A Southern Route from West to East

...create new capital from enforced private savings...

...As the once-marginalized succeed in pressing their interests in a number of ways, politics is being transformed...

...build heavy industry, defense and infrastructural systems...

...The Non-Aligned Movement, for instance, the largest international grouping of states excluding the great powers, elevated non-interference to an international norm of the highest level...

...It has also pressed critiques of unrepresentative national culture accompanied by demands for the rewriting of school textbooks to offer a more pluralistic history and culturally sensitive present...

...Economic activity was nationalized in more ways than one, and local control over scarce natural resources and subsoil minerals acquired the status of national obsession...

...The meeting points of Latin America’s most immense and remote natural features, the Amazon and the Andes, represent the zones causing the most anxiety and threat to the present order...

...The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), efforts to monitor the activities of MNCs and calls for a new international economic order came to represent the limits of international action by the weak and the small...

...These counter-hegemonic connections have not been easy to build or maintain, in part, because different parts of the world have their particular intellectual traditions, as well as distinct regional experiences with global power, flows and networks...

...influence has not been an issue in the same way...

...Its focus on marginal social actors and on the varied cultures of domination proved to be particularly useful in a context where, as we have now begun to realize, the boundaries of states and societies are far more porous, and the internal relations binding them far more fragile, than imagined in the heyday of high nationalism...

...FIFTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE historic Bandung conference, one of the first meetings of countries from the “Global South” seeking to chart their own conceptions of international order and progress...

...They are not the socially embedded and culturally uniform ties of national elites or transnational cosmopolitans, but connections forged through a common political program of change, built around mutual recognition of a common history of oppression...

...In the ECLA view, the strong state, in economic terms, was a state that would be willing to enter directly into production...

...Scholarly and policy debates over the appropriate strategy for national development might have shuttled between balanced and unbalanced growth as the more appropriate means to this end, but they rarely questioned the primacy of the instrument for making it possible: the nation-state...

...By the 1980s, Latin America’s historical trajectory had taken it further away from the rest of the world than ever before...

...It was not until the formation of the OPEC cartel and the first oil crisis that a clear message was sent to the world that economic power could be wielded by non-traditional powers acting in a concerted, coordinated manner...

...These developments may not have ended other means of “regime change,” but they do add a considerable burden of illegitimacy to political results produced by other means...

...These caucuses, while important, had very limited impact...

...These events and outcomes are the product of decades of transnational organization and struggle, as much at the local level as in global centers like Geneva and New York...

...National elites, however, have been forced to accept the results of the processes of liberal democracy in a similar fashion...

...The dependency school reformulated the question of neocolonialism in important ways, bringing a complex analysis to the multiple sites of domination by new foreign and domestic actors in the private sector...

...In both regions, relative success tended to follow the establishment of a single political leader who could be taken to embody the desired state: Sukarno, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Aung San in one part of the world...

...In the transnational struggles of South Asia’s dalits and Latin America’s indigenous people, we may well be witnessing a new path to cultural liberation and social transformation...

...The United States, alongside its military and economic strategies of dominance, increasingly defines its grand strategy around democratization as an instrument of global transformation...

...In this context, the work of the dependency theorists in Latin America struck an important intellectual chord across the world...

...Of particular interest is the history of interactions between Latin America and Asia against the backdrop of Northern dominance and modern Empire...

...economic interests were at stake...

...In their best expression they are out of necessity both counter-imperial and counter-national, and are based on solidarities of struggle rather than identity in a narrow sense...

...In the non-communist world, neocolonialism, the continuation of unequal relations of dominance under new conditions rather than formal imperialism as such, set the stage for the initial counter-hegemonic impulse for newly independent elites of Asia and the socially transforming states of Latin America...

...DESPITE ALL THIS, EFFORTS AT CREATING A NON-IMPERIAL universality across Latin America and Asia have persisted and grown over time...

...closely monitor and regulate the private sector (domestic and foreign...

...Corresponding to this desire for a strong state was a remarkably similar economic strategy of development...

...The net effect would be the eventual loss of legitimacy for the national state...

...If the Zapatista movement is the most vivid example of this emergence on a local scale, this new visibility is also an international phenomenon, represented on a global stage by legal victories of First Nations, the World Social Forums and the recent UN conference on racism and xenophobia held in Durban, South Africa...

