The South also
rises
By Pepe Escobar
The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global
South
by Vijay
Prashad
It is not so far-fetched to imagine Walter Benjamin's Angel of
History succumbing to the temptation, and stressing that the time
of the Global South has finally come.
Oh yes, it will be a long, arduous and winding road. But would the
Google/Facebook generation need only one textbook detailing the
stuff of dreams, trials and tribulations of the developing world in
the early 21st century, this would be it, Vijay Prashad's just
published The
Poorer Nations.
Call it the post-modern, digital follow-up to Frantz Fanon's
classicThe
Wretched of the Earth.
This is an absolutely essential book to be read alongside
another delight
written by a global Asian, Pankaj Mishra's From
the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking
of Asia,
which uses key figures such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Liang
Qichao and Rabindranath Tagore to tell an extraordinary
story.
Prashad, director of international studies at Trinity College,
Connecticut, and author of the splendid The
Darker Nations,
which should be read as a preamble to this book, sets the scene
right from the start - using the requisite Fanon quote; by 1961,
what was configured was a fight between the Third World Project
("for peace, for bread and for justice") and the Atlantic Project.
Key actors: the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the de facto
secretariat of the Third World Project, and the Group of 77
developing nations, created in 1964 to act on behalf of NAM in the
United Nations.
The founders of
the NAM enjoyed iconic status in the post-colonial world;
Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in
Indonesia, Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia. Yet they
knew this was an uphill battle. As Prashad notes, "the UN had been
hijacked by the five permanent members of the Security Council. The
IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank had been
captured by the Atlantic powers, and the GATT [General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade, precursor to the World Trade Organization] was
designed to undermine any attempt by the new nations to revise the
international economic order".
As for the Atlantic Project, a 1969 quote from Henry Kissinger -
co-destructor of Cambodia, Argentine leader Augusto Pinochet
enabler, disgusted Saudi ally (the "most feckless and gutless of
the Arabs") and praiser-in-chief of the Iranian Shah ("a tough,
mean guy") - would suffice: "Nothing important can come from the
South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses
over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the
South is of no importance."
Atlanticists were fiercely against the "no importance" Third World
Project, but also against social democracy and communism. Their
Holy Grail was to wallow in easy profits provided by a new global
geography of production, "technological shifts that enabled firms
to take advantage of differential wage rates" - most of all, those
very low wages paid all across East Asia.
So the stage was set for the emergence of neoliberalism. Here
Prashad moves in parallel with the indispensable David Harvey,
detailing how the Global South became ripe to be fully
(re)exploited; bye bye national liberation ideas of collective
good.
Keep the barbarians out
With the IMF currently part of the troika dictating austerity to
most of Western Europe (alongside the European Commission and the
European Central Bank), it's easy to forget that in 1944 things
were already pretty warped. The developing world had no say
whatsoever in Bretton Woods, not to mention any sort of control
over the UN's five-member Security Council. It was the silence of
the lambs; the wolves prevailed, and inequality was set in
stone.
Prashad proceeds with the indispensable details of how the US
dollar became the effective world currency, with the US swinging
the price of the dollar globally, regardless of any consequences;
the formation of the Group of Seven as essentially an
anti-developing world mechanism (and not anti-Soviet); and of
course the much-dreaded Trilateral Commission, set up by Chase
Manhattan's David Rockefeller to impose the will of the North
against the South.
And guess who was the Trilateral's intellectual architect? The
ineffable Zbigniew Brzezinski, later president Jimmy Carter's
consigliere. Dr Zbig wanted to "contain the "contagious threat of
global anarchy". Divide and rule, once again; the periphery needed
to be put in its place.
By the way, one should always remember that in his 1997
epic The
Grand Chessboard,
Dr Zbig, who became the foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama in
2008, wrote, "The three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy
are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the
vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the
barbarians from coming together." For a long while the "vassals"
were easily contained; but Dr Zbig, one step ahead of Kissinger,
was already planning how to contain the two key "barbarians",
ascending Eurasian powers Russia and China.
The Group of Seven anyway was a roaring success, pushing its
"theory of governance" everywhere, implemented by - who else - the
Bretton Woods mafia. Prashad neatly defines it: "What went by the
name of neoliberalism was less a coherent economic doctrine than a
fairly straightforward campaign by the propertied classes to
maintain or restore their position of dominance", via the David
Harvey-coined "accumulation by dispossession", now also known by
millions of Europeans under the codename
"austerity".
