The Global South is a uniquely amorphous term that, since its origin in the Cold War, has become a loose, colloquial shorthand for a whole host of nations seeking to reform unequal structures of the global economy and promote an equitable multipolar system.
The term’s political durability is matched by its intellectual elusiveness. It rose to prominence following a 1980 report by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt – North-South: A Programme for Survival.[1] The Brandt report distinguished between countries with comparatively higher GDP per capita – overwhelmingly in the northern hemisphere – and lower- and middle-income ones, overwhelmingly in the southern hemisphere. The line dividing these groups came to be known as the Brandt line: an imaginary boundary running across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Mediterranean Sea, over Central Asia and the Pacific Ocean. The divide was further highlighted in a 1990 UN-led report, The Challenge to the South, by then-Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere.[2]
Much of the Global South coincided with the so-called “Third World”, a term coined in 1952 by French demographer Alfred Sauvy to describe the nascent Cold War-era ordering of the world. The Third World was the ‘rest’ – left over after the U.S.-allied Western Bloc and the USSR-led Eastern Bloc – for whom non-alignment and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) became political strategies to survive the bipolar contest. In 1964, a set of these came together as the Group of 77 (G77) at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to voice and negotiate better for their priorities at the UN. The NAM, born out of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, and of which India was one of five founding members[3], acquired a life of its own in articulating a unifying political and economic agenda for the Third World during the Cold War.
These nomenclatures and alignments are now being used interchangeably. A Venn diagram of the Global South, the Third World, the Non-Aligned Movement, and G77 reveals overlapping layers of membership and cross-cutting alliances across the four terms. In light of the current global contestations, the term Global South seems to be the most inclusive of diverse aspirations and hence has the most traction. Most importantly, it does not seek to replace the current order, but to reform it economically, for greater equity.[4]
In calling for structural reforms of the global economic order, the term’s intellectual and political foundations borrow variously from critical scholarship on imperialism, colonisation and decolonisation, as well as dependency theories.[5] This is not a coincidence: a majority of the countries that participated in the NAM or G77 and identified with the Global South were former colonies that gained independence through the 1950s and 1960s. Through collectives like the NAM and G77, they voiced their concerns over the continued concentration of capital and wealth in the West, while the ‘rest’ had only peripheral access to these resources. The Global South has historically been at the outer edges of development, and the concept became an organising principle for this margin to voice its concerns.
It became particularly significant during the Cold War and the bipolar contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War, both the Global South and the Third World lost their relevance.
In the past four years, however, the Global South has made a resurgence, yet again as a political call to address the shared concerns of developing, lower- and middle-income countries.
This is the result of a succession of structural shocks: the health inequalities and economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, the sharpening divisions and imbalance in food and fuel access due to the Russia-Ukraine war, the strategic contest between the U.S. and China, and escalating climate impacts. These have underscored gross global inequalities and the vulnerabilities of lower- and middle-income nations in crises not of their making. As geopolitical realities head for renewed great power competition, the Global South has once again become synonymous with a non-aligned strategy for survival.
The construct is no less ambiguous today than when it first originated. This time though, it has become a big tent that accommodates all non-West aspirations. The 130-odd countries[6] that now constitute the Global South form a heterogeneous bunch accounting for more than two-thirds of the global population across Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America. It includes emerging middle powers like India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia, the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like Fiji and the Maldives, as well as oil-rich West Asia. All BRICS countries, including China, see themselves as part of the Global South, as does nearly half of the G20. Scholars[7] have also pointed out the presence of countries with vastly differing economic, political and governing systems and cultural identities.
Disparities within the Global South have sharpened since the 1970s: both Vietnam, with a GDP per capita of $4,346 and Kenya at $1,949, are part of it. Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE at $70,000, $40,000 and $97,000 per capita, have all acquired massive wealth. China is now the second-largest economy in the world, and India the fifth. [8]
Despite lacking a coherent definition, the Global South endures and is gaining strength. It is instructive to think of it as a geopolitical fact rather than a geographical demarcation. Its appeal lies in its ability to get to the heart of shared priorities and goals that bind this diverse array of nations. Equally importantly, it opens the door to form cross-cutting, pragmatic and issue-specific alliances to address several of these concerns – both, in terms of South-South cooperation like the IBSA forum and its IBSA Fund, and North-South dialogue as seen through the G20.
What is also different now is that the ‘developing’ world that constitutes the Global South is more powerful today than it was during the Cold War, and much more vocal in articulating the desire to realign the global order away from Western dominance. India, the host of two Voice of Global South Summits in 2023, has for long seen the value of forums like the Non-Aligned Movement or G20 in pushing for a more equitable world order.
For the G7-led Global North looking to engage with the Global South, the construct might be better understood as an organising principle through which to articulate and address several shared developmental priorities for both hemispheres and a vision for collective policy objectives and action.
Charuta Ghadyalpatil is a Research Assistant at Gateway House.
This article was exclusively written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. You can read more exclusive content here.
For permission to republish, please contact outreach@gatewayhouse.in.
Support our work here.
©Copyright 2024 Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. All rights reserved. Any unauthorised copying or reproduction is strictly prohibited.
References
[1] Willy Brandt, “North-South: a programme for survival; report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues,” 1980, UNESCO Digital Library, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000039496.
[2] The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South Commission, https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/The-Challenge-to-the-South_EN.pdf
[3] ‘History,’ Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), https://nam.go.ug/history
[4] ‘Listening Beyond the Echo Chamber: Emerging Middle Powers Report,’ Gateway House, Mar 18, 2024, https://www.gatewayhouse.in/listening-beyond-echo-chamber-emerging-middle-powers-report-2024/
[5] This school of thought was pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s. It attributed the lack of industrialization and the persistence of poverty in developing countries to the unequal structure of the world economy. According to this theory, countries on the “periphery” are locked in a state of dependency because they primarily export raw resources to wealthy countries of the global “core.” Wealthy nations thus control the terms of trade, perpetuating this dependence.
[6] The G77 is now 134-countries strong, all regularly referring to themselves as the Global South. India invited 125 countries to its two Voice of the Global South Summits in 2023. The NAM Summit held in January 2024 hosted 120 members.
[7] Sebastian Haug, Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner and Günther Maihold, ‘The ‘Global South’ in the study of world politics: examining a meta category,’ Third World Quarterly, Vol 42 (2021), 1923-1944.
[8] World Bank Open Data, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=VN