It is an interesting idea to talk about a 'mood' and not that the Global South has suddenly emerged. This will be the framework for much of what I am going to say. In the immediate years after decolonization, from 1945 to 1974, the countries that emerged out of colonialism formulated a joint agenda. It was an agenda first formulated at the Bandung Conference in 1955 and at the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in 1961, constituting what could be called the Third World project. Countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America began to see in common that even though they had attained flag independence with new flags, national anthems, and territories, they were still stuck within a neocolonial economic structure. This particular structure held them back from being able to achieve their aspirations. They had clarity about how they wanted to change the world and the confidence that they could, but they were put under immense pressure from the very beginning by the United States and the former colonial powers.
One could create a catalog of the pressure these countries were put under, for instance, one coup d'état after another. In Iran in 1953, the government of Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown. What he was doing was not dangerous; he was simply asserting that the Iranian people should have sovereignty over their oil. He believed the Iranian people should be able to control how much oil they sell on the open market and how they sell it, and that those decisions should not be made by the major oil companies, the so-called Seven Sisters. The very next year, in 1954, the United States government overthrew the government in Guatemala led by Jacobo Árbenz. Árbenz was doing something quite ordinary: he said that the landless people in Guatemala deserved access to land. For this to happen, he proposed that the surplus land held by large corporations but not in use should be delivered to the landless. It turned out the largest corporation was the United Fruit Company, a U.S. multinational, which was very upset with this idea. That was the reason for the coup d'état in Guatemala. These interventions — from the coup in Chile in 1973 to the wars pushed by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s — were designed to prevent the Third World countries of that era from establishing their sovereignty.
The key word, then and now, is sovereignty. The process of decolonization and the desire of formerly colonized peoples to establish themselves as dignified people in the world inevitably leads to the demand for sovereignty over their own territories, lives, resources, and cultures. Sovereignty is a simple word, well-established not only in Third World political discourse but also in European discourse. What was interesting was how colonialism created a toxic way of looking at the world, where sovereignty came to mean sovereignty only for the colonial powers. Their sovereignty was the only one that mattered, while the sovereignty of the colonized was not treated as real. This is what we at our Institute call the 'International Division of Humanity'. During the colonial era, humanity was divided between those seen as full humans — the colonizers, who gave themselves the right to have full sovereignty — and those seen as only partly human — the colonized, who were not permitted to have it.
This attitude of colonialism continues into our present. It interested me that recently, U.S. President Joe Biden, responding to the conflict in Ukraine, said that he has never seen one country invade another since World War II. This was a very peculiar statement because Mr. Biden, when he was a senator, voted for the United States to illegally attack and destroy Iraq. It requires a high level of political amnesia to believe that when you attack a country it is not a war, but when somebody else does, it is. The reason someone like Mr. Biden can believe that is because they do not believe that countries like Iraq or Libya are sovereign countries. These countries are on the other side of the international division of humanity and therefore do not have sovereignty. So when a former or current colonizer attacks a country that it believes does not deserve sovereignty, there is no violation of sovereignty, and therefore it is not a war; it might be a police action, but not a war.
In the 1980s, most of the Third World countries went into a grotesque debt spiral, and the Third World project was deeply weakened. These countries were unable to stand up for themselves or build a united project, buckling before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its structural adjustment programs. Particularly after the Soviet Union fell, they began to take seriously the possibility that the United States was the world's policeman. The test of this was the attack on Iraq in 1991, followed by the dismemberment of Yugoslavia by the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999, the War on Terror in 2001, the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003, and Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006. There began to be a feeling that there was no possibility for the Third World to reassert itself with its own authentic political project, leading to a period of great disorientation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. People felt the future was bleak forever.
In 2013, I published a book in which I said the concept of the Global South merely meant a world of protests, from the uprising in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1989 to protests against the IMF in Nigeria. But over the course of the last ten years, the Global South has come to have a different meaning. It is quite clear that the rise of the major Asian economies, with China at the lead, has changed the balance of forces in the world. The center of the global economy is no longer in the Atlantic Ocean but in Asia, with China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia. These countries have buoyant growth rates and immense changes in their own sense of confidence, producing highly sophisticated technological inventions. This change in the center of gravity of the world means that countries in Latin America, Africa, and other parts of Asia no longer need to go to Washington, D.C., to beg at the doors of the IMF for a balance of payments shortfall. They can go to the People's Bank of China for a currency swap or borrow from Indian capital markets. They no longer have to plead with the U.S. Treasury Department, promising not to vote against the U.S. at the United Nations in exchange for a good report from the IMF. The availability of alternative sources of financing has enabled the emergence of what we call the new mood in the Global South.
Let me give you four examples of this new mood. First, in the Sahel countries in Africa, the belt of countries just below the Sahara Desert, one after another has told France to go home. In Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso — the Alliance of Sahel States — they have told the French they are no longer welcome. It is also happening in Chad and Senegal. The word they use is sovereignty; they want sovereignty over their territory and do not want French military bases. This word was also heard in other French colonies in the Pacific Ocean, such as New Caledonia, where the Kanak liberation movement has stood up and demanded sovereignty. In the Marshall Islands, people have demanded the U.S. leave, citing the nuclear weapons tested there. This new mood is spreading from the Sahel to the Pacific and will eventually reach French Guiana, where France has its space launching station.