...These are connections that are truly new and different...

...Nationalism encompassed notions of self-reliance, pride and independence, combined in different ways to define national sovereignty as the greatest political good, as a “natural” end of state-making...

...It also prevented international scrutiny of abuses against domestic populations and minorities...

...Hence, in both Haiti and Venezuela in recent years, Washington has been forced to accept electoral outcomes decided by the counter-hegemonic votes of subordinated classes—outcomes it hardly favored...

...The return of the multinational corporation (MNC) as a political actor along with the arrival of politically repressive bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in South America, a phenomenon mirrored in Washington’s closest Asian allies—Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Iran and Pakistan—could be taken as a useful marker of the end of the short-lived period of high nationalism...

...A difficulty of building a counter-hegemonic project is related to this apparent separation of the political and the economic...

...Turning back to the early post- World War II period—the political moment that included the creation of a new international system as well as political independence for much of Asia—what defined international politics and brought diverse local actors together under a common system of threat, reward and restraint was, in the first instance, the Cold War...

...Where the state can resist the pressures of imperial demands to some extent—Brazil and India come to mind—some good may yet be done...

...Both in Asia and Latin America, the question of indigenous and socially marginal peoples has finally come to political center-stage...

...A large repertoire of counter-hegemonic ideas and actions has emerged since that time, ideas and actions that have sought—and seek—to connect the world horizontally, from South to South...

...The blueprint for escaping from underdevelopment, first articulated by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch and his colleagues at the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), was mimicked around the world to take root in very different contexts...

...Their mobilization has changed the nature of domestic politics fundamentally in both parts of the world, demanding recognition of and compensation for the suppression of marginal cultures, along with the recovery of lost cultural practices, artifacts and habitats...

...With anti-communism the reflexive rallying cry for policymakers in Washington, nationalist forces in the developing world were habitually seen in a very sinister light, especially when U.S...

...OPEC in the 1970s represented a case of effective localized resistance in the form of inter-state collaboration, though without a long-term political strategy...

...playbook could be used for undoing Jacobo Arbenz’s Guatemala and Mohammed Mossadeq’s Iran, as both countries were moving in the same direction for similar structural reasons...

...Similarly, the global scope of surveillance allows imperial eyes to quickly identify and respond to acts of resistance, and to comprehensively map patterns and behaviors that run counter to imperial interests...

...OPEC accomplished what few others could: it upset the established order by withholding a key industrial and consumer resource...

...But there was still no sufficient and sustainable motivation for inter-state cooperation outside the great power framework...

...In India, though, where independence brought with it full suffrage and free elections, U.S...

...This is nowhere more visible than in the huge scale of illicit international migration and the varieties of physical borderlands that are best characterized as zones of multiple political authorities...

...Thus, the 1940s and 1950s constituted a moment of asserting “national space” around the world...

...ESPECIALLY FOLLOWING THE WORLDWIDE “CELEBRATION” of the quincentennial anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas in 1992, new connections began to be forged between far-flung world regions...

...As dependency theory had transformed political economy a generation ago, subaltern studies, under a different set of circumstances, was now transforming understandings of domination, resistance and the state...

...Indeed, as globalization has progressed over the past three decades, the political realm appears to have become increasingly autonomous, while key elements of the world’s economies have been increasingly drawn together and enmeshed in a common global system...

...It is also worth keeping in mind that the extent of South-North migration, always presented as one of the primary public policy issues of the Americas, is much less than the scale of South-South migration, measured as a global phenomenon...

...Another barrier to concerted horizontal interactions is Empire’s universal reach, allowing its military managers the means to deploy and concentrate limited resources with telling effect, to use one sphere of the Empire against another, and to contain zones of conflict before they can acquire their own universal scale and momentum...

...Some of this attention translated into tangible international action...

...By the 1960s, across diverse parts of the Global South, nationalist economic leadership and the urge for selfreliance had led to the growth of large state-owned productive sectors and a population that closely identified with the state as a source of economic subsidy and social protection...

...Juan Perón, Fidel Castro and Getúlio Vargas in the other—leaders whose actions would foreground the socially approved demand to empower the state at the expense of other sectors...

...The language of independence and autonomy had acquired a global cast even as it set national limits to the meaning of that independence...

