Towards a non-hegemonic world order – emancipation and the political agency of the Global South in a changing world order

Abstract

This introduction presents an overview of this collection. It aims to clarify the making of the modern world order through the dialectic between the will to dominate and the will to resist. As conventional theories of international relations have been largely focused on the dominating powers, we attempt to highlight the constructive power of the countries from the Global South. By analysing the state-making within, and cooperation among, the Global South countries, we argue that the pursuit of human emancipation and national liberation makes countries in the Global South active agents in the creation of the world order and in human history in general. This paper also presents a short historical contextualisation of the terms ‘Third World’ and ‘Global South’.

Keywords:

• Bandung Spirit
• dependency
• Global South
• hegemon-centrism
• multipolarity
• Third World

Introduction

When we began organising this volume in 2021, the 1955 Asian–African conference in Bandung had just celebrated its 66th anniversary; the Non-Aligned Movement had been launched 60 years earlier (in 1961); and the 1966 Trilateral Conference in Cuba had just turned 55 years old. These ‘magic numbers’ – 66, 60, 55 – inspired the organisation of the Bandung–Belgrade–Havana conference in Indonesia, originally intended to be held in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a delay, so the conference took place a year later, between 7 and 14 November 2022, just ahead of the G20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia. The conference was organised by a broad, international network of the Bandung Spirit initiative, for which Darwis Khudori, an Indonesian engineering architect, historian, and associate professor at the University of Le Havre, has been the engine for more than a decade.

We originally wished to contribute to this valuable event by raising the waves and modes of the self-organisation of the Global South in the changing world order into the focus of attention with this collection. We wished to answer many questions. Can we say that there is an ongoing encirclement of the global centre by the countries of the Global South? What forms do the emancipatory movements of the Global South take and what roles are they playing in the transformation of the world order? What lessons can we learn from the past and present experiments aimed at building a better society beyond capitalism? How can the emancipation movements of the Global South be promoted on either a national or an international level? What is the significance of different cultures, identities and ideologies in making the world better than the prevailing, individualism-driven, competition-based, oppressive one?

When forming our questions at the beginning of 2021, we had no idea that the change of the world would accelerate so quickly. As we put down these words, mankind is already rapidly approaching a huge economic and social crisis, if not an annihilating nuclear World War III. Today it is more important than ever to find a way out of the increasingly violent world of imperialism, which started its rampage with the original capital accumulation and colonisation, and sustains itself through the perpetual, increasing exploitation of man and nature.

For a long time, our attention has been focused on the actions of the great powers. Their attempt to dominate and govern the world has long been the driving force in shaping the global order. Such a will to dominate has always been countered by the will to resist. It is the dynamic interaction and tension between the two forces that is constantly shaping our world. However, our international relations discourse has largely relied on the practices of the dominating forces to develop its theories. The limitation of viewing the world through the perspective of the great powers is two-fold. On one hand, it creates an ahistorical illusion that the world order is primarily determined by the power struggle between a handful of dominant, self-interested states. On the other hand, it creates a teleological framework, restricting our capacity to understand the diversity of state behaviour and the implications of state international conduct.

Our rapidly transforming reality reminds us of the limits of our perspective and theoretical frame for understanding the world order. Therefore, we propose to look beyond the major powers and into the state-making practices of, and international conduct among, the countries in the Global South. The Global South countries, which have long been under the domination of the big powers in the Global North, have fed imperialism with their natural and human resources for centuries. Even today, their economic development and state-making projects are still hampered by the ‘soft’ means of neo-colonialism. On the one hand, the norms and institutions, like human rights, rule-of-law, and ‘NGOisation’ (non-governmental organizationisation) that the Global North imposes on the Global South in the name of promoting development, often violate traditional national norms, foster neo-liberal policies and result in increased underdevelopment (Omach 2021; Sakue-Collins 2021; Sesay 2021). On the other hand, skyrocketing inequalities, bad governments and violent conflicts, mostly in Africa, are often the results of the old, neo-colonial practices (Parashar and Schulz 2021). The constantly recurring problems have led to continually renewing social movements, whose activities cannot be reduced to a national level. The emancipatory movements of the Global South always have an international dimension, which the pioneers of these countries recognised as early as the mid-1950s, when they argued for the right of nations to develop independently and peacefully. Our collection offers a sample of these national emancipatory movements that affect both national and international relations.

