2023-07-16 04:55:00
Among the changes that accompany and promote the current transition of the international system, the emergence of the nations of the global south as relevant actors stands out. Despite the ambiguity of the concept of the global South, which partially assumes the legacy of concepts such as the “Third World” and “developing countries” that accompanied the Cold War, a group of nations with rising economies and growing global influence have begun to display a growing incidence and projection in global affairs.
The return of geopolitics and the confrontation between great powers in the course of the covid-19 pandemic and, especially, as a result of the war in Ukraine, have promoted this awakening and have given rise to a new leading role for these actors. The covid-19 pandemic not only accentuated the differences between the Euro-Atlantic nations and the emerging countries and economies in terms of inequality and vulnerability when it comes to accessing the necessary medical supplies and, especially, vaccines to combat the pandemic, but also which also established a clear differentiation between actors that –beyond the existing multilateral mechanisms– made an initial effort to promote greater cooperation in this field, particularly in the global south.
The war in Ukraine, for its part, accelerated the process of differentiation of the global south from the collective West, particularly as a result of the economic sanctions imposed on Russia which, in turn, reverberated in a negative impact on both the Western economies and the access to energy, food and fertilizers from countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For their part, the sanctions set a negative benchmark in the perception of many nations of the global south in the face of the possibility that they could be imposed in a similar way.
As a consequence, the emerging economies that had benefited from globalization and the displacement of the global economic center of gravity from the Atlantic towards the Asia-Pacific, acquired greater economic weight than in the last century.
The crisis of the traditional multilateral mechanisms gave rise to the emergence of informal multilateral mechanisms such as the G20, the G7 and the Brics. In the G20, the tension between the global north and the global south has become manifest in the differences between the member countries of the G7 and the Brics, particularly in relation to the aspiration of the latter group to promote reforms both in the mechanisms of the United Nations United as in the Bretton Woods institutions.
This polarization, which, deep down, would express the erosion of the unipolar world hegemonized by the United States and the emergence of a multipolar world around the ordering axis of the dispute between Washington and Beijing becomes more complex, however, when analyzing the heterogeneity of the so-called South global, a geopolitical rather than a geographical concept.
Due to their economic potential and their military capacity, both China and Russia, respectively, do not fully qualify as emerging economies of the global south and, in reality, present a series of economic, strategic, demographic and technological characteristics that would place them in the field of the north. global were it not for its aspiration to question and reform the existing liberal international order and the rules and mechanisms established by the West.
On the other hand, the differences in terms of development and economic weight of other nations of the global South show asymmetries and heterogeneities that do not always lead to convergences. However, the Brics have recently been reactivated as an alternative bloc to the G7, within the framework of its eventual expansion with the incorporation of other states from the global south (currently there is already a list of 19 countries aspiring to join a Brics Plus ), the creation of financial mechanisms such as the New Development Bank and a questioning of the global hegemony of the US dollar that will probably lead to the creation of a common currency at the next Brics Summit, to be held in South Africa. These approaches, and especially the reform of multilateral organizations and de-dollarization, are also among the aspirations and interests of the global south in general in all their heterogeneity, although they mainly benefit China.
However, in this framework, the global fracture that the war in Ukraine has generated is not only posed in terms of a bipolarity, but also a multipolarity of the emerging global order where the global south configures one or several alternative poles that seek to expand its capacity to influence governance and global stability, in an environment where, frequently, some nations act as pendular actors with fluctuating alignments in the face of war and the strategic dispute between the United States and China.
*President of Cries and author of War and global transition.
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