The numbers tell the story. In 1981, the net flow of capital to the
Third World was $35.2 billion. In 1987, $30.7 billion left the
Third World for Western banks. Praise the Lord and his law set in
stone, also known as Structural Adjustment, based on
"conditionality" (savage privatization, deregulation, destruction
of social services, financial
"liberalization").
Paraphrasing Dylan, when you got nothing, you still got this
nothing to lose. There was never any political strategy by the
North to deal with the debt crisis of the 1980s. The Global South
lambs were only allowed in a sorry procession to receive their
structural adjustment consecrated host one by
one.
But still that was not enough. With the fall of the USSR,
Washington was free to develop Full Spectrum Dominance. Those who
did not fully abide were branded "rogue states" - as in Cuba, Iran,
Iraq, Libya, North Korea and even, for a while, Malaysia (because
it would not bow to the IMF).
But then, slowly but surely, the Global South began to rise.
Prashad details the reasons - the commodity boom driven by China;
commodity profits improving Latin American finances; more foreign
direct investment roaming the world. The Global South started
trading more within itself.
Then, in June 2003, at the margins of the Group of Eight gathering
in Evian, France, emerged something called IBSA (the
India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue). IBSA was keen to "maximize the
benefits of globalization" and promote sustained economic growth.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim defined it at the time as
"an ideology in the best sense of the word - an ideology of
democracy, diversity, tolerance, a search for
cooperation".
In parallel, China was - what else - booming. It's essential to
remind anyone at this point of that fateful November 1978 trip by
Deng Xiaoping to Singapore, where he was hosted by Lee Kuan Yew;
Prashad could have built a whole chapter around it. This was the
clincher. Deng knew right away that he would milk the guanxi
("connections") of the Chinese diaspora for all it's worth. I'll
never forget my very own first visit to Shenzhen only one month
after Deng's fabled Southern Tour of January 1992. That's when the
boom really started. At the time, I felt I was mostly neck-deep in
Maoist China.
Fast forward to China now helping to develop Africa. Vast swathes
of the developing world would not consider blindly adopting
azhongguo
moshi -
the Chinese Model. It's more like Prashad introducing this
wonderful quote from Donald Kaberuka, a former minister of finance
in Rwanda and now president of the African Development Bank: "We
can learn from [the Chinese] how to organize our trade policy, to
move from low to middle income status, to educate our children in
skills and areas that pay off in just a couple of
years."
BRIC by BRIC
Which brings us to the BRICS, created as a group in 2009 out of the
BRIC-IBSA union - and now the top locomotive of the Global
South.
By then, inevitably, Blame China had already become an established
fine art in Washington; the Chinese must imperatively become
consumers. They are, and they will - but in their own rhythm, and
following their own
political model.
Even the IMF already admits that by 2016 the US may cease to be the
world's largest economy. So the great Fernand Braudel was already
right when he wrote The
Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth-
Eighteenth Century,
stressing this would be the "sign of autumn" for Atlantic
hegemony.
Of course there are huge problems with the BRICS, as Prashad
details. Their domestic policies can indeed be interpreted as a
sort of "neoliberalism with Southern characteristics". They are far
from being an ideological alternative to neoliberalism. They have
been helpless to counteract the overwhelming military hegemony of
the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (see, for
instance, the Libya fiasco). And they are not the embryo of a
revolutionary shift in the world order.
But at least they are "allowing a breath of fresh air to oxygenate
the stagnant world of neoliberal
imperialism".
The fresh air will circulate in the form of a new development bank,
a BRICS Bank of the South version of the South American Banco del
Sur, founded in 2009 (here's Prashad's critical
take.
China and Brazil have set up a $30 billion currency swap deal to
pay for trade, bypassing the US dollar. Beijing and Moscow are
deepening their strategic partnership. (See BRICS
go over the wall,
Asia Times Online, March 26, 2013.)
The BRICS as they stand - three major commodities producers plus
two major commodities consumers trying to find a way out of a
Western-conducted disaster - are just a start. They are already
evolving as a powerful geopolitical actor stressing multi-polarity.
They are bound to be joined by the next BRICS - the MIST (Mexico,
Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey). And don't forget Iran. Time for
BRICS MIIST?
