[News] Why Nonalignment Is an Urgent Imperative for the Global South
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Tue May 3 16:06:42 EDT 2022
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GLOBETROTTER
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*Why Nonalignment Is an Urgent Imperative for the Global South*
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*By Nontobeko Hlela*
South Africa and other countries that have abstained
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from voting against Russia at the United Nations General Assembly in
response to the war in Ukraine face intense international criticism. In
South Africa, the domestic criticism has been extraordinarily shrill,
and often clearly racialized. It is frequently assumed that abstention
means that South Africa is in support of the Russian invasion, and this
is either due to corrupt relations between Russian and South African
elites, or nostalgia for support given to the anti-apartheid struggle by
the Soviet Union, or both.
There is seldom any acknowledgment that nonalignment, in this case
refusing to be aligned with the United States and its allies or with
Russia, can be a principled position, as well as an astute tactical
engagement with geopolitical realities. As two founding figures in the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Yugoslavia’s then-President Josip Broz Tito
and India’s then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, said in a joint
statement
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signed on December 22, 1954, “the policy of non-alignment with blocs…
does not represent ‘neutrality’ or ‘neutralism’; neither does it
represent passivity as is sometimes alleged. It represents the positive,
active and constructive policy that, as its goal, has collective peace
as the foundation of collective security.”
The Global South houses more than 80 percent
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of the world’s people, yet its countries are systematically excluded
from any decision-making in the international organizations that make
decisions in the name of the “international community.” For decades,
countries of the Global South have been advocating for the United
Nations to be reformed so that it moves away from the zero-sum game of
the cold war mentality that continues to drive it. Gabriel Valdés,
Chile’s then-foreign minister, said that in June 1969, Henry Kissinger
told
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him, “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been
produced in 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.”
Jaja Wachuku, then a Nigerian foreign minister, posed
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a still urgent question to the UN’s 18th Session on September 30, 1963:
“Does this Organization want… [the] African States to be just vocal
Members, with no right to express their views on any particular matter
in important organs of the United Nations…[?] Are we only going to
continue to be veranda boys?” Global South countries are still “veranda
boys” watching the adults make the rules and decide on the path that the
world must take. They continue to be lectured and chided when they do
not do as expected.
It is time for a revitalized NAM. The NAM will only succeed if the
leaders of the countries in the Global South put their egos aside, think
strategically on the global scale and put their considerable human
capital, natural resources and technological ingenuity to better use.
The Global South has an ascendant China, the second-biggest economy in
the world. It has India, one of the leading countries in medical care
and technological innovation. Africa is rich with a growing population
and the natural resources that are needed for the mushrooming AI and
cleaner energy industries. However, these resources are still extracted
for profit to be accumulated in far-off capitals while Africa and much
of the Global South remain underdeveloped, with millions still stuck in
the desperation of impoverishment.
A renewed NAM has real potential if time is taken to build new
institutions and to build buffers against the economic warfare that the
United States has been waging against countries like Cuba and Venezuela
and is now unleashing on Russia. Financial autonomy is critical.
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has a bank
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and for the 16 nations of the Southern African Development Community
(SADC)
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there is the Development Bank of Southern Africa; yet the reserves of
the countries joined to these projects are still kept in the United
States or European capitals. This is the time for leaders within the
Global South to wake up and realize that given the type of economic
warfare that is currently being let loose on a country like Russia,
weaker countries across the Global South have no meaningful autonomy.
This is the time to rethink how we conduct politics, economics and
foreign policy when it is clear that the West can decide to decimate
entire countries. The economic weapons being built against Russia will
be available to be used against other countries that have the temerity
not to toe Washington’s line.
BRICS has been disappointing in many respects, but it has opened some
space for Global South countries—with their many differences in creed,
culture, political and economic systems—to find a way of working
together. The rejection of intense pressure to bend their collective
knee at the United Nations Security Council is an encouraging example of
the Global South rejecting the assumption that they should remain
permanent “veranda boys” (and girls).
As the United States rapidly escalates its new cold war against Russia
and China, and expects other countries to fall in line, there is now an
urgent imperative to reject this cold war mentality of wanting to divide
the world along old acrimonious lines. The Global South should reject
this view and call for the respect of international law by /all/
countries. It makes a mockery of the concepts of human rights and
international law when they are only evoked when it is those countries
whom the West dislikes or disagrees with who break them.
Only by standing together and speaking with one voice can the countries
of the Global South hope to have any influence in international affairs
and not continue to be just rubber-stampers of the positions of the West.
The Non-Aligned Movement needs to be confident and bold and not seek
permission from the West. NAM leaders need to understand that they are
there to serve their people and protect their interests and not allow
the temptation of being included in the “big boys club” to sway their
stance on issues. They need to constantly keep in mind that they have
been kept as “veranda boys” for far too long, and unless they truly take
their destiny into their hands, they will forever be at the foot of the
table, with their people eating only the scraps from the wealth
accumulated by the global economy, much of it from the exploitation of
the South.
/This article was produced by the Morning Star
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and Globetrotter
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*Nontobeko Hlela* was the first secretary (political) at the High
Commission of South Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. She currently works as a
researcher for the South African office of Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/south-africa-/p1swqp/1049298320?h=ihhLKW5ckCSDM9uOSo9e_SmlNTFmMLd3hTJscZ-9zVY>,
a Global South think tank with offices in Johannesburg, South Africa;
São Paulo, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and New Delhi, India./
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