About 120 countries make up the non-Western world. They represent more than half of humanity and, for the most part, share a colonial past. They were victims of exploitation and racism and for several decades shared the same anti-Western and anti-capitalist strategy.
Today, however, we cannot speak of a Global South, even if most of these countries are south of the equator. They do not form a collective. They do not share the same economic interests, nor the same political traditions, nor the same development goals, nor the same concerns for their security.
During the cold war these countries were called the third world, then they became developing countries, and if today we call them the Global South it is partly due to the geostrategists of the North West and partly also to the India and China, the two giants fighting to lead them. Grouping them into a single category helps keep an eye on them.
The competition between New Delhi and Beijing for the favor of the South is increasing. It is a crucial dispute for the future of international relations.
India aspires to reform the order that emerged from the Second World War and that the United States leads. Basic institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank or the United Nations Security Council do not work for the benefit of the interests of a South suffocated by sovereign debt and various endemic conflicts.
Instead of reforming these institutions, China aims to eliminate them. He does not need them for the world he prefers, that is, one based on bilateral relations, dominated by economic strength and military power, and without a framework of universal values.
China is trying to lead the South through “global initiatives” on development, security and values. In March he launched the Global Civilization initiative to emphasize that if the world is to be “a community with a common destiny”, each country must interpret human rights in its own way. 130 countries attended, most of them more interested in doing business with China than discussing respect for human dignity.
India organized the G-20 meeting in September. Chinese President Xi Jinping, however, was not there. He did not want to participate in putting India in front of the international community. In November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi organized a conference he called “the voice of the Global South”. 125 countries participated, including seven from Eastern Europe, but China was not invited.
Indian Foreign Minister Subrajmanyam Jaishankar said that the West is not always the villain in the film and criticized that China, after becoming the world’s great factory thanks to capital and Western technology, now use this economic strength as a weapon in its favor. Modi wants India to be “the shoulder” on which developing countries jump to achieve higher development and, at the same time, “the bridge” that connects them with the countries of the north.
While China’s rhetoric is clearly anti-Western, India’s is more moderate. Having been a mainstay of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War, as well as being a client of the Soviet Union’s military industry, today it is approaching the United States. It is clear that, following the Chinese road map, it also wants to attract more Western capital and technology, but at the same time it needs more complicity with Washington on security issues. In this way, it aims to counter China’s influence in Pakistan and Southeast Asia.
That India wants to lead the Global South while strengthening its relationship with the United States and the European Union is not a contradiction, but a sign of the pragmatism that dominates international relations.
Even the smallest of countries has leeway to decide who it deals with. The states of the Sahel, for example, have disengaged from France, the former colonial power. Vietnam seeks its identity by approaching the United States, not China, despite the fact that it is also a communist and capitalist country.
The blog world has been replaced by an a la carte one because ideology has lost weight and the south is emancipating itself from everything, even from the south itself.
There is no South-South solidarity. There has not been, at least since the oil crisis of 1973 and the creation of OPEC a few years earlier, the cartel that works to keep the price of the barrel as high as possible, even if it is at the expense of the development of the south.
Nor is there uniform solidarity in the south with the climate crisis. India and South Africa insist on burning coal because they need more energy to grow and this is the cheapest for them and many other countries. The oil producers, for their part, will not give up squeezing the wells without great compensation either.
India still lacks the economic power and political influence of China to dominate the South, but thanks to a low-cost, high-tech economy and pragmatic, less bellicose diplomacy, it is well on its way. .
The South
Global
