The West’s addiction to ‘soft power’ is leaving us dangerously exposed to those who wish us ill

Do you know exactly what, or where, the “Global South” is? If you don’t, please do not feel ashamed. I am not sure anyone really does, but it is a sobering fact that, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the English-language use of the term has multiplied 36 times between 2000 and 2024. Quite a lot of people, including some Commonwealth leaders with whom our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are currently rubbing shoulders in Samoa, like using the phrase.

Why? As a way, I think, of asserting that every wrong in the world is the fault of the West and of trying to mobilise everyone who feels that way. Why not the “Global East”, then? As in the Cold War, it is the East – China and Russia – which leads the charge against wicked Americans and Europeans.

Use of the word East would not work in this context, though, because it leaves out several continents inhabited by what the Marxist revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth”– places like Africa, the South Seas and Latin America. They were made wretched, you see, by imperialism.

Once it became clear, in the second half of the last century, that destroying Western capitalism in its home countries would be slower work than Marx had predicted, his followers widened their theory of exploitation to apply to any place where the white man’s foot had trod.

For this, various phrases were tried out and various conferences and organisations devised. In the 1950s, there was “the Bandung spirit”. The idea of the “Third World” became current. In the 1960s, the Non-Aligned Movement was formed to claim a Third-World position balanced between East and West. It tended, in practice, to lean to the Soviet bloc. In 1969, an American political activist called Carl Oglesby wrote an essay including the phrase “the north’s dominance over the global south”. In 1980, the former German chancellor Willy Brandt published his famous report on international development. Its title was, North-South: A Programme for Survival.

It is true that Russia, host to this week’s BRICS conference in Kazan and pretender to great sympathy for the Global South, is undeniably not southern, as anyone arriving in Moscow with bermuda shorts and flip-flops can attest. The Kremlin therefore tends to prefer the term “Global Majority” – another phrase often on the lips of Anglican bishops and international NGOs. But whether you call this global thing “south” or “majority”, the aspiration, and the fallacy, are the same.

In its excellent new examination of all this, The Myth of the Global South, the think tank Policy Exchange describes the Global South as “an imagined community” rather than one of genuine shared interests or geography. There is little real community, for example, between the Caribbean countries currently clamouring for reparations from Britain for the wrongs of slavery more than 200 years ago and the Pacific islanders, whose chief concern is the physical shrinking of their nations because of climate change.

Nevertheless, what is imagined can be more exciting than what is real. What excites the leaders, though not necessarily the people, of so many countries involved, is the thought that their economic failures can be blamed on richer countries far away and that they might be able to wrest enormous sums, in reparations, subsidies, aid and soft loans out of those countries, eg Britain.

It is, of course, true, always and everywhere, that the strong tend to exploit the weak. So there are many sins that can rightly be laid at the door of any colonial power (though one must always remember the many answers to the famous Monty Python question, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”).

It is also true that modern Western leaders have, in effect, been inviting this trouble. This week, the foreign minister of the Bahamas, Fredrick Mitchell, has fairly pointed out that both Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy, before gaining office, spoke eloquently and often about the dreadfulness of the colonial legacy, Mr. Lammy even encouraging talk of reparations. Who can ever forget the vivid photograph of Sir Keir and Angela Rayner “taking the knee” to Black Lives Matter?

Not unreasonably, Mr Mitchell wants to take them up on their obeisance now they are in power. He is understandably annoyed that Sir Keir looks a bit shifty and tells him that what matters is what happens in the future rather than arguing about the past. Sir Keir is by no means as adroit as our King, with his long experience of Commonwealth language, in navigating such issues.

To Mr Mitchell, Mr Lammy’s “progressive realism” in foreign policy must look incoherent. “You’ve admitted guilt,” he might say, “so pay up.” “You’ve just surrendered the Chagos Islands to Mauritian sovereignty and Chinese power,” he might unkindly add, “What can you offer our sunny, but exploited islands?”

Labour does not know how to rebut this stuff. I suspect that Kemi Badenoch, who has had rich experience of Global South cant, will have no such problem if she becomes Conservative leader.

The key issue for the West here – or what is more accurately described, since it includes Japan, Taiwan, Ukraine, Australia and Argentina, as the free world – is not the sufferings of the poorer countries on the planet, real though they are. These can be better remedied by extensive bilateral links (especially Britain’s), by freer trade, and through all sorts of existing international institutions.

The key issue is that the Global South is being turned into a tool of power by those who wish us ill. It is almost beyond satire, for example, that China and Russia should pose as a friend of the sub-Sahara, when the actions of the former’s Belt and Road Initiative and the latter’s Wagner Group mercenaries are perhaps the most blatantly imperialist ventures in the world today. This is the 21st-century’s re-creation of what, towards the end of the 19th century, was called “The Scramble for Africa” by the European powers. In both cases, raw materials and even rawer power politics were the driving forces.

In the face of such threats, the West is dreadfully weak. Contrast, for example, America’s and Britain’s refusal to let Ukraine use the missiles we have given them on Russian territory because we fear Vladimir Putin crying foul with Putin’s order for thousands of North Korean troops to help him lay waste a sovereign country.

Non-European powers contemplate Western feebleness, and naturally hedge their bets. Look at Turkey, despite its Nato membership. Look at India, despite its hatred of China. Look at Egypt, which Barack Obama let down so badly after the Arab Spring.

The same applies to international organisations. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, is supposed to be the main formal supervisor of world peace. But he chooses to assail Israel, make nice to Hezbollah and Iran, and turn up in Kazan this week literally to bow (look at the photographs) to Putin. Take the World Health Organisation’s refusal to condemn China’s leak of the Wuhan virus, which killed 10 million. Take this week’s decision by HSBC to split in two so that one arm can join China’s alternative to the Swift international payments system.

Britain and many other Western countries, militarily enfeebled, are wedded to “soft power” diplomacy just when hard power is becoming more ruthless and unconstrained than at any time since 1945. The wider world starts to see us as losers. If enough of them think that for long enough, we shall indeed lose.