The Long March from Bandung to the BRICS

 

The Rise of Asian Solidarity

Many accounts of Bandung have rightfully stressed the contemporary context of decolonization at the time it was held.  It is also important to take account of the sense of regional solidarity that accompanied the anti-colonial nationalist movements that sprang up in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.   As the Indian scholar Sugata Bose points out, the martyrdom of Jose Rizal, who was executed by the Spaniards in December 1896, “posthumously elevated him to a pioneering figure in Asian resistance.”^[1]  The early 20^th century saw national revolutionary movements gather force throughout the Asian region, a major source of regional inspiration being the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and Sun Yat Sen’s establishment of the Republic of China.  A cosmopolitan network of Asian revolutionaries was forged in the coastal cities from Tokyo to Shanghai to Canton to Manila to Calcutta.  With the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the establishment of the Communist International in 1919, this coastal highway in maritime Asia provided the means by which communist revolutionaries such as Ho Chi Minh and Tan Malaka worked to bring about revolutions that would transcend colonial borders.

 

Japan’s Role in Stimulating Pan-Asian Consciousness

In the articulation of the emerging sense of a national identity with a regional or Asian consciousness in the pre-World War II Asian world, Japan played an outsized role.  Following its victory over Czarist Russia in 1905, “all paths seemed to lead to Japan.”^[2]  Japan provided a model of how a country could be fundamentally reformed but also how the instruments of domination by the West could be used successfully against it.  Not surprisingly, eager young people from throughout Asia flocked to Tokyo, and it was in such places as the Kanda district of that city that “Asian intellectuals first came to know each other and to speak to each other.”^[3]

Japan, however, developed as a Janus-faced entity that provoked both admiration and fear from other Asians.  On the one hand, it posed a challenge to Western supremacy.  On the other hand, it sought to join the imperial league, taking over in quick succession Korea and Manchuria, then in 1937, began a war to annex China.   The Japanese imperial elite convinced itself it had a mission to lead Asia from colonial bondage to the so-called “Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.”  The only problem was even as they sponsored governments and movements led by nationalists such as Aung San and Ba Maw in Burma, Sukarno in Indonesia, and Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the Indian National Army, the Japanese were brutal in dealing with the peoples of the occupied territories, particularly in China, Korea, and the Philippines.  “Asian anti-imperialists experienced both high-minded idealism and high-handed arrogance of middle-tier Japanese military officers in Southeast Asia,” notes Bose.^[4]  Japanese attitudes towards their nationalist allies oscillated between supporting their aspirations to free themselves from the Western colonial powers and using them as pawns to promote Japan’s wartime goals.  The Japanese effort to square the circle was most evident in the Assembly of the Greater East Asiatic Nations on November 5-6, 1943.  The tide of war was turning against Japan, so it had become important to enlist the support of Asian nationalists to complement the military effort.  With nationalists like Subhas Chandra Bose of India, Jose P Laurel of the Philippines, Ba Maw of Burma, and Prince  Wan Waithayakon of Thailand in attendance, this Assembly was, according to Ba Maw in his later years,

the first visual manifestation of the new spirit stirring in Asia, the spirit of Bandung as it was called twelve years later when it was reincarnated at the Bandung Conference of the Afro-Asian Nations.  That spirit had its first birth at the Tokyo Assembly in 1943.  Even the Assembly’s joint declaration consisting of the five basic principles of a new order in Asia foreshadowed the Pancha Sila or Five Principles, of the Bandung Nations.^[5]

However, though some of the leaders they sponsored became significant actors in the post-war world, the biggest impact that the Japanese had on the peoples of Asia was their shattering of the image of Western invincibility in the first six months of the war when the British, American, and Dutch armies and navies folded in quick succession to the Japanese military onslaught.  The collapse of the British empire in Asia during those months, writes one of the foremost historians of the Pacific War, “did lasting damage to Britain’s reputation as a great power…It was a dignity never to be recovered.”^[6]  The western collapse in the war underlined that, despite their ultimate victory, the western powers would no longer be able to reimpose the old colonial order.  As  the young Burmese leader Aung San noted perceptively prior to the outbreak of hostilities, “Colonialism’s difficulty is freedom’s opportunity.”^[7]

 

On the Eve of Bandung

There were three major conferences celebrating Asian unity that preceded Bandung that built up the sense of regional solidarity that would culminate in the latter.  The first was the Asian Relations Conference promoted by Jawaharlal Nehru in March 1947.  It was an Indian woman activist, Sarojini Naidu, who stole the show with a stunning speech that surpassed the eloquence of Nehru, who, a year later, would become Prime Minister of India.  According to Bose,

In her grand perspective, “mountains and riverways” could not divide the “heat of Asia.” Nor had a “lack of vocabulary, a lack of dictionary knowledge of words, ever prevented the true understanding between hearts.”  She made a compelling case for “the great diversity of Asian culture’ having ‘cemented the unity of the Asian people.”^[8]

Close to 470 delegates–a great number of them coming from Southeast Asia, and with women outnumbering male diplomats and politicians–attended the Asia Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing from October 2 to 10, 1952.  The conference saw fiery denunciations of the United Nations’ role in the Korean War, where a UN Command controlled by the United States, was in combat with North Korean and Chinese troops; its tolerance of continued colonialism in Southeast Asia; and its non-recognition of the People’s Republic of China.

One of the high points of the Conference was the way the Kashmir issue was dealt with.  Instead of letting the issue divide them, the Indian and Pakistani delegations staged what was described as “an emotional and sensational scene of Indian-Pakistan rapprochement,”^[9]  where the leader of the Indian delegation presented a Kashmiri lacquer box to the leader of the Pakistani delegation, and the latter in turn put a gold cap on the head of his Indian counterpart.  A joint India-Pakistan declaration was then read, placing the onus of the Kashmir crisis on “Anglo-American machinations and the ineptitude of the UN, to the cheers, kisses, and hugs of the two delegations.”^[10]

Finally, there was the First Asian Socialist Conference that was held from January 6 to 15 in Rangoon, which was described as “a transnational hub for like-minded socialists from Indonesia, India, Burma, and Japan to engage in the work of socialist internationalism with an Asian inflection.”^[11] A key organizer, Ram Manohar Lohia, urged Asian socialists to embrace “the politics of steering clear of the two big powerful combinations, not of following the middle course between the two but of initiating and struggling for positive policies of freedom, social reconstruction, progress, and the pursuit of happiness.” ^[12]

Asian unity and solidarity was a concept and infectious feeling that cut across the post-colonial state boundaries that were being set up as well as across the Cold War divide that the United States (US) was trying to impose in Asia, notably in Korea and Indochina.  Bandung was not the beginning but a high point of a process that began late in the 19^th century and would continue after Bandung.

 

The Conference Proper: High Points

The Conference was one of those rare gatherings where the climax took place at the beginning, with President Sukarno’s opening speech.  Sukarno was a charismatic speaker, and you can feel that charisma emerge from the printed text, from the very beginning  of his speech, in fact:

It is a new departure in the history of the world that leaders of Asian and African peoples can meet together in their own countries to discuss and deliberate upon matters of common concern. Only a few decades ago it was frequently necessary to travel to other countries and even other continents before the spokesmen of our peoples could confer.

I recall in this connection the Conference of the “League Against Imperialism and  Colonialism” which was held in Brussels almost thirty years ago. At that Conference many distinguished Delegates who are present here today met each other and found new strength in their fight for independence. But that was a meeting place thousands of miles away, amidst foreign people, in a foreign country, in a foreign continent. It was not assembled there by choice, but by necessity.

Today the contrast is great. Our nations and countries are colonies no more. Now we are free, sovereign and independent. We are again masters in our own house….^[13]

Particularly evocative of the spirit Sukarno desired was his reference to a gesture of concrete solidarity extended by the Indian anti-colonial movement at a critical juncture of  Indonesia’s struggle for independence:

As I survey this hall, my thoughts go back to another Conference of Asian peoples. In the beginning of 1949 –historically speaking only a moment ago–my country was for the second time since our Proclamation of Independence engaged in a life and death struggle. Our nation was besieged and beleaguered, much of our territory occupied, a great part of our leaders imprisoned or exiled, our existence as a State threatened.  Issues were being decided, not in the conference chamber, but on the battlefield. Our envoys then were rifles, and cannon, and bombs, and grenades, and bamboo spears. We were blockaded, physically and intellectually.

It was at that sad but glorious moment in our national history that our good neighbour India convened a Conference of Asian and African Nations in New Delhi, to protest against the injustice committed against Indonesia and to give support to our struggle. The intellectual blockade was broken! Our Delegates flew to New Delhi and learned at first hand of the massive support which was being given to our struggle for national existence. Never before in the history of mankind has such a solidarity of Asian and African peoples been shown for the rescue of a fellow Asian Nation in danger. The diplomats and statesmen, the Press and the common men of our Asian and African neighbours were all supporting us. We were given fresh courage to press our struggle onwards to its final successful conclusion. We again realised to the full the truth of Desmoulin’s statement: “Have no doubt of the omnipotence of a free people”.

Perhaps in some ways the Conference which has assembled here today has some roots in that manifestation of Asian-African solidarity six years ago.^[14]

With that gesture of gratitude, Sukarno deftly made Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the towering figures assembled in that hall, informally the co-chair of the meeting.

Much commented on by historians was another part of Sukarno’s speech, where he placed the Conference as a direct descendant of the American Revolution, pointing out that it was taking place on the 180^th  anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride through Boston, warning of the coming of British troops in what turned out to be a futile effort to crush what the Indonesian president characterized as the “first successful anti-colonial war in history.”^[15]

This was a clever effort to assure the United States that it should not see the meeting as a threat to its interests.  By the time of the Conference, the Cold War was in full swing, and Sukarno was essentially telling the US that it should not be apprehensive about the presence of Zhou En Lai, the Prime Minister of China, at the meeting. Just as Nehru had ended the blockade of Indonesia in 1949, so was Sukarno communicating to the Americans and the world that Bandung was ending the blockade of China since it was not attending as a Soviet stooge but as part of the anti-colonial struggle that began in their country in 1775.

