Where and what (for) is the middle? Africa and the middle class(es)

Abstract

The EADI General Conference 2014 under the title “Responsible Development in a Polycentric World. Inequality, Citizenship and the Middle Classes” happened to be more mainstream than maybe anticipated at the time when the topical focus was discussed and decided upon in the Executive Committee. This was however no disadvantage for the deliberations. Rather the opposite: thanks to an already ongoing process of also critical engagement, the exchanges turned out to illustrate the diversity of assessments. While the verdict on the current role of the middle class(es) remains pending, it became obvious that more scholars than originally expected had started to reflect on this phenomenon.i Not by accident Göran Therborn (2012) already wondered if we are entering a century of the middle class. He observed that the working class seemingly had been removed from our memory. The project of a worldwide emancipation under the leadership of the proletariat was instead replaced by a universal desire to obtain a middle class status. He takes the evidence from the OECD report on global development perspectives (OECD 2011), which emphasized the need to consolidate the growth of the emerging middle classes, and the advocacy role by Nancy Birdsall (2010) and the Center for Global Development she heads as an influential think tank. In a world, so Therborn’s conclusion, in which the relevance of the working class and of socialism has been declared obsolete, the middle class society emerges as the symbol of an alternative future (Therborn 2012: 17).