it’s time for the global south

When the annals of the war in Ukraine are written, it seems a fair bet that the African Mediation Mission announced by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa this week will struggle to make a footnote. Prospective mediators are two pennies these days, and anyway South Africa has marked its cards with Moscow as being too comfortable with Ukraine to be a credible interlocutor.

But when histories of the rise of a post-unipolar world are written, mention may be made of the strange intermediaries of Africa. The idea of ​​six African heads of state crossing the front lines of a European war not only echoes all those Western interventions in Africa over the years, but it also underlines the accelerated assertiveness of the countries of the “Global South”. — and their realization that their time may indeed have come.

This has been visible in many areas since the fracturing of the old globalized order following the 2008 financial crisis. But the war in Ukraine has turbocharged it.

Many non-Western countries have seen the West’s outright support for Ukraine and hypocritical powers again prioritizing their own interests and concerns over larger global issues such as health and climate change. They also sense two major opportunities: to play the US and China off against each other, and, as they see it, a long overdue rewriting of the post-1945 world order.

As with all great-revolutionary alliances, this reconstituted “Non-Aligned Movement” was a conglomeration of vastly different and often competing interests; And some can hardly claim to be neutral. The BRICS summit in Durban in August will be a raucous showcase for these contradictions. The group includes two autocracies, Russia and China, two large democracies, Brazil and India (extremely wary following China’s rise) and the host, and junior ties, South Africa. Now more than a dozen countries, including Iran, are keen to join.

Not only does it threaten to expose the world’s most mind-numbing acronym, but the risk, especially for India and Brazil, is that the BRICS could end up becoming a China club rather than a non-aligned forum of developing economies. Will bend more

But even then there are clear common interests and goals: restructuring the UN Security Council so that it represents today’s world; Rethinking the Bretton Woods Institutions; the fallout of the dollar as the global reserve currency; rolling back a system of US-led economic sanctions; even more.

All of these goals may not be attainable, but they are more precise than the goals set forth by the original Non-Aligned Movement at its first meeting in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. At that time the members represented a small fraction of the global economy; It is not so today.

“Back then it was a talking shop,” says Michael Power, who has studied the rise of the global south for 30 years, most recently as a Cape Town-based strategist for asset manager Ninety One. “But now they are talking about whether they should start trading with each other with local currencies.”

So what should the West do? Lead by example, finally commit to reforms of the global order and choose its words more carefully. One handy piece of advice for anyone drafting communiques at the end of this week’s G7 summit: Avoid coinage like “fence-sitters” and “geopolitical swing states” currently circulating in Washington. There are The swing state metaphor – meaning “we’ll focus on you once every four years” – maintains a sense of a patronizing, if not transcendent, imperial power.

“We should be talking about a rules-based international system, not a rules-based system,” says a senior Western diplomat. “And when we speak of war it should not be about European peace, but about the world we want to live in.”

More concretely, the Biden administration will forge predetermined regional alliances, from I2U2 (a Bono-inspired grouping that is India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the US) to the Asia-Pacific security quad of India, Australia Used to be. , Japan and the US

However, China is also calling busy. This week Xi Jinping hosted a summit of Central Asian nations – Russia’s backyard – reinforcing historian Serhiy Plokhi’s thesis that far from expanding Moscow’s global influence, the war in Ukraine has created a potential threat to Beijing. Subordination has been speeded up.

The New World Order is certainly easier to declare than to realize. In 1991, George HW Bush spoke of one. His words rang hollow a year later: Bosnia was in flames. And some will have difficulty navigating their new route. south african clumsy pas de deux There is an objective lesson in not playing non-aligned games with Russia. It is fortunate that the Biden administration does not seem inclined to punish him for his lapses.

But India, Indonesia and others are playing well. When the war in Ukraine ends, it will be against the backdrop of a subtler world order than in February 2022. It would be more complicated and probably more dangerous; But for some non-aligned countries it will be more of an opportunity. And it’s here to stay.

alec.russell@ft.com