The political momentum in the Third World

Before engaging in a discussion of the Global South, the first problem we encounter is the problem of naming. What terminology should we use to refer to the countries that are both economically underdeveloped and politically oppressed by the hegemonic order dominated by the superpower and major powers in the Global North? Our collection uses the term the ‘Global South’ with reservations. This widely accepted term fails to capture the complexity of inequality across the world. Such inequality reflects a structural problem of an imperialist world order, which permanently locks a majority of states and social groups at the bottom of a global economic, intellectual, and socio-cultural value chain. Such an imperialist world order is fundamentally hierarchical. The making of such an order should be historically contextualised.

We embrace the Global South to be part of a newly emerged political and intellectual global trend, which aims to move beyond the Western-centric world imagination. We do this by investigating the history of modernisation and transnational cooperation in mainly Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We are also keenly aware of the geographic limitations implied in the term ‘Global South’. Some articles in this volume, therefore, use ‘Third World’, a seemingly outdated term, to refer to a political momentum behind the transnational solidarity movement during the first three decades since the end of World War II in 1945. The Third World, in this context, brings forward a shared will among the oppressed countries in a capitalist world system. The political aspiration embedded in the solidarity movements in the Third World is to build a fairer and more democratic world in which states are equal not only legally but also politically and economically.

Here, the ‘Third World’ implies an unequal structure of the existing capitalist world system. Through this term, we emphasise the dialectical relation between the will to dominate and the will to resist. By analysing the state-making within, and cooperation among, the Third World countries, we want to bring forward the oppressed countries as a constructive force in shaping the modern world order.

To avoid confusion, we use the term the ‘Third World’ as a historical and political denominator, shared by countries in the Global South. We want to emphasise that the historical and political significance of the Third World resides neither in its status of being oppressed nor in its violent resistance. Its significance lies, instead, in its pursuit of human emancipation and national liberation, which makes countries in the Global South active agents in the making of the world order and human history in general.

A brief historical contextualisation will help us further clarify the terminological confusion.

Mao Zedong said in 1975:

We are living in an age in which four hundred years of the rule of capitalism is decaying before our very eyes. This is the age in which countries are fighting for independence, nations are fighting for liberation, and the people want revolution. Revolution is the main trend in the world today! (Mao 1975, 20)

Mao made this political statement in a historical moment that Samir Amin referred to as the ‘Bandung era’ (Amin 2006, 85). This period witnessed a surging enthusiasm for comprehensive inter-state cooperation on economic, political and cultural affairs between Asian and African countries. The bipolar confrontation between the two hegemonic powers, namely the US and the USSR, was not the only defining feature of the Cold War era. The Third World countries were actively involved in shaping the post-World War II global order. Through their bilateral interactions and various institution-building efforts – including the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Afro–Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), and Group 77 at the United Nations – the Third World countries became a prominent driving force behind the development of a ‘negotiated globalisation’ in the 1960s and 1970s (Amin 2006, 2019a).

Today, however, the Third World, as a category, appears to have lost its theoretical legitimacy. It has been increasingly considered to be an outdated, contested or even ‘offensive’ term (NPR 2021; Clarke 2018), since the 1980s, particularly in the English-speaking world. More ‘neutral’ terms such as ‘developing’, ‘undeveloped’, ‘less developed’, and ‘the Global South’ have been introduced to refer to the areas and economic condition that were formerly depicted by the term ‘the Third World’ (Tomlinson 2003). The political momentum behind the Third World ideals of national development and a more egalitarian world order withered away as well. To many of the Third World leaders, as Julius Nyerere sadly expressed in the 8^th NAM Summit in Harare in 1986, the Third World symbolised a movement, which had gone from ‘growth and hope’ to ‘disillusionment’ (Prashad 2007, 276).

The challenges faced by the Third World countries should not be simplistically viewed as a decline. It is a historical recession. For a short period beginning in the 1980s, the movement lost its political momentum. However, its political aim, to construct a fairer and more democratic world order by emancipating all nations, large or small, has remained valid. Today, as it was after the Second World War when the old colonial empires collapsed, a true cultural, economic and even political independence, for many countries, has yet to be reached. Revolutions can only be fought after the acquisition of national sovereignty. The three streams about which Mao spoke – the fight of the national ruling classes to enlarge their scope for manoeuvre and get greater access to resources of rent; the will of nations to develop according to their own needs; and the natural aspiration of people towards socialism – are all interwoven and express the need and will to overcome capitalism on a global scale. Samir Amin frequently quoted these words of Mao. He stressed that polarisation, which is inherent in capitalism, fuels ‘a permanent natural rebellion against the capitalist world order’ (Amin 2019b, 29). We can say, paraphrasing Karl Polanyi (1944), that there is a global double movement. One side pushes for a more profit-oriented market and the other, the global countermovement, resists and tries to protect society against predatory market forces (Artner 2023).

