The latest episode of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies’ podcast, International Horizons, is out now.  Today on International Horizons we host Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner, Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as well as in the Colin Powell School of Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York, to talk about how the Global South engages in international affairs and works to advance its foreign policies interests. 

You can listen to it on iTunes here, on Spotify here, or on Soundcloud below. You can also find a transcript of the here, or read it below.

Transcript:

John Torpey  00:00

Hi, my name is John Torpey, and I’m Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues.

John Torpey  00:20

Today, we examine the role of multilateralism as a strategy for increasingly influence of the Global South. In order to explore that terrain, we’re fortunate to have with us today Professor Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner, professor of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as in the Colin Powell School of Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York. She’s a specialist in foreign policy, diplomacy and global development, particularly with respect to small states, and specifically Caribbean States, as well as the nations of the Global South in general. She has authored or co-authored, or edited 11 books, including most recently, the Historical Dictionary of US-Caribbean relations, Diplomatic Strategies of Leading Nations in the Global South, Institutions of the Global South, Small States in Global Affairs, the Foreign Policies of the Caribbean Community, and The Foreign Policies of the Global South: Rethinking Conceptual Frameworks. Needless to say, she’s a very productive scholar on these issues. She served as a consultant on United Nations and CARICOM, the United States, Caribbean and Latin American government, and intergovernmental projects. She served as the first Caribbean born female president of the Caribbean Studies Association, and in many other valuable and important academic roles. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today, Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  02:00

You’re welcome, nice to be here.

John Torpey  02:02

Great to have you. Thanks very much. So let’s start right in. I think this term, the Global South, is now widespread, obviously. But we used to speak of the First, Second, and especially the Third World, but now we speak of the Global South and perhaps, somewhat less so of the Global North. Can you explain the evolution in the terminology and tell us what it tells us about the world?

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  02:32

Yes, certainly. And I think it’s important that you said less so the Global North, alright, and I’ll explain why. Whenever we think about the Third World today, we tend to think about bad governance, poverty, banana republics – a term that I absolutely don’t like – failed states, etc. We always think of it in a pejorative way. And even within the Third World, I am from the Third World, whenever we want to denigrate something, we will say, “this is very Third World”, right? “This person has very Third World values”, and so on. The point is that it wasn’t like this.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  03:18

When we originally use the term, Third World, the intention was never to make it into something that was equated with poverty or equated with bad governance. The Third World was simply a term that one could use as a reference for all countries that did not want to align with either the Eastern Bloc or the Western Bloc, in other words, non aligned or unaligned countries. And it has its ideological reference, way back to France in the 1940s, when there were political parties, which were distinct from De Gaulle’s Rassemblement Populaire Français, or the Fourth Republic. Another referent was the idea of the Third Estate, which was a reference to the underrepresented bourgeoisie in the French Revolution. So, there were precedents for using the “third” idea.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  04:25

In modern times, it’s thought to have been coined by Alfred Sauvy a Frenchman in 1952. And again, it was used it to describe unaligned nations. And over time, when we consolidated its use, it was through many multilateral conferences, such as: the Bandung Conference of 1955, a historic Afro-Asian conference; the first non-aligned conference of 1961: the first conference of The United Nations – Conference on Trade and Development in 1964; and all of these subsequent conferences and a very exciting decade of the 1960s. We call it the decolonization decade, when Third World countries were becoming independent. So, the use of the term was to indicate or to point to all of these exciting developments among countries, which were neither Western nor Soviet, belonging to the Soviet bloc.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  05:34

Unfortunately, over time, because these countries were primarily developing countries, and many of them were very poor, there were democratic deficits, and many other development problems,  corruption, etc. So somehow, Third World began to mean, not just that that are not-aligned, but that perhaps the values were not the values of the First World or even the Second World. So by the 1970s, the United Nations began to use South as a preferable term, you can see it in the documentation. I mean, there isn’t an immediate split between the time when Third World was used and the time when South began to be used. But we see it by the 1970s. The 1970s was a very, very important time that we consider the heyday of the developing countries at the United Nations. And, at that time, the North and the South entered into a dialogue with the intent of creating a new international economic order. So there was a lot going on at the UN, a lot of negotiation going on. And at that time, all of that was phased in terms of North meeting South, North sitting with South to determine a new order. The non-aligned movement established the South center, you’ll see a lot of reference to South in environmental and other documentation.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  07:21

