Kommentar af Tony Payne
Betegnelser som Nord og Syd er totalt antikverede – alligevel falder FNs Udviklingsprogram i faldgruben i sin seneste årsrapport om menneskelig livskvalitet.
The title of the UNDP’s latest Human Development Report (HDR), published just a couple of months ago, proclaimed ‘The Rise of the South’.
The wording was designed, no doubt, to catch the headlines, and it did so very successfully.
It also has to be said that the report told a good and very important story. It argued that ‘the rise of the South is unprece-dented (uden fortilfælde) in speed and scale’.
It was ‘the story of a dramatic expansion of individual capabilities and sustained (vedvarende) human development progress in the countries that are home to the vast majority of the world’s people’.
Lokomotiverne Brasilien, Kina og Indien
At the heart of this process was the performance of the three leading economies of the South, Brazil, China and India, and the fact, advertised prominently in the report, that their combined economic output is now equal to the total GDP of the longstanding industrial powers of the North, namely, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States.
But other countries had made great advances too, including Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey, and a number of smaller economies, such as Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Rwanda and Tunisia, had also notched up ‘substantial progress’.
All in all, the HDR identified more than 40 countries in the South that had experienced since 1990 significantly greater gains in the Human Development Index (HDI) than would have been predicted based on their previous HDI performance.
A fascinating scattergram (diagram) presented in the report plotted the performance of these countries on the basis of a comparison of 1990 with 2012, dividing them into a ‘highlighted 18’, other ‘big improvers’ and the rest.
This was the UNDP’s evidence, in a nutshell, for the claim that something really important and exciting has been going on over the past 20 years or so across the South as a whole.
Nord og Syd blev opfundet årtier tilbage
I do not quibble (pindehugger) at all with the evidence and even less with the implication drawn from it, which is that a lot of poor countries are now generating wealth that can be used to underpin (bygge videre på) human progress.
But I do wonder about the language that is still being deployed by UNDP.
The terminology of North and South dates back to the first report of the Brandt Commission published in 1980.
It deployed that metaphor (sprogbillede) to capture in simple, binary (dobbelte), geographical terms an analysis of the global political economy that was rooted in a perceived division between a rich, exploitative, Northern core and a poor, exploited, Southern periphery.
Since then, the term South (or, more confusingly still, the Global South, which is after all a contradiction (selvmodsigelse) in terms) has always been used to lump together for ease of reference (nemheds skyld) a whole bunch of countries and peoples who are said to fit into the world order in a disadvantaged fashion and suffer the consequences of doing so.
Forældet billede af verden i dag
HDR 2013 shows unequivocally (uimodsigeligt) that this is an utterly out-of-date portrayal of the world.
This is great news, both analytically and substantively. But why not go the whole hog (hele vejen), as it were, and draw the further, and surely obvious, conclusion to be discerned (uddraget) from the evidence, which is that the South has now disappeared, precisely because it has grown.
By the same token (ligeledes): what is the ‘Northness’ of a North characterised by financial crisis, slow growth and in many parts of the EU continuing recession?
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Tony Payne er professor i “Political Economy” på Universitet i Sheffield i Storbritannien og med-direktør for Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI).
