The Poorer Nations: a Possible History of the Global South (Verso) by Vijay Prashad

In February 1993, the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had lunch with US Secretary of State Warren Christopher and US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright. Boutros-Ghali asked them to give the UN some latitude: “Please allow me from time to time to differ publicly from US policy.” He recalls that Christopher and Albright “looked at each other as though the fish I had served was rotten”. They said nothing.

The 1990s were hailed by the political classes of the US and western Europe as peak liberalism, the “end of history”, where the only remaining task was to bring the nirvana of free markets and democracy to the benighted peoples of the rest of the world. What many of those peoples saw was something rather different: a tightening of the exploitative, domineering grip over their societies by the old imperial powers. The value of Vijay Prashad’s rich and fascinating account of the age of “globalisation” is that it tells the story from the latter point of view.

Postwar decolonisation divided the world into a Global North of developed nations and a Global South of former colonies and protectorates. The southern states quickly discovered that the independence they had won was severely curtailed: by the dominance of the permanent members of the UN Security Council over the wider UN, by the North’s leadership of the international institutions that shaped the world economy, and by the military strength of the northern states to intervene, invade and intimidate. Imperialism, it seemed, had been reconfigured rather than dismantled. Management was now delegated to local elites, but control was retained by the states of the new G7.

The era of neoliberal economics that began in the 1970s not only ended the postwar Keynesian consensus but served as a rejection of calls from the South for a new international order, structured so as to give their economies genuine autonomy and a chance to develop. They demanded access to finance and technology transfers under better terms, and the opportunity to diversify away from exporting primary commodities, instead producing value-added goods supported by systems of trade preference Neoliberalism brought almost the exact opposite. The IMF exploited debt crises to impose “structural adjustment” on southern states, enforcing sharp cuts to social spending, privatisations, and a focus on selling primary commodities and labour-intensive manufactured products. The World Trade Organisation rigged markets on the North’s terms, while intellectual property regimes starved the South of the benefits of scientific advances, even at the expense of the millions of victims of the global AIDS pandemic.

Globalisation is often depicted as nothing more than a force of nature, with critics of its neoliberal form portrayed as the “stop the world, I want to get off” brigade. But as Prashad shows, the specific way in which the world’s political economy has developed involved a series of conscious choices that were political, ideological and grounded in the material interests of those with the power to make them. Those misdescribed as “anti-globalisation” favour a genuine internationalism based on consent and the common good, rather than coercion and exploitation.

Prashad’s book contains none of the breathless over-optimism that characterised much of the commentary around the Arab uprisings and the Occupy movement in 2011 and early 2012. Despite the major crisis of recent years, the status quo remains deeply entrenched. The North retains its dominance and the loyalty of many southern elites. The leading “BRICS” countries of the South aspire merely to join the club of powerful states, for example seeking permanent membership of the UN Security Council rather than its abolition. Their increasing confidence in fighting for their place in the system may offset the North’s dominance – the new BRICS development bank will at least be an alternative to the World Bank and IMF – but does not constitute a fundamental challenge to the nature of the system itself. Such a challenge is required if the emergencies of global poverty and global warming are ever going to be dealt with.

Prashad seeks out grounds for optimism, and finds some, here and there. The loosening of Washington’s grip on Latin America over recent years should encourage those fighting police states and imperial power in other parts of the world. Western activists have a role to play, for example with NGOs helping under-resourced delegations from the South to resist the North’s diktats at major trade conferences. But the key may ultimately lie with the multitudes swept into the world’s slums and informal economies by the neoliberal tide. In their circumstances, building effective organisation and resistance will not be easy. But since globalisation is a power struggle, any real challenge must emanate from the peoples of the South themselves: those who overthrew colonialism within living memory, but who still have so much further to travel.