Always anxious to portray the Islamic Republic in a world leadership position, the official media in Tehran have been trumpeting a 3-day visit by President Masoud Pezeshkian to Doshanbeh and Moscow as a “significant strengthening of the global south.”
You might wonder what “global south” is all about.
This is a cliché invented in the 1970s to distinguish “Third World” countries from the two blocs of East and West without abandoning its sister cliché of “non-aligned world.”
With globalism in decline if not actually moribund yet, the “global south” is gaining new adepts in circles seeking to divide humanity on ideological grounds with Western democracies cast as villains as authoritarian regimes as choirboys.
Dividing the world on pseudo-geographical lines has a long history. The Roman Empire regarded the Persian Empire on its east as a cultural alternative if no an existential threat. In medieval times the concept of the Orient alternately depicted a seductive or a repulsive model for the Occident.
Marx who pretended to have discovered laws of human history found it necessary to acknowledge that his analysis didn’t apply to “Asiatic societies” by which he meant the whole world outside Europe and North America.
The English imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling, a literary giant but a political pygmy, played a similar chord: East is East and West is West- And the two shall never meet!
After the fall of the Soviet Empire some assumed that Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” also included the end of geography and advocated a one-size-fits-all model of governance labeled globalization.
Trying to understand history without understanding geography is always problematic and vice versa.
This is why the various geography-based concepts mentioned above ended up as short-lived comets in stormy skies.
Needless to say that both Tajikistan and Russia where Pezeshkian was a visitor are located to the north of Iran. In fact, Russia touching on the North Pole is located north of almost every other country. In contrast, Australia, a firm member of the “north” bloc in political, economic and cultural terms is, as its name indicates, geographically part of the south.
The idea that “global south” could describe the Islamic Republic’s relations with either Russia or Tajikistan because none has a Western democratic system is misleading. Trade between Iran and Russia in 2023, valued at $1,9 billion represented about one percent of Iran’s foreign trade. Iran’s biggest export to Russia was green pepper while gold was Russia’s biggest export to Iran. Iran’s trade with Tajikistan was under $50 million, the price of a penthouse in Manhattan. While almost three million Iranians lived in the United States, part of the
“global north” Russia was host to just a few hundred Iranian officials and students.
The “global south” cliché is another version of the “West and the Rest”, the topos for obfuscating political, economic, cultural and historical factors that identify the 200 or so nations that form the human community and fan the flames of an anti-capitalist especially anti-American discourse.
Interestingly, the Peruvian economist Herando de Soto, who first popularized the term “global south” used it to describe the failure of anti-West, specifically anti-American, regimes.
In his books, “The Southern Route” and “Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West but Fails Everywhere Else?” he argued that capitalism cannot succeed without democracy.
A non-democratic system might achieve dramatic results thanks to capitalism as did Germany under Hitler and in an obviously different context the “Asian tigers” in recent decades. However, such achievements could quickly disappear in the fog of internal discord or the tsunami of war.
Since the end of the Cold War, the “global south” concept has also appeared in abridged versions including The BRICS (Brazil; Russia, India, China & South Africa) invented by Goldman Sachs Wall Street bankers and sold to rulers who wished to do as Americans did while boasting that they were shaping their own model.
The expression “going south” in English is used when things are going badly or leading to failure.
The good news is that more and more of the countries classed together as part of “global south” aren’t going south in that sense.
In sub-Saharan Africa, at least 10 nations among them Senegal and Ghana recently have held democratic elections while the Freedom Index indicates progress in some 20 other countries.
In Latin America; too, outside fossilized regimes such as Cuba and Nicaragua the trend is towards going “north” rather than south.
Asia offers a mixed picture.
The latest general election in India showed that economic success may have tempered rather than comforted authoritarianism.
In the Middle East, the end of the 50-year long Assad nightmare may not lead to capitalism and democracy but could still become a step away from the most barbarous version of “the south” model.
Lebanon, which had been part of the “north” by playing a leading role in shaping the Universal declaration of Human Rights and for the first decades of its existence as a nation-state a haven of freedom and diversity is emerging from the “southern “nightmare imposed on it by Iran and its local hirelings.
In Iran itself even figures within the “southern” system are beginning to realize that their regime may be heading south. Just before he flew to Tajikistan, President Pezeshkian made this astonishing admission: “The situation we are in isn’t worthy of the Iranian nation.”
In what is labeled “the Greater Middle East”, another shibboleth that is best avoided, there is an overwhelming desire for social reform, economic development and political participation, in other words, for heading “north” rather than “south.”
A new generation of leaders has understood that unless they turn change into an ally they risk turning it into a mortal foe.
