Welcome back everybody to our studies in AQA global politics, sorry NXL global politics, specifically. AQA don't do global politics. This lesson is going to carry on talking about economic governance, focusing on the idea of poverty, the alleviation of poverty, and the distinction here between the north and the south.
And by the north and the south of course we're talking about the idea of the north-south divide between the global north and the global south. Now fundamentally this is obviously forms part of our understandings of the specification looking at the north-south divide looking at the ways in which ways in which poverty is measured the the the ways in which the poverty and we we think about the causes of poverty looking at economic development and all these different kinds of things and generally speaking we're gonna examine in this lesson what the concept of the north-south divide actually is what it means asked a question of whether or not it's even meaningful, especially in today's modern conceptualizations of international relations. To what extent is this idea of a basic north-south divide meaningful? Are there other alternative methods or alternative measurements for looking at a divide of this kind of nature, but in a way that's more accurate?
And generally speaking, we're going to begin by looking at a... essentially what the North-South Divide is. Now the North-South Divide, the term itself, was first used in the 1980s by the Brand Report, and this was used as a way to examine issues in relation to what was perceived to be a clear distinction between, on the one hand, you've got the developing world, and then on the other hand, you've got the developed world. And it was seen that this is sort of broadly divided among the global north and the global south. There was a sort of geographical representation and it makes sense the developed world includes countries like the United States and Canada and Europe well the Europe the continent and the global south included developing countries like the African states to a lesser extent or to a meaningful extent the Middle East and and Latin America.
and parts of Asia as well, Southeast Asia. And you could sort of see how this fits on a basic global north, global south division. Of course, it's not perfect because you would include in developed countries, states like New Zealand and Australia and potentially even South Africa to a lesser extent as well.
which are obviously countries that all exist very much in the global south. But generally contextualized, the idea here is that there is this geographic divide on the earth. Today, when we think about the global north and the global south, we're referring to states which are generally divided in this southerly and northerly way. Australia, like I said, is one of those outliers in the same sense that we don't include that in the global south, despite geographically we would. So even though there are exceptions, we still maintain this kind of division.
In international relations and in international law, we tend to use this kind of characterization. And it is not necessarily the case that the global north is defined by where it is in the world, but it might be better to try and define the global north and the global south, and then by extension of that, the North-South divide as on the count of their characteristics. What are the characteristics of the Global North? What are the characteristics of the Global South? Well, the Global North is often described as developed.
We'll get into development and international development in future lessons time, what that generally means. Westernized, they sort of seem to exhibit a certain degree of what we would describe as Western values. And that can... be a myriad of variety of different things including um including democracy for example um including things like including things like freedom uh basic human rights freedom of freedom of speech freedom of press freedom of religion all these different kinds of things um generally um responsible for the hosting of transnational corporations so the us the uk europe are all parts of the world in which there are transnational corporations, corporations which do exist on a global scale. And they're also generally responsible for the majority of trade and investment exports.
So trade goes out from the US, the Europe and the UK and other parts of the global north. So too does investment. There is also this idea that the global north enjoys what we call structural hegemony, i.e. they are very, very much, they wield a certain degree of power and influence within the international community. Within the context of global governance, this includes through the, not only the establishment, but also through a variety of very strong claims in and economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the G7 for example is mainly made up of global north countries as well as the G20. And so as a result of which there is this idea of structural hegemony that exists among members of the global north.
This doesn't just exist by the way in terms of economic institutions. You could look at the ways in which And the ability for the global north to have quite a significant amount of power in political governance and in security governance. Things like, for example, the UN Security Council.
The fact that the five permanent members of the Security Council are mainly made up of global north countries. They are mainly made up of the US, France, the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation to a slightly lesser extent. There are countries like the Russian Federation on the one hand and also countries like... like China on the other, that while perceptively could be considered to be part of the global south, especially China, the fact that China is the second largest economy in the world implies that there is a certain divide that is being crossed there between global north and global south on account of China.
But of course, how you measure what constitutes global north and global south is, of course, a very, very important question for where China fits into that. general framework. Because if you look here at the various characteristics, you would say that there is a certain degree of development in China, but not to the same extent as other parts of the world, because there's still quite a lot of poverty in China.
There is not this sense of westernization within China. So that theoretically suggests that maybe this global north-global-south divide is a way of looking at it through a very western lens. The idea of it being westernization that characterizes global north versus global south is a very sort of neocolonial theoretical conceptualization of international relations, one that would be challenged by a lot of the global south itself.
