Russia in Global Affairs

For citation, please use:
Telin, K.O., 2025. Deconstruction of the South, Or Goodbye, Compass! Russia in Global Affairs, 23(4), pp. 67–72. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2025-23-4-67-72

Discussions about the fate of world politics generate new spatial conceptions with amazing regularity. One is the conception of the Global South, which surprisingly includes some countries in the Northern Hemisphere. Now the term Global East is also coming into daily use, as if the South alone were not enough. And it is somehow awkward to speak of the West and North, as the former will soon be as old as the countless assertions of its decay, while the latter is increasingly defined as including Australia and Israel. The United Nations openly admits that Global North and Global South refer to the developed and developing worlds. One of the first reports to shift to a ‘compass-based’ categorization was published in 1980 by the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, chaired by Willy Brandt (1980). Under the current circumstances, however, such retro-futurism has political risks.

COLONIAL DECOLONIZATION

The creative and even visionary impulses of IR researchers cannot be constrained, but their readers, and politics and economics above all, cannot keep up with their neologisms. Societies across the world may now discover overnight that they have changed civilizational affiliation or geographical location. One hears of Greater Europe and Greater Eurasia, of Euro-Pacific powers and the Indo-Pacific, of Afro-Asia and even Mackinder’s Heartland. Exploring the images of the Global North and the Global South in sociological research, Ivan Kislenko (2020) notes multiple motives for the division, ranging from a distinction between rich and poor (which is quite strange, since Uruguay, for instance, is richer than Serbia (World Bank, 2024) to a revision of the Third World concept (permitting polemics like Beijing’s claim that “China breathes the same breath with other developing countries and pursues a shared future with them” (Xinhua, 2025)).

Oddly enough, such statements have connotations of colonialism in two respects.

Firstly, a given constructed category may incorporate countries with completely divergent economies, histories, and geographies. Similar experiments—e.g., forcing everything from Turkey to China onto the Procrustean bed of the East—have taken place in the past, and are reasonably called Orientalism. Is there any heuristic potential in the term Global South, or at least the possibility of a fresh look at long-standing problems and questions? Obviously not. The term has purpose only within a narrative about hegemony—whether to criticize the existing hegemony, which purportedly humiliates and limits the Global South, or to assert a new hegemony, which the Global South will definitely defend as a just world order. In the old days, colonial empires used the image of the East to supplement and complete their own identities. Does the current appeal to the South not similarly seek to inflate one’s ego as a defender of the oppressed, a tribune of the unrecognized, a leader of the World Majority?

Secondly, in the best traditions of Gayatri Spivak’s policy essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, discussions about the Global South are conducted by a handful of states, silencing ‘southern’ countries and delegating their organization to certain self-proclaimed leaders that are themselves not exactly undeveloped economies. Spivak (1994) identified rhetoric about how “white men are saving brown women from brown men.” Likewise, the basic principle of Global South rhetoric is “a developed state is saving developing states from other developed states.” Such a perspective is colonial, even if the speaker explicitly denounces colonialism, because he undoubtedly denounces someone else’s colonialism.

Recent events have clearly shown that states oppose aggression and interference in internal affairs only when those things are done by someone else.

When they do it themselves, ‘intervention’ becomes a ‘humanitarian operation’ and ‘aggression’ becomes ‘conflict resolution.’

In fact, Rudyard Kipling of Britain praised the dedication of the British, who gave their lives to build ports and bridges in the colonies, and Gilberto Freire of Portugal spoke of his empire’s special character, softer and more humane than that of other European projects. There is probably no empire in human history whose apologists would not claim that it is not an empire at all, but a caring father, an anxious guardian, and a kind custodian.

RELATIVISM & PRIMORDIALISM

It might seem logical to link this heading’s words with ‘versus’ rather than with an ampersand. After all, in academia, relativism (claiming the fluidity and variability of identity) does oppose primordialism. But the two get along quite well in the current political confrontation, which spreads everywhere the seeds of the Global South and other equally imaginary communities. The same forces that assert the inviolability of their own millennium-old values say that their opponents have no monopoly on truth, because each country has its own path of development and its own social model.

The disingenuity here is implicit, but easily revealed if we recall that many states, which now have the right to independent existence, were absent from the world map half a century ago or even less. Apparently, at a certain (if not arbitrary) moment in history, once unshakable cultural unity and centuries-old sets of values suddenly changed, with new states emerging on empires’ beloved ‘historical territory.’ Are they unique? If so, where was their uniqueness before? If not, how do they become unique? Is it established administratively?

The union of relativism and primordialism has another amazing feature: it advocates the relativity and diversity of world development, while defending a country’s own historical experience as monolithic. “We are what we have always been,” say the same people who upheld pluralistic and non-deterministic development. So, it seems that relativism begins at the borders of one’s fiefdom. Within this fiefdom any interference into the reproduction of state-selected rules and standards is ‘destructive external influence.’

Slavoj Žižek has criticized multiculturalism as a cover for capitalist dominance: “…the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people”; “…multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, … it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position” (Žižek, 1997).

When proclaiming the sovereignty of nations, international relativists view those nations as entirely self-enclosed communities that have already made their choice, with no prospect of doing so again; the past and a cultural fixation are in this formula much more important than the right of choice, including of one’s future.

If a country falls out of the zone where it has been placed by the relativists, this is immediately condemned as foul play, or even a hybrid war and color revolution.

The political maneuvering of Armenia, Georgia, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus is complicated by such a vision of the world; a free choice is that which is customary and which relativists see as correct.

This vision is not just primordial and essential, but also conspiratorial to accommodate outcomes that do not fit it. Adversarial states’ common position that does not match one’s own is seen as the result only of manipulation and coercion, while any similar consolidation on one’s own geopolitical side is seen as the unbreakable voluntary unity of natural partners.

FROM ORDER TO ORDER

So why do international relativists need the Global South, or any other abstraction that justifies their claim to something more than their own voice? What is the purpose of blurred concepts that encompass all the most fashionable alliances, formal associations, and pseudo-communities?

The claim to speak on behalf of an imaginary majority, wrapped in a variety of trendy constructs, has become an illusory piece on the global chessboard, where the main goal is seemingly to maximize one’s own pieces—if necessary, by making new ones, like José Capablanca’s ‘chancellor,’ of papier-mâché.

If the G7 and G20 do not support us, the OSCE rejects us, and we are dissatisfied with the General Assembly’s voting, then we need new platforms for our ambitions. An infinite variety of World Majorities, Global Souths, Greater Eurasias, etc., will be molded and nurtured until they are convincing and useful as guarantees of our status claims. And it does not really matter that world order has never been established at the initiative of a ‘majority.’