To say that we are living through an age of crisis has, by now, become commonplace – almost to the extent of being a truism. It is very evident that the post-Cold War world order is deep in the throes of profoundly turbulent transformations, and that those transformations have thrown up a conjuncture that is not only turbulent, but in many ways also perilous. But how do we understand this age of crisis from a distinctly Southern perspective? That is the question at the heart of the newly published book Southern Interregnum: Remaking Hegemony in Brazil, India, South Africa, and China, which I have co-authored with Karl von Holdt, Ching Kwan Lee, Fabio Luis, and Ruy Braga.
We begin to develop an answer to that question by taking a critical look at a narrative which is circulating widely both within and beyond academic, which is centred on the proposition that the early twenty-first century is defined by the rise of the global South. In geoeconomic terms, this rise is manifest in the fact that most Southern countries have made the transition from low-income to middle-income status, and that as a result, inequality across the North-South axis of the world-system has decreased. Some scholars read this as a process of convergence that overturns developmental cartographies that pivot on a simple counterpoint between a rich North and a poor South. In geopolitical terms, the rise of the South is thought to find expression in the greater assertiveness of emerging powers in relation to American and Western hegemonic power – for example through such formations as the BRICS, which has expanded significantly in recent years.
In reviewing the arguments at the core of this narrative, we acknowledge that the global South has been the epicenter of a major material expansion in the world-system since the end of the Cold War, but we also point to the very clear limits of this expansion. For one, it is overwhelmingly concentrated in China’s economic boom, and this boom, in turn, is more contradictory and uneven than what is often assumed to be the case. But more importantly, whereas this material expansion has caused between-country inequality across the North-South axis of the world-system to decrease, within-country inequality across emerging powers in the global South has escalated dramatically. As a result, the political economy of development in the twenty-first century is defined by a new geography of poverty, in which more than 70% of the world’s poor live in Southern middle-income countries.
Similarly, whereas there is no doubt that the geopolitics of our age is distinctively multipolar, multipolarity does not in and of itself herald a progressive future for the global South. Instead, we argue that we are witnessing a nascent form of inter-imperial rivalry. In this context, emerging powers in the global South are deeply invested both in the super-exploitation of labour and authoritarian forms of governance, precisely because this enables them to compete with older – that is, northern – centres of power in the world-system.
As an alternative to the rising South narrative, we argue that economic growth in middle-income countries across Asia, Latin America, and Africa has been characterized by falling labour shares of income, weak employment growth, and an expanding informal sector. This means that varying degrees of precarity constitute the norm for Southern working classes, and that neoliberal accumulation strategies are incapable of bringing about the kind of structural transformation and material progress that is normally associated with the term development. As a consequence, governing elites across emerging powers in the global South confront a disjuncture between the two imperatives that capitalist states everywhere must be able to reconcile, namely the imperatives of accumulation and legitimation.
This disjuncture is manifest in the waves of popular protest that have shook regimes across the global South in the past one and a half decades – beginning with the Arab uprisings of 2011 and 2012, and erupting most recently in countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Argentina, and Kenya. These crises of legitimation have the potential to destabilize and disrupt hegemonic configurations in very substantial ways. In this sense, the current conjuncture can well be thought of as an interregnum in Gramsci’s sense of the term – that is, as a long and drawn-out period of organic crisis, in which the old is dying while the new cannot be born. Southern Interregnum attempts to make sense of this organic crisis by way of a comparative conjunctural analysis of how governing elites in Brazil, India, South Africa, and China attempt to remake hegemony.
In the Brazilian case, we focus on how the Bolsonaro regime fused neoliberal fundamentalism with a return to the authoritarian ethos of the dictatorship, pushing back the concessions granted to subaltern citizens in the making of the New Republic. This hegemonic project, we argue, succeeded both in uniting big capital and in enlisting the consent of Brazil’s precarious working classes, but ultimately Bolsonaro’s hegemonic project lost the support of capital. India, by contrast, has witnessed the rise of a far more durable hegemonic project under Modi’s BJP, centred on a neoliberal form of Hindu nationalism. While implementing aggressively neoliberal accumulation strategies that have concentrated wealth among the country’s corporate elite, it has also ensured popular support through the psychological wages embodied in the elusive promise of development and dignity that is extended to India’s working poor.
In China, governing elites found their legitimacy challenged in the late 2000s, when export markets collapsed and workers’ protests escalated. The Chinese leadership responded with a dual strategy of global and digital expansion, embedded in a new ideological vocabulary that fused entrepreneurialism and nationalism. So far, this project has been remarkably resilient, but it may well come under strain due to economic stagnation and new forms of popular discontent. Finally, South Africa’s trajectory through the interregnum originates in the contradictions of the country’s transition from apartheid to democracy, which left the country’s racialized structures of inequality relatively intact. In this context, the country’s political economy is animated by a contest between Cyril Ramaphosa’s technocratic neoliberalism and a patronage-violence complex that accumulates wealth through corruption, while propagating an ideological blend of xenophobic populism, ethnic nationalism, and law-and-order bluster.
In sum, we argue, the Southern interregnum is at the heart of the systemic chaos that defines the world-system in the early twenty-first century. The trajectory of the Southern interregnum will hinge, to a very large extent, on the evolving relationship between governing elites and oppositional social movements. So far, the protests that have taken place across Brazil, India, China, and South Africa from the early 2000s into the first half of the 2020s have not been able to bring about structural transformation. The ability of social movements to do so, we conclude, will depend on determined work to undo the vertical alliances that governing elites have constructed in their efforts to reconcile accumulation and legitimation in our turbulent conjuncture. If a new world is to be born at all, such counterhegemonic work will surely be crucial in its delivery.
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