Amid so many other United Nations events this September, headlined by the procession of national leaders addressing the General Assembly, it would be easy to miss the celebration of the U.N. Day for South-South Cooperation on Sept. 12. Slotted inconveniently late on a Friday afternoon—well before most world leaders arrive the following week—the event will mark the 47th anniversary of the adoption of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries (mercifully shortened to BAPA).
The U.N. celebration is just one example of the growing calls for a renewal of south-south cooperation, the tradition of developing countries relying less on the industrialized world than themselves for their path to material progress. But are these renewed calls up to the task of charting a new path through the current crisis in international development?
The situation for traditional development looks bleak. The spectacular destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the largest (and depending on definitions the oldest) bilateral aid organization in the world, captured headlines this year, but other warning signs about bilateral aid abound. Even stalwart agencies in countries such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have instituted significant cuts in bilateral assistance.
The consulting firm McKinsey and Co. estimates that the new steady state could easily end with aid up to 22 percent below current levels; it calls this a “generational shift” that goes well beyond the cruelty-by-design efforts of the Trump administration. In such an environment, encouraging poorer countries to engage in collective self-help seems one of the few avenues still open. But is it enough?
Over its many decades, south-south cooperation has blossomed in moments of crisis. It came into being, and has persisted, as an idealist movement born of harsh realities. With faint echoes for calls to revolution—“Poor countries of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains”—proponents hoped that building solidarity and self-reliance could protect them from the apathy (or even antipathy) of the global north as well as from global economic headwinds. In such settings, cooperation within the global south functioned as a consolation prize—and a potent symbol of the distance between the global south’s aspirations and its options. This may well be the case for present-day south-south cooperation efforts.
Calls for cooperation of the have-nots date back at least to the 1920s, decades before the term “global south” came into common usage. Anti-colonial activists found common cause, and the Soviet-supported League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression brought together leading nationalists from Europe’s colonies. And South Asian lawyers crisscrossed the British Empire helping to promote rights for colonial subjects. These efforts focused on advocacy and politics—namely independence—though many interwar activists denounced the economic exploitation that defined colonial rule. The final declaration of the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 opened with a 12-point plan for expanding economic cooperation among participating states.
Talk of international economic cooperation in the decade after World War II came amid a flush of optimism. Political independence, the argument went, would help bring prosperity to impoverished former colonies. Yet the optimism of these early years dissipated as the difficulties of achieving sustained economic growth became apparent. Sure, U.S. President John F. Kennedy got the United Nations to call the 1960s the “Development Decade,” but this wasn’t backed up by substantial U.N. funding. And improved marketing did not translate into improved economic conditions. By the end of the decade, a slew of books and articles referred to one or another crisis in development.
These unfavorable conditions spurred new efforts to build global south unity. By the time Secretary-General Raúl Prebisch inaugurated the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964, talk about solidarity among poorer countries swirled about many international venues. The first UNCTAD session gave birth to the Group of 77 developing countries, which put economics front and center; others, such as the Non-Aligned Movement, focused more on geopolitics. Observers pinned high hopes on these new organizations; one declaration called the creation of the G-77 an “event of historic significance.”
Yet these efforts did little to counter the increasing headwinds for international development. By the early 1970s, growing Western aid fatigue led to stagnant, or even declining, levels of assistance. While the World Bank expanded the scope of its work in this period, the fact that it only offered financing, not grants, meant that recipient (i.e., borrowing) nations were on the hook for loans even as crisis conditions prevailed in the world economy. And the early 1970s were rife with such crises, most notably the fourfold spike in oil prices in during the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
Optimistic leaders in what was then called the “Third World” pointed to the oil embargo as a demonstration of the power of the have-nots, the global south flexing its economic muscles. But other cartels could not match OPEC’s impact. An agreement for cocoa launched by UNCTAD, for instance, never managed to shape commodity markets, let alone spark a global crisis. Much to the chagrin of Cadbury and Hershey’s, not to mention Ghanian farmers, chocolate did not fuel the international economy.