Zhou responded affably to Sukarno and Nehru’s intention of making Bandung Chou and China’s “coming out party.”  In fact, he stole the show.  Instead of the fire-breathing Communist that Western propaganda had led many at the meeting to expect, Zhou came across as the embodiment of reasonableness and affability. In a report on Zhou’s performance in Bandung, A. Doak Barnet, a prominent American liberal scholar with close ties to the US government, wrote:

Chou’s performance at Bandung was extremely skillful.  During the early days of the conference, he played a patient, conciliatory, and one might say even defensive role.  When attacks were made against the Communists, he kept his temper.  He refrained from any of the propaganda blasts which typify Chinese Communist pronouncements from Peking.  He did not assert himself, and for the most part, he stayed in the background.  Then, on the last three days, he emerged as the main performer, and in a series of fairly dramatic diplomatic moves he assumed the role of the reasonable man of peace, the conciliator who was willing to make promises and concessions in the name of harmony and good will.^[16]

With his reasonable mien and willingness to negotiate all the key issues China had with its neighbors and with the United States, like the question of Formosa (Taiwan), Barnett concluded, “Chou’s personal influence on the delegates attending the conference may have subtle long-range effects which cannot now be accurately foreseen or predicted.”^[17]

Zhou’s charm offensive with a light touch overshadowed Nehru’s role.  As Barnet put it in his first-hand report,

On balance…it was clear that Nehru did not do very well at the conference.  His obvious effort to assert leadership, his intemperate and tactless criticism of those who opposed him, and his transparent pique when things did not go his way antagonized many delegates at the conference and irritated most, including some of his friends.  If Nehru hoped that the Asian African Conference would create political ground swell which would point toward a neutralist Afro-Asia under his leadership as the wave of the future, he was disappointed.^[18]

 

Unity and Solidarity

Despite Nehru’s failings when it came to personal diplomacy, he scored where it counted: the conference’s coming out with a final declaration that would serve as a template for neutralism or non-alignment:

1. Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.
4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.
5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
6. Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers, abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries.
7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.
8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration or judicial settlement as well as other peaceful means of the parties’ own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
10. Respect for justice and international obligation.^[19]

Mindful of the fact that there were still territories that remained under colonial control, the conference communique declared that “colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should speedily be brought to an end,” calling for the self-determination and independence of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia from French rule.  Also significant in light of recent events, was the declaration of unqualified support for Palestine:  “In view of the existing tension in the Middle East, caused by the situation in Palestine and of the danger of that tension to world peace, the Asian-African Conference declared its support of the rights of the Arab people of Palestine and called for the implementation of the United Nations (UN) Resolutions on Palestine and the achievement of the peaceful settlement of the Palestine question.”^[20]

The emerging Cold War divide that the organizers feared would upend the conference was thwarted.  In the end, a spirit of compromise prevailed, with the pro-western bloc refraining from aggressively pushing the anti-communist agenda into the final declaration.  They were most likely worried about being seen as disruptive of the dominant anti-colonial spirit of the meeting and being tarred with the word “neocolonial” that was then coming into vogue in progressive circles.  Even Carlos P. Romulo, the Filipino statesman who was very close to the US and whom the US mainly relied on to push the anti-communist agenda, ended up with one of the eloquent expressions of the transnational solidarity that Bandung embodied:

Nation no longer suffices. Western European man today is paying the terrible price for preserving too long the narrow and inadequate instrument of the nation state.  We of Asia and Africa emerging into this world as new nations in an epoch when nationalism, as such, can solve only the least of our problems and leaves us powerless to meet the more serious ones.  We have to avoid repeating all of Europe’s historic errors.  We have to have the imagination and courage to put ourselves in the forefront of the attempt to create a 20th-centruy world based on the true interdependence of peoples.^[21]

But they were also probably disarmed by Zhou’s masterful performance. Romulo, America’s man at the meeting, found  Zhou to be “’affable of manner, moderate of speech’ by contrast with  Nehru’s ‘pedantry.’”^[22] Indeed, Zhou’s influence extended to the wording of the final text, which had marked similarities to the declaration of peaceful coexistence that he delivered earlier at the meeting.  However, the ideological divide did not disappear; it was simply contained, for the moment.

 

Absent Voices

Yet the threat posed by the ideological rift did not mean there were no other sources of tension at the conference, though these lay, for the most part, below the surface.

One was the presence of very few women, and the absence of a mention of women’s rights in the final declaration—a curious omission because as Bose notes, women’s rights had “formed such a key element in unofficial Asian conferences in the past.”^[23]

Another was that, as Homer Jack, one of the conference’s attendees, put it, “Africa was very much a junior partner” in the Afro-Asia solidarity movement.^[24] Only four African countries were present, the dominant one being Egypt, from North Africa, which was mainly regarded as an Arab country.  Indeed, as one analyst points out, “Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser took a patronising view of Africa. He not only endorsed the imperial framing of Africa as “the dark continent” but also signaled Egypt’s duty of ensuring “the spread of enlightenment and civilization to the remotest depths of the jungle.”^[25]

Another major tension was the the non-participation of regional or continental movements, such as the Pan-African movement, which had played such a key role in previous Afro-Asian meetings, owing to the insistence of the five governments, the so-called “Colombo Powers” (Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) that convened the conference, that only governments of nation-states would be invited.  As a result,  as one analyst noted, “the pursuit of cultural cooperation and global cultural diversity, Third World solidarity and the possibility of an alternative movement for the transformation of the international order was dimmed by a commitment to building interstate alliances and regional hegemonies, and the anti-solidarist pursuit of national interest.”^[26]

Moreover, the presence in Bandung and later events of regional or continental solidarity movement, and not just states, could have helped mitigate or counter the ethnic tensions and conflicts stoked by the arbitrary territorial divisions departing colonial powers were making, decisions that struck many as being without rhyme or reason except administrative convenience.  In Africa, in particular, such arbitrary divisions became the vessels of new “nation states” with little organic basis on the ground.

A third key actor that was missing in Bandung was the peasant movement.  In many countries represented in Bandung, there were strong peasant movements.  In Vietnam and the Philippines, for instance, the peasants had formed the backbone of national liberation movements.  True, it might not have been possible to have representation from peasants in these two countries that had just undergone peasant-based insurgencies—one successful, the other unsuccessful—at the height of the Cold War.  However, the host country itself, Indonesia, boasted of massively organized peasant organizations.  There were, for instance, millions of peasants in the Indonesian Peasant Front (BTI) affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and many others in the Petani, which worked with Sukarno’s Nationalist Party.^[27]   Had the presence of organized social forces such as peasant movements been institutionalized in Bandung, they could have been a source of transnational pressure for domestic social reform within the decolonizing countries.

In any event, Bandung, for all the positive contributions it made to decolonization, had the one questionable legacy of legitimizing the nation-state as the principal, if not the only, vehicle for developing relations among the post-colonial societies, to the detriment of other relations of South-South solidarity.

 

Post-Bandung: Positives

The 20 years after Bandung saw major developments in the evolution of the spirit of Bandung.  Over two years after the meeting, the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference was held in Cairo in late 1957.  Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was at Bandung, was the force behind the meeting.  Nasser had shaken the world and drew massive support from the Third World when he nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and hung on to it despite British and French efforts to retake it, with the military complicity of Israel.

In what appeared to be a competitive move to claim the Bandung spirit, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana hosted the Conference of Independent African States in Accra in April 1958 and the All-African People’s Conference in December of the same year.  At the same time, some of the original sponsors of the Bandung meeting, the so-called “Colombo Powers,” and other rising personalities seemed to be miffed by the charismatic Nasser’s drive to capture leadership of the Afro-Asian movement.  One historian describes these dynamics:

Nasser and Nkrumah engaged in ‘soft-power war between 1957 and 1959 by way of rival conferences and claims of the defence of the Bandung Spirit’. In March 1957, for instance, Nkrumah announced that Ghana would hold the first Pan-African Nationalist Conference. The idea for such a conference, it was later revealed, was ‘to match Bandung on an African scale with Asia as observers’. On the other hand, Egypt planned to host the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference, a move which was seen as challenging Nkrumah’s bid for Pan-African unity. In the end, Ghana hosted the Conference of Independent African States in Accra in April 1958 and the All-African People’s Conference in December of the same year. According to comments attributed to George Padmore, Nkrumah’s advisor at the time, the April conference partly aimed to keep ‘for Black Africa priority over the Afro-Asian movement in Cairo’.  In Cairo, the December 26, 1957–January 1, 1958 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference was dubbed ‘the second Bandung’.  Anup Singh, secretary of the preparatory commission, declared: ‘Let Cairo be the People’s Bandung’. This did not go down well with the Colombo powers, who viewed the conference as nothing more than an Egypt–Soviet Union alliance, hinting at the unlikelihood of a second Bandung conference. In Africa, some leaders saw the conference as an overreach by Egypt, with one West African leader commenting: ‘None of the West African Nationalist movement accept Nasser as an African Leader.’^[28]

These were, however, friendly rivalries within a brotherhood.  The spirit of solidarity articulated in Bandung had its next most important manifestation in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade in 1961, with Sukarno, Nkrumah, Nehru, Nasser, and Joseph Broz Tito, president of Yugoslavia, serving as the midwives.   Close on the heels of the NAM was the founding of the Group of 77 during the first meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964.

