". But the Bandung Declaration was not just a document promoting political and economic decolonization. Indeed, the very first of the 10 points of the Declaration was “respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and principles of the charter of the United Nations.”
Two of the key movers in Bandung were India and China, who play central role in the BRICS. Nehru and Zhou En Lai were exemplary voices of the Global South in 1955, when decolonization was the burning issue. However, when it comes to the first Bandung principle, their governments today are not exactly paragons of human rights. India today is ruled by a Hindu nationalist government that considers Muslim second-class citizens. Beijing is accused of carrying out the forcible cultural assimilation of the Uygurs, though there might be exaggeration of this process by the West. As for the other key sponsors of the Bandung meeting, the military regimes in Myanmar and Egypt are notorious for massive human rights violations.
Indeed, most states of the Global South are dominated by elites that, whether via authoritarian or liberal democratic regimes, maintain problematic social and economic structures. The levels of poverty and inequality are shocking. The gini coefficient for Brazil is 0.53, making it one of the most unequal countries in the world. China’s 0.47 also reflects tremendous inequality, despite remarkable successes in poverty reduction. In South Africa, the gini coefficient is an astounding 0.63, and 55.5 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. In India, incomes have been polarizing over the past three decades with a significant increase in billionaires and other high-net-worth Individuals.
The reality is that for the vast masses of people throughout the Global South, including indigenous communities, workers, peasants, fisherfolk, nomadic communities and women are economically disenfranchised, and in liberal democracies, such as the Philippines, India, Thailand, Indonesia, South Africa, and Kenya, participation in democracy is often limited to casting votes in periodic, often meaningless, electoral exercises. South-South investment and cooperation models such as the Belt and Road Initiative and free trade agreements frequently entail the capture of land, forests, water, and marine areas and extraction of natural wealth for the purposes of national development. Local populations—many of whom are indigenous—are disposessed from their livelihoods, territories, and ancestral domains with scant legal recourse and access to justice, invoking the specter of home-grown colonialism and counterrevolutions.
Two points are important here. Although the Global North has played a role in the perpetuation of poverty and inequality in the Global South, much of our current condition is the creation of the Global South’s own elites. Second, democratic governance at the global level cannot be delinked from democratic governance at the local level.
Capitalism and Multilateralism
There is a third, not minor, consideration when it comes to assessing the future of the BRICS, and here it is useful to compare Bandung’s historical moment to today. At the time of the Bandung Conference, the political economy of the globe was more diverse. There was the communist bloc headed by the Soviet Union. There was China, with its push to move from national democracy to socialism. Neutralist states like India were seeking a third way between the communism and capitalism. With decades of neoliberal transformation in both the Global North and the Global South, that diversity has vanished. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a new, equitable global order is the fact that all countries remain embedded in a system of global capitalism, where the pursuit of profits remains the engine of economic expansion, both creating great inequalities and posing a threat to the planet.
The dynamic centers of global capitalism may have moved, over the last 500 years, from the Mediterranean to Holland to Britain to the United States and now to the Asia Pacific, but capitalism continues to both penetrate the farthest reaches of the globe and deepen its entrenchment in areas it has subjugated. Capitalism continually melts all that is solid into thin air, to use an image from a famous manifesto, creating inequalities both within and among societies, and exacerbating the relationship between the planet and the human community. Whether market-driven, developmental, or state capitalist, the same dynamics of surplus extraction, with massive planetary externalities, cut across these variants of capitalism."
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