This misreading of the economic power of the global south also gave momentum to calls for a new international economic order (NIEO). After the International Monetary Fund (IMF) rebuffed proposals to democratize international finance, the G-77 agitated instead for the NIEO in a more sympathetic venue: the U.N. General Assembly. While the voting structure of the World Bank and the IMF limited the influence of poorer nations, the global south had a substantial majority in the General Assembly, with its one-country, one-vote principle. Thus, the NIEO resolutions passed easily on May 1, 1974. The NIEO marked the high tide of Third World idealism, with these countries hoping to convert numerical strength into economic and political power through solidarity and increased economic connections.
The NIEO was not the only attempt to draw political capital from the muscle-flexing of OPEC’s Arab members. Take the efforts of Rehman Sobhan, a University of Cambridge-trained economist who spent the 1960s agitating for the autonomy of East Pakistan, the more populous but less powerful portion of the bifurcated Pakistani state. When this movement culminated in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, Sobhan spent much of the next decade trying to rebuild (in fact, just build) the Bangladeshi economy. He called on OPEC to serve as a counterweight to Western aid, a task made all the more urgent by U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s infamous endorsement of Bangladesh as a “basket case” in December 1971.
Though Third World rhetoric alone could not bring about Third World solidarity or self-reliance, it did pave the way for the creation of the U.N. Office for South-South Cooperation.
Sobhan looked on with satisfaction when OPEC established a special fund for development purposes after the price spike. In its first year, it loaned more than $400 million to Third World countries. This figure, though, needs to be seen in light of the oil states’ $70 billion windfall from oil prices in 1974 alone. Sobhan, well aware of this calculation, praised OPEC support as a political benefit even if it offered little concrete aid to Bangladesh. Ultimately, though, even Sobhan had to concede that the cartel was not likely to “underwrite collective self-reliance” of the global south “on the wings of Third World rhetoric.” Idealism would not be enough.
Though Third World rhetoric alone could not bring about Third World solidarity or self-reliance, it did at least pave the way for the creation of the U.N. Office for South-South Cooperation. The body’s founding resolution contended that poorer countries needed to unite to achieve their political and economic goals. The push for such cooperation, then, came out of the tumult of the early 1970s and, much like the NIEO before it, saw unity as a tool to mitigate the effects of global economic crisis.
The next burst of activity for south-south cooperation came about a decade later, at the end of the 1980s. For Africa and Latin America alike, the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and structural adjustment was a “lost decade.” Having accumulated debts well beyond their ability to repay, leaders in the global south were put through their paces by the World Bank and IMF. Under the rubric of structural adjustment, both organizations offered financing—but with strings attached: demands for fiscal austerity, privatization, and openness to international trade and investment. Even those economists in the global south who favored such policies chafed at the strict conditions and tight surveillance that accompanied structural adjustment.
As had happened a dozen years earlier, deteriorating economic conditions led to renewed calls for south-south cooperation. Socialist Julius Nyerere, the founding leader of independent Tanzania, spent the mid-1980s drumming up support for a “South-South Commission”—a name quickly streamlined by dropping the first “south”; its purpose was to build solidarity and self-reliance across the global south. Even some South Commission leaders wondered whether south-south cooperation could produce results when most members were in the same boat: commodity exporters seeking to industrialize. But such doubts did little to tone down the enthusiasm for south-south cooperation, which once again blossomed when poorer countries faced inauspicious conditions.
During the 1980s and ’90s, as the center of gravity of development assistance shifted from infrastructure loans to support for economic reforms (i.e., liberalization), south-south cooperation adapted. Regional trade blocs appeared across the global south, uniting neighbors in an approach modeled on the European Economic Community (now European Union) and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Such efforts in South America, southern Africa, and Southeast Asia have successfully expanded trade relations among neighbors. But this was a new kind of south-south relation; instead of working primarily between governments, new economic relationships took place within global markets.