Beyond Eurocentrism

The relationship between state and market is an intriguing one. The Eurocentric ontology stresses a dichotomous relationship between the two. Freeing the market powers from state control has always been depicted as one of the driving forces enabling the modern transformation of Europe. However, can this understanding of the market–state relationship be transplanted outside Europe, particularly to the areas where local economy and social structure have been devastated by the imperial mode of modernisation? To the core countries in the capitalist world system, such as the United States, France, and the UK, ‘yes’ is the obvious answer to the question. This Eurocentric discussion of development provides a teleological understanding to the world’s future. In his short essay published in 1952, Alfred Sauvy borrowed the term tiers état (the Third Estate) from French political tradition and used it to describe the population in underdeveloped areas across the globe. He claimed that tiers monde (the Third World) depicted the political aspiration of these people who wished their countries to transform into developed capitalism (Sauvy 1952, 14). By using the term tiers monde, Sauvy depicts the socio-economic condition of sous-développés (underdevelopment) in the peripheral areas of capitalist global order. This socio-economic understanding of global inequality was quickly adopted by intellectuals such as Georges Balandier, whose work focused on the developmental issues within colonised or formerly colonised areas (Balandier 1956). The implication of this developmental discourse is that the circumstance of underdevelopment in the colonised and semi-colonised worlds is an economic issue. Thus, the issue of underdevelopment is taken out of the historical context of colonial expansion and the capitalist world system. The resistance from the oppressed is then viewed as a reaction of poverty and desperation. The focus of development led by the liberal West is to eliminate the threat of resistance, which is understood as a structural violence to the liberal world order (Galtung 1971; Worsley 1984).

Instead of addressing the fundamental inequality of the capitalist world system, developmental study and modernisation theory in the US, starting from the late 1950s, began actively exploring the possibility of pacifying the Third World resistance through further capitalist global expansion (Millikan and Rostow 1957). During the Cold War, the eminent threat of the Third World countries leaning towards the opposing Socialist camp forced the Western camp to address the Third World developmental issue. However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Third World also lost its political significance. American scholars of international relations lost interest in the Third World completely. This argument states that, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Third World no longer bears the value of being a playground for the superpower competition for influence during the Cold War. It is asserted that most Third World countries cannot threaten the United States, and the few that could will not, as it would not be in their interests (Buchanan 1990; Maynes 1990; Van Evera 1990; Hendrickson 1992).

Not every American political scientist shared the same optimism. Some suggested that instability in the Third World states could still threaten American interests and the US-dominated world peace (David 1992–1993). In this scenario, the Third World was seen as a place filled with ‘failed states’ and ‘rogue states’ which were either completely ‘ungovernable’ or waiting to be ‘fixed’. They posed challenges to ‘American national security and international peace and stability’ (Yoo 2011). Nevertheless, neither view considered the Third World nations to be autonomous entities. From this hegemon-centric perspective, the Third World countries could only rely on the favour of the major powers to gain their chances of economic development and relevance in global politics.

During the same period, we witnessed the emerging tendency to push the entire problem of the ‘Third World’, and the centre–periphery relations in the capitalist world order, out of the academic and political lexicon. On a geopolitical level, this transformation featured the decline of the Soviet Union and its sinking to a Third World status – resulting in the emergence of the concept of the ‘Global South’ – and the rapid rise of the United States as a unipolar global hegemon. On an economic level, it echoed the increasing influence of neo-liberal globalisation, replacing the negotiated globalisation made possible by the newly independent, formerly colonised, and economically underdeveloped nations largely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Amin 2019a). The academic rejection of the Third World also saw the return of the economic determinist understanding of inequality among nations and regions. The neo-liberal development model in the West in the 1980s was reaffirmed with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, leading towards a widespread triumphalism that the future of human development was determined to move towards globalisation of market economics and electoral democracy.¹

Despite the post-Cold War political exultation, the economic condition that shapes the underdevelopment of the Third World countries has not changed. The economists and modernisation theorists see the neo-liberal globalisation as a silver bullet for all the problems in the Third World countries. Most researchers in the English-speaking world also agree that global stratification is not determined only by economic differentiation. The social systems, as they pointed out, also play a vital role in human development (Worsley 1964, 1984). However, proponents of the neo-liberal globalisation do not offer any innovative solutions to address the developmental gap. Instead, they go back to the framework brought forward by the modernisation theorists in the 1950s. Such a project of modernisation builds on the classic British, liberal economic theory of comparative advantage. It argues that the technological and capital input from the West will mobilise the surplus labour in the Afro–Asian underdeveloped countries. By further integrating the Third World countries into the advanced, Western-dominated global market, the West could build their confidence in the democratic process and, consequently, prevent the Third World from leaning towards the Communist bloc (Millikan and Rostow 1957).

