{"id":30076,"date":"2023-03-03T11:24:55","date_gmt":"2023-03-03T10:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=30076"},"modified":"2023-03-03T11:39:42","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T10:39:42","slug":"the-global-south-refuses-pressure-to-side-with-the-west-on-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=30076","title":{"rendered":"The Global South refuses pressure to side with the West on Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION<\/p>\n

An article by \u00a0by\u00a0Vijay Prashad in Peoples Dispatch<\/a><\/p>\n

Europe and the US ignore Africa, Latin America, and Asia\u2019s calls to find a solution that ends the war in Ukraine\u2014and, as Namibia\u2019s prime minister put it, redirect funds spent on weapons toward solving global issues.<\/p>\n

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\nFrancia M\u00e1rquez Vice President, Republic of Colombia speaking at the Munich Security Conference next to Namibia\u2019s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, Enrique Manalo (Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Republic of the Philippines) and Mauro Luiz Iecker Vieira (Minister of Foreign Affairs, Federative Republic of Brazil). Photo: MSC\/Baier<\/center><\/p>\n

At the G20 meeting in Bengaluru, India, the United States arrived with a simple brief. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen\u00a0said\u00a0at the February 2023 summit that the G20 countries must condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and they must adhere to US sanctions against Russia. However, it became clear that India, the chair of the G20, was not willing to conform to the US agenda. Indian officials\u00a0said\u00a0that the G20 is not a political meeting, but a meeting to discuss economic issues. They contested the use of the word \u201cwar\u201d to describe the invasion, preferring to describe it as a \u201ccrisis\u201d and a \u201cchallenge.\u201d\u00a0France\u00a0<\/a> and\u00a0Germany\u00a0<\/a> have rejected this draft if it does not condemn Russia.<\/p>\n

At the G20 meeting in Bengaluru, India, the United States arrived with a simple brief. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen\u00a0said\u00a0at the February 2023 summit that the G20 countries must condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and they must adhere to US sanctions against Russia. However, it became clear that India, the chair of the G20, was not willing to conform to the US agenda. Indian officials\u00a0said\u00a0that the G20 is not a political meeting, but a meeting to discuss economic issues. They contested the use of the word \u201cwar\u201d to describe the invasion, preferring to describe it as a \u201ccrisis\u201d and a “challenge.\u201d\u00a0France\u00a0and\u00a0Germany\u00a0have rejected this draft if it does not condemn Russia.<\/p>\n

Just as in Indonesia during the previous year\u2019s summit, the 2023 G20 leaders are once again ignoring the pressure from the West to isolate Russia, with the large developing countries (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa) unwilling to budge from their practical view that isolation of Russia is endangering the world.<\/p>\n

The next two G20 summits will be in Brazil (2024) and South Africa (2025), which would indicate to the West that the platform of the G20 will not be easily subordinated to the Western view of world affairs.<\/p>\n

Most of the leaders of the G20 countries went to Bengaluru straight from Germany, where they had attended the Munich Security Conference. On the first day of the Munich conference, France\u2019s President Emmanuel Macron\u00a0said\u00a0<\/a> that he was \u201cshocked by how much credibility we are losing in the Global South.\u201d The \u201cwe\u201d in Macron\u2019s statement was the Western states, led by the United States.<\/p>\n

What is the evidence for this loss of credibility? Few of the states in the Global South have been willing to participate in the isolation of Russia, including\u00a0voting\u00a0<\/a> on Western resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly. Not all of the states that have refused to join the West are \u201canti-Western\u201d in a political sense. Many of them\u2014including the government in India\u2014are driven by practical considerations, such as Russia\u2019s discounted energy prices and the assets being sold at a lowered price by Western companies that are departing from Russia\u2019s lucrative energy sector. Whether they are fed up with being pushed around by the West or they see economic opportunities in their relationship with Russia, increasingly, countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have avoided the pressure coming from Washington to break ties with Russia. It is this refusal and avoidance that drove Macron to make his strong statement about being \u201cshocked\u201d by the loss of Western credibility.<\/p>\n

(Article continued in the column on the right)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Question related to this article:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n 
\nFree flow of information, How is it important for a culture of peace?<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