However, by the 1980s, this Southern excitement, the heyday, and the solidarity of these countries, began to fade. There was a recession, there was the onslaught of nationalistic ideologies, there was a push toward liberalism, which was heavily promoted, especially by President Reagan in the United States. And so, the countries began to fracture, and there was this division among these countries, which suggested that perhaps there wasn’t really a South, that there wasn’t really even a Third World. And it was only after the Cold War ended, that we began to see a sort of reinvigoration of the idea of a community among these countries, and then we refer to it as the Global South. It’s obvious that the intent of the word global was simply to point to the fact that we have now a new world in which there’s a heightened sense of globalization. So globalization = global, right. And that was the idea. The idea was that, rather than north-south, as we had before, the South was, was truly integrated into the globe in this new era. And this is what Global South really points to, where it suggests, or suggests to me, the whole idea that the South is not separated from the North, the South is a part of it. It’s just global, as globalized, and as integrated as, as the North is.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  09:11

I don’t think that we even refer very much to Global North. You would you see it, let’s say books, etc., where you will see Global South versus Global North, but I’ve hardly ever seen in UN documentation, or international organizations, this idea but global north, because again, I think that although it is it is logical to say the South is counterposed against the North, I think there is a suggestion there of that division, which we had in the North-South era. And I don’t think that one wants to really recreate that so much. The idea is really to focus on the South and to focus on what these nations are doing rather than to just make it seem as though there’s a divide between one or the other.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  10:04

I should mention one thing. There’s a difference between the policy arena and the scholarly arena in much of this, because in the policy arena, these terms are adopted. The UN has many terms for these countries. They’re primarily the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. And in UN policy work, Global South would be a sort of overarching rubric. But really the work is done with all sorts of different differentiations, such as high developed countries versus medium developed and low developed and human development and highly indebted countries. And you know, they’re much more specific about the use of terms, in terms of their policymaking.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  11:01

The scholarly community tends to be a bit obsessed now that they have adopted the idea of the Global South, and I’ve got to tell you that we ended up having in [the field of] international relations, and it took a long time for IR people to even recognize the existence of the Global South, but that has to do with the nature that international relations is taught. And I think, as someone mentioned, in an article some time ago, my use of the term Global South, in my 2003 book was one of the earliest strides in international relations. But in the scholarly community, there is a lot of debate over the use of the term. And I think that’s, that’s what scholars do. We debate and we dissect and deconstruct. And so there are those, especially I have found in Europe, who don’t like the idea of the use of this term to be territorial, in the territorial sense of Africa, Asia, Latin America, they point to problems such as the geography. I mean, Australia is in the south, right? You know, why is a South there. There are countries which are Northern, but in the South. There are some countries like Brazil and so on, which are very Northern in some ways, as well as Southern if you equate Southern with poverty, which I don’t do, but which many people seem to do.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  12:45

And so there’s all this debate, and I wanted to get to specifically mention that this sort of takes the Global South away from the policy arena, and makes it into a more of an abstraction, which I absolutely don’t favor, but which I understand is important in a scholarly way. For example, there is the decolonial movement led by Walter Mignolo, who is an Argentinian. And that movement looks at Global South in a in a very broad way of the need for emancipation from Eurocentrism. And there are race and gender scholars who are associated with the inequities of race and gender. Those things are important, it’s important to consider it that way, but in much of my work, I tend to focus both on this on the theoretical aspect, and on the policy aspect, but perhaps a little bit more on the territorial aspect of Global South, which I still see as referring to similarities among the countries that were formerly colonized, so I’m sorry, that’s a long way away.

John Torpey  14:14

Sure. Well, it’s a complicated issue. And I want to probe a little bit further, I mean, sometimes these concepts or ideas are developed, because they kind of offer a useful shorthand that includes things that maybe shouldn’t exactly be included, but they have a broad kind of significance or they make a broad kind of sense. But maybe you could say a little bit more about what you see that it is that brings the Global South together. I mean, I think a second ago, you were saying, essentially, this is the formerly colonial world. But is that the way we should think about the Global South? There are these sort of geographical problems, obviously, if you think of the Global South as Asia, Africa, Latin America as a kind of quasi-racial sort of set of parameters.  What do you think is the core idea behind the Global South? And to what extent is this a kind of, cohesive bloc, if you like, in the world, or in world politics?