What's graphically obvious is that the Global South has had enough
- from the ravages of casino turbo-capitalism to NATO playing
Robocop from North Africa to Southwest Asia, not to mention Eurasia
being encircled by that Dr Strangelove chimera - a missile
shield.
The Global South remains fraught with absurdities; one just has to
think of the oil and gas GCC petro-monarchies - those paragons of
"democracy" - now configured as an annex to NATO. Few developments
lately have been so appalling as the Arab League licking their NATO
master's boots, breaking international law to install dodgy Syrian
"rebels" in the chair of a sovereign state, one of its very own
founding members.
Weird scenes inside the goldmine
The fall of neoliberalism will be bloody - and it will take time.
Prashad attempts an objective analysis in terms of the unity of the
Global South, drawing on the work of Indian Marxist Prabhat
Patnaik.
Patnaik is a sound fellow. He knows that "a coordinated global
resistance is not on the horizon". Instead, "he emphasizes the
centrality of building resistance within the nation-state, and his
analysis can easily be extended to regions (he writes mainly of
India, but the analysis he provides is equally applicable to the
Bolivarian experiments in Latin America)".
So the road map spells tackling the "peasant question", which is
essentially about land and rights; and to concentrate on the
immediate struggles of improving people's living and working
conditions. Inevitably Prashad has to refer to Bolivian vice
president Alvaro Garcia Linera, one of Latin America's top
contemporary intellectuals.
In many aspects, where the emancipation of the Global South is more
advanced is in parts of South America; I was hugely impressed when
I was in Bolivia in early 2008. Prashad neatly summarizes Linera's
analysis of how the process develops:
It begins with a crisis of the state that enables a ''dissident
social bloc'' to mobilize the people into a political project. A
''catastrophic stand-off'' develops between the bloc of power and
the bloc of the people, which in the case of Latin America was able
to be resolved for the moment on the side of the people. The new
government must then ''convert opposition demands into acts of
state,'' and build a deeper and broader hegemony by ''combining the
ideas of mobilized society with material resources provided by or
via the state.'' The turning point (''point of bifurcation''), for
Garcia Linera, comes through a ''series of confrontations'' between
the blocs that are resolved in unexpected ways, with either the
consolidation of the new situation or the reconstitution of the
old. We are at or near the point of bifurcation. What will come
next cannot be predicted.
What is definitely known by now by the best minds in Asia, Africa
and Latin America, is that there was never an end of history, as
parroted by pathetic orphans of Hegel; and there was never an end
of geography, as parroted by "world is flat" globalization dancing
fools.
The Global South's intellectual liberation from the North
is finally on. And it's irreversible. There's no turning back to
the old order. If this was a movie, it would be 1968 replayed all
over again - full time, all the time; let's be realists, and
demand, and implement, the
impossible.
The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global
South by
Vijay Prashad. Verso, March 2013. ISBN-10: 1844679527. Price US$26.
300 pages.
Pepe Escobar is the author
of Globalistan:
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid
War (Nimble
Books, 2007) and Red
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge.
His new book, just out, is Obama
does Globalistan (Nimble
Books, 2009). He may be reached at
[email protected]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-050413.html
Apr 05, 2013 - Devaki
Jain
For those of us who participated in the South Commission and in the
preparation of its report and recommendations, the announcement of
setting up of the Brics bank, at its just-concluded summit in
Durban, is a moment not only to celebrate but to
reflect.
Further, its raison d’etre is to claim some autonomy from the
traditional Bretton Woods Institutions, which is heartening. This
was in fact the reasoning behind the South Commission’s
recommendation, in chapter four of the report, A Challenge to the
South, which was released in 1990.
In A Challenge to the South the idea of a South Bank was also
derived from the same analysis and towards the same purpose — a
form of liberation as well as a form of sharing of wealth and
opportunity within the south family. Therefore, one could argue
that it was more inclusive. “Finance has proved to be the critical
missing link in the entire range of south activities.
