'The South Also Exists,' as the Third World Once Did
Prashad, Vijay
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: the multipolar moment?
‘The South Also Exists,’
as the Third World Once Did
Chilean foreign affairs minister Joaquín Fernández signs the Un Charter in...
...He is working on a book titled The Poorer Nations: A People’s History of the Global South, a follow-up to The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007...
...Morocco’s Mehdi Ben Barka, who was assassinated just before the conference, had preIn latin America, the Global South dynamic translates into political office, whereas in Africa and Asia it pushes into and around the centers of power...
...The new nations inherited this lack of variety, and even while free, dicted that “two currents of the world revolution would be represented at [the Tricontinental]: the current born with the October Revolution and the national liberation revolutions’ current...
...He wanted a debt strike: All indebted countries would simply refuse to pay and demand debt forgiveness...
...Panama led the fight...
...The Bandung generation had either died or fallen prey to the very populist authoritarian structures it had created, especially the military...
...Latin American representatives did gerations aside, the fact that the Latin American states NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: the multipolar moment...
...Pelé, of course, was a hero in India...
...The “South” or the “Global South” refers to those poorer nations that are not left out of development, but whose labor and lives pay for the affluence of the North...
...Prebisch and Pérez Alfonzo were the architects of the third leg...
...Panama’s feint ments and from the international institutions they would was backed by fellow Latin American states, includcreate...
...The following year, Argentina sizzled at the World Cup, from Leopoldo Luque’s volley against France in the first match to Mario Kempes’s goal in the final...
...In Latin America this Global South dynamic translates into political office, whereas in Africa and Asia it pushes into and around the centers of power...
...vided the intellectual fodder for the Third World project...
...Castro’s fight-back was, as usual, creative, but it was insufficiently attractive for the other governments...
...El sur también existe,” Chávez said, quoting the Uruguayan poet Mario Bendetti, “The South Also Exists...
...What might they be...
...The few pages I wrote were not historically grounded, not fully exploring why it is that the planet’s people share no common project for social justice...
...From the Peruvian Aprista Party to the Indonesian National Party, political leaders realized that the Atlantic countries that dominated world affairs had neither the will nor the ideas to solve the planet’s problems...
...human rights, including rights to education, to come from elsewhere, from the anti-colonial move-health care, social security, and work...
...Venezuela, with a 56% increase in government spending almost entirely due to its oil revenues, has begun to offer finance in Africa, Asia, and across Latin America...
...There is no good biography of him in English (in Spanish there is Pedro Rodríguez Rojas’s underwhelming 1997 study, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo: mito del nacionalismo petrolero...
...and those who carp about its failures (the majority...
...I where...
...The solution had In the most unobtrusive way, Latin American latin American leaders had done these countries an immense leaders had deed: They had fought to extend the charter of the United Nations so as to include human rights fought to and to open UN institutions to the countries that extend the would become independent after 1945...
...From 1977 to 1994, Maradona dominated world soccer—even when he didn’t score as much as one expected, all eyes in the stadium remained on him...
...But one Venezuelan, Pérez Alfonzo, and one Arab, ‘Abdullah al-Tariqi, the Saudi petroleum minister, found the idea valuable...
...While there are fairly good books on 0 the countries were at the mercy of corporations that controlled the purchasing of raw materials...
...How all of Chávez’s initiatives will be funded is in question...
...W hen i went to work on the darker nations, people I met and archives I consulted kept pointing to two Latin American men who are little known outside their areas of specialization: Raúl Prebisch, an Argentine economist, and Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, a Venezuelan politician...
...Now I am not interested in oil anymore...
...Chávez evoked the eDuarDo comesaña NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: the multipolar moment...
...Walking the streets of a still shell-shocked New York City with my friend and editor Andy Hsiao, I told him I wanted to write a book about SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 report: the multipolar moment...
...independent At San Francisco, Alfaro quickly submitted a proposal for an expansive definition of after 1945...
...For them, the patriotism of the bottom line was more important now than the socialist constraints placed on them by the nation-state and its international partners (like UNCTAD...
...Some of the institutional elements should include a bank of the South (“to finance our development”), a university of the South, a TV network of the South, and “a petroleum energy pact for the South,” the already inaugurated PetroSur...
...Similar problems became was their lingua franca (except for Brazil and the Dutch evident at the World Social Forum (WSF), held mainly in colonies), whereas most of the anti-colonial leaders from Porto Alegre, Brazil, but also in other cities, including once Africa and Asia spoke English or French, and many of in the megacity of Mumbai, India, in 2004...
...Castro, at Durban, spoke for the exploited millions...
...Cuba brought these two currents together...
...Prebisch would be roundly criticized from the left, particularly from the school of dependency theorists, but their foray would have been impossible without his pioneering intellectual and institutional work...
...He walked where he could and kept his own house in darkness...
...The term has been swept up, partly through its use by NGOs, then by the United Nations, and finally by those who are part of the WSF dynamic...
...had membership within the United Nations before the end of the 1940s meant that their input into its Charter created the pathway that would be used by the Third World project...
...OPEC, as an ecological group, has really disappeared...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: the multipolar moment...