Yet the idealistic aims survived this transformation, as supporters of south-south cooperation continued along familiar lines. In the 1990s, the U.N. and the Organization of American States each created a fund for cooperation; funding for these new efforts, though, paled in comparison with bilateral aid as well as development lending from the World Bank and the proliferating regional development banks. Hoping to chart the future of south-south cooperation, the U.N. office called for a global summit to take place in 1996. Yet the future arrived long before the summit, which took place only in 2019—an index of the U.N. office’s limits.
What does this not-so-ancient history suggest about the future of south-south cooperation as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century? If historical patterns hold, renewed excitement about south-south cooperation in the 2020s is an important signal—a signal of distress.
Even as many once poor nations have graduated (at least in the World Bank’s reckoning) into lower-middle-income status, there are plenty of reasons for pessimism. Long before the gutting of USAID, international development was in crisis. Progress toward the Millennium Development Goals swooned in the 2010s until they were replaced in 2015 by the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, a set of concepts so broad that they can’t be contained on a single webpage. Recent indicators give little reason to hope that the SDGs will surpass the record of their predecessors. The 2025 SDG progress report estimates that about 10 percent of the world’s population now lives in extreme poverty, a number not forecast to shrink significantly in the next five years. Dreams of a “world without poverty” by 2030 seem all the more unattainable today.
If historical patterns hold, renewed excitement about south-south cooperation in the 2020s is an important signal—a signal of distress.
Even when the SDGs were brand-new (and the distance to 2030 was greater), those who sought to empower the global south still had their doubts. Take Branislav Gosovic, a Yugoslav radical who held senior posts at the South Commission and in the U.N. In 2016, when the SDGs were still in their infancy, he called for a “resurgence of South-South cooperation.” Yet even he had to concede its limits:
… in terms of conceptualisation, declarations, blueprints, plans of action, initiatives and political enthusiasm for South-South cooperation, the record has been more than satisfactory. Many of these ideas, however, have remained in the realm of declaration and failed to result in expected action and tangible advances.
Two years later, Gosovic offered a comprehensive plan for the future of south-south cooperation—before admitting that it differed little from the failed attempts of the past.
So has south-south cooperation run its course? Sobhan doesn’t think so. Sobhan, like Gosovic a preternatural optimist, has sung the praises of south-south cooperation for more than four decades; he has long seen it as a key instrument to break the economic dominance of the West.
Yet the cooperation he praises today is buttressed not by political calculations or “Third World rhetoric” but by statistics on trade and investment flows among and between the poorer nations. South-south cooperation has succeeded, he told me in July, not through diplomacy or the official organs of south-south cooperation—but instead through the rise of China and the structural changes in global economic and finance that have made Asia the leading source of merchandise trade, investment funds, and technology transfer. When I asked him to compare the present state of cooperation to the past, he observed that while working to make OPEC an instrument of global south cooperation, he worked “at the governmental level.” Since the 1990s, he said, economic cooperation “has largely taken place through the global market.”
If south-south cooperation aimed only to build economic ties around the world that did not revolve around or go through the West, then mission accomplished. The rise of China and the increasing flows of capital, goods, technologies, and workers have created a far more global economy than most proponents might have imagined a few decades ago—so global, in fact, that U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to put the globalization genie back in the bottle.
But are global trade and investment the only measures of success for south-south cooperation? What of the decades-old hopes of Gosovic, not to mention Sobhan, that emphasized southern solidarity, trying to bring the world’s have-nots together in a community of interest—indeed, into a community full stop? The economic integration of the global south has succeeded well beyond what its most ardent supporters might have dreamed. But this isn’t necessarily the same as cooperation, as solidarity, as becoming a unified political force. As new formations of solidarity come and go—such as BRICS—poorer countries are building ever deeper economic and financial ties with one another. What decades of idealistic declarations couldn’t do, global markets did.
Or did they? On the heels of the rise of China and the arrival of what the U.N. office called the “locomotives” of the global south, economic integration has advanced markedly, transforming global economic structures. For their part, poorer countries are more integrated but not necessarily more united. Integration ultimately comes at the cost of the dreams of solidarity that animated the early proponents of south-south cooperation.
The post The Problem With the Global South’s Self-Help Push appeared first on Foreign Policy.