Second, at the United Nations, Colombia's President Gustavo Petro said that the richest 1% in the world, a "powerful global oligarchy," allows bombs to be dropped in Palestine while sanctioning countries like Cuba and Venezuela. He stated this oligarchy is bringing humankind to the brink of destruction. The president of Colombia, a country that for so many years had been subordinate to the United States, went to New York City and declared that the rich of the world are willing to drop bombs on Palestine but are not bothered about poverty and starvation. They prefer to sanction Cuba rather than harness its medical potential to help save people from any number of diseases.
Third, when President Donald Trump threatened tariffs and sanctions, the incoming President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, wrote a response. At a press conference, she read the letter, stating that Mexico does not produce the weapons that are illegally exported from the United States into Mexico, nor does it consume the synthetic drugs for which the U.S. market is creating a crisis on the border. "Unfortunately," she said, "it is our people that are being killed." A Mexican president, so close to the United States, is nonetheless standing up and saying this is no longer tolerable.
Fourth, at the recent COP29 (Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change) meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, there were interesting debates over who should fund the climate transition. Towards the end of the meeting, the Secretariat imposed an agreement, and the Indian delegate, Janani Rana, took the mic and called the deal an "optical illusion." She said the whole thing was stage-managed, that India had told the major powers it wanted to speak on the terms of the deal before ratification, but was never allowed to. This is the representative of Mr. Modi's government saying the process was stage-managed. This is the new mood in the Global South. There is a new mood, but there is also a deep understanding that the world has not fully changed, which is why the term 'new mood' is so important. The shift of the global economy's epicenter to Asia has something to do with politics, not just economics. The third Great Depression, which began in 2007-2008 with the collapse of mortgages in the United States, shocked many countries in the Global South. Following this collapse, the countries of the G7 (Group of Seven), particularly France, the U.K., and the U.S., approached India, Indonesia, and China. They asked for liquidity to save their banking systems, promising that in return, they would close down the G7 and make the G20 (Group of Twenty), which included the emerging economies, the central political body for world discussions. India, China, and Indonesia put liquidity into the Western capital markets, but once the markets began to recover, these countries were betrayed. The G7 was maintained intact.
This betrayal, along with the realization that the West could no longer be the market of last resort due to stagnant wages and credit crises, forced these countries to reorganize their understanding. It was around this time that they began to rejuvenate ideas such as South-South cooperation. As a consequence of the third Great Depression, the five largest economies in the Global South came together in Russia in 2009 to create the BRIC bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). The first BRIC statement from Yekaterinburg affirmed the centrality of the G20, as these countries were still hopeful. However, the rest of the statement was effectively about increasing South-South cooperation, financial transparency, and trade. It is no surprise that in 2013, Xi Jinping articulated the One Belt, One Road, now the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This project was also about pivoting the Chinese economy away from reliance on U.S. and European markets to build new economic structures across the Global South. Both BRICS and the BRI are indicators of new political-economic structures, providing the concrete infrastructure for the new mood. This infrastructure was set by the re-establishment of South-South cooperation.
The United States has been talking a lot about the "rules-based international order," a peculiar term rooted in the international division of humanity: some people make the rules but do not follow them, while others do not make the rules but must follow them. The full consciousness of the political and military dangerousness of the United States and its allies came into focus after the NATO countries, led by the U.S. and France, destroyed Libya in 2011. They pushed for a U.N. resolution that merely authorized a no-fly zone, but they violated its terms and destroyed the Libyan state. When we asked NATO for a sense of how it followed the resolution, its principal lawyer, Peter Olson, wrote that NATO will not allow itself to be brought under scrutiny by any international agency because NATO never commits war crimes. This is the same attitude that motivates France, the United States, and others to say they will not arrest Benjamin Netanyahu based on an International Criminal Court warrant, because they believe Israelis do not commit war crimes. This is the international division of humanity: the United States violated the U.N. Charter by bombing Iraq in 2003, an illegal war, but it has not committed a war crime. After the war in Libya, there was increasing alarm in the BRICS and other forums that the West could not be trusted.
Hyper-Imperialism: we note that almost 75% of all military spending is by the United States and its allies. China is responsible for about 10%, and Russia 4%. The United States and its allies have the capacity to destroy any country in the world. That is the reason why we do not advance the idea that the world has changed dramatically. There is a new mood, but not a dramatic change in the overall balance of forces. There are now a billion mutinies across the planet — in workplaces, in societies, and of countries. From the Sahel to South American countries talking back to the United States, and even India's foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, saying, "We don't follow the NATO mindset." These mutinies are not always easily decipherable, and it would be naive to imagine they can be arithmetically added up into a unity. It will take a long time to build our unities. We are in a new mood, but we are not yet in a new unity.
It will take a lot of work to build these mutinies into something together. To build the world we need, we need to build humanity. We have to fight to end poverty, to ensure people do not live on the streets, to build a world with no hunger, and to ensure that the planet will survive. We have no choice: we either fight to save the planet or we watch it be destroyed. There is a new mood, but not yet a new unity. This new mood is captivating and important; it should mobilize us and make us move. We cannot be static. We are moving, and this conference is part of our movement.
(Transcribed from recording and edited.)