On Tuesday, 18th. July 2023 — with leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean gathered in Brussels for the EU-CELAC Summit — the South-North Dialogue was born.
Convening scholars, diplomats, and parliamentarians from over 15 countries — South Africa to Spain, Pakistan to Honduras, Belgium to Cuba — the Progressive International and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation opened a new space for deliberation across this deepening geopolitical divide.
“What is the South’s vision for trade, finance, and development? How can it be won? And what can the Northern allies gathered here do in solidarity with this struggle?” asked coordinator Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla in her opening speech to the dialogue.
These are not new questions. 50 years ago, 27 nations gathered in Paris for the Conference on International Economic Co-operation. Setting up special commissions on energy production, raw materials, and development finance, the Conference marked the highpoint of so-called “North-South Dialogue,” the debates of the 1970s that set out to restructure the relationships between liberated nations of the South and their former colonizers in the North.
Today, the economic relationship between the South and North is once again under severe strain. Investment treaties defend Northern claims to profit over Southern paths to sustainable development. Trade agreements protect Northern intellectual property over Southern health and habitat. Bailout packages pay out to Northern creditors while keeping Southern economies trapped in debt.
Yet we lack today a common forum to facilitate the South-North dialogue that animated the debates of the 1970s.
“Global governance in the twenty-first century is defined by two conflicting trends. The number of international summits, forums, conventions and conferences has multiplied. But their meaning has declined in equal measure,” reads the opening paragraph of the South-North Dialogue mission statement.
“At best, they serve as pageantry for the North’s tepid promises. At worst, they provide a pulpit from which to dictate rules to their South neighbors. Serious debate among sovereign powers about the terms and conditions of South-North cooperation has gone missing.”
The South-North Dialogue aims to revive, rejuvenate, and renovate those debates. “The world is changing, and we are seeing the convulsions of a descending world order,” said Belgium Workers Party (PTB) General Secretary Peter Mertens in his remarks to the dialogue. “If we can get the mutiny of the North to lend a hand to the mutiny of the South, and vice versa, we can turn the world around, in the democratic, social and ecological direction this planet needs.”
From its launch in Brussels, the Dialogue will now travel across the world — from São Paulo to Addis Ababa and beyond — to invert the terms of the dialogue from a half-century ago: led from the South, dictating terms of cooperation to their Northern neighbors.
The mission statement, published the morning after the Brussels deliberation, ends here: “We convene the dialogue in that spirit — of serious deliberation, without fake smiles; of committed negotiation, without empty promises; of programmatic imagination, without false solutions — calling on allies both South and North to help chart a course toward a New International Economic Order fit for the 21st century.”
In solidarity,
The Progressive International Secretariat