Replacing Eurocentrism with hegemon-centrism

The divide between the West and the rest is not simply a geographic one. Instead, it should be understood as a particular way of comprehending the world through a hegemon-centric structure, in which the West is the hegemonic centre responsible for governing the world according to its own image. This hegemon-centric view sees the world as a hierarchical one. It envisions the forming of a global order based on a Hobbesian state theory. It holds fast to the assumption that the ‘governance of international systems’ could not be possible without the presence of ‘empires, hegemonies and great powers’ (Gilpin 1981). Even for Keohane’s rule-based multilateral cooperation, a strong state power still needs to be the pivot point, providing leadership and security for the smooth running of the international order (Keohane 1984). This hegemon-centric hierarchical understanding of the world order reminds us of the discussions of civilisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

On the issue of development, the hegemon-centric view assumes that only domination by a hegemonic power or a cohort of powers could constitute the optimal situation for ensuring and maintaining an open and stable world economy. The small and weak nations do not make any significant impact in global affairs. Instead, their development is assessed by predominantly two criteria, namely the level of integration with the neo-liberal world economy, and the similarity of their political system to the liberal democratic countries in the Global North. Such a hegemon-centric view of the global order believes that the decline of one hegemon means confrontations and conflicts and will always lead to the rise of another (Keohane 1980, 1984; Gilpin 1975, 1981; Kindleberger 1987). In this teleological destiny, nationalism around the world will always repeat the European historical experience, leading to expansionist aggression, causing havoc to people and the world (Kedourie 1961). A state will either strive to become a regional or global hegemon and succeed, or it will be placed under the dominance of a rising hegemon.

The prevalence of this hegemonic-centric worldview corresponds with the ascent of a unipolar world order mainly under the US hegemony. This is depicted as an ‘era of globalisation’. However, international institutions continue to be strategic instruments of US will. The American state is undisputedly the ‘hegemon of the system’ that exercises its power through military intervention, enormous nuclear and conventional weapon arsenals, the dominance of the dollar in international finance, and the selective deregulation of markets (Strange 1982).

By beginning to discuss the diverse experiences of modernisation, manifested through the state-making and nation-building history of the Global South countries, we hope to move away from the hegemon-centric worldview and truly challenge its epistemology. One of our aspirations is to democratise theories by engaging with the practices of modernisation by peoples beyond the Euromerican historical tradition. We aim to explore beyond the limitation of normative thinking and incorporate dialectics into our analysis. Hence, we propose to focus on the relations between different forces and the constructive power manifested in the process of interaction. In this case, world system theory and its related dependency theory become the analytical foundation for the Global South, considered as a viable category beyond the hegemon-centric and economic-determinist understanding of the world. The underdeveloped status of the Global South is an inherited structural component of the capitalist world system. Without addressing the structural problems of the hegemon-centric capitalist world system, it is impossible to resolve or even alleviate the inequality and the undemocratic nature of the existing world order.

Organisation of this volume

This volume encompasses a broad spectrum in terms of space, time and issues. It deals with all parts of the Global South (Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe); it raises economic, political, environmental and cultural questions; it looks back into the past and investigates the present – but, in both cases, from the perspective of a greater future.

The first group of articles discusses general issues: the waves of anti-systemic movements since 1870; the comparative achievements of the socialism-oriented countries in terms of the population’s standard of living since 1960; and the question of economic management during a transition from capitalism to socialism in a periphery country, using the example of Cuba. This is followed by articles about the emancipatory movements of Latin America, in general, and the Amazon region, in particular. While these articles deal mostly with the economic base, the last group of articles concentrates on the superstructure, discussing the relevance of culture, ideology and education, based on the experiences and challenges of consciousness formation in Rojava, China and Africa. All of the articles contribute to our understanding about what kind of counter-hegemonic and anti-capitalist movements, and with what results, have been influencing the ongoing change of our world.