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  15:31

I think that’s a very important question. Because if you’re thinking of the Global South as a group of countries that are similar and share all the complete agreement on various issues, then that’s just not true, never was; Third World countries were never united in that way. It is perfectly appropriate to ask what then are we talking about when we say Global South? What unites them? The Global South today, as in the past, is more of a labor union. I think it was Johan Galtung who is a very important peace researcher in Sweden who said that it’s a labor union. The members don’t necessarily feel exactly alike, but they agree on certain things that must be done in order to protect their status, etc. So it’s the same thing with the Global South, these countries are not the same. Regional differences are extremely important. National differences are extremely important, and it has always been this way. But they do share a few things which bring them together. One of these, yes, is the history of colonialism.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  17:07

I think anybody who has any country or any person who has lived under colonialism understands what you’re talking about, when you talk about the legacy of colonialism. Colonialism has left a legacy in economic areas, political areas, it has left a legacy in terms of identity and culture. Local cultures were subdued to the colonial metropolitan culture. Economically, we had very distorted economies, because some countries were completely turned over to cash economies based on plantations and latifundia in Latin America etc. And so, you have this legacy, and the political legacies, of course, very strong. It remains the fact that these countries are dominated. These countries still are subjected to sanctions and to all sorts of different incentives by their larger neighbors, there is a hegemony in the international system, that the decision making, even an international organization such as the United Nations, rests with the larger countries of the world, the Security Council, the P-5 right are much more important than any number of countries in the in the General Assembly. And so, these are the things with these legacies, which bring these countries together, definitely historical, economic, the fact that despite many years of independence, most of these countries are still not at the level in what I call the early industrialized countries, at least the countries of Europe, etc.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  19:13

You have these differences, and this is what brings them together. Not all have the same strategy, but to have an overarching strategy – they may approach it with different tactics – and an overarching purpose, which is to, of course, improve their own economic standing, but also their political standing in the world and to gain influence  in world forums, which they have not had at this point in time.

John Torpey  19:48

This raises a lot of interesting questions and sort of problems for the idea, I guess, of the Global South. But one thing that you know, comes to mind immediately is that, you know, insofar as you’re referring to the history of colonization, as being kind of a defining feature of the Global South. That obviously speaks to what happened in Latin America, what happened in much of Africa and to some degree in Asia. And we went through this period that you described earlier of decolonization, sort of culminating, basically in the 1960s.

John Torpey  20:28

But I wonder now about another actor on the global scene, that wasn’t part of that earlier experience of colonization, that is to say, the place of China in world affairs now. China is now playing a huge role in some of the places that you’ve mentioned in Latin America and Africa, in particular, but also to some degree in Europe. Is China part of the Global South? And how are the countries that are sort of unambiguously – some places that we would all agree – are in the Global South. How are they dealing with or responding to the emergence of China as a kind of international player, so to speak?

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  21:16

Yes. Well, if I may make a little correction, if you don’t mind. China, considers itself to have been colonized, or what we would call imperialized. Because you will remember that during the century of humiliation in China, and that century of humiliation is colored a lot of what China does today, during that century Europeans came in, and the Europeans forced China into submission. Okay? And this century of humiliation resulted in things like unequal treaties and unequal trading treaties. You should remember that when the British wanted their opium they had the alternative.

John Torpey  22:02

Yeah, I maybe misstated what I wanted to say, but what I really wanted to say it was not that China wasn’t colonized itself in the previous period, but that now it’s in a different position. How one should describe China’s role in the world outside of China today? Are they a colonial power? It doesn’t appear to be a kind of settler colonial project? And there is enormous influence from China, in other countries.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  22:37

Yes. And we always had a little problem with locating China, not just today, but even a little before this, because China also, if you remember, has nuclear weapons, for example, that you when you’re talking about being non-aligned, you’re basically talking about also being anti the use of nuclear power, etc. So China has always been bigger than the rest of this. And also, with more economic potential; everybody knew that once China was allowed to trade freely in the world it would basically become extremely important. But the reason why I pointed out the century of humiliation and so on is because I wanted to lead in to the fact that China still today identifies itself as a Global South nation, in terms of its relationship with the developing countries, which we call the G77, the group of 77 in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. If you look, you will see that China sits with this group, whenever any documentation is produced, it’s from the G77, and China; G77, and China.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  24:04

