NEW DELHI (AP) – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his country is “becoming the voice of the Global South”, and that at the upcoming Group of 20 meetings being held in New Delhi, that voice will be heard.
At the August summit of the BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – current chair South Africa declared its goal was to “advance the agenda of the Global South”.
And ahead of this May’s summit of the Group of Seven wealthy democracies in Hiroshima, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stressed that the guest nations he had invited reflected the importance of the Global South.
The United Nations (UN), the World Bank, United States (US) President Joe Biden – everyone seems to be talking about the Global South these days. But what, exactly, is it?
WHAT CONSTITUTES THE GLOBAL SOUTH?
Despite how it sounds, it’s not really a geographical term. Many countries included in the Global South are in the northern hemisphere, such as India, China and all of those in the northern half of Africa. Australia and New Zealand, both in the southern hemisphere, are not in the Global South.
Most cite the so-called Brandt Line as the border; a squiggle across the globe running from the north of Mexico, across the top of Africa and the Middle East, looping around India and China before dropping down to encompass most of East Asia while avoiding Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The line was proposed by former German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1980s as a visual depiction of the north-south divide based upon per-capita GDP.
“The Global South is a geographical, geopolitical, historical and developmental concept, all at the same time – with exceptions,” said founder of the New Delhi-based Council for Strategic and Defence Research Happymon Jacob.
WHICH COUNTRIES MAKE UP THE GLOBAL SOUTH?
It’s complicated, and often depends upon who is using the phrase.
Most commonly the term refers to the countries belonging to the Group of 77 at the UN, which, confusingly, is today actually a coalition of 134 countries. They’re primarily considered developing countries, but also include China and several wealthy Gulf states.
Though the G77 is a group at the UN, the UN itself does not use that as its own definition, according to Rolf Traeger, who is with the UN’s trade and development office.
For the UN, Global South is something of a shortcut to refer to developing countries in general, Traeger said. The UN currently lists 181 jurisdictions as developing countries or territories, and 67 jurisdictions as developed, he said.
In January, India’s Modi hosted a virtual ‘Voice of the Global South Summit’. It only included 125 countries, however, with China and Pakistan among the absentees.
Some use different criteria, such as whether a country was previously colonised or whether a nation’s per-capita GDP is above USD15,000.
There is also a Global North, though the term is not regularly used. That is defined basically as not the Global South.
SHOULD WE USE THE TERM GLOBAL SOUTH?
The term Global South first appeared in the 1960s, but took time to gain traction.
No matter how you define it, the Global South accounts for such a vast majority of the world’s population and broad swath of territory that some argue it’s impossible and misleading to use the label.
How can countries like China and India, each with about 1.4 billion people and GDPs of about USD18 trillion and USD3.4 trillion respectively, be lumped together with the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, with a population a little over 300,000 and a GDP of USD984 million, or the southern African nation of Zambia with 19 million people and a GDP of USD30 billion?
For his part, Modi has stressed the commonality of many issues facing the Global South, such as emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, rising debt, and food and energy security.
Vice president of the German Marshall Fund and director of its Brussels office Ian Lesser noted that most discomfort with the term comes from Global North countries, and that “Global South” is widely used by the countries that make it up.
Even though the Global South is not a group with a monolithic view or widespread uniformity, he said what’s important is that it reflects how the group sees itself.
“There is embedded in it a notion that not all strategies need to be made in the West,” Lesser said.
“For some this is simply a way to assert a degree of historic independence and distance on key issues and it is affecting the way Europe and the US think about foreign policy, and the idea that we need to live in a world where not everyone will be on the same page with us on every issue.”
