The recent financial crisis, worsened since the beginning of the millennium, and which experienced its most critical moments in the period between 2007 and 2009, has been marked by an economic recession without precedent since that of 1929. This crisis, which started in the United States of America, rapidly produced a shock wave which extended through practically the whole planet due to globalization.

The crisis which we continue to suffer in various forms is, according to Jacques Sapir, “the crisis of the distribution of income”. The different manifestations of the crisis are linked to the same mechanisms of globalisation, with a speculation crisis and an international financial transaction crisis which escape the control and sovereignty of the States. For a long time, the U.S.A. focused its economy simultaneously on mortgages for the promotion of consumer demand, on the debt of the U.S.A. and on financial speculation. The American mortgage crisis has had a great impact on the nature of household debt and on the difficulty in keeping up with payments on this debt, in particular because of the heavy weight of the interests related to household debts.

The crisis, as well as having provoked the bankruptcy of various multinationals such as Lehman Brothers, has also seen as a consequence the closure of various factories and insurance companies, in particular in Germany and the United States (General Motors, AIG, etc.), leaving thousands of people out of work (159,000 posts lost in September 2009 in the U.S.A), and which have increased ranges of those excluded from the system. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the number of unemployed across the world may have risen from 190 million in 2007 to 210 million at
the end of 2009. The crisis has also brought with it a drastic reduction in the money transfers from north to south, both in relation to Public Development Aid and the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), producing as a consequence the stagnation of various big infrastructural projects in various countries of the south, especially in Africa, with many other jobs lost. The crisis has also brought with it a reduction in the diasporas’ money transfers to their families, in a context in which the expatriated family members’ financial contributions represent the essential part of the income of many African families, and that suppose various millions of the GNP of various African states (Cape Verde, Senegal, Mali, etc.). The crisis has also affected in particular Civil Society Organisations and NGOs, of the north and the south, which have seen their subsidies and the financing received from public bodies, foundations and other philanthropic organisations reduced.

Even if the economic crisis seems to be holding a truce thanks to the measures of the quasi-nationalisation of AIG, for example, through the acquisition of 80% of its actions by the American treasury and a loan sourced by the Federal Reserve of 80 thousand million dollars, many observers consider it risky to consider that the neoliberal capitalist system that dominates the world is in a position to revive itself alone. All over the world we ask ourselves more and more if the governing of the world by the market can lead to sustainable development, without forgetting all the threats that it supposes to the resources of our planet and to the environment. Because the neoliberal system has not only generated a financial and economic crisis, but is also the origin of the energy crisis (with the growing scarcity of oil and its derivatives, which has fed the struggle for access to the globe’s oil resources 2) and of the food crisis (or, rather, the crisis of the price of foodstuffs) linked to the rising prices of oil, in a moment in which the planet produces more food that we can consume. The African continent (nearly 200 million Africans suffer from chronic hunger3) has been especially affected by the food crisis, with “hunger revolts” in various big cities in the last two years.

The neoliberal system, a glutton for natural resources, is also the origin of the world climate crisis, linked principally to the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by systems of intensive production (industry and intensive livestock farming) that destroy the ozone layer which protects our planet, with all the climatic imbalances caused as a consequence (floods, droughts, tsunamis, etc.).

But while the whole world suffers the consequences of this multiple crisis, the public authorities do little to tackle the deeper causes of this crisis in order to prevent this from happening again in the future. Rather, the northern governments have placed their banks and factories suffering bankruptcy on a strong drip, injecting vertiginous sums4 to save private banks from bankruptcy, so contradicting one of the fundamental principles of neoliberal system based on the non-intervention of the State in the forces of the market.

In the southern countries, and above all in Africa, the reactions of Governments are varied, arising from the denunciation of Africa’s isolation in the international meetingsabout the crisis, the attempt to express its voice through the Africa only meetings, in which the African Bank for Development initiatives stand out, but also in some cases, the taking up of initiatives on a state level to channel the crisis.

Faced with the “weak reaction” of the public authorities, above all in the south, for an in-depth analysis of this multiple crisis and the lack of application of long-lasting solutions, the Civil Society Organisations (CSO) (of both the north and the south, and in particular the African ones), also victims of this widespread crisis, see within the crisis a supplementary and crucial argument for their claim since the beginning of the millennium, the need for “another world”, an alternative to the globalisation of neoliberalism. Since that time they have taken the floor, sometimes unanimously, sometimes individually or in topic groups, to denounce the underlying causes of the crisis and to request a new world order, around the concept that another world is possible.

The history of humanity in fact shows us that crises sow the seeds of a new order, often supported by particularly bold thinkers or pressure groups, which obligate Governments to create conditions for the expected changes. The neoliberal system crisis, under its different expressions (financial and economic crisis, energy crisis, food crisis, global warming, to mention only a few) has been arousing a reflection since then about the responses that should be given, that perhaps are happening through a radical geopolitical change originating from the three poles: the G8, the G20 and the South. In this search for a new order, which should probably undergo paradigmatic changes in the context of globalisation, the organised civil society, on not only a world scale but also a regional/continental and local scale, has an important role to play.

Through the present Document of Didactic Support for the International School of Cooperation to Development of IEPALA (The Institute of Latin American and African Political Studies), we are going to examine the essential dimensions in understanding the financial crisis and the crises linked to the neoliberal system; afterwards we will take a look at the most prominent impacts of the different crises in Africa. Next, we will study the principal Government reactions, both in the north and the south, and in particular Africa, facing their union. Finally, we will emphasise the impacts of this multiple crisis on African organised civil society relating to its diversity and its search for unity, which is looking to place the African citizen as a citizen of the world and Africa, not as a spectator, but as an Actor in world geopolitics.