But China also is responsible for a lot of trade and investment exports. And China also has a significant amount of control in parts of the world in terms of their structural hegemony. in parts of economic institutions, as well as in the Security Council as well, of course.
So it's not exactly a clear-cut picture as to the clear countries which are part of the Global North versus part of the Global South, or even the extent to which this distinction is even valuable. There are often, as I've mentioned, political commonalities between the Global North and Global South countries. So...
The global north is seen to be democratic, liberal, constitutional, promoting human rights, for example. And then by contrast, there is the global south, which is described as a developing. So in the process of development, often have economies which are either in the early stages of industrialization or relies on things such as food exports, which suggests that they are a few, a good century behind a lot of the developed countries, especially when it comes to things like industrialization.
It is said that. the Global South does not enjoy any semblance of structural hegemony, they often have lower life expectancies, and the characterization of a lot of Global South countries is seen as less stable, more corrupt, autocratic, less likely to support human rights, more likely to be embroiled in armed conflict, etc, etc. Now, if we ignore, of course, the very problematic undertones with this division, essentially suggesting that in not so many words that the global north is quote-unquote civilized and the global south is quote-unquote uncivilized, which is the sort of general idea that is seemingly being presented by looking at this distinction, we do get a better understanding of how these divisions are often characterized. And I want to refer to you first to this idea known as world systems theory.
World systems theory suggests that it is the perpetuation of neoliberal economic policies which have led to the perpetuation of this north-south divide and it has led to the global hegemony and the structural hegemony on the part of the western world and so the pressure to conform to neoliberal conceptions of global economics basically means that the more developing countries either have to adhere to the rules of the Bretton Woods institutions which then allows them to be essentially amicable to neoliberalism and therefore are good places for good investment and the creation of cheap goods into the global south or they can try to challenge that conceptualization they can try and challenge neoliberalism at which point they don't get access the economies of the Western world. They don't get access to things like IMF loans, for example, all of which therefore suggests that it is a sense of coercion. There is a sense of coercion and conformity towards the sort of Western neoliberal world rather than the freedom of choice in relation to a variety of different economic and political ideologies.
In addition to this, through the imposition of foreign direct investment by Western corporations, there is of course the ability for the Global South to have their labour exploited at a cheaper rate, which is obviously good for the Global North, but not so good for ordinary people in the Global South. Attracting foreign direct investment, this therefore requires and leads to the Global South often being less concerned for the protection of the environment, for the protection of labour standards, for the protection of health standards, for the protection of human rights. all of which leads to a sort of race to the bottom where all of the global south countries are starting to compete for more and more Western foreign direct investment. And so are going to increasingly throw away their concerns for the environment or for for labor standards or for human rights.
The result being that the brunt of all of this, of all of this, of all of this economic exploitation fundamentally is that of. ordinary citizens in the global south. World systems theory clearly then presents quite a negative view of neoliberal economics and so neoliberalism obviously has responses to this. Neoliberalism is seen to have responses to a variety of different points of view.
The Washington Consensus which is seen to be the sort of not necessarily the founding ideas of neoliberalism, but at least encapsulates the basic premises of neoliberalism, responds to these accusations and may point to the fact that whether or not we agree on the methods, it is seen that neoliberalism has led to an extraordinary amount of economic growth worldwide, in addition to the West, but also in relation to developing countries. The growth of China, for example, is a... prime illustration of how a developing country under Mao's rule has led to becoming the second largest economy in the world, second only to the United States, a country that was struggling to feed its own people under Mao's collectivization policies and his great leap forward, and how that went from there in the sort of 50s, 60s and 70s to the second largest economy in the world as we speak right now in 2024. In addition to this, there is the argument that, of course, while the global north-south division is considered to still be relevant, it is becoming less relevant in time because more and more modern standards and development is taking place in these developing countries, Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia. Many of the fastest growing economies in recent years have been countries like, for example, Rwanda, countries like Ethiopia, countries like China, of course, all countries which would be characterized as part of the global south.
or developing countries. Finally, for many of the countries which are still developing, they may also just be bouncing back from and recovering from the process of decolonization. Now, of course, colonialism and the imperialism that existed was, of course, the fault of the West. But through the process of decolonization after the end of the Second World War, we see that there is a recovery from these quite horrific and quite imperialistic practices and policies and ideas, the collapse of these European empires has led to further enrichening and deepening of development.
And so to judge developing countries from the global south in the same way that we judge the growth of the global north would fundamentally ignore the fact that decolonization plays a very key role and the fact that these countries or the global north, these western countries had quite a significant head start over the global south.