Features
North-South issues resurfacing in international politics
Famine is making a strong comeback in the African continent and in a country of the Middle East and unless the world takes strong note of the spectre and begins to deal with it unitedly it could strike in other vulnerable parts of the South as well. We have it on the authority of the UNHCR that the following countries are in danger of being ravaged by famine: South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Syria.
These countries have been witness to endemic conflict and deprivation and in current times their problems have been steadily compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic and issues growing out of it. The UNHCR added: “People in extreme poverty worldwide are expected to rise between 119 million and 124 million as a result of the pandemic.” Speaking more recently on the spread of extreme poverty worldwide UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was quoted saying: “More than three quarters of these “new poor” are in middle income countries.”
Accordingly, it is not only the economically backward countries of the African continent that could be heading for extreme poverty and its debilitating consequences; middle income countries that have hitherto been showcased as economic growth centres of the South need to be on the alert as well against spreading poverty, currently caused in the main by the pandemic. Needless to say, these middle income countries have a vast geographical spread 
However, how prepared is the world to take up this challenge of keeping a wide-ranging economic debacle at bay? More specifically, the issue is to what degree the world would be united in facing the challenge. That global unity and solidarity, at present, is hardly forthcoming on this score, is the answer. While it ought to be clear that the pandemic is aggravating the economic challenges of the world, the evidence is also at hand that support from the rich countries in tackling the pandemic and linked issues is leaving much to be desired.
Once again, UN chief Guterres presented the stark facts: “Rich countries have poured the equivalent of 28 per cent of GDP into weathering the Covid-19 crisis. In middle income countries this figure drops to 6.5 per cent; in least developed countries, to less than 2 per cent.” He was speaking of the need for G20 countries to take on the urgent task of “extending a lifeline” to countries on the verge of debt crises. It’s plain to see that the world’s richest countries could be more generous in meeting the challenge of alleviating the growing economic challenges of particularly the South.
The minds of the more seasoned commentators on global politics ought to go back, while focusing on the above questions, to the Southern-driven New International Economic Order of the seventies and early eighties. Those were the times when the North-South divide was one of the foremost issues in international politics. Besides the exploitation on several fronts suffered by the South at the hands of the North during colonial times, the situation was no better at the time the NIEO project was launched and campaigned for by the South, backed by NAM and other organizations that staunchly took up the cause of the South in international forums.
The North-South divide and issues that flowed from it soon became a thing of the past when the developing countries too went in a major way in the mid-seventies for economic liberalization and market-led growth, which came to be seen as comprising the keys to development. Market-led growth was the development paradigm which came to be advocated by the two foremost global financial institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, which enjoyed Western financial backing in a major way and which, essentially, advocated market economics; the only growth path known to the foremost capitalist countries of the West.
However, decades after the adoption of the free enterprise model and the downplaying of central planning in the management of their economies the South today, as is known, is no better off than what it was in colonial times. Essentially, Southern governments have found that ‘growth’ has not trickled down to their peripheries or their people. While a microscopic minority among their publics is flourishing, their masses have slid further into poverty and disempowerment. The South continues to be yoked to the West in numerous ties of exploitation and dependence and has earned for itself overwhelming debt traps from which escaping is proving almost impossible. Put in a nutshell, so to speak, this is where the South in general stands today in political and socio-economic terms.
However, in the current Covid-19 crisis, unlike at the times when North-South questions first came to the fore, almost the entirety of the world seems to be facing overwhelming odds. The foremost powers of the West are likely to imagine that they will be spared many of the crippling socio-economic issues flowing from the pandemic but this is wishful thinking. An economic debacle in the South will eventually cripple the North, inasmuch as it weakens the South. It ought to be plain to see that a South that has lost its economic strength will not be in a position to offer the North any trading or investment opportunities, for example.
Besides, economically crippled Southern societies will prove the breeding ground of increased criminality and runaway law and order problems. Identity politics, which usually pave the way for “terrorism” and extremism of numerous kinds, will initially blight Southern societies and eventually those of the North as well.
Needless to say, the West is having a sizeable crop of law and order problems that has its origins in Southern religious extremism, for instance, and it is plain that economic deprivation is the most fertile field for the breeding of these extremisms. Besides, if Southern refugees are a major problem in the North, it is because socio-economic distress is prompting them to flee their countries of origin; the numerous “boat people” being just one case in point.
Accordingly, North-South issues are back in world politics, but with the difference that the North is not in the almost unassailable position that it was in, in the seventies, when ‘North-South’ first made it to the Southern political lexicon in particular. Issues coming to the fore in the wake of the pandemic, it is hoped, would force the North to see the wisdom in supporting the South economically. That is a chief means of staving off an economic cataclysm.