China is also a big player in terms of the aid, assistance, investment, and so on. And what I definitely want to point out is that a lot of that investment is done under the norms of SSC, which is South-South Cooperation and these norms are supposed to be different from the norms of assistance of the northern countries, the traditional norms, under which aid were given. Aid under the South-South norms involves non-conditionality, meaning not imposing conditions on these countries. Another norm is localization, meaning that the country that is being given the assistance should have a big say in where it goes and what programs and so on should be funded. And respect, meaning that there is equality and respect among the giver and the host; the host and  the recipient.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  25:27

So, these kind of norms, which are the the norms that are considered anti-hegemonic, are promoted and pushed by the South and China is trying to stick to those norms. If it’s one word, or one description that really riles up the donors, the South-South donors as if you say they are becoming hegemonic. So, of course, there is this concern as to whether China is simply replacing the US and so on in terms of its domination of these countries, particularly Africa at this point of time. There is concern about whether, under the Belt and Road Initiative, China is simply assuming a position of hegemony – heaven forbid hegemony, right? – over these countries. But I would reserve judgment, we all are reserving in judgment on that for the moment, because China, of course, is, as I said, constantly attempting, opening itself to the norms of SS, of South-South cooperation. So, we understand where that is coming from.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  26:52

China and India were great powers before the colonial era. India, feels the same way, India wants to recover this great power, become a great power again. India’s approach is a bit different. It is a poorer country. And it has given assistance, but it’s not as evil and as significant as China. China alarms the United States and so on, because of its economic power, and because they are geopolitical concerns. But within the developing world, China is still welcomed. There are increasing concerns, and you will find ruminations about Chinese policies. But up to this point in time, I have to say that most countries are still quite favorable toward Chinese aid and Chinese investment. In fact, they welcome it, especially because it is not conditional. You don’t have to meet environmental standards and labor standards and all sorts of, you know, standards. And so who wouldn’t take that assistance? Of course, countries are welcoming China.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  28:13

Okay, so I want to move on a bit to a topic that I think you hinted at a little bit in your answer to that question. And that is something you’ve written and thought a lot about, and it’s this issue of multilateralism. And I wonder if you could talk about what that means in the Global South? What kind of strategies that entails? And how they’ve evolved, and what kind of success they’ve had, with that kind of approach to international affairs? I mean, who are they defending themselves against, first of all?

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  28:46

Well, I see multilateralism as a foundational strategy for helping the developing countries tangibly, in economic and social areas, and in a way, somewhat, even more importantly today, given them influence and voice in global forums, and enabling them to change, to make changes, and to introduce new norms into the international system. But multilateralism can be construed in various ways. So I want to be very clear as to what I’m talking about. When Americans sometimes talk in foreign policy about multilateralism they’re referring to “Okay, yeah, we will sit with the Europeans and, you know, have some sort of cooperative approach.”  That is true, that is important.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  29:50

But multilateralism, as John Ruggie (he was an advisor to the UN and he’s a scholar) pointed out that it misses the point, if all you think multilateralism is is about having more than two countries get together. He emphasized that multilateralism also contains elements of reciprocity and generality. Meaning, for example, that if you look at the Most Favored Nation clause of the World Trade Organization, that is a multilateral arrangement, par excellence, because what’s happening is every country has to give the same benefits to all their partners. Any benefit that they give to the favored nation has to apply to the whole nation. So there’s that generalization that is extremely important. I lean towards that, and with a little bit of allowance for the fact that multilateralism, while it can be done as general terms or general norms, and everything applies to everyone, etc. At the same time, we mustn’t think of multilateralism as being altruism. I mean, multilateralism does not mean that you sacrifice your self interest. So countries use multilateral strategies in order to increase their own economies, and so on and so forth.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  31:34