The UN had been criticized in Bandung for allowing itself to be used by the United States, particularly in Korea, when its multinational force fought against North Korea and China under the banner of the UN Command controlled by the US.  However, by the early sixties, with more and more countries becoming independent, the balance of forces within the UN began to shift and the General Assembly became more and more a convenient site for the developing countries’ missions in New York to coordinate their interests. By 1965, the UN had 117 members, the 77 developing countries being in the majority.  The changing view of the UN from an instrument of the big powers to an agency that could advance the interests of the Third World was expressed by Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana when he addressed the UN in 1960: “I look upon the United Nations as the only organization that hold out any hope for the future of mankind.”^[29]

Bandung’s legacy at the international level was clear.  At the regional level, the record was more mixed.  Inter-state alliances in the Middle East and Africa tended to be evanescent.  Perhaps the most successful case of the Bandung model of inter-state solidarity at the regional level in the decades after the conference took place in Southeast Asia, as Amitav Acharya perceptively points out:

[One] might argue, with the benefit of hindsight, that the real winner at Bandung was neither China nor India, but the future ASEAN. The suspicion of both India and China, the big powers of Asia, generated at Bandung paved the way for a regionalism of smaller nations to emerge in Asia—one that is led by none of the big powers. This was realised with the establishment of ASEAN in 1967…By paving the way for a regionalism of smaller nations…the Bandung conference might have decisively shaped the trajectory of Asian regionalism, which continues to this day to be ASEAN-centric. What is more, the informal, interpersonal and consensus-driven nature of the interactions among the top leaders at Bandung might have presaged the ‘ASEAN Way’—the non-coercive and non-legalistic mode of interactions that marked the formative years of ASEAN.^[30]

Still, despite its having two major documents suffused with the spirit of non-alignment, the declaration establishing ASEAN as a “Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality” (ZOPFAN) and that creating the “Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapons Free Zone” (SEANWFZ), ASEAN leaned toward the United States, which manipulated it to try to isolate Vietnam in the region after it lost the Vietnam War in the mid-seventies.  It was only with Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia joining ASEAN in the 1990s that the body became substantially non-aligned.

Moreover, the so-called ASEAN consensus rule meant that it was mainly non-controversial issues that could elicit shared declarations.  And it should also be added that Bandung helped institutionalize ASEAN’s rule of strict non-interference in one another’s affairs, one of whose consequences has been ASEAN’s immobility while massive human rights violations were taking place in its member countries, such as Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and are now occurring on a massive scale in Myanmar.

 

Post-Bandung: Negatives

Yet, not everything in the aftermath of Bandung was an advance.  There were two significant setbacks: the Sino-Indian border conflict in 1962 and the counterrevolution in Indonesia in 1965-66.

Sugata Bose has characterized the Sino-Indian border war as a “fratricide” that was tragic owing to the fact that it was triggered by a colonial legacy, the arbitrary British drawing of borders between India and China in the 19th century.  Two years of fruitless negotiations centered on the so-called McMahon Line drawn by the British in 1914 as the eastern border between the two countries.  Since it had been arbitrarily drawn by an imperial power, China refused to concede its legality while India stubbornly insisted on it.  After the issue was resolved by force by the Chinese with massive attacks on both the western and eastern sectors of the border, with Indian forces retreating in a rout before China made a unilateral ceasefire after a month-long war.  Seven years earlier, Nehru had insisted on inviting  Zhou to the Bandung conference in the interest of Asian unity against the West. That ideal died in the border war, leaving a “twenty year legacy of diplomatic non-engagement between the two Asian neighbors at the highest levels of government.”^[31]

Three years later, in 1965, it was the turn of Indonesia to suffer a deep rent in the solidarity forged in Bandung.  A failed coup became the trigger of a terrifying genocide that claimed over a million lives.  Communists and alleged communists were the main victims of this army-run operation, but thousands of victims were Indonesians of Chinese lineage, who were doubly damned as Communists and as a fifth column for the People’s Republic of China.  What was a close relationship between China and Sukarno forged with amity in Bandung was replaced by a government that was anti-Chinese, anti-communist, and anti-Beijing.

By the end of 1970, fifteen years after Bandung, three of the Big Four in Bandung, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, and Sukarno of Indonesia had passed away, their last years being marked by a decline in their political fortunes.  Nehru could never get over the humiliation of India’s defeat in its border war with China.  Nasser’s reputation as a leader of the Third World had fallen victim to Egypt and the Arab world’s disastrous defeat by Israel in the 1967 war.  Sukarno spent the last years of his life powerless and a virtual prisoner of General Suharto.  Only Zhou remained alive, but he was under constant political attack from what came to be known as the “Gang of Four,” Mao’s most loyal allies in the Communist Party elite,  and was only able to stay in power because Mao needed him to stabilize China as he directed his Red Guards and the Gang of Four to destabilize it.

Still, despite the passing of the Bandung generation of key leaders, the Global South solidarity had been institutionalized as the Group of 77 that functioned as a bloc within the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

 

The Tricontinental Alliance

Latin America was absent at Bandung, which was an Afro-Asian affair.  One of the reasons for this was that many of the Latin American nation-states emerged during a much earlier period of decolonization, in the early 19th century, when liberation movements led by Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin threw off the Spanish yoke.  Another was that they were not involved in the Second World War, which had shaken the foundations of colonialism in Asia and Africa and led to increased interactions among anti-colonial forces across borders.

In the 1960s, however, the region was shaken politically by the Cuban Revolution, which triggered solidarity from states and people’s movements in Africa and Asia.  Its leaders, Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, underlined the common condition of subordination that Latin America had with the peoples of Africa and Asia in their relationship to the West.  This realization led to the Cairo Conference in 1962, which was the first time the Latin American, Asian, and African blocs jointly tackled the problems of development.  This unity was reinforced intellectually by the development of an economic theory that placed Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a position of structural subordination to the Global North.  This was the paradigm developed by Raul Prebisch, an Argentine theorist who was probably the most influential economist produced by the Global South in the 20th century.

Prebisch took off from his observation of trade data that showed that over time the terms of trade turned against the goods produced by the agricultural and mineral-exporting countries of the developing world, which he termed the “periphery,” in their relation to the industrial goods produced by the industrially developed countries, which he termed the “center.”   Over time, Prebisch contended, the developing countries suffered a decline of 30 per cent in their terms of trade, meaning that the developing countries had to use more and more of their agricultural products to purchase fewer and fewer manufactured goods.^[32]  Moreover, the trading relationship was likely to get worse because northern producers were developing substitutes for raw materials from the Global South, and northern consumers would, according to Engels’ Law, spend a decreasing proportion of their income on agricultural products from the South.  Prebisch’s perspective came to be known as “structuralism,” because it saw the developing world as trapped in the structure of unequal relations of the global trading system inherited from the colonial period.

Remarkably, at around the same time, Hans Singer, another UN economist, was doing research on global trade trends and was coming out with the same conclusions as Prebisch, so that the phenomenon of deteriorating terms of trade for the Global South came to be known as the Prebisch-Singer Theory.

Prebisch was not simply a theorist.  He was a good writer and educator, and, as Ali Allawi put it, “he set to work to attract a number of brilliant economists and policy experts who single-handedly created a development discourse that stood in marked contrast to that from the multilateral institutions and Western capitals.  Studies poured out of CEPAL (or Economic Commission for Latin America, in English), each one adding to the growing edifice of the structuralist school.”^[33]

But what attracted both developing country economists and technocrats to it was that it described what one analyst described as “bloodless but inexorable exploitation” of the non-industrial world by the industrialized world,^[34] irrespective of how different the developing countries’ internal social and economic structures were.  It offered the possibility of creating a united economic front among different regimes, whether they were Arab monarchies, liberal democracies, authoritarian regimes, or left-wing national liberation governments.

The absence of internal differentiation of the developing country economy in the Prebischian model was its strong point when it came to building an international alliance of the Global South.  It also allowed it to be distinguished from the Marxist or communist perspective that greatly worried the North.  To some of Prebisch’s colleagues, however, this was both a theoretical defect and a political illusion, that is, there were classes in the developing country that benefited from the unequal integration of the South in the global economy.  Among those who evinced dissatisfaction with the simple center-periphery model were a trio of Brazilians, Celso Furtado, Theotonio dos Santos, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

This spelled trouble at CEPAL, as Allawi notes:  “Furtado’s historical orientation and his emphasis on the unequal status of classes and the moulding of institutions to favour the ruling elites…had the whiff of an underlying Marxist bias.  They were all anathema to Cold War Washington, irrespective of the dry, scholarly jargon of CEPAL.”^[35]  Anxious to keep Washington at bay while keeping together his motley assembly of developing countries, Prebisch inevitably clashed with Furtado, leading to the latter’s departure from CEPAL.

Prebisch was not just an economist but a political entrepreneur, and his strategic objective was to enhance the power of the Global South in its dealings with the Global North.  The major fruit of this effort was the establishment in 1964 of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which became over the next decade the principal vehicle used by the developing economies in their drive to restructure the world economy.

 

From UNCTAD to the New International Economic Order

With Prebisch as its first secretary general, UNCTAD advanced a strategy that did not focus on aid but on restructuring the global trading system.  This had four prongs.  The first was commodity price stabilization, through the negotiation of floors below which commodity prices would not be allowed to fall.  The second was a scheme of preferential tariffs allowing Third World exports of manufactures, in the name of development, to enter First World markets at lower tariff rates than those applied to exports from other industrialized countries.  The third was to defend the use of a protectionist trade policy as a mechanism for industrialization, a process now better known as industrial policy.  The fourth was to push for accelerated technology transfer to the South.  The UNCTAD agenda focused on global trade reform, not aid, but it nevertheless did not shy from demanding aid, on the rationale that aid was not charity but “compensation, a rebate to the Third World for the years of declining commodity purchasing power.”^[36]

The UNCTAD strategy formed the core of the agenda  articulated by the historic Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) adopted by the General Assembly on May 1, 1974, the main points of which were:^[37]

• Just and equitable relationship between the prices of raw materials, primary commodities, manufactured and semi-manufactured goods exported by developing countries and the prices of raw materials, primary commodities, manufactures, capital goods and equipment imported by them with the aim of bringing about sustained improvement in their unsatisfactory terms of trade and the expansion of the world economy;
• Extension of active assistance to developing countries by the whole international community, free of any political or military conditions;
• Ensuring that one of the main aims of the reformed international monetary system shall be the promotion of the development of the developing countries and the adequate flow of real resources to them;
• Improving the competitiveness of natural materials facing competition from synthetic substitutes;
• Preferential and non-reciprocal treatment for developing countries, wherever feasible, in all fields of international economic co-operation whenever possible;
• Securing favourable conditions for the transfer of financial resources to developing countries;
• Giving to the developing countries access to the achievements of modern science and technology, and promoting the transfer of technology and the creation of indigenous technology for the benefit of the developing countries in forms and in accordance with procedures which are suited to their economies;
• The need for all states to put an end to the waste of natural resources, including food products; the need for developing countries to concentrate all their resources for the cause of development;
• The strengthening, through individual and collective actions, of mutual economic, trade, financial and technical cooperation among the developing countries, mainly on a preferential basis;
• Facilitating the role which producers’ associations may play within the framework of international cooperation and, in pursuance of their aims, inter alia assisting in the promotion of sustained growth of the world economy, accelerating the development of developing countries.