(Article continued from the column on the left)<\/p>\n

At a\u00a0panel discussion\u00a0<\/a> on February 18 at the Munich Security Conference, three leaders from Africa and Asia developed the argument about why they are unhappy with the war in Ukraine and the pressure campaign upon them to break ties with Russia. Brazil\u2019s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira\u2014who later that day\u00a0condemned\u00a0<\/a> the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a tweet \u2014 called <\/a>\u00a0upon the various parties to the conflict to \u201cbuild the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Billions of dollars of arms have been sent by the Western states to Ukraine to prolong a war that needs to be ended before it escalates out of control. The West has\u00a0blocked\u00a0<\/a> negotiations ever since the possibility of an interim deal between Russia and Ukraine arose in March 2022. The talk of an endless war by Western politicians and the arming of Ukraine have resulted in Russia\u2019s February 21, 2023, withdrawal from the New START treaty, which\u2014with the unilateral withdrawal of the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019\u2014ends the nuclear weapons control regime.<\/p>\n

Vieira\u2019s comment about the need to \u201cbuild the possibility of a solution\u201d is one that is shared across the developing countries, who do not see the endless war as beneficial to the planet. As Colombia\u2019s Vice President Francia M\u00e1rquez\u00a0said\u00a0<\/a> on the same panel, \u201cWe don\u2019t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers, and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most powerful statement in Munich was made by Namibia\u2019s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila. \u201cWe are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict\u201d in Ukraine, she\u00a0said<\/a>, \u201cso that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.\u201d When asked why Namibia abstained at the United Nations on the vote regarding the war, Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, \u201cOur focus is on resolving the problem\u2026 not on shifting blame.\u201d The money used to buy weapons, she said, \u201ccould be better utilized to promote development in Ukraine, in Africa, in Asia, in other places, in Europe itself, where many people are experiencing hardships.\u201d A Chinese\u00a0plan\u00a0for peace in Ukraine\u2014built on the principles of the 1955 Bandung Conference\u2014absorbs the points raised by these Global South leaders.<\/p>\n

European leaders have been tone-deaf to the arguments being made by people such as Kuugongelwa-Amadhila. The European Union\u2019s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell had earlier shot himself in the foot with his ugly\u00a0remarks\u00a0<\/a> in October 2022 that \u201cEurope is a garden. The rest of the world is a jungle. And the jungle could invade the garden\u2026 Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us.\u201d In the February 2023 Munich Security Conference, Borrell\u2014who is originally from Spain \u2014 said\u00a0<\/a> that he shared \u201cthis feeling\u201d of Macron\u2019s that the West had to \u201cpreserve or even to rebuild trustful cooperation with many of the so-called Global South.\u201d The countries of the South, Borrell said, are \u201caccusing us of [a] double standard\u201d when it comes to combating imperialism, a position that \u201cwe must debunk.\u201d<\/p>\n

A series of reports published by leading Western financial houses repeat the anxiety of people such as Borrell. BlackRock\u00a0notes\u00a0<\/a> that we are entering \u201ca fragmented world with competing blocs,\u201d while Credit Suisse\u00a0points\u00a0<\/a> to the \u201cdeep and persistent fractures\u201d that have opened up in the world order. Credit Suisse\u2019s assessment of these \u201cfractures\u201d describes them accurately: \u201cThe global West (Western developed countries and allies) has drifted away from the global East (China, Russia, and allies) in terms of core strategic interests, while the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and most developing countries) is reorganizing to pursue its own interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

This reorganization is now manifesting itself in the refusal by the Global South to bend the knee to Washington.<\/p>\n

Vijay Prashad\u00a0is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of\u00a0LeftWord Books\u00a0and the director of\u00a0Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at\u00a0Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including\u00a0The Darker Nations\u00a0and\u00a0The Poorer Nations. His latest books are\u00a0Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism\u00a0and (with Noam Chomsky)\u00a0The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION An article by \u00a0by\u00a0Vijay Prashad in Peoples Dispatch Europe and the US ignore Africa, Latin America, and Asia\u2019s calls to find a solution that ends the war in Ukraine\u2014and, as Namibia\u2019s prime minister put it, redirect funds spent on weapons toward solving global issues. Francia M\u00e1rquez Vice President, Republic of Colombia … Continue reading The Global South refuses pressure to side with the West on Russia<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,76],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-30076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information","category-global","tag-global"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}