In his paper, Chungse Jung renews the discussion of the antisystemic movements, invented by Immanuel Wallerstein, and redefines them as emancipatory struggles in the Global South (Jung 2023). He investigates the two threads of the movements, and the struggles against exploitation and exclusion, from an international standpoint. The movements against exploitation include those mobilisations that aim at ending or mitigating economic oppression, such as poverty, austerity measures, dispossession of people of their land, and other forms of primitive accumulation. Struggles against exclusion denote those local, national or international movements that contest the political subordination of people, mainly through racist and ethnic discrimination. For the empirical analysis regarding the number and nature of anti-systemic movements between 1870 and 2016, the author collected data from The New York Times. He found four great waves of popular protests in the Global South. In all of them, the most characteristic theme of the protests was the struggle against exclusion. While the proportion of struggles against exploitation in the protests reached its peak in the middle of the twentieth century and declined afterwards, the rate of the struggles against exclusion was the highest during the 2010s. The increasing importance of the struggle against exclusion coincides with the growing signs of the decline of the US hegemony. However, in the era of neo-liberalism, the anti-systemic movements as a whole weakened and, by the end of the examined period, a new wave did not unfold. We will likely experience a new wave in the coming years, as the contradictions between the imperialist forces and the rising powers of the Global South sharpen. Chungse Jung’s paper also demonstrates that nationalism has always been at the forefront of the anti-colonialist liberation struggles, and, even today, nationalist and ethnic conflicts are strongly connected to the states’ struggles for resources. In our age of accelerated change in the world system, we can count on a new rise of nationalism. We note that this phenomenon relates to the need of states for independence, which is underpinned by the wish of all nations for liberty. Whether nationalism, awakened in this way, becomes a framework of hatred, enmity and xenophobia or is guided towards the feeling of solidarity with other nations depends on which political forces take the lead in the struggle for independence. To this question, Yin Zhiguang’s article (Yin 2023) gives an answer.

Alexandra Arabadzhyan discusses the past experiences of socialism-oriented countries, but from another angle (Arabadzhyan 2023). She investigates the problem of macroeconomic management through the Great Economic Debate in Cuba in the 1960s. From her paper, we come to know Che Guevara as a political economist who studied Marxism assiduously and applied his knowledge immediately and consequentially to the transition of Cuba from dependent, colonial capitalism to socialism. Arabadzhyan presents Guevara’s position on the role of the market during the socialist construction. Following Marx, Guevara defined socialism as a society in which the capitalist commodity production is abolished, and a strong state works for the society (the working people) with the help of central planning. Guevara’s starting point in the debate was that the rule of value belongs to capitalism, so its role should diminish as the construction of socialism progresses, and in no way should market mechanisms be allowed to dominate the socialist construction. Guevara saw the use of the law of value, in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, as a major step backward – but nevertheless a necessary one because of the low concentration of production. However, he also thought that, as the market logic and capitalist values did not disappear even after its industrialisation, the USSR would return to capitalism. In the same vein, he opposed the contemporary pro-market economic reforms in Eastern Europe, because these implemented the profit motive in state-owned companies and, through decentralisation, destroyed the hierarchic structure of central planning. He was convinced that, instead of the law of value feeding the interests of the individual, the socialist morale should drive people towards a greater and better performance during the transition to socialism. Guevara’s insistence on both the determining role of central planning, and the crucial importance of the socialist mind-set on the long road to socialism is a hypothetical message to the Global South that is worth considering, in light of both the collapse of the socialist experiment in Eastern Europe, and the achievements of China over the last century.

Bruno De Conti and Patricia Villen start their article by explaining why it is misleading to interpret the rise of the Latin American emancipatory movements as a product of the global neo-liberal turn in the 1980s (De Conti and Villen 2023). They emphasise that neo-liberalism worsened, but did not create, the contradictions of peripheral capitalism. The Latin American social movements are deeply rooted in the historical heritage of colonialism and neo-colonialism, which, in turn, determined the path of the integration of the subcontinent into the global capitalist division of labour. The pressure of capitalism on the working classes of the Global North has become more tangible as neo-liberalism has gained ground, but this pressure was a reality in the everyday life of people in the Global South well before that. The most authentic face of capitalism is seen in the periphery of the capitalist world order. The authors describe the main characteristics of the Latin American societies, which derived from their colonial pasts and resulted in structural underdevelopment. These features, for example the concentration of lands, the oligarchic rulers, the monoculture, the genocide of the native population and the relentless influence of the US, have led the Latin American societies towards an externally oriented, dependent development. De Conti and Villen provide examples for the most important movements in Latin America, which are organised around four issues: livelihood, territory, ethnic identity and nature. Through their descriptions of the landless and homeless workers’ movement, the Zapatistas, and the Buen Vivir movement, the authors show how these have grown beyond their original, immediate goals and arrived at an attitude of criticism against the colonial structures of capitalism. These various movements challenge cultural, economic and political aspects of the Latin American reality and have a tendency to unite in a complex struggle against all socio-economic and environmental problems produced by the global capitalist accumulation.

