North-South conflict

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So-called "northern states" (blue) and "southern states" (red)

The historically grown term north-south conflict is used to describe the economic-social and political-cultural development gap between the industrialized and developing countries.

term

The term comes from the fact that the majority of industrialized countries and former colonial powers are in the northern hemisphere, while the developing countries and former colonies are mostly found in the southern hemisphere.

However, the division into industrialized and developing countries does not reflect today's reality. You can graduate to three or four.

Tripartite:

Today, the regional disparities in human development are recorded and presented in the Human Development Index (HDI) published by the United Nations Development Program . The HDI is an indicator of prosperity for countries. He is since 1990 in the annual report on human development (English Human Development Report ) published by the United Nations (UNDP) development program.

History of the North-South Conflict

The north-south conflict began in the 1940s with the flare-up attempts for independence in the Asian colonies of Great Britain such as Jordan , India etc. This was followed by the wars of independence in Africa in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s . This process of political decolonization was not completed until the early 1980s. The Cold War influenced this process, as in several cases the United States and the Soviet Union tried to integrate the newly independent states into their respective economic and social systems.

Many of the newly independent states, however, joined the movement of the non-aligned states . The basis of this global movement, which began as early as 1955 at the Bandung Conference , was not only the criticism of the atomic power show of the great powers, but above all the condemnation of racial segregation in the USA and South Africa, as well as the experience and sustained liberation from (neo )Colonialism. Above all, the painful experience of the structures of colonialism and European imperialism and their reappraisal caused an awareness of ongoing economic exploitation ( neo-colonialism ) to arise in " third world states" . In cultural studies, the intellectual tendency of postcolonialism emerged from this debate .

By rejecting the dominance and influence of the global East-West conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union and their criticism of the global situation, the "neutralist" non-aligned states shifted their focus to the North-South conflict at an early stage.

literature

  • Jürgen Dinkel, Steffen Fiebrig, Frank Reichherzer: North / South. Perspectives on a global order . De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin / Boston 2020 ISBN 978-3-11-067600-6 .
  • Hartmut Elsenhans : North-South Relations. History-politics-economy . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1984 ISBN 3-17-008369-4 .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. United Nations Development Program (UNDP): Human Development Report 2015 . Ed .: German Society for the United Nations eV Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin ( undp.org [PDF; 9.3 MB ; accessed on November 3, 2016]).