The UNCTAD and NIEO objectives were ambitious, but the Group of 77 felt that in the mid-seventies, they had the momentum, with the US debacle in Vietnam and the successful coordinated effort by the OPEC countries to drive up the price of oil during the Israeli-Arab War of 1974 and again in 1979.

During the fourth conference of UNCTAD in Nairobi in 1976, agreement was reached, without dissent from the developed countries, on the Integrated Program of Commodities (IPC).  The IPC stipulated that agreements for 18 specified commodities would be negotiated or renegotiated with the principal aim of avoiding excessive price fluctuations and keeping prices at levels that would be fair to producers and consumers.  It was also agreed that a Common Fund would be set up that would regulate prices when they either fell below or climbed too far above the negotiated price targets.  UNCTAD and Group of 77 pressure was also central to the IMF’s establishing a new window, the Compensatory Financing Facility, which was meant to assist Third World countries in managing foreign exchange crises created by sharp falls in the prices of the primary commodities they exported.

Another UNCTAD achievement was getting the industrialized countries to accept the principle of preferential tariffs for developing countries.  Some 26 developed countries were involved in 16 separate “General System of Preferences” schemes by the early 1980’s.

These concessions were, of course, limited.  In the case of commodity price stabilization, it soon became apparent that the rich countries had replaced a strategy of confrontation with a Fabian, or evasive strategy of frustrating concrete agreements.  A decade after UNCTAD IV, only one new commodity stabilization agreement, for natural rubber, had been negotiated, an existing agreement on cocoa was not operative, and agreements on tin and sugar had collapsed.

Still it appeared that “Prebischnomics,” much like Keynesian economics much earlier, had conquered the world.  There were skeptics, but the empirical data on the deterioration of the terms of trade, the foundation on which a whole theoretical and policy edifice was built stood the test of time.  In the 1990s, 40 years after Prebisch and Singer published their identical conclusions, the theory was tested by a group of economists using four centuries of trade data.  “Their conclusion was clear,” notes Allawi.  “The evidence they deduced for a large number of commodities showed a long-term decline in their relative price.”^[38]

Prebisch may have won the intellectual struggle, but it was not ideas that determined the direction of the global economy but power.  The very success of Prebisch’s ideas in providing a strategy for reform of the global trading system for the South served as the trigger of a backlash by the Northern powers.

 

The End of the Bandung Era

The push for the NIEO came in the 1970’s at a time that the US was not only wracked by domestic dissent over the Vietnam War but also by the phenomenon of “stagflation,” or the simultaneous rise of inflation and unemployment, which was not supposed to occur according to the famous “Philips Curve” in Keynesian economics. Not surprisingly, in this troubled atmosphere, an angry mood brewed among forces that felt the US was being assailed by destabilizing influences both on the domestic front and the international front. The NIEO and the United Nations thus became a lightning rod for criticism.

Conservative think tanks took the lead in fanning the reaction.  The Heritage Foundation, for instance, accused the Global South of having a systematic strategy to undermine the Global North:

At the Algiers non-aligned summit of 1973, the Group of 77 urged political unity to gain economic power.  The participants demanded extensive economic concessions by Western nations.  The following year they moved their campaign to the UN General Assembly, and approved the “Declaration on Establishment of a New International Economic Order” and the “Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.” These resolutions were the philosophical framework for a decade-long assault on the West in pursuit of a New International Economic Order.^[39]

What did the Global South want?  Practically everything:

A key element of NIEO’s demands is financial redistribution: international taxation, increased foreign assistance, the right to expropriate private foreign assets, commodity price protection, and commercial preferences  regarding shipping  and trade generally.  Technological redistribution, through mandatory transfer of industrial, seabed, space, and pharmaceutical technology has been another NIEO tenet.^[40]

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), which was negotiated throughout the 1970’s, was seen as part of an effort by the Global South to bring under its control and distribute the planet’s natural resources; and where it could not obtain legal title to natural resources and other assets, it sought to “regulate them:”

Private business data flows are under attack internationally and by individual Third World countries; proposals for strict control of the international pharmaceutical trade are pending before more than one UN body; other international agencies are drafting restrictive codes of conduct for multinational corporations; and UNESCO has proposed international restraints on the press.^[41]

The neoliberal, free-market counterrevolution came to power in Britain with Margaret Thatcher’s becoming prime minister in 1979 and in the United States with Ronald Reagan’s election as US president in 1980.  Reagan’s radical perspective was summed up by his pithy comment: “Government does not solve problems.  It subsidizes them.”  Thatcher agreed: “Free enterprise works because, like democracy, it gives power to the people.”

The climax of what the United Nations had titled the “development decades,” the 1960s and 1970s, was supposed to take place at the Cancun Summit from October 22 to 30, 1981.  Attended by leaders of 22 countries, including Reagan and Thatcher, the meeting was expected by many to herald a new era of North-South relations, wherein the North would be more receptive to the South’s demands for global structural reform.  Instead, it marked the end of the Bandung era and the prelude to four decades of economic counterrevolution.

 

Crisis for the South, Opportunity for the North

The campaign for the NIEO came to an abrupt end in the early 1980s.  The cause was the so-called “Volcker Shock,” the steep rise in the federal funds interest rate pushed by US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in the late seventies and early eighties, when the rate reached as high as 19 per cent.  The Volcker Shock, meant to end the upward inflationary spiral in the US in the late seventies, but it had the knock-on effect of triggering the so-called “Third World” debt crisis owing to the steep rise in interest payments they had to fork over to transnational banks.

During the seventies, the profits derived by the OPEC countries from their raising the price of oil were placed in Western banks, which then proceeded to relend them at relatively low interest rates to developing countries.  There was both careless lending and careless borrowing.  In the case of Latin America, at the end of 1970, total outstanding debt from all sources totaled only $29 billion, but by the end of 1978, that number had skyrocketed to $159 billion. By 1982, the debt level reached $327 billion.  US banks led the lending spree: by 1982, the nine largest US money-center banks held Latin American debt amounting to 176 percent of their capital; their total LDC debt was nearly 290 percent of capital.^[42]

The spark for the crisis occurred in August 1982, when “Mexican Finance Minister Jesús Silva Herzog informed the Federal Reserve chairman, the US Treasury secretary, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director that Mexico would no longer be able to service its debt, which at that point totaled $80 billion. Other countries quickly followed suit. Ultimately, sixteen Latin American countries rescheduled their debts, as well as eleven LDCs in other parts of the world.”^[43]

In response, many banks stopped new overseas lending and tried to collect on and restructure existing loan portfolios. The abrupt cut-off in bank financing plunged many developing crisis countries deep into recession, leading them to run to the IMF and the World Bank to lend them money to service their loans and enable them to continue functioning.

This was the opportunity that the US and other governments had been waiting for to roll back the gains of the Global South.

What economic historians John Toye and Richard Toye rightfully characterized as the “conservative counterrevolution” of the 1980’s had three major prongs: structural adjustment or the so-called Washington Consensus, which was applied to most of the developing world; the defanging of the United Nations system that had been the key weapon the countries of the Global South had advanced their demands; and the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as the overseer of global trade.^[44]

In the mid-1980s, IMF and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment, the main elements of which were radical privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization, became the principal vehicle for a program of free market liberalization that was applied across the board to Third World economies suffering major debt problems.  By the mid-1990’s, more than seventy developing and post-socialist economies had submitted to this one-size-fits all approach imposed from distant Washington.  While the overt justification for structural adjustment was to enable the indebted countries to repay their debts, the strategic objective was to dismantle the system of state-assisted capitalism that served as the domestic base of the national capitalist elite.  In 1988, a survey of SAPs carried out by the UN Commission for Africa concluded that the essence of SAPs was the “reduction/removal of direct state intervention in the productive and redistributive sectors of the economy.”^[45]  As for Latin America, one analyst noted that the United States took advantage of this period of financial strain to insist that debtor countries remove the government from the economy as the price of getting credit.”  Similarly a retrospective of the decade of adjustment published by the US-controlled Inter-American Bank in 1992 saw the remedy to Latin America’s economic crisis as lying in “the withdrawal of the producer state and state-assisted capitalism, the limiting of the state’s responsibilities to its constitutional commitments, a return to the market for the supply of goods and services, and the removal of the obstacles to the emergence of an independent entrepreneurial class.”^[46]

By the end of the twelve-year-long Reagan-Bush Sr era in 1992, the Global South had been transformed by structural adjustment.

 

Defanging the UN

The most dramatic act of the northern government’s assault on the United Nations system was their successful dismantling of the UN Center on Transnational Corporations whose high-quality work in tracking the activities of global firms in the South had earned the ire of the corporate community.  Also abolished was the post of Director General for International Economic Cooperation and Development, which had been among the few concrete outcomes, and certainly the most noteworthy, of the efforts of the developing countries to secure a stronger UN presence in support of international cooperation and development.^[47]

Wielding the power of the purse, the United States, which funded 20 to 25 percent of the UN budget, moved to silence NIEO rhetoric in all other key agencies dealing with the North-South divide, among them the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The UNDP was reduced to a minor player in the disbursement of multilateral aid to developing countries, most of which was channeled through the World Bank and the regional development banks influenced by the World Bank.

