Global South is demanding changes to world power structures

Three international summits in a row illustrate the changing patterns of world power and the forces driving them. Demands for more equality from a more confident and independent group of middle powers loom large. So does the growing competition between the United States and China and their associated allies for influence over the outcomes.

The BRICs summit in Johannesburg, the Asean summit in Jakarta and the G20 meeting in New Delhi had many prominent leaders and political and economic agenda items in common – including support for multilateralism, calls for joint action on climate change, on debt and implementation of the sustainable development goals. Regional disputes loomed large, most notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also Myanmar, maritime security in the South China Sea, African military coups and tensions on the India-China border.

A striking feature of the diplomacy over the Ukraine war running through the summits is relativisation of the issue as seen by leaders from the Global South. Representatives from Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, India, Turkey and Saudi Arabia refuse to follow calls by US and European leaders to condemn Russia. Instead, they emphasise the war’s global effects, how they can be mitigated and how peace negotiations can be encouraged. These leaders are impatient with overweening Western concerns about the war, and detect double standards, given previous US unilateralism in Iraq and elsewhere.

Western media preoccupations with these diplomatic manoeuvres – and with US-China competition through the summits – obscure the deeper reality that stronger and better resourced states in the Global South are rightly demanding change in world power structures.

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Xi’s attendance at Brics signalled his growing support for that grouping as a new source of international influence

Instead of binary choices they are seeking out and creating multi-aligned ones in politics and trade. Much of their autonomy from Western-dominated institutions and norms arises from growing trade with China by Brazil, Gulf states, India and southeast Asians. This is counteracted by an intense US effort to establish new links with states in the Global South – a dramatic example being the economic and security agreements reached this week by Joe Biden with Vietnam.

Biden did not attend the Asean summit while Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin skipped the G20 one. Xi’s attendance at Brics signalled his growing support for that grouping as a new source of international influence. Its decision to enlarge membership with Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates gives it greater heft. So does the presence of more than 30 other states in Johannesburg as observers, telling a story of dissatisfaction with existing distributions of institutional power laid down after the second World War.

That includes the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as the United Nations Security Council. Compared to western members of the richer OECD grouping many large states in the Global South remain deeply constrained by debt burdens and higher interest rates as payments continue to flow north. They are impatient with western domination of these institutions and the threat of sanctions against them, and determined to change the balance of representation.

Despite the geopolitical mandate claimed by the Ccommission in 2019, and how it has dealt with Covid, Ukraine and growing demands for enlargement, the EU has been drawn back to the US and transatlantic orbits by the war

More will be heard in coming days about this at the UN General Assembly meetings. It seems rational to expect such pressures to break the logjams surrounding debates on UN reform. Other straws in the wind of change include Indonesia’s bid to join the OECD and the G20′s invitation to the African Union to join.

Doctrine of Asean centrality

At the conclusion of the Asean summit, the Indonesian president Joko Widodo warned that regional grouping will be destroyed by growing superpower competition if it does not respond more effectively. He wants to reassert the doctrine of Asean centrality in southeast and wider Asian affairs; but strategic competition threatens to disrupt it. Indonesia’s chairmanship of Asean has failed to make decisive progress on resolving the conflict between the military regime in Myanmar and the opposition to it. Asean’s doctrines of non-interference in domestic politics and consensual decision-making inhibit its responses to these pressures.

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The European Union also struggles to assert itself globally in this period of change. Despite the geopolitical mandate claimed by the commission in 2019, and how it has dealt with Covid, Ukraine and growing demands for enlargement, the EU has been drawn back to the US and transatlantic orbits by the war. Relations with other regional blocs such as African Union and Asean are being improved gradually rather than transformatively.

A new commission next year will have the task (like Asean and the African Union) of moderating US-China competition and maintaining strategic autonomy from the US. To do that it will need to pay much more attention to the geopolitical changes at play in this summer’s intensive summitry.

The changes open up opportunities for imaginative Irish diplomacy by turning Ireland’s former subaltern position to advantage to argue for a greater Global South role in world governance. EU member-states with an anti-imperial and anti-colonial background like ours can contribute constructively to such EU efforts as those dominant legacies are overcome.