Do you know exactly what, or where, “Global South“is? If you don’t, don’t be ashamed. I’m not sure anyone really does, but it’s a sobering fact that, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the English-language use of the term has multiplied 36 times between 2000 and 2024. Quite a few people, including some Commonwealth leaders with whom our Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs currently rubbing shoulders in Samoa, as to use the phrase.

Why? As a way, I think, to claim that all the wrongs in the world are the West’s fault and to try to mobilize everyone who feels that way. Why not “Global East” then? As in the Cold War, it is the East – China and Russia – that leads the charge against evil Americans and Europeans.

However, using the word East would not work in this context, as it leaves out several continents inhabited by what the Marxist revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth” – places like Africa, the South Seas and Latin America. They were made miserable, you see, by imperialism.

When it became clear in the second half of the last century that destroying Western capitalism in its homelands would be slower work than Marx had predicted, his followers extended their theory of exploitation to any place where the white man’s foot had set foot . .

For this, different phrases were tried and different conferences and organizations were devised. In the 1950s there was the “Bandung spirit”. The idea of ​​the “Third World” became relevant. In the 1960s, the Non-Aligned Movement was formed to assert a Third World position balanced between East and West. In practice it tended to lean towards the Soviet bloc. In 1969, an American political activist named Carl Oglesby wrote an essay containing the phrase “the dominance of the North over the global South”. In 1980, former German Chancellor Willy Brandt published his famous report on international development. Its title was, North-South: A Program for Survival.

It is true that Russia is hosting this week BRICS conference in Kazan and feigns great sympathy for the Global South, is undeniably not Southern, as anyone who arrives in Moscow in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops can attest. The Kremlin therefore tends to prefer the term “global majority” – another phrase often on the lips of Anglican bishops and international NGOs. But whether you call this global cause “southern” or “majority,” the aspiration and the delusion are the same.

In its excellent new examination of all this, The Myth of the Global South, the Policy Exchange think tank describes the Global South as “an imagined society” rather than one with genuine common interests or geography. There is little real commonality, for example, between the Caribbean countries currently demanding reparations from Britain for the wrongs of slavery more than 200 years ago and the Pacific islanders, whose main concern is the physical shrinking of their nations due to climate change.

Yet the imagined can be more exciting than the real. What excites the leaders, though not necessarily the people, of so many of the countries involved is the idea that their economic failures can be blamed on richer countries far away and that they might be able to extract huge sums, in reparations, subsidies, aid and soft loans from these countries, e.g. UK.

It is of course true, always and everywhere, that the strong tend to exploit the weak. So there are many sins that can rightly be laid at the door of any colonial power (although one must always remember the many answers to the famous Monty Python question, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”).

It is also true that modern Western leaders have actually invited this problem. This week, the Bahamian Foreign Minister, Fredrick Mitchell, has rightly pointed out that both Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy, before taking office, spoke eloquently and often about the horrors of the colonial legacy, Mr Lammy even encourages talking about reparations. Who can ever forget the vivid photograph of Sir Keir and Angela Rayner ‘taking the knee’ to Black Lives Matter?

Not unreasonably, Mr Mitchell wants to take them up on their laurels now they are in power. He is understandably annoyed that Sir Keir is looking a bit shifty and tells him that the important thing is what happens in the future rather than arguing about the past. Sir Keir is by no means as adept as our King, with his long experience of the Commonwealth language, in navigating such matters.

To Mitchell, Lammy’s “progressive realism” in foreign policy must look incoherent. “You’ve pleaded guilty,” he might say, “so pay up.” “You have just handed over the Chagos Islands to Mauritian sovereignty and Chinese power,” he might add unkindly, “What can you offer our sunny but exploited islands?”

Labor doesn’t know how to refute this. I suspect that Kemi Badenoch, who has rich experience in Global South cant, will have no such problems if she becomes Conservative leader.

The key issue for the West here – or what is more accurately described, as it includes Japan, Taiwan, Ukraine, Australia and Argentina as the free world – is not the sufferings of the poorer countries on the planet, however real they may be. These can be better addressed through comprehensive bilateral relations (especially Britain’s), through freer trade and through all sorts of existing international institutions.

The key issue is that the Global South is being turned into a tool of power by those who wish us ill. It is almost beyond satire, for example, that China and Russia would pose as friends to the south of the Sahara, when the actions of the former Belt and Road Initiative and the latter’s Wagner Group mercenaries are perhaps the most flagrantly imperialist ventures in the world today. This is the 21st century recreation of what was called “The Scramble for Africa” ​​by the European powers towards the end of the 19th century. In both cases, raw materials and even cruder power politics were the driving forces.
Faced with such threats, the West is terribly weak. Compare, for example, the US and UK’s refusal to let Ukraine use the missiles we have given them on Russian territory because we fear Vladimir Putin will cry foul over Putin’s order for thousands of North Korean troops to help him lay waste to a sovereign country.

Non-European powers consider Western weakness and naturally hedge their bets. Look at Turkey, despite its NATO membership. Look at India, despite its hatred of China. Look at Egypt, which Barack Obama failed so badly after the Arab Spring.

The same applies to international organizations. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, is supposed to be the main formal monitor of world peace. But he chooses to attack Israel, be nice to Hezbollah and Iran, and appearing in Kazan this week literally bowing (look at the photographs) to Putin. Take the World Health Organization’s refusal to condemn China’s leak of the Wuhan virus, which killed 10 million. Take this week’s decision by HSBC to split in two so one arm can join China’s alternative to Swift’s international payments system.

Britain and many other western countries, being militarily weak, are wedded to “soft power” diplomacy just as hard power is becoming more ruthless and unrestricted than at any time since 1945. The world is beginning to see us as losers. If enough of them believe that long enough, we will indeed lose.

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