The lesson shown to us by De Conti and Villen is very much in line with the conclusion of Gabriel Domingues and Sérgio Sauer, who found that the different streams of resistance in the Brazilian Amazon region culminated in a common anti-systemic frontier (Domingues and Sauer 2023). The authors state that the indigenist, environmentalist and peasant organisations, mobilisations and other grassroots activities originated in the nineteenth century but gained momentum after the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s. Their struggle has evolved with varying degrees of success depending on the objectives (class content) of the governments in power. The strengthening of the agrarian extractive frontier after Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the 2018 elections has accelerated the cooperation between the free streams of movements and has led to the creation of what the authors call a socio-environmental frontier. On top of that, the global relevance of the tropical forest extinction has allied local resistance in the Brazilian region with the environmental organisations of the industrialised countries and has given new tools to the movements to resist the ‘predatory developmentalist model’ of the local and national elites. The concentration of efforts in the common socio-­environmental frontier has yielded fruit – for example, numerous protected areas have been created in the Amazon – but these improvements are far from enough to change the basic socio-economic relations, or the superstructure, both of which work for the survival of anti-social and environmentally unsustainable modes of production. There is a risk, the authors warn, that local initiatives and communities will fall into the trap of the market logic that surrounds their activity. In this respect the accumulation and concentration of capital under the control of the ‘green’ multinational organisations of the Global North poses one of the biggest threats.

We know from Marx that in every class society, the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class. This truth is excellently illustrated by Elise Boyle Espinosa and Adam Ronan. Their article (Boyle Espinosa and Ronan 2023) is about the importance of education through the example of the self-declared Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, better known as ‘Rojava’. The authors describe how education managed to create a political community that is different from the nationalist-capitalist mode of social reproduction. Their knowledge about the topic is based on their fieldwork in mid-2018, when they visited Kurdish-majority cities and conducted individual and group interviews. Because they were located in four different states and subjected to oppression and nationalist policies, a logical choice for the Kurdish movement for emancipation has been an ideology that seeks emancipation through ecology, Jineology (the science of women) and pluralism, in place of the traditional ideologies that might guide a nation. On these pillars of a democratic nation, elaborated by Abdullah Öcalan, the ideology of a multicultural society is built. The ethical values, including the traditional ‘equality, democracy, freedom’, and the resistance against oppression are the foundations of education in Rojava. Their education is multicultural and multi-lingual. Representation, participation and decentralisation are not only incorporated in the curriculum but also practised in the everyday life of the schools and the whole autonomous region. Although the number of schools under Rojava’s administration has increased, the attempts to destroy the educational system have persisted and created ‘a war of education’. The schools of Rojava are not officially recognised by Syria, and do not promise good career opportunities to students. However, those who adopt this ideology of emancipation become soldiers of a better society and will support the revolution in Rojava.

