Most of the world’s people live in poverty in the third world. About a billion live in extreme poverty, without access to adequate food, water, and other necessities.
Moving from poverty to well-being requires the accumulation of capital. Capitalism and socialism take different views on this process. Capitalism emphasizes overall growth with considerable concentration of wealth, whereas socialism emphasizes a fair distribution of wealth.
Most states have a mixed economy with some degree of private ownership of capital and some degree of state ownership. However, state ownership has not been very successful in accumulating wealth. Consequently, many states are selling off state-owned enterprises (privatization), especially in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Marxists view international relations, including global North-South relations, in terms of a struggle between economic classes (especially workers and owners) that have different roles in society and different access to power.
Since Lenin’s time, many Marxists have attributed poverty in the South to the concentration of wealth in the North. In this theory, capitalists in the North exploit the South economically and use the wealth thus generated to buy off workers in the North. Revolutions thus occur in the South and are ultimately directed against the North.
IR scholars in the world-system school argue that the North is a core region specializing in producing manufactured goods and the South is a periphery specializing in extracting raw materials through agriculture and mining. Between these are semiperiphery states with light manufacturing.
Today’s North-South gap traces its roots to the colonization of the third world regions by Europe over the past several centuries. This colonization occurred at different times in different parts of the world, as did decolonization.
Because of the negative impact of colonialism on local populations, anticolonial movements arose throughout the third world at various times and using various methods. These culminated in a wave of successful independence movements after World War II in Asia and Africa. (Latin American states gained independence much earlier.)
Following independence, third world states were left with legacies of colonialism, including their basic economic infrastructures, that made wealth accumulation difficult in certain ways. These problems still remain in many countries.
Wealth accumulation (including the demographic transition discussed in Chapter 11) depends on the meeting of basic human needs such as access to food, water, education, shelter, and health care. Third world states have had mixed success in meeting their populations’ basic needs.
War has been a major impediment to meeting basic needs, and to wealth accumulation generally, in poor countries. Almost all the wars of the past 50 years have been fought in the third world.
Hunger and malnutrition are rampant in the third world. The most important cause is the displacement of subsistence farmers from their land because of war, population pressures, and the conversion of agricultural land into plantations growing export crops to earn hard currency.
Urbanization is increasing throughout the third world as more people move from the countryside to cities. Huge slums have grown in the cities as poor people arrive and cannot find jobs.
Women’s central role in the process of accumulation has begun to be recognized. International agencies based in the North have started taking women’s contributions into account in analyzing economic development in the South.
Poverty in the South has led huge numbers of migrants to seek a better life in the North; this has created international political frictions. War and repression in the South have generated millions of refugees seeking safe haven. Under international law and norms, states are generally supposed to accept refugees but do not have to accept migrants.
Many people throughout the third world have turned to political revolution as a strategy for changing economic inequality and poverty. Often, especially during the Cold War, states in the North were drawn into supporting one side or the other during such revolutions.
Today the most potent third world revolutions are the Islamic revolutions in the Middle East. Even more than the communist revolutions of the past, Islamic revolutions are directed against the North and reject the Western values on which the international system is based. Like communist ones, Islamic revolutions draw support and legitimacy from the plight of poor people.
When revolutionaries succeed in taking power, they usually change their state’s foreign policy. Over time, however, old national interests and strategies tend to reappear. After several decades in power, revolutionaries usually become conservative and in particular come to support the norms and rules of the international system (which are favorable to them as state leaders).
North-South relations, although rooted in a basic economic reality—the huge gap in accumulated wealth—reflect the close connections of economics with international security.
