Global South

Origins

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, South and North have largely replaced the Cold War-inspired categories of First World (capitalist), Second World (communist), and Third World (developing); however, the binaries of developed and developing are still widely used. But static categories, when describing countries, are inappropriate, as the graduation of many Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs) from poor to wealthy has shown.

The terms North and South were first popularized in the Brandt Commission's report North-South: A Programme for Survival (1980). The commission's essential finding was that economically poor or [Page 725]developing countries (the South) were economically dependent on economically rich or developed nations (the North), which dominated the international rules and institutions of trade and finance. The terms were based on the geographic fact that—in 1980—the majority of poor and marginalized countries were in the Southern Hemisphere (excepting White South Africa and Oceania), while the rich and powerful countries (all G-7 members and all the noncommunist permanent members of the UN Security Council) were located in the Northern Hemisphere.

Since the post-World War II development era, countries have been ranked according to gross domestic product (GDP) growth, per capita income, sectoral development of the economy, levels of employment, population, life expectancy, and so on. The resulting categories—First World/Third World, developed/developing—typically start from a Western-centric, economistic view of the norm.

These norms are endlessly quantified. Agencies such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as well as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) spend substantial resources collecting data to create sophisticated categories of countries according to economic (e.g., GDP and growth), socioeconomic (Human Development Index), and political characteristics (such as the Transparency Index), all of which routinely reveal that there is indeed a huge inequality between the North and the South.

But these data can be read in different ways. For some the data indicate where countries are on the development ladder, with the implicit assumption that the North represents an ideal of development that can be achieved with the proper policies. It is on this basis that institutions such as the World Bank and the WTO advocate certain economic and trade policies that are supposed to take countries closer to achieving the ideal: maximizing GDP growth, no matter the eco-social cost. Others look at these same tables and graphs and see the results of historical and economic processes and relationships. Based on the evidence of persistent and growing inequalities, they question the assumption that development can be achieved through a linear step-by-step progression along a capitalist path. Rather, they see that world capitalism generates inequalities and contradictions as part of its uneven dynamic, including a North and a South within countries and between countries.

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