Letter: Global south takes divergent path from great western powers
Alec Russell’s article “This is the hour of the global south” (Opinion, May 20) hits the nail on the head.
Much to the west’s chagrin, some of the leading countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America have refused to go along with the “us versus them” logic applied by the G7 to the war in Ukraine. While many of these countries in the global south condemn Russia’s invasion, they are also opposed to making this into a global, rather than a European war.
The notion that the rules-based international order is in peril when there is a war in Europe, but not when such wars, often fuelled by Nato countries themselves, take place elsewhere, does not go down well in Delhi, Pretoria or Brasília.
Thus the opposition to join in the unprecedented diplomatic and economic sanctions against Russia. And far from this being a one-off instance of rising powers and other developing nations following their own path, or expressing a moral failure to take sides in a “good versus evil” battle, as some would have us believe, it shows what with my colleagues Carlos Fortin and Carlos Ominami in a new book we have called “active non-alignment” (ANA). This is an approach to foreign policy premised on not taking sides in the great power competition of our time, and evaluating each issue on its merits.
ANA takes a page from the non-aligned movement (NAM) of yesteryear, but adapts it to the realities of the new century, one in which the GDP of the Brics in PPP terms is already larger than that of the G7. It is also pragmatic, non-ideological and focused on the global issues that keep being sidelined by the great powers in their misguided obsession to attain primacy over each other. And although Latin America was late to join the NAM, on this occasion it has been ahead of the curve, both in theory (originating the notion of ANA in 2020) and in practice (with an unaligned Brazil spearheading mediation efforts in the war in Ukraine).
Jorge Heine
Research Professor
Pardee School of Global Studies
Boston University, Boston, MA, US
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