But the focus of the northern counteroffensive was the defanging, if not dismantling, of UNCTAD.  After giving in to the South during the UNCTAD IV negotiations in Nairobi in 1976 by agreeing to the creation of the IPC, the North, during UNCTAD V in Belgrade, refused the South’s program of debt forgiveness and other measures intended to revive Third World economies and thus contribute to global recovery at a time of worldwide recession.^[48]  The Northern counteroffensive escalated during UNCTAD VIII, held in Cartagena in 1992.  At this watershed meeting, the North successfully opposed all linkages of UNCTAD discussions with the Uruguay Round negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and thus managed to erode UNCTAD’s negotiation functions, calling its existence into question.  UNCTAD’s main function would henceforth be limited to “analysis, consensus building on some trade-related issues, and technical assistance.”^[49]  Indeed, although UNCTAD managed to survive this onslaught, it was rendered impotent by the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994.  It continued to serve, however, as the source of quality research that questioned many of the trade policies promoted by the North.

 

The WTO: Climax of the Northern Counterrevolution

When the Uruguay Round was being negotiated, there was considerable lack of enthusiasm for the process by the developing countries. After all, these countries had formed the backbone of UNCTAD, which, with its system of one-country/one-vote and majority voting, they felt was an international arena more congenial to their interests. If UNCTAD was no longer an alternative, then they preferred GATT, the predecessor of WTO, which focused mainly on reducing tariff barriers among the industrialized countries, did not require the liberalization of developing country agricultural markets, and had weak enforcement capabilities.  Largely passive spectators, with a great number not even represented during the negotiations owing to budget constraints, the developing countries were dragged into unenthusiastic endorsement of the Marrakesh Accord of 1994 that sealed the Uruguay Round and established the WTO.

With their economies dominated by the IMF and the World Bank, with the structural adjustment programs pushed by these agencies having as a central element radical trade liberalization, rendered much weaker as a bloc owing to the debt crisis compared to the 1970’s (the height of the NIEO), most developing country delegations felt they had no choice but to sign on the dotted line, especially when the alternative, they were told, would be their being isolated in global trade like North Korea.  Moreover, they were warned, unless they got in on the ground floor, that is, at the founding of the WTO, their being able to get into the organization in the future was not assured.

When they signed on to the WTO, many developing countries had not had the capacity to read the over 700 pages of fine print in the 19 sub-agreements that constituted the WTO Agreement. Over the next few years, however, these countries realized that they had signed away much policy space for development.  The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), which affected most of them, was, they realized, mainly meant to pry their agricultural markets open to highly subsidized commodities from the US and the European Union (EU).^[50]  Their common desire to industrialize was now blocked by two major agreements: the Trade-Related Investment Measures Agreement (TRIMS) and the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS).

In their drive to industrialize, countries like South Korea and Malaysia had made use of many innovative mechanisms such as trade-balancing requirements that tied the value of a foreign investor’s imports of raw materials and components to the value of his or her exports of the finished commodity, or “local content” regulations which mandated that a certain percentage of the components that went into the making of a product was sourced locally. These were now banned under TRIMs.^[51]

Like the TRIMs agreement, the TRIPs regime was seen as effectively opposed to the industrialization and development efforts of Third World countries. Earlier industrializing countries undertook what might be called “industrialization by imitation.” The TRIPS regime made this route almost impossible with its strict patent rules that imposed draconian penalties on countries that violated them.  The new regime was described by UNCTAD as “a premature strengthening of the intellectual property system … that favors monopolistically controlled innovation over broad-based diffusion.”^[52]

The policy space the South had under GATT principles like “Special and Differential Treatment,” which recognized that the countries of the South could not be expected to follow trade rules governing trade among the industrialized countries owing to their underdeveloped status, was drastically reduced in the WTO owing to the weak enforcement of these rules in the new organization.

 

The South Fights Back: Seattle, Doha, Cancun

Counterrevolutions, like revolutions, have one big problem: they tend to overreach, creating a pushback from their victims.  Not satisfied with the elimination of significant policy space for development in the Global South through the Uruguay Round, the big powers of the North wanted more.  They wanted another trade round, to be held in Seattle, in late 1999, to intensify the process of trade liberalization, at a time that many developing countries had not yet amended their laws and constitutions to comply with the demands of the Uruguay Round.  Moreover, the EU in particular wanted to expand the WTO’s remit beyond trade to include investment regimes, competition policy, government procurement rules, and trade facilitation.  The developing country governments went to Seattle in late November 1999 for the WTO’s Third Ministerial Meeting with great reluctance to make more concessions.  Also converging on that city were some 50,000 protesters from different parts of the world that were alarmed by the WTO’s intrusions into agriculture, labor rights, environmental policy, and development space.

Decision-making at the WTO could only be done by consensus rule.  The northern governments had initially seen consensus as something they could easily get from weak third world governments.  Instead, the consensus rule turned out to be the WTO’s fatal flaw.

The synergy between developing country resistance at the Sheraton Convention Center and massive street protests turned downtown Seattle into a war zone where the police ran wild.  In Seattle, the already apprehensive governments of the South were emboldened by the street protests and refused to sign a ministerial declaration that would have legitimized the North’s demands, and with that the Third Ministerial Conference collapsed.  Since the WTO had become the principal arena where the North-South conflict played out, the North’s defeat had a massive worldwide resonance.

Seattle may well have been the turning point in the battle against globalization.  Before Seattle, there had been many studies, some released by UNCTAD, showing that corporate-driven globalization was not, in fact, leading to a reduction of poverty and spawning more dynamic economies.  These were, however, regarded as “factoids” by the established media and academics.  After the Seattle debacle of the WTO, the established media began to talk about the dark side of globalization, and then came the spectacle of prominent defectors from the globalist camp like the financier George Soros and economist Jeffrey Sachs, the author of “shock therapy” in Poland.  In a very real sense, truth was ratified by action, in this case the action of thousands of protesters in the streets of Seattle.

But the EU and the US were undeterred.  The Fourth Ministerial Meeting in Doha, Qatar, in November 2001, saw developing countries subjected to tremendous pressure to agree to the launching of a new round in order to “save” the global economy following the terror attacks on the US on September 11, 2001.  But there was more than moral pressure in the name of the anti-terrorist struggle involved.  There were also threats of retaliation for recalcitrance, combined with offers of massive aid packages for compliance.  Most countries were excluded from decision-making, which was limited to a select group of 35 governments handpicked by the EU and the US.  The result was the “Doha Development Round”, which had nothing to do with development and everything to do with expanding developed-country access to developing country markets.

But the bitter experience of being subjected to divide-and-conquer tactics in Doha proved to be a turning point for developing-country politics in the WTO.  Alliances were formed—among them the Group of 20 led by Brazil, India, South Africa, and China—to demand cuts in developed-country agricultural subsidies and greater access to developed country markets, and the Group of 33 led by Indonesia and the Philippines to push for the creation of  “special products” that would be exempted from tariff reductions and for “special safeguard mechanisms” like protective tariffs against imports from the developed countries.  The stubborn push by the EU to bring into its ambit non-trade issues like investment rules sparked the creation of the Group of 90, whose walkout triggered the collapse of the Fifth Ministerial in Cancun in 2003.

If lack of organization led to their being outmaneuvered in Doha, effective coalition building enabled the developing countries to outmaneuver the developed countries in Cancun, with technical and moral support from NGOs and social movements seeking to shut down the meeting in a protest atmosphere much like Seattle’s.

The Cancun collapse meant the end of the US’s effort to use the WTO as the principal mechanism of global trade liberalization.  While there were more ministerials after Cancun, they could not break the stalemate between the Global North and the Global South.  This outcome was remarkably like the scenario of a strategy prescribed by Focus on the Global South in 1999: “Where structures are hopeless, the next best solution is to have non-functioning structures or no operative structures at all.^[53]  Such was the fate of what one WTO director general called “the jewel in the crown of multilateralism.”^[54]

 

Farmers at the Center of Resistance

As pointed out earlier, one key element in the collapse of the ministerials was the very vital role of global civil society organisations (CSOs), and among the most energetic and visible forces in the opposition were farmers’ and peasant movements.  The threat of being subjected to the disciplines of the AoA brought peasant and farmers movements and their CSOsupporters into the political arena, pushing their governments to resist what they portrayed as the irreversible crisis, if not extinction, of agriculture if quantitative restrictions on agricultural commodities were to be lifted, tariffs lowered, and genetically modified seeds by TNCs like Monsanto introduced.

Peasant movements were active not only in the domestic front but in the international arena.  Peasant organizations, many of them affiliated with the international peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC), were shock troops in the streets of Seattle, Geneva, Cancun, and Hong Kong.  In Hong Kong, hundreds of Korean farmers disputed the streets with the police and led the effort to try to penetrate and close down the Hong Kong Ministerial where the Fourth Ministerial of the WTO was taking place in December 2005, leading to many of them being arrested.   Among the key events that led to the collapse of the Third Ministerial in Cancun in September 2003 was the suicide at the barricades of the street struggle of the Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae to protest the threat to peasants everywhere represented by the WTO.

 

The Global South Pushes Back against the IMF I: Argentina

Like the WTO, overreach undid the IMF.  Argentina led the pushback.

