North–South Issues

The idea of the North and South—sometimes called Global North and Global South to prevent confusion with countries' domestic northern/southern divisions—as socioeconomic categories rather than just geographic ones was first formulated by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1980. Brandt described a line encircling the globe at roughly 30 degrees North latitude, dipping down to place Australia and New Zealand above the line. Above the line was the North: rich, industrialized, developed nations, the First and [Page 295]Second World. Below the line was the South: poorer, developing or undeveloped nations, often former vassals of the North during the Colonial era, the Third World. The terminology is sometimes found wanting, and many “Southern” nations like Brazil are difficult to categorize as “developing,” given their high incomes, levels of industrialization, and participation in the global economy.

Though coined during the Cold War, the North/South terminology essentially reflects a post-Cold War division. During the Cold War, the First/Second/Third World terminology was more common, with the capitalist Western bloc constituting the First World, the communist Eastern bloc the Second World, and unaligned developing nations (potential and actual sites of proxy wars between the first two alliances) the Third World. One reason “developing nations” and “Global South” have replaced “Third World” is because the Third World label made that segment of the world sound like an afterthought, a spare part; at the same time, it lost some of its specificity when it was unofficially adopted to describe impoverished conditions within the First World. That association with poverty and starvation was never intended by French economist Alfred Sauvy, who first coined the term Third World (inventing First and Second World by reverse engineering)—rather, he intended a parallel with the French term tiers etat, the Third Estate, the workers, peasants, and middle class. “Like the Third Estate,” Sauvy wrote, “the Third World has nothing and wants to be something,” a connotation of movement and ambition that is perhaps retained by “developing nations” more than “Global South.”

The different needs of the North and the South have been an obstacle in international trade and may prove a problem in the worldwide negotiations to repair and revise the global financial system in the aftermath of the 21st-century financial crisis. The Doha negotiation round of the World Trade Organization, for instance, is as of 2009, several years behind schedule and likely several more years away from completion, in part because of the matter of agricultural subsidies. Although developing nations have been urged away from protectionist policies by developed nations since the Bretton Woods era, the use of agricultural subsidies in the European Union and the United States has acted as a trade barrier against agricultural goods from developing countries. By inflating the profits and artificially dampening the prices of domestic agricultural goods, agricultural subsidies make it difficult for foreign producers to compete—which, in turn, encourages those producers to use cost-lowering methods, many of which (such as the use of pesticides, genetically modified organisms, and chemical fertilizers to increase yields and decrease crop loss) are in opposition to the goals of sustainability and environmental safety that are espoused in the North. The South depends on the North as customers, in effect, but is arguably sometimes placed in the position of deciding between the product the customer asks for and the product the customer is actually willing to buy.

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