Going Global Goes South
Recently Joseph Nye, a venerable and influential Harvard professor and former government official, and the Financial Times’s senior trade writer, Alan Beattie, have taken against the popular political term Global South. They attack it as inaccurate, misleading, and “deeply unhelpful” (Beattie). They are not exactly wrong, but getting rid of the term will not make any difference. Another will replace it, because, like “less developed countries” and “developing countries” and “emerging markets” and “frontier markets” and the Third World, it serves a genuine need. Unlike globalization 1.0 (1830-1914), which concerned a world divided into imperial powers and colonies, globalization 2.0 (1960 -?) has taken place in a world of relatively stable sovereign states among poor as well as rich, and with much higher rates of capital mobility, common education, and intellectual-property transfer. Very crudely put, the colonized of the 19th century have enough power and shared experience in the 21st century to constitute a kind of collective. Banning the use of Global South won’t change that, and ignoring the realities that generated the term and its many ancestors will lead to bad analysis.
Nye and Beattie rightly point out that much of the Global South is in the North. China and the U.S. are at about the same latitude. China, India and most of Africa are above the Equator, as is most of the world, while prosperous countries like Australia, New Zealand and Chile are south of it. (Nye’s article is here. Beattie’s Trade Secrets columns are behind a paywall but appeared on 14 September and 5 October.) If you were to mark out the Global South on a map the result would be interesting but also a bit silly. On political-economic grounds, the attack on the Global South is less compelling. The inclusion of Russia, because Jim Neill put it in the BRICS in 2001 and Vladimir Putin has sought to exploit this position to harry his wealthy enemies, is scarcely credible, even to Russians. More plausibly, Nye and Beattie underline that the Global South’s aspiring champions, India and China, are at odds with each other and opportunistic in their support for other Southerners. China, indeed, is not looking very Southern any more along its prosperous eastern seaboard, where its world-beating high-technology companies gather. And its Belt and Road Initiative, useful as it was for off-loading excess heavy-industrial capacity a decade ago, no longer looks much like disinterested solidarity.
All this may be granted. However, Global South and its terminological ancestors did not come into being for geographical reasons or to satisfy the ambitions of the largest players. The Global South would still be a thing under whatever name even if China were to move on, which it well might as it pursues autarkic policies of self-sufficiency (zili gengsheng, a revived Maoist term) under Xi Jinping. Global South exists primarily because Global North exists. The U.S. under Trump and now Biden has been moving toward its own zili gengsheng, what Trump called “economic nationalism”, for seven years. One of the core reasons for the European Union was to create a common market that could rival the North American one is achieving economies of scale, growth through the refinement of internal comparative advantages, and efficiencies of regulation and distribution. Intensification of anti-immigrant policies in Italy, Britain, Germany and Austria — the Netherlands might join in after 22 November elections — only increases the sense that the non-South wants to take its winnings and leave the table. Given the size and centrality of Northern markets, capital, and technology, their clear desire to withdraw inside themselves will only increase the importance of the Global South concept if not its current name.
But there is a twist. The Global South is not just about staring forlornly at a border wall or dying on a raft near Lampedusa. As Beattie acknowledges, in analyzing possible changes in voting shares at the International Monetary Fund, the Global South has a large and growing share of global production. He cites this as more evidence of its misleading nature. But the idea of the West didn’t weaken as its wealth increased. Neither, interestingly, has the idea of Asia. (See Parag Khanna’s The Future Is Asian.) Nor, in a global context of both splintering and forms of consolidation like large-market self-sufficiency, will the idea of a Global South. It should be able to generate its own credibility for some time to come.
https://nltimes.nl/2023/09/21/omtzigt-calls-firm-cap-many-forms-immigration-50000-people-per-year