This to me has been very important to both the Third World and the Global South. Because in the early days, very little would have happened if they did not cooperate. Remember, when I talked about the union, this kind of strategy, if they did not work together, they could easily have been picked off by the colonial powers of the former colonial powers. So in getting together, and in two very important multilateral arrangements: one was the non aligned movement, which began in 1961, and which, of course, also one of the founders was Tito, President Tito of Yugoslavia, who wanted to not fall completely under the Soviet umbrella. So the non-aligned movement was very important; countries getting together, and countries agreeing on issues such as prioritizing decolonization, prioritizing disarmament, prioritizing development. Because after a while they realize that decolonization was continuing apace, let us now turn to what we see as neocolonialism in our economies; meaning that our economy is still far too much focused on sending our exports to the UK and to France, and so on and so forth, we need to work together. And one of the ways in which you work together is regionalism. By us getting together as regions, and a lot of regional integration movements will form. And that in itself is also multilateral, getting together with others in your area to trade.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  33:26

So that’s very important. And then the other very important institution was the UNCTAD. I’ve mentioned it quite a bit already the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and that was established in the 60s and 64. And and that took to heart these economic problems and has, across the years, tried to promote fairer trade, better conditions for aid, investment, which can help the host countries rather than just, profits being repatriated to the North to help the early industrial nations. So, I consider that these initial multilateral institutions were so important in getting the South to come together, and to work to advance their interests.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  34:28

Subsequently, and you know, I was quite amazed when I was recently doing a report for the United Nations. This was a report, which was intended to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Buenos Aires platform of action. This was a platform of action where the developing countries came together and talked about assisting each other, technical assistance among developing countries would be a strategy for them to move forward. And so now 40 years later, you’re celebrating this, and you celebrated it under the rubric of South-South cooperation, because it has now changed, you know, become South-South cooperation, which really means economic and technical cooperation among developing countries. As I was doing the institutional chapter of that report, I was quite amazed at the advances that have taken place in the post Cold War period. Because earlier on, there was a bit of stagnation with all these regional movements and so on. But in the post Cold War period, there’s been this excitement to create new regional movements, some of them have to be revived, and some new ones had to be formed. Latin America is very much has always been very much ahead of the curve on all of this, but we have even Asia and an Africa. Africa recently, for example, has decided to do something very important, which is to have an African continental economic union.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  36:16

And all of these things, there are so many I was mapping each area of the world, and I could not believe the sheer number of regional and sub regional organizations on multilateral that have cropped up. So there’s a lot of activity. And I don’t just mean, in the economic sense, obviously – everybody thinks economics when they think about the developing countries – but in the political sense, as well, so many arrangements to try to help countries reduce the amount of civil conflict and interstate conflict and so on in the world. And  I was quite astounded myself by what’s been created. This is not to say that all of the all of them are successful. But there are so many, and I was also pleased to include Central Asia; what we call developing Eurasia, because now we see, after the Cold War, that the countries that surrounded around it, and were dominated by the Soviet Union, a number of them decided that they would have some luck by joining with other countries; some joined the non-aligned movement, and so on, that they would be able to established a little more independent influence. And so we now include the developing Eurasia region in the Global South. So I think it is pretty exciting.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  37:54

I think one of the countries that actually wants to be and participate with the Global South, apart from China, is also Turkey, or which you wouldn’t know whether Turkey is either European or Turkish. It turns towards the Middle East towards a lot more than it used to, because, of course, it has been somewhat rejected by the Europeans. And so they too are trying to focus right on cooperating with the Middle Eastern countries. A lot is going on. And I think that multilateralism is clearly the way to go. And if I may, I know it’s a long answer. But in another book that I was doing, recently, The Diplomatic Strategies of Nations in the Global South, looking at nations which were trying to achieve influence in the Global South, when you looked at all of these countries, one of the platforms that they were using was the multilateral platform. They wanted to be non-permanent members of the Security Council as much as possible. They wanted to participate in peacekeeping operations as much as possible. They wanted to do things which would bring them visibility, not just in their regions, but in the world. So multilateralism is an extremely important strategy for development.