In Argentina, radical financial liberalization that included pegging the value of the peso to the dollar was fervently supported by the IMF in the early 1990s.  The approach led to the unraveling of the economy later in the decade.  The crisis unfolded with frightening speed in late 2001, forcing Argentina to go to the IMF for money to service its mounting debt. After agreeing to earlier requests, the IMF refused its pupil this time, leading to the government’s $100 billion debt default.  Businesses collapsed, people lost jobs, capital left the country, and riots and other forms of citizen unrest toppled one government after another.^[55]

When Nestor Kirchner won the elections for the presidency in 2003, he inherited a devastated country. He saw the choice as debt or resurrection, putting the interests of the creditors first or prioritizing economic recovery. Kirchner offered to settle Argentina’s debts but at a steep discount. He would write off 70-75 percent, repaying only 25-30 cents to the dollar. The bondholders screamed and demanded that the IMF discipline Kirchner. Kirchner repeated his offer and warned the bondholders that this was a one-time offer that they had to accept or lose the rights to any repayment. He told the creditors that he would not tax poverty-ridden Argentines to pay off the debt and invited them to visit his country’s slums to “experience poverty first hand.” Faced with his determination, the IMF stood by helplessly and a majority of the bondholders angrily accepted his terms.

Indeed, Kirchner played hardball not only with the creditors but with the IMF. He told the Fund in early 2004 that Argentina would not repay a $3.3 billion installment due the IMF unless it approved a similar amount of lending to Buenos Aires. The IMF blinked and came up with the money. In December 2005, Kirchner paid off the country’s debt to the IMF in full, with financial assistance from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and booted the Fund out of Argentina.

 

The Global South Pushes Back against the IMF II:  The Asian Financial Crisis

A bigger catastrophe hit the IMF in the Asia-Pacific, where its policy interventions provoked the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98.

The Fund was heavily criticized on three counts.  First, it had encouraged the governments of the region to eliminate capital controls, thus provoking uncontrolled capital flows. Second, it assembled multi-billion dollar “rescue packages” that went to rescue not the people suffering from the crisis but to compensate the foreign financial speculators that had lost millions in dubious speculative ventures, thus encouraging “moral hazard,” or irresponsible investing.  Third, its measures to stabilize the damaged economies intensified the crisis, since instead of encouraging government spending to counteract the collapse of the private sector, it told the governments to radically cut spending, leading to a “procyclical” negative synergy that ended in deep recession.

In just a few weeks, one million people in Thailand and 22 million in Indonesia fell below the poverty line.   The only country that contained the crisis was Malaysia, which refused to follow the Fund’s dictates and imposed capital and currency controls.

Eventually, the Fund was forced to admit that the “thrust of [the recommended] fiscal policy…turned out to be substantially different…because the original assumptions for economic growth, capital flows, and exchange rates…were proved drastically wrong.”^[56]  But things were never the same again.  The IMF was so reviled for its performance that Asian governments developed IMF-phobia, swearing never again to ask the IMF for rescue even in the most dire circumstances.  Like Kirchner in Argentina, Thaksin Shinawatra came to power in the midst of a crisis in 2001 with a promise to get the IMF off Thailand’s back.  Promoting expansionary policies, Thaksin oversaw the recovery of Thailand.  Upon his early repayment of the $17.2 billion emergency loan it contracted from the IMF, Thaksin declared Thailand “liberated” from the IMF in 2004.^[57]  He considered this one of his proudest achievements.

Perhaps more devastating, the crisis brought the long-simmering conflict within the US elite over the role of the Fund to a boil. The US right denounced the Fund for promoting ‘moral hazard,’ that is, irresponsible lending that ensured private foreign creditors that they would be paid back no matter what. Some, including former U.S. Treasury Secretary George Shultz, called for the IMF’s abolition. Meanwhile, orthodox liberals like Jeffrey Sachs and Jagdish Bhagwati attacked the Fund for being a threat to global macroeconomic stability and prosperity. Late in 1998, a rare conservative-liberal alliance in the U.S. Congress came within a hair’s breath of denying the IMF a $14.5 billion contribution.^[58]

 

The World Bank’s Crisis of Legitimacy

A parallel crisis of legitimacy engulfed the World Bank.  In the 1990s and 2000s, the Bank had come under attack for the social consequences of its structural adjustment programs and the environmental impacts of its funding of fossil fuel-enabling and mega-dam projects.  However, the most damning assault on its credibility was delivered by a team of prestigious economists that accused the Bank of fudging its data and making up public relations missives instead of serious studies.  The panel headed by Nobel Prize awardee Angus Deaton did not mince words:

[World] Bank researchers have…done extremely visible work on globalization, on aid effectiveness, and on growth and poverty. In many ways, they have been the leaders in these issues. But the panel had substantial criticisms of the way that the research was used to proselytize on behalf of Bank policy, often without taking a balanced view, and without expressing appropriate skepticism. Internal research that is favorable to Bank positions was given great prominence, and unfavorable research ignored. In these cases, we believe that there was a serious failure of checks and balances that should have separated advocacy and research. The panel endorses the right of the Bank to strongly defend and advocate its own policies. But when the Bank leadership selectively appeals to relatively new and untested research as hard evidence that these preferred policies work, it lends unwarranted confidence to the Bank’s prescriptions. Placing fragile selected new research results on a pedestal invites later recrimination that undermines the credibility and usefulness of all Bank research.^[59]

The Bank’s refusal to acknowledge real-world refutations of its pro-globalization advocacy and its unbalanced, one-sided research led to justifiable rejection of its advice by the people who were suffering from the policies it was implementing, confessed Paul Collier, head of the Bank’s Research Development Department of the Bank from 1998 to 2003:

The profession has been unprofessional, fearful that any criticism would strengthen populism, so that little work has been done on the downsides of these different processes [of globalization]. Yet the downsides were apparent to ordinary citizens, and the effect of economists appearing to dismiss them has resulted in widespread refusal of people to listen to “experts.” For my profession to re-establish credibility we must provide a more balanced analysis, in which the downsides are acknowledged and properly evaluated with a view to designing policy responses that address them. The profession may be better served by mea culpa than by further indignant defenses of globalization.^[60]

Like the Asian Financial Crisis in the case of the IMF, the panel’s judgment that the Bank was mainly churning out public relations material was one from which the World Bank never really recovered.  It limped along diminished over the next two decades, with critical voices on both the left and the right raising questions of the value of the billions of dollars being burned up to subsidize 12,300 personnel engaged in implementing wrong-headed policies.

 

A Southern Actor Inflicts Defeat on the North

The Global South’s fighting the Global North to a stalemate in the WTO, its successful defiance of the IMF and global capital in Argentina and Thailand, and a deep crisis of credibility of the IMF and the World Bank,  were not the only setbacks experienced by the western capitalist elite.  On the political and military front, the US was lured by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda to a disastrous 20-year intervention in the Middle East that ended in an inglorious surrender in Afghanistan in 2021.  Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic movements were not state actors, but their actions led to weakening the domination of the South by the North, driving home the cost of expanding and maintaining empire to a US population that was increasingly unwilling to countenance imperial adventures. As the foremost student of Al Qaeda, an analyst with the CIA put it, “Though the 9/11 attacks turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for Al-Qaeda, Osama still changed the world and continued to influence global politics for nearly a decade after.”^[61]

Articulating this truth is not meant to justify Bin Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s horrific deeds; it is simply to acknowledge the massive negative impact of 9/11 and its aftermath on the power of the United States, from which, in many ways, it is still reeling today.

 

The China Factor

A major force that contributed to the changing balance of power between the Global North and the Global South was the rise of China.  While the first 25 years of the People’s Republic of China were marked by conflict with the United States, following US President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing, it became one of accommodation and cooperation.  Led by Deng Xiao Ping, China sought a path of rapid development by inviting foreign capital, but it was one taken from a position of strength: the People’s Republic was the product of a successful anti-imperialist struggle and boasted of a strong state with the capacity of bargaining on equal terms with the West.

Beijing’ strategy was to offer China’s force for exploitation by foreign capital in order to comprehensively develop the economy, an important quid pro quo being the acquisition of advanced technology. It is difficult to understand the strategy in conventional economic terms, and is best understood as one that is akin to a military strategy of trading space for time.^[62]  Attracted by a cost of labor that was two to five percent of the cost of labor in the United States, US transnational corporations, with the acquiescence of Washington, entered the informal contract.

This devil’s bargain was costly.  A recent estimate shows that for the period 1960-2018, among developing countries, China suffered the greatest loss in terms of value transfer—or unequal exchange—the figure coming to some $19 trillion.^[63]  One must also note the tremendous environmental and social costs, such as massive air pollution, forced dislocation of hundreds of thousands by mega-infrastructure projects, extensive landgrabbing from peasants by local authorities, and corruption. But, to the Chinese Communist Party, the deal with foreign capital was a bargain worth making.  The result was the fastest run in history from being a complete outsider to the global capitalist system to being at its very center, China’s becoming the world’s biggest economy, the rapid reduction of poverty to two per cent of the population, and the creation of a base for self-sustaining technological innovation.

Like the Soviet Union decades earlier, China, by the 2010s, became an alternative pole to the West and provided policy space for developing countries.  This was especially the case when it came to development assistance, where they were in search of aid and loans that would not carry the stringent conditionalities of those provided by the IMF and World Bank.  By the end of the second decade of the 21st century, China, in the words of one specialist, had become the “world’s largest development bank,” its agencies, the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China having provided nearly a trillion dollars worth of financing, mainly to countries in the Global South.^[64]

China also launched three ambitious international projects, the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB), New Development Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).  The  BRI, for which Chinese President Xi Jin Ping committed $1 billion, has been China’s biggest gambit not only to influence developing countries but also those of Europe.  Drawing on the historical image of trade routes from China to Europe—one the overland “Silk Road” via Central Asia, the other the “Maritime Silk Road” that had Southeastern China as a starting point—Beijing offered to finance a plan of infrastructure building across regions that it claimed would lead to collective prosperity.

