North-South Conflict Part II
North-South conflict, term for the contrasts that arise from the economic-social and political-cultural development gap between the industrialized countries of the northern hemisphere and the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, which are predominantly located in the southern hemisphere (north-south divide) result. They emerged after the Second World War in the wake of decolonization and were mainly caused by population explosion, food shortages, insufficient industrialization, lack of integration of developing countries in the international division of labor, exploitation of their raw materials and workers, and unjust trade relations.
Since the 1970s, the states are looking for the Third World as part of the run in the UN system and at numerous conferences North-South dialogue on the call for a new world economic order to defuse the north-south divide. At the end of 1977 a North-South Commission was set up (18 politicians and scientists, half from industrialized and developing countries), whose task is to analyze the relationships between industrialized and developing countries and to propose ways to a more balanced world order.
Main features
According to Thedresswizard, the term North-South conflict is partly schematic. The two groups of countries are neither antipodal to the northern or southern hemisphere, nor can they be located in a clear north-south orientation. The comparison of a group of countries in the northern hemisphere with a high level of economic development, above-average social standards and strong development dynamics over historical periods, and a group of countries with a low level of development and enormous socio-structural deficits, mainly south of it, would actually be demand from a “West-South conflict” (Franz Nuscheler) to speak. This clear contrast with its existentially threatening consequences for a large part of humanity cannot be adequately described with the term “north-south divide”. The relationship between the two groups of countries represents a structural break that is interpreted as the relationship between the center and the periphery of modern development. Also the emergence of a growing number of developing countries v. a. in East and Southeast Asia as well as in Latin America, which has caught up with the developed industrial countries in terms of certain economic and social growth factors (emerging countries), does not remove the north-south contrast, but shows that the structural foundations of the conflict configuration are in motion are.
In the social science literature, the term North-South conflict has been controversial since the late 1980s at the latest. Critics point out that the countries and regions of the Third World show different levels of development not only with respect to the developed industrialized countries, but also with each other and, in relation to the industrialized nations, pursue not only common interests but also distinctly particular interests. Some authors as well as significant political representatives of the developed industrial countries relativize the polarity of the north-south relationship increasingly by referring to the growing globalization and general interdependence as a characteristic of the current world situation. In particular, the need to jointly overcome the global problems of the present through cooperation in the “One World” should not be associated with a fundamentally irreconcilable constellation of interests between two opposing camps. The objection to this interpretation is that it inadmissibly reduces the application of the concept of conflict to a directly confrontational friend-foe thinking and fails to recognize that highly complex collective subjects of action are always socially differentiated and internally not capable of alliances, organization or conflict in every respect prove. The differences in the basic social structure of the states of the north and the south in connection with a structural economic dependency and social inequality of opportunity to the disadvantage of the developing countries in a world comparison form the permanent breeding ground for a North-South dispute, which is also waged when the measure The current readiness for conflict of the ruling elites in the Third World is estimated to be low, because they take into account the pressure to adapt, the power to sanction and the influence of the developed world in a pragmatic way and not infrequently through the use of singular advantages and widespread inconsistency. The focus is on a material distribution conflict over development resources.
