Opinion C Raja Mohan writes: India’s G20 — Focus must be on emerging as a bridge between the developing and developed world

The summit, however, is not a simple return to the past. After all, the context and concerns in the 21st century are very different from those in the middle of the 20th. India and the Global South are very different today from what they were in the 1970s, when the political mobilisation of the so-called “Third World” peaked.

On the face of it, though, the Global South is a reincarnation of the Third World framework from the 1970s. But many of the past political divides — including the one between North and South — have blurred. India’s new activism in the Global South must necessarily adapt.

The idea that there were “three worlds” became obsolete after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many countries of the Second World or the socialist world have become a part of the First World of capitalist states. Many East European countries that were part of the Soviet economic and military sphere of influence are now part of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

Consider, for example, that China, which continues to call itself a developing country, is today the world’s second-largest economy. Its military power overshadows many developed states of the North. After he led the Chinese Communists to power in Beijing in 1949, Mao Zedong turned to Stalin, the leader of Soviet Russia from the Global North, for economic and military assistance. Today, China’s economy is 10 times larger than that of Russia and is more advanced in several technological and industrial areas. It is also the senior partner in the Sino-Russian alliance.

South Korea, which was one of the poorer countries in the world in the middle of the 20th century, has been a member of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, which is the rich nations’ club.

Some of the Gulf countries, like the United Arab Emirates, which were not even independent in the middle of the 20th century today control massive amounts of capital and drive economic development in large parts of the Middle East, Africa and beyond. Singapore, a city-state of the Global South, today boasts a per capita income of $72,000 which puts it among the top tier of the developed nations.

Thinking across borders and beyond the per capita metric, there are slivers of super-rich elites in the developing world and significant underclasses in the developed world. In that sense, the Global South is truly global.

The differentiation within the Global South is not limited to the economic domain. Although the post-colonial moment suggested common political ideals within the Global South, they were quickly lost amidst new inter-state and intra-state conflicts among the newly-independent nations.

In fact, none of the post-colonial solidarity movements in the Global South, including the ones focused on pan-Asian, pan-Islamic, pan Arabic causes, have survived the 20th century intact. That also applies to the Non-aligned Movement, which focused on the issues of the Global South.

Four decades ago, when the Non-aligned Summit met in Delhi in 1983, the Iran-Iraq war, the Russian intervention in Afghanistan, and Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia had paralysed the meetings. There was very little agreement on global issues.

While the radicals directed their fire at America, the conservative regimes were focused on the Soviet Union and its proxies in the South. Delhi had to struggle to bridge the political differences within the Global South.

By the 1980s, the economic differentiation too became pronounced within the Global South. The East Asian nations were pursuing a path of economic liberalisation while the statist orthodoxy held in many others.

The East Asian growth miracle was about abandoning the post-colonial ideas of economic development that would follow a path different from capitalism and communism (the so-called “third way”). Even committed communist countries like China and Vietnam joined the bandwagon of export-led economic growth driven by foreign investment.

The G77, a group of 77 countries that came together in the 1960s to alter the terms of economic engagement between the Global South and the North, now boasts more than 130 countries, but has little impact on the nature of the global economy.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw the steady political marginalisation of the NAM. Although a number of new countries joined the movement, it had lost its vigour and purpose in the changing world order. The decline of NAM was accompanied by the rise of regional institutions like the ASEAN. New institutions like APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association) that emerged since the 1990s cut across the North-South divide.

India’s own international trajectory followed a similar path. It abandoned the old economic formulae of the NAM and adopted the mantra of globalisation. Instead of scoffing at regional institutions, Indian diplomacy devoted much attention to joining existing or promoting a range of new regional institutions, including the SAARC, ASEAN, IORA, BIMSTEC, and the SCO.

Even more interesting, India itself went beyond the North-South framework to build institutions with cross-cutting membership. Both the BRICS and Quad forums are very different from the NAM. They involve developed and developing countries.

This long and troubled history should help provide a better template for India in re-engaging the Global South. Two imperatives stand out. One, India should avoid the temptation of building a bloc against the developed North. In the past, the NAM often presented itself as a trade union against the West. Despite the proclaimed “non-alignment” between the superpowers, the NAM, by the end of 1970s, was proclaiming the Soviet Union as the “natural ally’ of the developing world.

Today India’s focus must be on emerging as a bridge between the developing and developed world. Because, none of the problems confronting the Global South can be solved without substantive international cooperation between the developed and developing countries.

Second, Delhi should differentiate its approach from China’s current cynical instrumentalism that claims to build a “post-Western order” in the international system. Although China never joined the NAM, it took much interest in its policies. It started attending some of the recent summits as an observer.

As China’s economic power rose, it saw the Global South as a massive market for commercial and political influence. If China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been the culmination of this strategy, the growing backlash against it in the Global South today underlines the limits of Beijing’s approach.

India, which was the first nation to highlight the problems of the BRI, must tread a different path. Delhi must offer sustainable economic cooperation to the Global South through national, regional, and global institutions.

The writer is senior fellow, Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express