There was a time in the 1980s before the end of the Cold War and the ensuing era of globalization when discussing the economic-political divide between the Global “South” and “North” was in vogue in intellectual circles as well as at the United Nations and other international organizations.
As part of the trendy jargon of the time, the terms “the South” and “the North” were used in the global context as alternative designations for “developed” rich nations (defined as Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia) and “developed” or “less developed” or “poor” countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America.
Working on my PhD in political science at that time, I had no choice but to study the growing literature on the topic, authored by neo-Marxist scholars whose “dependency theory” proposed that the global capitalist system encouraged resources to flow from the “periphery” of poor states to the “core” of wealthy nations, enriching the latter at the expense of the former.
Issues of race and culture as well as geopolitics also entered the discussion, the North being dominated by “white” nations, Europe and its offshoots, while the South consisted of non-Western and people of color. Many governments there tended to pursue a “non-aligned” foreign policy or to embrace an uncompromising anti-American orientation.
Even then that designation didn’t make a lot of sense, especially since the Soviet Union and its European allies (including “the Ukraine”) were leading the attacks against the North. That required changing the terms by referring to the bloc consisting of the poor non-white people of the South as the “Third World” while the West and the Communist groupings were classified respectively as the “First” and “Second” worlds.
Moreover, the economies of countries in the South, starting earlier with Japan, and later followed by Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina and Brazil, were being industrialized, while the oil-producing countries in the Middle East were attaining vast wealth.
And globalization seemed to have made all the talk about a South-North divide sound anachronistic, as major nations of the Third World led by China and India abandoned their centralized economic systems and were integrated into the capitalist global economy and on their way to becoming members of the club of the wealthy nations as they ceased waving the anti-American flag.
It was a new world where Singapore and Saudi Arabia had higher GDPs per capita than Britain, whose empire once dominated them.
But then to paraphrase General Douglas McArthur, old paradigms don’t die, they just fade away for a while, and in some cases they come back in new covers.
Hence the recent attempt to revive the old intellectual fashion of the 1980s by suggesting that the old divide between the South and the North, between white nations and the people of color in the Third World, explains why some nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America are not joining the United States and its allies in their campaign against the Russian aggression in Ukraine.
From that perspective, the US and its Western partners are seen as the resurrection of the old North while those countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America that have refused to jump on the anti-Russia bandwagon supposedly represent a resurgent South or Third World raising expectations of the rebirth of a non-aligned bloc of nations.
Hence the fact that not only China, but India, Saudi Arabia, Brazil or South Africa, have refused to join the US-led economic sanctions against Russia demonstrates the American and European “disconnect with much of the Global South,” according to Trita Parsi, vice-president of the Quincy Institute.
In the 1980s it was the global capitalist system that was the target of the critique of anti-American neo-Marxist intellectuals. Now it’s the US-led “rules-based order” that has “begotten allergic reaction” by nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, according to Parsi.
“That order hasn’t been rules-based,” Parsi states, speaking supposedly on behalf of “diplomats and analysts from across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America” who told him that that order “allowed the US to violate international law with impunity.”
And now Washington “is demanding that the countries of the Global South make massive and costly sacrifices – with little regard for their vulnerabilities and security needs – to save the order the US itself has been on the forefront of eroding,” insists Parsi, a former president of the National Iranian American Council.
This is an exercise in retro global political theorizing, which ironically in the case of the Ukraine war has nothing to do with an injustice committed by white countries against the South but involves one European nation attacking another European country.
In a way, what Parsi and other left-leaning and anti-American intellectuals are doing is to turn on its head the grand theory promoted by US President Joe Biden, who has marketed the resistance to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the representation of a global struggle between a coalition of democratic nations led by Washington and an axis of authoritarian regimes headed by Russia and China.