South‐South: Parameters and pre‐conditions

Abstract

I cannot think of any other year in the post-war period that started so badly, in so many ways for so many people in so many lands, as 1982. That is a sombre reflection; but it is the reality of the moment and we will get everything else wrong unless we truly appreciate the international environment in which we are operating. The world faces great danger all the world. But, if I can turn Dickens around, I would say: 'It is the worst oftimes, it is the best oftimes; it is the age of foolishness, it is the age of wisdom; it is the winter of despair, it is the spring of hope; we have nothing before us, we have everything before us'. Worst and foolish, despairing and empty, for reasons I will mention; but best and wise, hopeful and promising, because we have an unprecedented opportunity to save mankind from selfdestruction and the knowledge and capability to rise to the challenge. To begin with, we are playing roulette with nuclear weapons and playing both the Russian and the American version. It is roulette, because there has been, I believe, no time since 1945 in which the superpower struggle for primacy has been characterised by so many variables, so many unpredictable factors, so many imponderables. Nor has that struggle been so vigorously pursued in a global environment so full of flash points. What has all this to do with South-South? Everything, because it has to do in the first place with North-South. Some of the moods that hold sway in the political arena a return to the cult of power, a resurgence of inward-looking nationalism, a fashion for jingoism, a retreat from morality are beginning to dominate the economic life of some nations, and relations between many. We are at a low point of internationalism: lower than at any time since the war. Who are its champions now? Assuredly not the superpowers neither of them who are immersed in their own power game. Not Europe, which is so confused and uncertain that it is failing to give the enlightened leadership of which it is capable. Not even the Third World which, however intact its instinct for cooperation, is battered and bruised. In the North-South domain, for example, there are forces at work to dismantle the very concept of North and South of developed and developing as if by statistical permutations you can dispel the world's disparities. Concepts like 'graduation', 'differentiation', even 'reciprocity' are being invented or reinvented to blur the fundamental divide of wealth and poverty, between the industrialised elite of our one world and the rest of it relegated to third class status or worse. The United Nations, the very symbol of post-war internationalism, is under