The Global South: origins and significance

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• The unwillingness of many leading countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to stand with NATO over the war in Ukraine has brought to the fore once again the term “Global South.”

Global South

• The term “Global South” is not geographical. Rather, its usage denotes a mix of political, geopolitical and economic commonalities between nations.
• It refers to various countries around the world that are sometimes described as ‘developing’, ‘less developed’ or ‘underdeveloped’.
• Many of these countries — although by no means all — are in the Southern Hemisphere, largely in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
• In general, they are poorer, have higher levels of income inequality and suffer lower life expectancy and harsher living conditions than countries in the “Global North” — that is, richer nations that are located mostly in North America and Europe, with some additions in Oceania and elsewhere.

Going beyond the ‘Third World’

• The term Global South appears to have been first used in 1969 by political activist Carl Oglesby.
• But it was only after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union — which marked the end of the so-called “Second World” — that the term gained momentum.
• Until then, the more common term for developing nations — countries that had yet to industrialise fully — was ‘Third World’.
• The term ‘First World’ referred to the advanced capitalist nations; the ‘Second World’, to the socialist nations led by the Soviet Union; and the ‘Third World’, to developing nations, many at the time still under the colonial yoke.
• Eventually ‘Third World’ became a synonym for banana republics ruled by tinpot dictators — a caricature spread by Western media.
• The fall of the Soviet Union — and with it the end of the so-called Second World — gave a convenient pretext for the term ‘Third World’ to disappear, too.
• Meanwhile ‘developed’, ‘developing’ and ‘underdeveloped’ also faced criticism for holding up Western countries as the ideal, while portraying those outside that club as backwards.
• Increasingly the term that was being used to replace them was the more neutral-sounding “Global South.”

Geopolitical, not geographical

• The term ‘Global South’ is not geographical. In fact, the Global South’s two largest countries — China and India — lie entirely in the Northern Hemisphere.
• Rather, its usage denotes a mix of political, geopolitical and economic commonalities between nations.
• Countries in the Global South were mostly at the receiving end of imperialism and colonial rule, with African countries as perhaps the most visible example of this.
• It gives them a very different outlook on what dependency theorists have described as the relationship between the centre and periphery in the world political economy — or, to put it in simple terms, the relationship between “the West and the rest.”
• By 2030 it is projected that three of the four largest economies will be from the Global South — with the order being China, India, the U.S. and Indonesia.
• Already the GDP in terms of purchasing power of the the Global South-dominated BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — surpasses that of the Global North’s G-7 club. And there are now more billionaires in Beijing than in New York City.

Conclusion

• Countries in the Global South are increasingly asserting themselves on the global scene — be it China’s brokering of Iran and Saudi Arabia’s rapprochement or Brazil’s attempt to push a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine.
• One thing is for sure: the Global South is flexing political and economic muscles that the ‘developing countries’ and the ‘Third World’ never had.