The possibilities of regionalism

The resurgence of the ideas of multilateralism, regionalism and non-alignment indicates a movement away from the rigidities of unipolar globalisation, an agenda driven by the United States on behalf of international capital. Reproduced below is an excerpt from a report by Tricontinental: Institute for Global Research which traces the possible contours of a more balanced and development-oriented international order.

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SINCE the turn of the century, scholars of international relations have contemplated the emergence of a ‘world of regions’ or of ‘regional worlds’. Some parts of the world, notably Latin America and Africa, have robust traditions of regional consciousness that trace back to anti-colonial movements and carry the names of that history, such as Bolivarianism and Pan-Africanism. In other areas, the legacy of regionalism is more uneven. For example, the potential of Pan-Asianism was greatly damaged by the record of Japanese imperialism during the 1930s and 1940s, the political tensions between China and India as well as India and Pakistan, the coup in Indonesia in 1965, and the US war on Vietnam (1955-75).

None of these regions, whether Latin America, Africa or Asia, have been brought together by intrinsic characteristics. Rather, their regional dynamics have emerged from their political histories, which, in turn, have produced and amplified cultural unities. To develop and solidify regionalism, it is necessary to construct both inter-state and people-centred institutions.

Regionalism by itself is neither inherently progressive nor reactionary. During the period of decolonisation in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a serious dispute arose between the formerly colonised states and the imperialist bloc over the nature of the new regional architecture that needed to be constructed. The imperialist bloc developed a regional state system premised on military pacts and on trade agreements that advantaged corporations domiciled in the Western world. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), established in 1949, and the European Economic Community, established in 1957, shaped Europe into a region that could be integrated into the world order in a way that would be advantageous for the United States. Similar moves were afoot in Latin America, with the establishment of the Organisation of American States (1948); in Asia, with the creation of the South-East Asian Treaty Organisation, or Manila Pact (1954); and in the Middle East, with the Central Treaty Organisation, or Baghdad Pact (1955).

Meanwhile, those formerly colonised states that did not want to enter these neocolonial structures created their own multilateral institutions, which were not yet organised regionally but alongside and through the United Nations system. These included the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), founded in 1961, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), established in 1964. At that time, no country in the formerly colonised world was prepared to anchor a more substantial regional process, since most of these nations already bore the enormous tasks of protecting their newly won political sovereignty while simultaneously constructing a new social order that advanced the dignity of their populations.

Early attempts at regional integration were assisted by the United Nations, which, for example, helped set up economic commissions in Asia and the Pacific (the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 1947); Europe (the Economic Commission for Europe, 1947); Latin America and the Caribbean (the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean or CEPAL, 1948); Africa (the Economic Commission for Africa, 1958); and Western Asia (the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, 1973). The charge for these commissions has been to promote regional trade and development, but not to challenge the capitalist world system in any meaningful way.

These institutions emerged alongside political manoeuvres inspired by the historic Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, which called for the formerly colonised states to cooperate in a range of areas, from economics to culture, and to adopt a non-aligned posture regarding the Cold War. Influenced by CEPAL and UNCTAD, the Latin American and Caribbean states created several trade and development blocs, including the Latin American Free Trade Association (1960), the Central American Common Market (1960), the Andean Pact (1969), and the Caribbean Community and Common Market (1973). A more radical regional vision was put forward by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of post-independence Ghana, who called for the creation of ‘an African common market of three hundred million producers and consumers’ that would break the ‘artificial boundaries’ created by the former colonial powers. This ambitious proposal sought to transform the infrastructure networks of African countries away from being designed to remove raw materials from the continent and towards the production of internal markets for goods and services for the continent.

Significant debates in the Third World developed around the themes of dependency and development. Namely, would formerly colonised countries be able to develop their economies and societies from their ‘peripheral’ position within the world capitalist system, or would they remain mired in a state of dependence and subordination to the ‘core’ imperialist powers? A range of thinkers wrote about the developmental constraints imposed by the continued existence of colonial structures and the newly emerging neocolonial system, from the Brazilian founders of dependency theory (Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotônio Dos Santos and Vânia Bambirra) to Indian Marxists (such as Ashok Mitra), Caribbean Marxists (such as Eric Williams and Walter Rodney) and African Marxists (such as Kwame Nkrumah and Issa Shivji).

For these thinkers, both endogenous factors (property relations and social hierarchies) and exogenous factors (imperialism), in different ways, prevented any breakthroughs from taking place both in countries that relied upon the extraction of primary commodities through agromining and in countries that had been able to develop industrial production. As a result, the agenda for national development and regionalism was centred around attempts to delink from the logic of capitalist accumulation on a world scale, which was intrinsically structured to privilege the core imperialist countries and Western multinational corporations.

The collective political experiences and understandings of the newly independent countries were consolidated in a UN General Assembly resolution passed in 1974 known as the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which called on the world to build a new global system ‘based on equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest, and cooperation among all States’. This resolution, alongside the UN Environment Programme (1972) and UNCTAD’s Cocoyoc Declaration (1974), directly challenged the world capitalist system and re-envisioned development as centring the needs of humanity, not capital.