Zhiguang Yin continues the discussion on the role of education in the socialist nation-building of the Third World (Yin 2023). His article focuses on cultural aspects in the formation of international solidarity among peoples of the Third World, fighting against imperial oppression. The author leads us to China in the late 1950s and describes several concrete events that illustrate how the Afro–Asian solidarity movement functioned within the framework of the Great Leap Forward of Culture and served to build a progressive, internationalist, national identity of Chinese people. Today, in the age of accelerated change in the world order, the lessons of the state- and nation-making processes after the Second World War in the Third World are coming back to the fore. National independence was the core issue in that era. However, the formation of nations and states in the Third World has always been different from that of the ‘First World’ during the nineteenth century. While the latter was built on war, the former involved nation-building with the leadership of strong governments, helped by transnational solidarity and mutual aid, mainly within the Afro–Asian world. There, the nationalism of peoples fighting for their independence has always been interwoven with internationalism and respect for other nations. Another lesson from Yin’s paper is that such nation-building can only be successful if the state mobilises people for this purpose by raising awareness about anti-imperialist internationalism. If, in the process of nation-making, people are able to identify themselves as a population in a very similar position to the people of other nations, the national feeling will never become xenophobic nationalism. If this ‘similar position’ of people is understood to mean a similar place in the world order, their hatred will be directed against the inequality between nations and classes itself, rather than against the other nations as such. The leaders of the revolutions that have managed to stay on their feet, like Lenin, Mao, Guevara, or Kim Il Sung, have all emphasised that, in the transition from capitalism to socialism, the elements of the superstructure, like politics, culture and the state of mind of the citizens in general, gain priority over the economy. This is also true if we consider the transition on a global level, from a world order in which hegemony prevails to another that is founded on the equality of nations. From this point of view, the Afro–Asian cultural cooperation after the Second World War played an important role in the process of the transformation of the global order. The Movement helped to create an alternative vision to the Anglo-Saxon narratives of modernisation and thereby facilitated the process of cultural decolonisation. This leads us to the conclusion that the nationalism of the people of the Third World can only exist as an anti-imperialist, internationalist interpretation of ‘the national pride’.

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s article is also related to the problem of changing the world by changing the minds of the oppressed (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2023). He interprets the change necessary for the global order as re-envisioning the world – ‘reworlding’, as he calls it – from the perspective of the Global South, a viewpoint in direct opposition to that of their colonisers’ Eurocentric reality and worldview. We call this process the emancipatory movement of the Global South, or, to use the author’s own term, the Global South ‘project’. This project takes many forms, ideological as well as material, from the formation of aspirations and ideologies to waging protests and revolutions, but all forms are united in their counter-hegemonic focus and rejection of the colonialist model of the world. Ndlovu-Gatsheni goes on to describe the Africa-related movements, ideologies and activism in greater detail. He chooses the Haitian Revolution as the starting point of the effort to envision and rebuild a world outside the colonisers’ prejudice and limitations. The Haitian Revolution represented an anti-racist and egalitarian worldview at the dawn of capitalism, and it provides an alternative to the Eurocentric epistemology of the world. We must note that since the time of the revolution, the imperialist forces have not allowed the Haitian people to get free from neo-colonial subordination and form their own destiny. Their fight continues to this day. The Haitian people’s more-than-a-century-long, almost constant struggle combines peoples’ desire for independence, liberty and revolution, and so it has become a perennial symbol of the fight against colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism and the oppressive world order of capitalism in general.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni claims that the Haitian Revolution became the basis of the Black Radical Tradition, which has formed the epistemological framework of many initiatives such as Black Feminism, Negritude, The Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism, Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism, Black Lives Matter, and others. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s article contributes to our understanding about how the racist ideology, promoting the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon world built by the ‘white’ people, has left the oppressed populations no alternative other than ‘to assert their being’, by considering themselves a Black/Negro/African race whose destiny it is to shatter the unjust world order imposed on mankind by the white colonisers, and to create a new civilisation, free of oppression. The revolutionary forces in the Global North, as well as globally, seem to pay more attention to the revolutions and wars for the independence of Asia (China, Viet Nam, Korea, etc.) and Latin America (Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.) than to the emancipatory movements rooted in Africa.

Conclusions

Taken together, the articles in this issue demonstrate that no emancipatory movement has existed in the Third World/Global South without an inherent international vein. Internationalism is in the very nature of the social movements of these countries, even if the movements started with different original foci. They all are rooted in the experiment of colonisation and the struggle against its long-lasting effects. Unlike the social movements of the Global North, where the efforts of the working classes for self-protection relate exclusively to exploitation by their own capitalist class, the social movements of the Global South cannot but target both their own national capitalist classes and the transnational capitalist class, of which the national capitalist classes are appendixes but also competitors. In this way, the working classes of both the Global North and the Global South are opposing the same global ruling class, but from different positions. The working classes of the Global North are situated between the global ruling class and the exploited masses of the global periphery. Exploited as they may be, the working classes of the Global North, as a whole, belong to the global labour aristocracy by the mere existence of Western imperialism. Engels already realised in 1858 that

… the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course, justified to some extent. (Engels 1858, 343 - emphasis in the original)

Half a century later, Lenin observed the rise in the number of imperialist countries and concluded that ‘A privileged upper stratum of the proletariat in the imperialist countries lives partly at the expense of hundreds of millions in the uncivilised nations’ (Lenin 1916, 107). Since then, the capital accumulation on the global scale has deepened, expanded and strengthened this mechanism. So, the historical task of changing from a hierarchic and hegemonic world to an egalitarian one is left to the Global South. However, as this challenge from the Global South strengthens, so the fight, put up by the decaying imperialism to preserve its hegemony, intensifies. This inevitably leads to increased pressure on the working people of the Global North. This we have seen in the last year, watching the boomerang effects of the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia, and in the growing popular protests against them in Europe.

