Rise Of The Global South, The: Philosophical, Geopolitical And Economic Trends Of The 21st Century

Philosophical, Geopolitical and Economic Trends of the 21st Century

Justin Dargin

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9789814397827
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book provides a broad and in-depth introduction to the geopolitical, economic and trade changes wrought with the increasing influence of the countries of the Global South in international affairs.

The global role of the developing countries came to the forefront in 1974, when the United Nations General Assembly promulgated The New International Economic Order.

Since then, the countries of the Global South, particularly China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Qatar, made an indelible impact upon the world's economic architecture.

However, their true influence became starkly illustrated during the onset of the 2000s, when several seismic events occurred. The September Eleventh terrorist attacks — with the resultant debilitating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — extreme world commodity price increases and the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 all served to wrench the epicenter of global influence increasingly southward. While the developed countries of the Global North became mired in economic stagnation with problems associated with the global financial crisis, their collective influence waned. Since then, the world has been attempting to accommodate, somewhat unevenly, the rising geopolitical and economic clout of the Global South.

This book presents a collection of scholarly articles that, taken together, functions as a primer on the workings of the immense global changes at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Contents:

• Cooperation in the Global South: History and Process:
  • How the South Was Born: Reflections on the Geography and Culture of Inequality (Anouar Majid)
  • South–South Cooperation: A Counter-Hegemonic Movement? (Deniz Altinbaş)
  • South–South Cooperation: A Bridge Between Regionalism and Globalization? (Rita Giacalone)
• Conflict and Resolution: Geostrategic Cooperation in Africa and the Arab/Islamic World:
  • Africa and South–South Cooperation: Opportunities and Challenges (Amadu Sesay, Olayode Kehinde Olusola, and Mashood Omotosho)
  • Gaddafi's Southern Legacy: Ideology and Power Politics in Africa (Dennis Kumetat)
  • The Gulf States and South–South Cooperation (Kristian Coates Ulrichsen)
  • South–South Cooperation and the Impacts on Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb Region: Missed Opportunities and the Way Forward (Mhamed Biygautane and Nicolas Depetris Chauvin)
  • Searching for an End Game in the West's Unwinnable Wars in the South: The Experience of Counter-Terrorism Strategies in a Selection of Muslim Countries (Marat Terterov, Marine Vallet, and Claudia Nocente)
• Trade, Tourism, and Migration as South–South Cooperation Drivers:
  • Tourism, Sustainable Development, and Poverty Alleviation (Madan Bezbaruah)
  • Migrants as Agents of South–South Cooperation: The Case of Chinese in Africa (Giles Mohan)
  • Promoting Industrialization: Trade and Industrial Strategies for the Global South (Justin Dargin)
  • South–South Cooperation in the WTO: Doha to Cancun (Adhip Chaudhuri)
  • South–South Cooperation and Emerging Economies: Insights from Health Sector Cooperation between India and Brazil (Sachin Chaturvedi and Halla Thorsteinsdóttir)

Readership: Graduate students and ambitious undergraduates in the field of international affairs. Non-experts interested in international relations.

Part One

Cooperation in the Global South: History and

Process

1

How the South Was Born: Reflections
on the Geography and Culture
of Inequality^*

Anouar Majid

Center for Global Humanities
University of New England, Maine, USA

On a clear day, you might stand on any elevated point in the Moroccan city of Tangier and have an unobstructed view of the Mediterranean, which includes a spectacular view of southern Spain. There is an intriguing quality to this sight because Morocco and Spain witnessed many scenes of cultural clashes and reversed fortunes. Tangier’s memories are all the more intriguing, of course, because the city’s history stretches back into antiquity.

As a child, I believed that the legendary Greek demi-god Hercules physically separated Europe from Africa. In fact, I believed that he broke it fairly near the point where the respective land masses of Tangier in Morocco and Tarifa in Spain almost meet. I never doubted that, after this stupendous feat, the powerful Hercules wanted solitude and rested in the caves on the African side. These land masses remained separate, that is, until the Europeans circumnavigated Africa and, so to speak, surrounded the world.

1The Pre-Modern Muslim World Order

Morocco, which represented the African, Arab, and Islamic worlds, could easily have merged with the equally rich traditions of Spain. Europe, however, thwarted any move toward the union, with its incessant wars of conquest and bloody religious conflicts. While the distance between land masses probably remained relatively constant through the centuries, the cultural chasms that these civilizations reflected grew increasingly wide.

Although Europe and Africa could be closer culturally, an irony born of necessity lurks in the fact that, after more than 500 years, Spanish-speaking peoples of the Americas embrace common cause with Muslims and Arabs. As surprising as this trend appeared initially, it now seems inevitable, as each culture becomes increasingly aware not only of its heritage vis-a-vis Spain but also of its legacy in a Western-dominated world.

With nations such as Brazil in the lead, these cousins and the cultures they represent strive to overcome historical obstacles among themselves and to enhance the autonomous traditions of tolerance and multiculturalism that bring them closer together. The year 1492 witnessed not only the end of the Muslim Caliphate in Iberia but also the beginning of Spain’s rise as a voracious state that consumed other lands and peoples.

Irony abounds in the fact that Christopher Columbus' (Cristobal Colon) maiden voyage later that same year prepared the groundwork for Spain’s conquest of the Americas. Through Columbus' lenses, Spain’s conquest of America was a prelude to Europe’s capture of Jerusalem and a decisive victory over Islam, a faith that seemed to empower the political South. Europe’s emergence as a conquering industrial and capitalist entity was, from the outset, fueled by a strong animus toward Islam and its southern adherents. From these environs, Islamic nations governed the northern portions of West Africa and its influence stretched across the oceans to East Asia.