China, it is true, has seen its share of crises over the last three decades, but these are crises of growth that are inevitably produced by rapid unbalanced development, as the economist Albert Hirschman would put it.^[65]  Also eliciting concern have been China’s intentions in offering generous infrastructure and other aid programs (some which have had negative impacts on many rural communities in the Global South) and its territorial conflicts with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea.  However, these have not prevented China’s state-assisted model of development becoming increasingly attractive to the Global South, despite initial reluctance by Beijing to acknowledge its relevance beyond China.  For many in countries in the Global South, China had accomplished a change in North-South relations without firing a shot.  Its super-industrialization was the obverse of the deindustrialization of the US as TNCs fled to China in search of cheap labor and made it the anchor of their global supply chains.  Moreover, what China provided was a lesson not only in how to break Western domination but to use the West as a means of national resurrection.  For those with a longer view, China’s rise to the summit of the global capitalist economy was the latest, most remarkable phase of the Global South’s 150 year old struggle to end the 500-year-old yoke of western hegemony.

 

BRICS: Common Concerns and Contradictions

BRICS, as is well known, was a name coined by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill to refer to promising emerging markets for finance capital that would extend the boom of the global economy in the first decade of the 21^st century. But one can say that even if O’Neill had not invented the name, the BRICS –Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa–would most likely have emerged as a conscious formation of big, rapidly developing countries with an ambivalent relationship to the traditional center economies of Europe and the United States.

Perhaps the key arena where “BRICS consciousness” was forged was in the World Trade Organization.  As noted earlier, quick on the heels of the WTO’s establishment in 1995, the US and EU wanted more trade concessions from developing countries. In response, India and Brazil emerged as the key actors in a defensive strategy that resulted in the formation of the Group of 20. This formation emerged as the most formidable opposition to the unequal trade liberalization that the North was foisting on the South, and was instrumental in bringing about the collapse of the Fifth Ministerial Meeting of the WTO in Cancun in September 2003.  The group, led by Brazil, India, and South Africa (and fortified with the accession of China to the WTO in 2001), played a decisive role not only in halting the Euro-American drive for greater liberalization in the agriculture, manufacturing, and services sectors of developing countries, but in stopping the North’s effort to expand the WTO’s authority into the areas of investment, competition policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation.

The agendas of the BRICS in the WTO were not always the same. For instance, in agriculture, Brazil was more interested in opening up export markets for its soybeans and other plantation products in Europe and the United States, while India put the emphasis on protecting its small-scale and peasant agriculture. But they were willing to subordinate their differences to a common comprehensive anti-liberalization and pro-development agenda that helped bring the Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.

The BRICS are capitalist regimes, and the role of the state in the economy is more pronounced and successful in some rather than in others.  One of the key features they had in common was their “dialectical” relationship with the center economies.  On the one hand, they benefited from globalization and the entry of foreign investment.  On the other hand, all have also manipulated foreign capital to accumulate technological and management expertise to eventually wean them off their dependence on the latter. Even as they have developed as dynamic centres of accumulation that energized or re-energized global capitalism as a whole, they have followed what might be considered the goals of enhancing their geopolitical and geoeconomic power vis-a-vis the traditional centers of global economic, political, and military power.

Complementarity and contradiction are twin aspects of their relationship to the dominant powers, and this is exhibited most sharply in the relationship of China to the United States, where, as noted earlier, it used American capital and the US market to fuel its emergence as the US’s main competitor globally.

If competition is pronounced at the economic level, it is even fiercer at the geopolitical level since there is a greater degree of “relative autonomy” in the political relations among states than in their economic relations.  During the second decade of the 21st century, Beijing moved from its policy of “peaceful rise” on the global stage to overtly challenging, in the Western Pacific, the military power of the United States and Japan, two economies to which China was deeply integrated.  At the same time, ties between Russia and Europe and the United States, two blocs with which Moscow has developed significant ties, especially when it comes to finance and energy, deteriorated as the Putin government pushed back against NATO’s expansion right onto Russia’s doorstep in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, this being a key factor in the current war between Russia and Ukraine.

The BRICS developed institutionally in a gradual fashion.  The New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA), which were conceived as performing functions akin to the World Bank and IMF respectively, were formed in 2015, but they remained relatively low profile, perhaps so as to assure the West they were not meant to supplant these key institutions of the western-dominated multilateral system as well as discourage developing countries to think of them as major alternative sources of development and emergency finance.  As of the end of 2021, the cumulative lending of the NDB came to only nearly $30 billion,^[66] a fraction of World Bank lending for the period 2015 to 2021.

However, the resistance of the US and Europe to much-needed reform of the IMF and the World Bank to give more voting power to the Global South, the growing debt problems of the developing countries that portended a new global debt crisis, and Trump’s sidelining of multilateral agencies as instruments of US power, accelerated a sense of an emerging vacuum in the frontlines of the North-South conflict.  The result was more and more countries knocking for admission.  As of January 1, 2025, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have joined the original five members. A number of current and prospective members have significant surplus funds potentially available for development lending.  Aside from China’s massive resources, the UAE has $2.3 trillion in its sovereign wealth fund; Saudi Arabia, which has delayed its membership but is expected eventually to join, has $1.3 trillion in its fund. These sums could potentially bolster the firepower of the current Contingent Reserve Arrangement and the New Development Bank.

Now a 10-country organization, BRICS currently boasts a total population covering over 40 percent of the world. They also have a substantial 28 percent share of the global economy, equivalent to $26.5 trillion.  That so many countries, including Thailand and Malaysia, are queueing up to join indicates that the Global South realizes that the scale is steadily tipping against the West, which has grown increasingly defensive, grouchy, and insecure.

Not surprisingly, by 2024, some 50 countries were knocking at the door of the BRICS.  The BRICS summit held in October 22-24 in Kazan, Russia, was, as the European Parliament’s Think Tank  admitted, a success both in geoeconomic and geopolitical terms:

Under Russia’s presidency, BRICS (acronym for the founding states – Brazil, Russia, India and China) held its first summit following the group’s expansion on 1 January 2024, from 22 to 24 October in Kazan (Russia). With more than 30 delegations, 22 heads of state or government and several representatives of international organisations including United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres attending, the summit was a diplomatic success for Russia: it offered President Vladimir Putin the opportunity to demonstrate to the world that Russia is not isolated. For the first time, a NATO member, Türkiye, attended the summit, and applied to join BRICS. The meeting in Kazan underlined BRICS’s ambition to foster relations with the Global South, and its aim of shaping an alternative multipolar world order, particularly in the global financial and trade system.^[67]

With the US-dominated global multilateral system facing uncertainty under President Donald Trump, who does not have the same allegiance to the Western alliance as previous US presidents, the BRICS have become increasingly attractive to the  Global South as both a source of development funds as well as a political alliance.  It is backed by something that the General Assembly, for all its virtues as a site of alliance building for the developing countries, lacks: economic clout. This is likely to create more pressure for clearer formulation of its policies and institutionalization of its decision making structures and those of its agencies, the CRA and NDB.

 

Trump and the Global South 

For the Global South, the current period is a time of great uncertainty.

There are contradictory trends.  In the US, with Trump’s ascension to power a second time, it is certain that the next four years will be bad for the climate, women, migrants, and minorities. In the US, Europe, Israel, and a number of countries in the Global South, like India and Brazil, we have witnessed the rise of fascist movements, some of which have seized power.

At the same time, there are strong indications that Trump is dumping the paradigm of liberal internationalism or expansive imperialism where the US elite was committed to fighting on all fronts in the world where they felt US imperial interests were threatened. Trump appears to be retrenching to the Americas, focusing on reinvigorating the imperial heartland, North America, while strengthening the US grip on Latin America in an aggressive reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine.

What is emerging is an imperialism that is on the defensive, with the priority being setting up tariff walls against foreign imports, harsh measures to prevent the entry of non-white migrants and expel undocumented workers, destroy the global supply chains set up by US transnational capital and reshore or bring back their productive facilities to the US.

It is likely that we are entering an era of geoeconomic competition emerging whereby free trade and the free movement of capital are being replaced by close cooperation between national capital and the state to limit foreign penetration of the domestic market and prevent the acquisition of advanced technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI), by rival corporate-state actors. Unilateral economic actions rather than multilateral initiatives via the Bretton Woods institutions, and unilateral military strikes rather than joint assaults under NATO appear to be the preferred approach of the US under Trump.

But despite the complexity of the moment, one can perhaps cautiously advance the proposition that the balance of the advances and reversals in the Global South’s struggle with the Global North in the seventy years since Bandung, the balance favors the former. Indeed, it is difficult to disagree with a recent assessment of the noted economic historian Adam Tooze, to the effect that,

…{W}e’re already in a multipolar world. I think it’s anachronistic to cling to a different view. I think we exited the unipolar moment in the 2010s. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t still huge domains of US power and even US predominance. The three obvious ones are military power, global finance and certain areas of high tech.

However, in a more general sense, we’ve seen the fragmenting of American power. Its delegitimisation, the soft tissue of US hegemony, has suffered considerable attrition. The ability of US elites to articulate the different dimensions of power is really threadbare at this point.

This doesn’t preclude the tub-thumping efforts at reasserting US dominance. Nor does it preclude the more nostalgic Atlanticist version, which is what we saw with Biden … but they are pushing against the tide of dramatic movements.

I’m not a monocausal person analytically, but if you want to nominate one driver, it would be the scale of global economic development, which has created proliferating centres of competence and power. This means that a whole range of actors can now engage in various types of power politics that they were previously unable to do. The most dramatic case is China, but Indonesia, Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Brazil are all passing certain thresholds and constitute a new kind of polycentric order.^[68]

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had this memorable saying, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” What he was trying to say was that you cannot have opportunity without crisis.

The crisis of global capital and US hegemony offers both great risk and great opportunity. The geopolitical conflict between the US and China that is turning out to be a major feature of the coming period brings with it the danger of war, but it can also open up the path to a world where power could be more decentralized, where there could be greater freedom of political and economic maneuver for small, traditionally less-privileged actors from the Global South, playing off the superpowers against one another, where a truly multilateral order within a multipolar world could be constructed through cooperation rather than be imposed through either unilateral or liberal hegemony.

 

Moving Forward

The push of the Global South to parity with the Global North since Bandung has experienced advances and retreats, offensive and defensive phases.

