. Climate crisis, technological disruption, demographic shifts, and geopolitical realignments are scrambling every assumption. For Africa and MENA, this is both dangerous and liberating.
Dangerous, because competition among great powers can turn regions into battlegrounds, both literally and financially. Liberating, because the cracks in the old order create openings for new alignments and new voices.
The question is whether leaders in these regions will use this moment to reproduce the old script—trading one patron for another—or to write a new one altogether. Will they cling to the old Western gaze, hoping for a positive review in someone else’s newspaper? Or will they cultivate an Eastward and South–South horizon, while finally centering their own societies as the primary audience that matters?
Looking East is not a slogan. It is an invitation to stop treating the West as the sun around which all planets must orbit. It is a call to embrace a world of many suns, many orbits, and many possible futures.
For African and MENA countries, the riskiest strategy is no longer to defy the West. The riskiest strategy is to keep believing that doing what they have always been told will somehow, eventually, produce different results.