Until the calendar year 1402, Islam had woven African and Asian nations in a large and inclusive human, social, and commercial tapestry that consisted of a multitude of cultural and economic networks. The economic historian A. G. Hopkins speaks to this phenomenon, when he explains that:

Islam helped maintain the identity of members of a network or firm who were scattered over a wide area, and often in foreign countries; it enabled traders to recognize, and hence to deal readily with, each other; and it provided moral and ritual sanctions to enforce a code of conduct which made trust and credit possible. It was through Islam that Dioula and Hausa merchants established the commercial networks, or diasporas, which made them so prominent and successful in long distance trade.¹

As if in a continuous sweep, the Arabic tongue and the Arabic script that accompanied Islam spread literacy to levels that were impressive by medieval standards; they laid the foundation for written languages, such as Swahili and Hausa. Beyond that, Islam incorporated Africa into the world’s main trade routes and centers of civilization. The historian Mervyn Hiskett noted that:

... strong similarity in content and format that exists across the written vernacular Islamic literatures of Africa testifies to the depth to which Islam has penetrated into the life-style of the people, who still cherish these literatures to the present day; and the remarkable evenness with which Islamic mainstream culture has imposed itself upon what were originally diverse indigenous societies ranging from cattle nomads to primitive agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers.²

From a functional view, Islam and the South were reluctant participants in the multifaceted dynamics that led to Europe’s 16th-century hegemonic status. Spain herself was an integral part of this Islamic tapestry. However, Europe’s Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, coupled with Spain’s happenstance discovery of the New World, when Columbus earnestly believed that his ship was India-bound, fatally wounded the established world order and launched a new predatory order, the likes of which the South never suffered. There were several components to Spain’s global drive — commercial, military, ideological, and religious. Ultimately, however, each aspect merged into a dynamic whole that was designed to undermine the South in every conceivable way.

2The Bloody Quest For God, Gold, and Glory

The consequences of the new northern world order were, in many respects, like a wound to the human corpus. As Granada fell in 1492, the stage was set for a new crusade on non-European cultures. Spain, the most Catholic of European countries, waged a two-front war against America’s indigenous people and North African Muslims, which set in motion an exploitation model that other European powers would eagerly embrace. By mid-20th century, Muslims and Native Americans, Africans, Latin Americans, and Asians stood relatively helpless before the gigantic European behemoth that reduced them to a condition that Franz Fanon could characterize, in his 1961 allusion to Algerians, as the “wretched of the earth”.³

This world transformation remains pregnant with profound human and global implications. A few seafaring European nations, such as England, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, reduced most of the globe to a slave plantation that was ruled — and exploited — at will. However, this is not a blanket condemnation of the European people. Many humanitarian voices condemned their leaders' relentless cycles of injustices against the world’s non-European people. Yet, for all these isolated voices' courage and self-sacrifice, Europe’s brutal domination still remains an incontrovertible fact for non-Europeans.

It may be that the rest of the world was hobbled by centuries of religious obscurantism, or that it failed to keep pace with the intellectual and industrial revolutions that Europe’s most ruling circles either tolerated or accepted in the spirit of benign neglect. Weakened by superstitions of all sorts, many non-European nations could not resist Europe’s exceptionalistmarch. Instead of using newly acquired advantages to uplift other nations, Europe capitalized on these asymmetrical relationships. While Europe resorted to violence and conquests, non-Europeans could do precious little to protect themselves. In confrontation with Europe’s multinational juggernaut, natives the world over often suffered slavery and genocide.

Whether out of romantic or fatalistic motives, some writers assume that the rise of Europe and its extended colonies in other continents was a byproduct of a violent Weltanschauung (worldview) that surfaced during the Christian-Muslim religious wars. From this perspective, Christian Europe’s defeat of Islam inevitably entailed the end of a multicultural world order and the rise of European supremacist ideologies. That emergent world order still operates today, even though it is increasingly challenged by former peripheral nations, including China, Brazil, and Turkey.

Islam’s final Iberian defeat in 1492 not only weakened the cultural bonds that cemented a vast network of exchange stretching from Africa to Asia, and through the Ottoman Empire to Asia Minor and Central Europe but also inaugurated a half-millennium of tragedies for the world’s non-European peoples. In The Conquest of America,Tzvetan Todorov is unambiguous about the significance of that fateful date: “We are all the direct descendants of Columbus,” he writes, and “it is with him that our genealogy begins, insofar as the word beginninghas a meaning.”

Seemingly interested in gold or meeting the Grand Khan of China, Cristobal Colon’s ultimate motive, as his journal reveals, was to reconquer Jerusalem.⁴ J. H. Elliott safely speculated that “the close coincidence between the fall of Granada and the authorization of Columbus’s expedition would suggest that the latter was Castile’s thank-offering and an act of renewed dedication to the still unfinished war against the infidel” .⁵

The indigenous people of the Canary Islands, the Guanjes or Guanches, precariously situated between the predatory North and the non-European Global South, were among the first to incur Spain’s crusading fury. In view of Colon’s 10 October 1492 landing, the new continent would become the scene of very bloody reprisals against heathen folk, whose slaughter would not cease until most had perished in “the greatest genocide in human history” .⁶

The zeal to capture of souls and lands, however, merged with Eurocentric constructs of Christianity, which combined matters relating to purity of faith and proper blood, racial, or color lines, into one indistinguishable ideology. The convenience of such blurred theological concepts increased the probability that Spain would deploy even mightier crusading ideologies against the New World’s natives.

Not surprisingly, America’s natives felt the instant brunt of being transformed into Muslims. In fact, Christian Spain’s quintessential notion of difference had always been Islam. Semiotically and ideologically, the world would henceforth be divided into a pure, civilized, Christian, White, enlightened, and capitalist world, and a world of swarthy otherswho incarnated...