...If I could show how joined by two newly freed countries, Lebanon and it was killed off, I would better be able to understand the the Philippines—an early sign of the coming Third lack of such a vision in our present day...
...Political and social movements across what is now called the Global South regrouped in the 1980s and 1990s, initially in the IMF riots, then in single-issue struggles (rights to livelihood, medicine, water, dignity), and finally in a battle for political power (whether this is indigenous rights or else a new kind of anti-imperialist nationalism...
...I saw him play in Kolkata in 1977...
...How will the Global South make finance bend to its will...
...Both were crucial figures in constructing the Third World project...
...A founder of Venezuela’s Acción Democrática, he believed that oil, as the nation’s asset, should be used for the people’s good...
...Or at least the Bolivarian Revolution will try to make its existence manifest...
...When this enlightplore the lineaments of the Third World project and to ened measure fell apart, the Latin American bloc was show how it dissolved in the 1980s...
...This could work only if all NAM countries went along with it...
...Colonialism distorted the historical dynamic of the parts of colonized world in many ways, one of which was to create single-commodity economies...
...The Durban conference culminated several years of political work to raise issues of oppression and to seek a common solution to several injustices...
...Pérez Alfonzo, the architect of OPEC, was an intriguing man...
...Alfaro also found important allies in that killed it might help us understand what must be at Chile’s Felix Nieto del Río and Hernán Santa Cruz, in the centerpiece of the new project, the project of Durban, Ecuador’s Carrera de Andrade, and Uruguay’s Eduardo of the WSF, and beyond...
...That left pole consolidated in 1966, when Havana hosted the first Tricontinental, a meeting of governments and national liberation movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America...
...I would hear of Argentina and Brazil every few years, when the soccer World Cup came around...
...This became the framework for my study, to ex-ing Chile, Cuba, and Mexico...
...Cuba’s president, the well-respected lawyer Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, went to Belgrade as the only Latin American representative at the founding of the NAM...
...Maradona called Bush “human garbage” and attended the rally alongside Chávez...
...In 1955, leaders from 29 countries—as diverse Assembly in 1948 with thanks to Santa Cruz in paras Ghana and India, Tanzania and Indonesia, Egypt and ticular, because he “kept alive in our mind the great China—came to Bandung, Indonesia, for the Asian-humane outlook of his Latin American world...
...It was, rather, the name of a project, cultivated by the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements and its intellectuals from the 19th century into the 1940s...
...The mechanism World alliance...
...He was the shining star of the 1980s...
...Its delegate, Ricardo Joaquín Alfaro, was that would not only a veteran diplomat but had also served become briefly as the country’s president...
...His 1948 paper for the Economic Commission for Latin America was compulsory reading from Santiago to Jakarta: It launched structuralist economics and proWorld project...
...Somewhere in the attic of my memory, I remember first seeing the iconic image of Che Guevara, and feeling the immense power in his Christlike revolutionary look...
...These questions are on the table for Latin America and for the world...
...Although the African and Asian countries had no seat at charter of the the San Francisco conference that inked the UN United nations Charter, since most were still colonies, the Latin American delegates did their work for them...
...He was extraordinary, schooling us on the massive ecological and economic crisis faced by the planet, and then, with his inimitable sense of optimism, he said, “History has demonstrated that great solutions have only emerged from great crises...
...Still I feel OPEC is a good instrument of the Third World...
...Everyone I spoke to pointed to Prebisch, whose reputation suffered as the Third World project collapsed...
...I live for my flowers...
...The idea went nowhere for most commodities...
...As it developed at Bandung and at Belgrade, the project had three legs: for peace (an end to the nuclear confrontation and nuclearism), for justice (dignity for the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America), and bread (a new international economic order...
...I first saw Fidel Castro in Durban, at the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in 2001...
...When he took the stage in Durban in 2001, it was this resilient Castro, now the representative of the planetary upsurge against the triangular forces of neoliberalism, globalization, and finance capital...
...their target was not Old Europe but New Yankee, found myself being overly critical of the WCAR, of the and in this they differed greatly from most of Africa and multiplicity at the venue, and of the inability of the many Asia (except for the Philippines...
...Its legends became our legends...
...But can it counteract the role being played by Beijing, whose own position is as yet unclear...
...Latin America formally joined the world of the Afro-Asian gatherings in 1961 to create the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM...
...The accumulating debt crisis that began a few years before claimed Mexico in 1982, and it threatened most of the planet...
...Additionally, Spanish to create a common horizon...
...The third country, Cuba, had a different place in my consciousness...
...Jiménez de Aréchaga, as well as the dynamic Guy Pérez Cisneros of Cuba and Minerva Bernardino of the Do n the late 1940s and early 1950s, the newly minican Republic...
...C astro, the colossus of the third world, came to New Delhi in 1983 to pass the NAM baton from Cuba to India...
...Drawing and to open from the 1938 Declaration in Defense of Human Rights passed by the Inter-American Conference, Un institutions the Latin Americans came to San Francisco armed to the countries with legal and moral challenges...
...In doing this, Dorticós and Cuba established a left pole within the NAM, one that Cuba continues to hold to this day (the most recent NAM conference, the 14th, was held in Havana in September 2006...
