The North-South Divide and International Studies: A Symposium1

Abstract

This symposium on the North–South Divide encompasses a sample of papers delivered at the 2006 annual meeting of the International Studies Association in San Diego, California. Our intention is not to exhaustively catalogue all aspects of this structured dimension in international relations. Nor do we seek to resolve the issues at risk. Rather, our thesis is that North–South issues have already become prominent and they are likely to become even more prominent in the future. We would all do well to recognize them more explicitly and to focus more analytical attention on North–South questions as they move toward the center of the world stage. Economic history is not a destiny but it has been a powerful factor in shaping the nature of international relations over the past several centuries. Precisely where one should break into a very long story of economic development is debatable, but many analysts would be comfortable in beginning with the British Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Innovations in producing iron and textiles led to the creation of a technological edge for the innovating pioneers and were followed by subsequent waves of further radical innovations (steam, electricity, gasoline engines, computers) in production and transportation and the uneven diffusion of the capability to emulate, absorb, and improve upon the industrial armature of modern economic growth. The consequent distribution of technological edge and emulation created an increasingly unequal world in which the economies that could work with the new technologies became highly affluent and those that could not did not nor were they able to prosper anywhere near the same extent. Highly structured inequality also created greater incentives for late developers to try to catch up with the pioneers as quickly as possible. In turn, these incentives contributed importantly to two world wars and a Cold War …