Our only hope can be that the multifaceted emancipatory movements of the Global South continue to strengthen and integrate until the point at which they are powerful enough to force the US-led imperialism to back away from its hegemonic position and allow the nations to establish their own true sovereignty. Reaching this point would open the way for a multipolar world, ‘where many worlds fit’ – as the Zapatistas say – and where socialism would be possible.

As Zhou Enlai stated in his Bandung Speech in 1955, with more and more ‘Afro-Asian nations freeing themselves from the constraint of colonialism’, the ‘Afro-Asian region’ has transformed tremendously. The Afro-Asian peoples’ wish to regain ‘control of their own fates’ after a ‘long struggle’ against colonialism symbolises that ‘yesterday’s Asia and Africa’ are being made anew. The common historical experience of suffering and struggle enables the Afro–Asian peoples to envision their volonté générale to achieve ‘freedom and independence’, and to ‘change the socio-economical backwardness caused by the colonial rule’ (Enlai 1955, 112–114). In this long historical process of transformation, the Afro-Asian peoples have developed a sense of ‘empathy and solicitude’ that enables the Afro-Asian nations to peacefully coexist and achieve ‘friendly cooperation’ (Enlai 1955, 120).

In the first few decades after World War II, a large percentage of humanity believed in the ideal of a new global order, in which the principle of sovereignty was not a synonym for hegemony. Nation-building initiatives were understood in the context of building a better future for the world. Ordinary people around the globe were engaged in discussions about international affairs, daring to believe that they could be the ‘driving force behind the making of history’. The vision embedded in the Third World movement might be idealistic in the eyes of today’s people, notably through the lenses of political realism and pragmatism. However, in the context of the 1950s, when the war-torn world was eagerly redeeming itself from its brutal hegemonic past, the discourse of internationalism indeed provided new hope for people who believed in the new world order as depicted in the United Nations Charter. It was in this moment of international solidarity that the need for redemption, transcendence and ultimately salvation was presented to the people through political practices. Today, the emancipation efforts seem to be intensifying at all levels.

Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to Madeleine Hatfield and Catherine Bentley for their patience and tireless assistance during the preparation of this issue, to the reviewers of the articles for their valuable comments and to Melanie Slater for her dedicated work as a language editor.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annamária Artner

Annamária Artner is a political economist, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of World Economics of the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, and Professor at Milton Friedman University, Budapest, Hungary. She has studied imperialism, transformation of the world system, global capital accumulation, labour markets and crises and their socio-economic consequences. Her recent publications are ‘A New World Is Born: Russia’s Anti-imperialist Fight in Ukraine’ (International Critical Thought, 2023), ‘Samir Amin and the Changing of the World’ (International Critical Thought, 2022), ‘Planning and Social Change’ (Critique, 2021), ‘Can China Lead the Change of the World?’ (Third World Quarterly, 2020) and Capital, Labour and Crisis in the Era of Globalisation (a monograph in Hungarian, 2014).

Zhiguang Yin

Zhiguang Yin is a Professor of International Politics at the Fudan University. His research interests lie mainly in the areas of Chinese modern intellectual and legal history, ethnic minority policy, nineteenth- to twentieth-century history of international relations, imperial history, and Sino–Middle Eastern relations. His research and teaching centre on theoretical interests in understanding the making of the modern world order through the dynamic tension between domination and resistance. His current projects include studies of liberal imperialism and Afro–Asian solidarity movements, with a particular interest in Sino–African relations, Sino–Middle Eastern relations and pan-Africanism. His most recent monographs include: A New World: Afro–Asian Solidarity and the PRC’s Imagination of Global Order (Chinese, 2022) and Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2014).

Notes

1 The most well-known exponent of this view is Francis Fukuyama, with his triumphant claim of the ‘end of history’ in 1989 (Fukuyama 1989). For a detailed survey of how the development theory and conservative theorists in North America and Western Europe pushed out the ‘Third World’ as an analytical and political category in their discussions, see Berger (1994).