...pions of neoliberalism (and there were many at the WCAR) Latin America was not present, but neither was it absent...
...No surprise, then, that in 1964 Prebisch became the founding secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the headquarters of the Third World...
...This structural adjustment of the states occurred just as transnational corporations found the technological means to assert their dominance over the increasingly porous boundaries of the nation-state...
...Is the Beijing Consensus going to be any different from the Washington Consensus, and what will be the position of the new Latin America between Washington and Beijing, or indeed Caracas...
...The so as to include Atlantic powers wanted only a security pact, but human rights the Latin Americans demanded more...
...To document our current predicament, I first had to settle accounts with an earlier project that dominated the world from the interwar years to the 1980s: that of the Third World...
...But a few days after the final ceremony, the September 11 attacks occurred...
...This dynamic assassinated the Third World idea...
...Castro came with strong medicine...
...At that meeting, the Third World project imploded...
...by vijay prashad I n my childhood, latin america had only three countries: Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba...
...Next to Argentina, Brazil and Cuba, Venezuela now stands...
...I put the book to rest...
...Lucky to have passes to both the ministerial and the nongovernmental meeting, I got to see him speak twice...
...When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed for the “structural adjustment” of the internal economies of the NAM countries, it found a relatively willing state bureaucracy and an eager economic elite...
...Its heirs were not disposed to the Bandung ethos, even as they continued to pursue some parts of the Third World project...
...Finance capital, an unfamiliar social force in the 1940s and early 1950s, had exploded across the planet and constrained the Third World project...
...But more than that, it was hearing of the Cuban Revolution: its audacity and its inventiveness...
...Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment visually introduced me to Cuba and seared its powerful hopes into my imagination...
...My first stab, not attend largely because their imperial orbit lay else-a journalistic book on the conference itself, stumbled...
...They first met in Cairo, and then in Baghdad in 1960 they inaugurated the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a child of the Third World project...
...independent countries of Africa and Asia looked to Lebanon’s Charles Malik introduced the Univer each other for support and solidarity in a still hostile sal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN General world...
...One of Prebisch’s ideas was to create a commodity cartel...
...history of the NAM in Havana and called for the creation of a new project of the South: a set of proposals needs to be articulated by a commission that draws together those proposals that are often thrown to the wind...
...But Castro survived to fight another day...
...When Hugo Chávez, the new Castro as far as the Global South goes, comes to India and Iran or to the podiums of the 2006 African Summit or the 2006 NAM, he is greeted as the vanguard of a new, as yet unspecified, project...
...At the conference, Dorticós carefully parsed the rhetoric of “peaceful coexistence“ to ensure that it would not mean the continued imperial domination of smaller countries...
...Prebisch conceptualized import-substitution industrialization, the mechanism by which the new nations would jump-start their battered economies and the political process by which they would create national economies (which would trade, of course, but foreign trade would not be the raison d’etre of economic development...
...Exag-African Conference...
...Durban, to excavate the ruins of the WCAR...
...In 2005, when Chávez traveled to Argentina to lead a protest against George W. Bush at Mar del Plata, he walked the road with a legend, Diego Maradona...
...The use of the word south comes from the independent commission under the chairmanship of former German chancellor Willy Brandt (set up in 1977, with its influential Brandt Report released in 1980...
...un photo / yutaka nagata Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and the Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford...
...At both events, Castro received standing ovations...
...The ideological them met in their continental sojourns, whether in Lon-terrain of internationalism appears saturated by the cham-don, Paris, or Geneva...
...This was largely through the new Cuba’s forceful intervention...
...It has just not been used properly...
...The Durban dynamic was an early casualty of the war on terror...
...Cuba grew sugarcane, the Gold Coast grew cocoa, northern Bihar grew indigo...
...Two years before he died in 1979, Pérez Alfonzo wrote, “I am an ecologist first of all...
...Instead of allowing these corporations to set prices, Prebisch and others suggested that the Third World project create a cocoa cartel, a bauxite cartel, a sugarcane cartel, and so on, allowing Cuba and Jamaica and Ghana to protect their main assets...
...I have always been an ecolo SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 gist first of all...
...These names, and their pictures from the newspapers and an early issue of Sportstar, adorned my room...
...The Third World, for me, was not a spatial marker, the omnibus name of underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, and the Americas...
...Brandt’s team divided the world at a latitude of 30 degrees (with some exceptions, like Australia and New Zealand...
...How will the new project, that of the Global South, be able to handle financialization, a social force that appears to have no location and to be uncontrollable...
...What is above the line, the North, is the affluent part of the world, and what is below, the South, is the impoverished...
...Alternatives were called for but remained unrealized...
...When Castro’s platoons descended into Havana, it not only inaugurated a new moment for the island nation, but it also built a bridge between Latin America and the newly constituted Third him in Spanish, there is no full-length biography or comparably intellectual treatment of him in English...
...The South Also Exists,’ as the Third World Once Did Chilean foreign affairs minister Joaquín Fernández signs the Un Charter in 1945...
Vol. 40 • September 2007 • No. 5