John Torpey  39:22

Right, lots of interesting and important developments. And as you said earlier on, I mean, it’s the Third World, the Global South, is not what we used to think about it. I think as our colleague Branko Milanović has written, the relative inequalities between the former First World-formerThird World, Global North-Global South, is not as great as it used to be. And increasingly the Global South is becoming wealthier, the degrees of poverty have declined. And indeed as a result, they are catching up with the kind of disease burdens that we have in the Global North. Their burden of disease is less and less the kind of historic burden of infectious diseases and more and more of the diseases of the wealthy parts of the world. But what I wanted to ask, before we go, is a question about the situation in which we find ourselves in the United States and its relationship to these developments. I mean, we’re on the cusp of a transition from one administration to another. And I wonder whether you might say a little bit about how you think things may change and what you expect from the new administration relative to the Global South.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  40:53

If you don’t mind, just give me one minute to what you what you said about the advancement of the developing countries. There’s no question that they have had a faster growth rate over the last decade than many countries in the in the so-called developed world and that many of them are proceeding and moving ahead to first world status. Singapore, for example, is certainly a first world country. But I don’t want to overdo it in the sense of there are still those inequities and this is why they have to continue working together to fight it. There is still more poverty, right, in the developing countries than in the developed world.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  41:35

And it also came to me as you talked about disease, yes. One of the big problems now that everybody has to tackle is what we call NCDs, right? Non-Communicable Diseases, heart attacks, and so on, and so forth, obesity, etc. And those things have to be tackled. But it also occurred to me that in the pandemic that we are experiencing right now we are seeing some of these inequities, but we’re worse in terms of the distribution of vaccines, if I may just add that in there that what’s happened, for example, in the drug area, is that India and others are asking for a release, if you will, from the agreements – what we call the TRIPS agreements – the agreements by which you protect right patents, and so on. So that we can have these vaccines distributed to other parts of the world; to Africa and Asia and Latin America cheaply. And, and that is being opposed by some of the drug companies. I mean, everybody realizes that the world’s health is at stake, but it’s still being opposed to some degree. So we still have these inequalities, for example, where is the research done on on drugs, R&D etc. And, and these drugs then have to be sent to these other countries. So I think we still have a lot of things to deal with.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  43:15

In terms of Mr. Biden’s approach. And this is interesting, because I did an interview recently, the Caribbean countries are concerned about Biden. And one of the questions that sort of surprised me was that I was asked whether it is true that Democratic [administrations] have been less friendly to the Caribbean than Republican administrations. I found that a bit startling. And I said, It has nothing to do with the actual ideology. It may be a little bit of the ideology of the Republicans which used to favor free trade, and the Democrats used to protect their trade. So the Democrats used to be more protectionist. And now it’s changed. So everybody is concerned about whether Mr. Biden really would have a program that would favor things like free trade, or favor some of the developments that the Global South countries want. Clearly, climate change is something which most of them are into, and he’s very much into that and that’s wonderful. But there are concerns about the policies, what would be the policy towards Iran? What’s the policy towards Saudi Arabia? I have been in Saudi Arabia quite a lot recently for personal reasons. There are changes there that are occurring under the young prince. But and of course, nobody would say that it is not an authoritarian country, but you want to make sure that you’re not imposing some sort of approach that will cause these the recent advances such as women driving, etc, to be to be pulled back.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  45:23

So each country has its own concern. China, obviously is concerned about what kind of approach that Biden will take. And I can only say that, as far as the Caribbean is concerned, the big concern would be Cuba. And the question would be, are we going to be open now to Cuba again? There’s Venezuela, which is another big issue, what is going to happen there? Are sanctions going to continue? And a lot is being discussed in terms of whether we’re going to have an Obama three, the third term of Obama, because it is not totally clear that Obama’s foreign policy around the world was that successful. So I can’t answer the question about the Global South as a whole unit. Because I think as a whole unit they will benefit from more multilateralism. But each individual region has its concerns. And I don’t think anybody’s exactly jumping for joy at the moment, other than Europe. Everybody’s sort of waiting to see what would be the changes that take place.

John Torpey  46:45

Absolutely. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion about the rise of the Global South and its future prospects, at least for the near term. I want to thank Professor Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner for sharing her insights about the Global South with us. I want to thank Hristo Voynov for his technical assistance. This is John Torpey, saying glad you were with us and look forward to having you with us the next time on International Horizons. Thank you very much.

Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner  47:18

Thank you.

John Torpey  47:18

Thanks so much.