Schemes of cooperation whether in trade, production and investment,
education or science and technology, need adequate financial
resources to be viable. We have selected several areas in which
cooperaton in financial matters or financing of cooperation in
economic matters is greatly needed in the long run…notably a South
Bank, which would initially finance trade and ultimately provide
development finance.” (quoted, pg 165)
Lest we forget,
the leader of the South Commission, Dr Julius Nyerere could
anticipate as far back as in 1987, the dangers that lay in store
for the countries in the southern continents if they did not form
their own economic clubs and mobilise their own resources to design
their own political economy destiny. He would often
refer to the EU as the model of self-strengthening , as well as the
OECD secretariat in Paris, to argue that we need similar
consolidation of our economies apart from regular key intelligence
to enable us to keep going as was provided by OECD secretariat to
the EU governments.
Nations such as members of the Brics group have woken up to the
idea of bonding across our continents, after the economies of the
North went into crisis and really ran a tsunami over the southern
countries too, who had become more engaged with them, than with
each other. The meltdown of 2008 and the later financial crisis in
the “advanced” countries has woken up the Brics.
It does not surprise me to read that South Africa had mobilised all
the nations of South Africa and all the commissions within the
continent to attend the Brics conference. For all its internal
troubles, fractured states, the African continent aspires, and
seems to have succeeded in that aspiration, to unite itself as a
continent and not as a summation of individual nations.
Whether we recall the famous appeal by a former President of South
Africa, Thabo Mbeki, in his poetic speech “I am an African”, or the
structural power of the African Union, Africa wants to put forward
her continental identity.
As we have known over the several decades from being colonised
states, to being so-called liberated countries, media reports us to
each other in the most negative terms. South Africa in Indian media
is seen as “dangerous to walk in the streets, crime everywhere,
rape every three seconds crumbling with severe
unemployment”.
The Rainbow Nation is only a dream. All of it is true , as it would
be true to read South African newspapers on India — corrupt,
violent rapes, entrenched casteism, you name it.
When I visited South Africa earlier this month after a break of 10
years and spent more than 10 days in three cities and read the
newspapers, I realised how much the news we receive, is misleading.
The finance minister is a confident leader and holds much strength,
Parliament and its committees are functioning vigorously,
inter-African meetings are galore. The one I attended was convened
by the inter-parliamentary union of Africa in a hall in
Johannesburg, meant for their meetings, which I believe takes place
four times a year.
The newspapers were so similar to India’s newspapers, full of
political and economic news, unlike many other country papers,
which basically are glossies. The announcements include programmes
and new laws by the various premiers of provinces, similar to what
the chief ministers of our states do.
The constant debate of the National Development Plan, columns with
debating controversies. Where they beat us Indians, the most news
hungry people in the world in my opinion, was that every lamp-post
had a poster, a double fullscape size rectangle stuck on flat
matting, tied to the pole, with very bold large capital letters
giving the latest, almost previous hour, political news as you
drive, whether in Johannesburg or Pretoria.
In preparation for Brics, there were campaigns and mobile
exhibitions and arrangements to hold discussions not only all over
South Africa, but also all over the continent on the meaning of
Brics and how to bring forward South Africa as a strong leader,
supported by the continent.
A decade or so ago when my husband the late L.C. Jain presented his
credentials to the then President Nelson Mandela, he entitled his
acceptance speech as “Africa – the Continent of Hope”. As can be
expected the President loved the idea of faith expressed in the
speech, and wanted a copy of the argument on which Jain had built
his speech.
We read every day how the continent of Africa is the most endowed
that the rest of the world wants, namely energy, natural resources,
oil from there, and how China, apart from other international
powers, is working to exploit these resources for its own progress.
It is interesting, if not troubling, that this matches our
understanding or description of what colonisation was all
about.
This continent of hope is also extremely vulnerable at this time,
as she suffers from a lack of financial strength as well as stable
governments while the world wants to harvest her resources. But
Julius Nyerere, otherwise called Mwalimu, or Teacher, was acutely
aware of the vulnerability of the African continent and was
appealing to all, especially China and India, to be the leaders of
real emancipation, namely economic emancipation — an extension of
what M.K. Gandhi called economic freedom for the more vulnerable
countries.
Thus, while Brics is the first brick in memory of Mwalimu Nyerere,
its vision needs to match the purpose he had in mind — to build an
equitable and non-exploitative economic south.
The writer is a member of the erstwhile South Commission
1987-1990
http://www.asianage.com/ideas/brics-continent-hope-576
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93South_cooperation
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, united by
rejection of the neoliberal model, plan to create their own
institutions
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/02/brics-challenge-western-supremacy