These political manoeuvres floundered on the rocks of the Third World debt crisis, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of Western-driven globalisation and neoliberalism. The integration of the formerly colonised world into the financial and industrial systems dominated by Western capital and multinational corporations undermined the promise of social development. In 1982, the bankruptcy of Mexico sounded the alarm on the enormity of the debt crisis and the decades of political disorientation that would follow. From 1980 to 2015, the external debt of the Global South increased by 900%, with external debt repayments to wealthy bondholders of the Global North estimated to have reached a total of $2.6 to $3.4 trillion per year for low-income countries in 2021-22 alone. Neoliberal globalisation eviscerated the possibility of the world moving towards the values proposed by the NIEO and increased the dependency of the poorer nations until the start of the great recession in 2007. After the fall of the Soviet Union, globalisation was organised by neoliberal austerity states, with the United States operating as the arbiter of the international system – a dynamic called unipolarity.

However, the tide began to turn in the early 21st century. In 2003, then President of South Africa and NAM Chair Thabo Mbeki attempted to advance a peaceful solution against the US government’s drive towards war against Iraq. In an attempt to hamper these efforts, Washington tried – but failed – to pressure South Africa to expel Iraq’s ambassador. Across the world, millions of people took to the streets in massive demonstrations against war and in favour of a peaceful settlement. Undeterred, the United States went to war, disregarding both popular opinion and the NAM’s efforts.

That same year, the US and Europeans again refused to honestly discuss issues of development and trade with the South at the World Trade Organisation (WTO)’s ministerial conference in Cancun, insisting that subsidies to agriculture in the North did not violate their own free trade nostrums. This incensed the countries of the South. Together, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, along with the group of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc, resisted pressure from the European Union’s Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy to ‘steer’ the organisation towards a ‘compromise’ (i.e., victory for the North). The South prevailed, leaving Lamy to lament that the WTO ‘remains a medieval organisation’, by which he meant that it was not sufficiently pliable to Northern direction.

In the context of the debates around war and trade issues, the emerging states of the South began to explore the creation of new entities. One such effort was the IBSA Dialogue Forum, launched by India, Brazil and South Africa in June 2003, bringing together one country from each of the Asian, African and Latin American continents. Complementarities in these countries led them to increase their mutual trade and to work together at international forums to advance their interests and those of the South in general. Over the course of several meetings, the IBSA Dialogue Forum produced the foundation of a new intellectual agenda built on the concepts of non-alignment and regionalism. Brazil brought the Latin American experience to the table, notably the agenda of integration put forward by Venezuela’s then President Hugo Chávez (which later inspired the creation of the political bloc CELAC in 2010). Shortly thereafter, in 2006, the 14th NAM Summit in Havana saw more discussion of regionalism than at any meeting previously. Regionalism and non-alignment again appeared as central intellectual themes later the same year when China and Russia joined Brazil, India and South Africa to form the new major world grouping BRICS. Presently, the BRICS countries account for 40% of the global population and 25% of global GDP (though the latter figure also rises to 40% if the BRICS is expanded to include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Algeria).

The concepts of multilateralism and non-alignment anchored these new regional processes. The term multilateralism emerged after the Second World War to describe processes where three or more institutions (especially states) operated together around an agreed upon set of laws or procedures. The concept of non-alignment arose in the 1950s during the Cold War and was used by the post-colonial states to indicate that they would not join either the US or Soviet blocs but would instead pursue their own independent developmental agendas. These two concepts have re-emerged in recent decades amid the attrition of US unipolar power.

Regionalism and non-aligned multilateralism are the consensus categories of state-oriented Southern institutions such as BRICS, IBSA and the G77. For the nations of the South, the era of US primacy, sharpened during the Bush years, has to be rolled back. The overwhelming dominance of the United States has constricted policy space for economic and social planning and institutions and has led the views of the world’s majority to be disregarded on matters of global governance, suffocating developmental agendas in the South. Unless developing countries are content to be a spoke in the wheel of the US machinations, their interests are entirely set aside.

The concepts of regionalism and non-aligned multilateralism were given a decisive thrust in the 2000s by the work of Latin American countries to construct new regional institutions. At the same time, other countries in the South were contemplating the limitations of their own regional organisations, such as the League of Arab States, African Union, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Although these latter institutions had absorbed the language of regionalism and non-aligned multilateralism, unlike the Latin American project they were unable to craft a fresh, effective policy direction for their regions or substantially remove the influence of external actors in their political processes. Nonetheless, the successful experience in Latin America and the emergence of China as a new major power have provided a significant stimulus to the ideas of regionalism and multilateralism.