Bandung arose at a moment of anti-colonial consciousness.  Today most of the world has been freed of direct colonial control, but the legacy of settler-colonialism continues to hobble the economies of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and several other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.  But the most egregious example of the persistence of colonialism is Israel, which continues to deny by massive force the rights of the people of Palestine, going to the extent of carrying out Nazi-like genocide in Gaza, and functions as a hugely destabilizing force in the Middle East.  Israel, it must be stressed, receives massive support from the United States, former colonial powers France and Britain, and from Germany. The anti-colonial mission of Bandung is unfinished.

On balance, however, the Global South has tipped the balance in its favor.

This does not mean that the North-South divide no longer matters.  But it does mean that it has become more porous, and with the US and Europe increasingly drifting from each other and the US under Trump refocusing its energies on being a regional power, it is likely to increasingly be matched or overshadowed by other relationships in what is definitively a multipolar world.

The BRICs may not be the only game in this multipolar universe for developing countries, but it is a strong candidate to be one of the principal ones.

One major challenge for the BRICS and other alternative poles that may emerge is not only how to become more structured but how to ensure they do not simply copy the Bretton Woods model of monopolistic hegemony of a few over the majority in the guise of multilateralism.  Can the most politically or economically powerful countries of the Global South avoid the temptation of falling into a similar great power relationship with the less advantaged ones?

Another challenge is how to go beyond representation of people only by nation-states in the western Westphalian tradition to include peoples’ organisations, social movements, unions and other civil society formations as central members and participants in decision-making.

Related to this is how these emergent alternative poles can be made to pressure their members to enact internal reforms towards greater participatory democracy, equality, human rights and all forms of justice–not in a coercive way, like the IMF and the World Bank, but by way of moral pressure, including not just positive but also negative reinforcement.

The best way to advance the spirit of Bandung is to go beyond its political, ideological, and organizational limitations.  Most of the governments of the Global South may no longer be beholden to colonial powers, but many are dominated by political and economic elites that hold down most of the people.  Upholding the Bandung spirit means a commitment not only to free the country from colonialism and neocolonialism but to make sure the voices that were not heard at Bandung—the voices of women, peasants, indigenous people, the planet—are listened to and their interests are placed in the forefront of the agenda for change.

————

^[1] Sugata Bose, Asia after Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2024), p. 34.
^[2] Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (UK: Penguin, 2021), p. 33
^[3] Ibid., p. 35.
^[4] Bose, p. 153.
^[5] Quoted in ibid., p. 157.
^[6] Francis Pike, Hirohito’s War: The Pacific War (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 270.
^[7] Quoted in ibid., p. 292.
^[8] Bose, p. 167
^[9] Lionel Lamb, British consul in Beijing, quoted in ibid., p. 184.
^[10] Ibid.
^[11] Ibid.,  p. 185
^[12] Quoted in ibid., p. 185
^[13] “Address Given by Sukarno,” Bandung, April 18, 1955, https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/opening_address_given_by_sukarno_bandung_18_april_1955-en-88d3f71c-c9f9-415a-b397-b27b8581a4f5.html
^[14] Ibid.
^[15] Ibid.
^[16]  A. Doak Barnett, “Chou En-Lai at Bandung,” American Universities Field Staff,” May 4, 1955, https://www.icwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ADB-77.pdf
^[17] Ibid.
^[18] Ibid.
^[19] “Final Communique of the Asian-African Conference of Bandung,” Bandung, Indonesia, April 24, 1955, https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/final_communique_of_the_asian_african_conference_of_bandung_24_april_1955-en-676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html
^[20] Ibid.
^[21] Quoted in Bose, pp. 190-191.
^[22] Quoted in ibid, p. 192.
^[23] Ibid., p. 194.
^[24] Quoted in Joseph Hongoh, “The Asian-African Conference (Bandung) and Pan- Africanism: the Challenge of Reconciling Continental Solidarity with National Sovereignty, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 70:4 (2016): 374-390, DOI: 10.1080/10357718.2016.1168773, p. 382.
^[25] Gamal Abdel Nasser, quoted in Hongoh, ibid.
^[26]  Ibid., p. 383.
^[27] Gerrit Huizer, “Peasant Mobilization in Java, Conflict-Model Strategy in Rural Development,” Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/74369.
^[28] Ibid, p. 383.
^[29] Quoted in Richard Falk and Hans von Sponeck, Liberating the United Nations: Realism with Hope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024), p. 56.
^[30] Amitav Acharya, “Studying the Bandung Conference from a Global IR Perspective, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 70:4 (2016), 349-350, DOI: 10.1080/10357718.2016.1168359
^[31] Bose, p. 201.
^[32] Ali Alawi, Rich World, Poor World: The Struggle to Escape Poverty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 113.
^[33] Ibid., p. 121.
^[34] Bernard Nossiter, The Global Struggle for More (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 42-43.
^[35] Allawi, p. 123.
^[36] Nossiter, p. 45.
^[37] “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order adopted by the General Assembly on May 1, 1974,” https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/218450?ln=en&v=pdf
^[38] Allawi, p. 117.
^[39] Doug Bandow, “The US Role in Promoting Third World Development,” in Heritage Foundation, US Aid to the Developing World: A Free Market Agenda (Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1985), p. xxii.
^[40] Ibid., p. 20
^[41] Ibid.
^[42] “Latin American Debt Crisis of the 1980’s, Federal Reserve History, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/latin-american-debt-crisis
^[43] Ibid.
^[44] John Toye and Richard Toye, The UN and Global Political Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 254-275.
^[45] Cited in Seamus Cleary, “Toward a New Adjustment in Africa,” in “Beyond Adjustment,” Special Issue of African Environment, Vol. 7, Nos. 1-4 (1990), p. 357.
^[46] John Sheahan, “Development Dichotomies and Economic Development Strategy,” in Simon Teitel, ed., Towards a New Development Strategy for Latin America (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 1992), p. 33.
^[47] “South Decries Moves to Close UNCTAD, UNIDO,” Third World Resurgence, No. 56, p. 41.
^[48] Ibid.
^[49] Walden Bello, “Building an Iron Cage,” in Views from the Global South (San Francisco: International Forum on Globalization, 1999), p. 72
^[50] Ibid., pp. 78-84.
^[51] Ibid.,  pp. 74-75.
^[52] UNCTAD, quoted in ibid., p. 76.
^[53] Ibid., p. 89.
^[54] Quoted in Wenwei Guan, “Consensus Yet Not Consented: A Critique of WTO Decision-making by Consensus, Journal of International Economic Law, Vol 17 (2014), p. 78.
^[55] This account is based on the article by Walden Bello, “Defy the Creditors and Get Away with It,” Foreign Policy in Focus, Nov 10, 2010, https://fpif.org/defy_the_creditors_and_get_away_with_it/
^[56] International Monetary Fund, “IMF-supported Programs in Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand,” Occasional Paper 178. Washington, DC: IMF, p. 62.
^[57] Amy Kazmin, “Thailand’s Thaksin Warns of Return to IMF Aid,”  Financial Times, March 20, 2006, https://www.ft.com/content/eb867e22-b7fe-11da-bfc5-0000779e2340
^[58] Walden Bello and Shalmali Guttal, “Crisis of Credibility: The Declining Power if the International Monetary Fund,” Focus on the Global South, Nov 2, 2005, https://focusweb.org/crisis-of-credibility-the-declining-power-of-the-international-monetary-fund/
^[59] Ahijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, Nora Lustig, and Ken Rogoff, “An Evaluation of World Bank Research, 1998-2005,” Sept 24, 2006, p. 6.  The “all-star” panel included Edward Hsu (IFC) Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Joshua Angrist (MIT), Marianne Bertrand (U. Chicago), Timothy Besley (LSE), Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development), Francesco Caselli (LSE), Peter Diamond (MIT), Esther Duflo (MIT), Sebastian Edwards (UCLA), Marcel Fafchamps (Oxford), Andrew Foster (Brown), Sebastian Galiani (Washington U), Geoffrey Heal (Columbia), Edward Glaeser (Harvard), Michael Kremer (Harvard), Murray Leibbrandt (U Cape Town), Justin Lin (China Center for Economic Research), Jonathan Morduch (NYU), Nina Pavcnik (Dartmouth), Gordon Hanson (UCSD), Antoinette Schoar (MIT), Jan Svejnar (Michigan), Christopher Udry (Yale), and Martin Wittenberg (U. Cape Town).
^[60] Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism (UK: Allen Lane, 2018)
^[61] Nelly Lahoud, The Bin Laden Papers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), p. 287.
^[62] See Walden Bello, “From Partnership to Rivalry: China and the USA in the Early Twenty-First Century, Journal of Contemporary Asia, April 27, 2023, DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2023.2199760
^[63] J. Hickel, J., D. Sullivan, and H. Zoomkawala, “Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018,” New Political Economy,  Vol 26, No 6 (2021): 1030– 1047.
^[64] Kevin Gallagher, “China’s Role as the World’s Development Bank Cannot be Ignored,” National Public Radio, Oct 11, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/10/11/646421776/opinion-chinas-role-as-the-world-s-development-bank-cannot-be-ignored
^[65] Albert Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.
^[66] New Development Bank, Annual Report 2021: Expanding Our Reach and Impact (Shanghai: New Development Bank, 2022), p. 2.
^[67] Think Tank, European Parlliament, Outcome of the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia (Strasbourg: European Parliament, 2024), (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_ATA(2024)766243
^[68] Adam Tooze and Walden Bello, “A Fractured World: Reflections on Power, Polarity, and Polycrisis,” State of Power 2025 (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2025), https://www.tni.org/en/podcast/a-fractured-world?fbclid=IwY2xjawIhfwhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHZQs8RqmXd3PBfz7DvQ-7OoPX5CDrt1OXHaqDlKl5O1RjouaA8F3VbzI4w_aem_zxPSQ5FxZSgeHeGPEXruBg