...What was at stake at this time in the Southern countries, across the left-right divide, was the common desire for a strong, sovereign state...

...While the impetus for the creation of national barriers can be easily understood when set against a history defined by the loss of sovereignty, such a self-imposed limitation played easily into the tactics of external powers seeking to regain lost influence...

...Caught in the intellectual trap of a state model that demands a coincidence of identity, authority, territory and population, state managers around the world have seen their inability to control the cross-border flows of people, ideas and goods as a sign of state failure...

...This anxiety is now overlaid by the manifest pressures of a global War on Terror, however selectively applied, leading to the criminalization of hundreds of thousands of illicit migrants and a similar criminalization of cross-border life and livelihoods...

...Even for those countries that were fortunate enough to be able to resist subordinating all strategic action to the pressures of conforming to one bloc or the other, the ideological fault lines of Cold War struggles were still the point of departure...

...In response, states are seeking greater control over their extensive borderlands, transforming zones of weak authority by making them more secure, especially through military action...

...But perhaps Empire’s greatest power lies in its ability to define itself as “universal”—encompassing a coherent worldview represented as complete in itself—and to simultaneously represent dissent as “anti-universal,” against the hegemonic order of things...

...In particular, from South Asia came new Gramsci-inflected critiques of the nation and the relationship of national elites to subordinated classes that were assimilated and translated through a variety of transnational intellectual circuits...

...Fortunately, new connections and transnational social networks offer material and conceptual resources for the forging of a new counter-imperial project, one that addresses both empire and state at the same time...

...In the four decades it has taken for the political visibility of lower castes and dalits to be consolidated, the nature of the Indian polity has changed radically...

...The political emergence of once-marginal peoples in both North and South is also an ironic consequence of the hegemony of the liberal democratic political system as a global model...

...The United Nations was pushed to create new caucuses of states seeking greater regulation over the international system...

...Thus, though political responses differed according to the extent of the interrelated problems of state capacity and popular legitimacy, there was a greater similarity between Latin American populism in the 1940s and 1950s and the post-colonial struggles over regime and state legitimacy in Asia than is usually recognized...

...The economic collapse that hit the region in the 1980s only exacerbated these isolationist trends...

...They have involved the careful forging of ties of solidarity across barriers of nationalism, class, language, culture, history and place...

...Empire thus has the ability to set the legitimate boundaries of meaning and reference, preventing the alliance of counter-hegemonic projects across imperial space, and localizing antiimperial resistance both militarily and conceptually...

...As a result, it is increasingly bound to respect the results of formal democratic processes, especially elections...

...It is no coincidence that this is also the area where the majority of the region’s indigenous people live...

...Two decades of military rule, the resulting internal turmoil, economic crisis and the close involvement of the United States in the affairs of the hemisphere had stripped the region of the relatively few transnational connections it had with the rest of the South...

...Following the first oil shock, greater unevenness resulted across the South as geo-economics now joined state nationalism...

...Ironically, embedded in that language of sovereign statehood were many of the barriers to the building of international coalitions of the weak and small across the Global South...

...Also, while developments in Latin America and Asia once seemed to follow a broadly similar political logic, common points of intersection now appear to lie primarily in the economic...

...Subaltern transnational circuits have the potential of being transformative in a larger sense...

...Not surprisingly, the same U.S...

...Socially marginal dalits, or “untouchables,” in India and racialized communities and indigenous peoples throughout the Andes, Brazil and Mesoamerica are agitating for rights and entitlements as never before...

...But as the state in the developing world increasingly bows to international norms, the socially marginal and politically weak become familiar targets of state power and domination...

...create a domestic market for nationally produced goods and pay for this with a perpetual fiscal deficit...

...The outcomes of these struggles have changed, and will continue to change, the dominant cultural centers of these regions in important ways...

...The privileging of the national had its international counterpart in formal treaties and tacit agreements that defined the internal affairs of states as off-limits for international discussion...

...It would take another decade, the consolidation of civilian rule and other pressing international crises affecting the United States for Latin America to get the breathing room and political space it needed to begin to define its interests anew, and to resurrect old and fading contacts with the rest of the world...

...The impulse to strengthen the national state as the primary means for resisting neocolonial domination in different parts of the South has a mixed legacy today...