Today, there is once again a robust discussion in the South about the nature of development and the potential of multilateral regionalism and non-alignment. Scholars such as Feng Shaolei, the director of the Collaborative Innovation Centre for Peripheral Cooperation and Development at East China Normal University, and María Elena Álvarez Acosta of the Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI) in Havana, Cuba, make the case that the US unilateral sanctions policy and the war in Ukraine are accelerating the drive towards non-aligned regionalism. Indira López Argüelles of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs also notes that this new regionalism appears to be grounded in the concept of non-alignment, highlighting the use of this term by Latin American regional processes to refer to ‘economic self-determination’ and ‘regional complementarity’.

In September 2022, the United Nations General Assembly added a new item to the agenda of the UN system: globalisation and interdependence. At the core of this agenda item is the need to revive a discussion around the New International Economic Order, which has been discussed each year since 1974 only to be relegated to the dustbin of the UN chambers. Now, with the rise of a widespread awareness that the neoliberal order has failed the world’s people, there is a renewed hunger to debate the ideas of the NIEO and forge a new kind of globalisation and interdependence.

In December 2022, the UN’s Second Committee, which deals with global economic and financial matters, submitted a draft resolution to be debated in the UN General Assembly that brings attention to the principles put forth by the NIEO. A majority of the UN member states expressed overwhelming agreement with the resolution, including a paragraph that is of special concern to our discussion here, which recognises ‘the role played by regional, subregional, and interregional cooperation as well as regional economic integration, based on equality of partnership, in strengthening international cooperation with the objective of facilitating economic coordination and cooperation for development, the achievement of development goals, and the sharing of best practices and knowledge’. The ideas of regionalism and interdependence, on the basis of inter-state equality, are on the table at the highest levels of the UN.

Revivals

In March 2021, 16 UN member states came together to establish the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations. This body includes several countries that have been subjected to unilateral, illegal US sanctions, including Algeria, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Nicaragua, Russia and Venezuela. The focus of the Group of Friends is to champion the foundational principles of the UN system, namely non-aligned multilateralism and diplomacy against unilateralism and militarism. Two important points need to be considered about the emergence of the Group of Friends:

1. First, the Group of Friends contends that there is no need to create a new world system, but merely to allow for the proper functioning of the original postwar and post-colonial world. This system was built upon the international consensus to address the horrors of the Second World War, including both Nazism and the use of atomic weapons, and upon the post-colonial consensus in the Third World to establish state sovereignty. This system is rooted in the UN Charter and, importantly, in the Final Document of the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, which established sovereignty and dignity as its main concepts (sections 13a and 13b). An important attempt to realise these concepts was the NAM-initiated NIEO, passed by the UN General Assembly in 1974 and subsequently rejected by the United States and its allies, who instead championed a neoliberal world order. The revival of the NIEO is part of today’s new atmosphere.

2. The emergence of a multilateral grouping such as the Group of Friends raises the question of how to begin to understand the post-unipolar world order. One school of thought argues that we will enter a multipolar world order, where different poles will be established. Evidence for this school is unclear, since, other than the United States, no major power is seeking to establish an extra-territorial reach or constitute itself as a pole (as was made clear at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China, for example). Furthermore, a multipolar world is not necessarily an antidote to militarism, since it could intensify rivalries and, therefore, warfare. A second school of thought makes the case that the actual movement of history favours the creation of regional blocs that would like to integrate with other regional blocs and countries in a mutually beneficial fashion. Evidence for this is robust, such as the creation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA, 2004) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, 2010) in Latin America, as well as the Shanghai Cooperative Organisation in 2001 in Asia. Chapter VIII of the UN Charter endorses the growth of ‘regional arrangements’ to further the ‘maintenance of international peace and security’. These regional networks are not exclusive power blocs that are designed to intensify conflict, but arrangements to improve regional trade, manage regional conflicts, and develop cross-regional programmes to build schemes for mutual benefit.

The resurgence of the ideas of multilateralism, regionalism and non-alignment indicates a movement away from the rigidities of unipolar globalisation, an agenda driven by the United States on behalf of international capital. These ideas announce the possibility of sovereignty – that states, and even regional alignments, can be free, to a greater extent, from the pressures of the United States and its instruments [including the International Monetary Fund (IMF)].

But sovereignty by itself does not mean that the conditions of everyday life would be improved from their state of despair; for that, an additional term is necessary: dignity. Sovereignty creates the opportunity for a state to craft policies that enhance the dignity of people, but it does not, by itself, guarantee dignity. The terms sovereignty and dignity populate the important treaties of our time, such as the UN Charter and the NAM Final Document. These concepts – sovereignty and dignity – enable people’s movements, whether struggling for or in state power, to fight against the suffocation of unipolarity and against the wretchedness of inequality.         

This is an extract from ‘Sovereignty, Dignity, and Regionalism in the New International Order’, a Dossier (No. 62, March 2023) published by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research in collaboration with the Centre for International Policy Research. The full report with references is available at https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-regionalism-new-international-order/

    Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international institute seeking to bridge academic production and political and social movements in order to promote critical thinking and stimulate debates and research with an emancipatory perspective that serves the people’s aspirations.

*Third World Resurgence No. 355, 2023, pp 28-31