Vital Interests: Luis thanks very much for joining us today on the Vital Interest forum. Our conversation will focus on the global realities that will confront the Biden administration as it initiates a policy of re-engagement. Recently, there was a high-level meeting in Alaska between Chinese diplomatic representatives and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. The intent was to begin a dialogue between China and the United States that would set priorities and tackle increasing tensions. The meeting was reportedly contentious.

Yang Jiechi, the most senior Chinese delegate, set the tone by stating ‘I don't think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion.’ He went on to say, ‘These countries may not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.’ 

So here we have in a key initial meeting China lecturing the United States on how to define the loaded term ‘the international order.’ We are fortunate to be able to discuss this with you as the focus of your research and writing is on this idea of an international order - how it has evolved and what it means in today’s context, in particular for so-called peripheral countries. I know you from your involvement with the edited volume Bandung, Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts, Pending Future which examines in detail the 1955 Bandung Conference and the beginning of the Non-aligned Movement. It would be good to go back and learn about the international order as it emerged, in its contemporary form, during the decolonization era in the 2nd half of the 20th Century.

Luis Eslava: John, thank you so much for the invitation. In trying to place these current debates between the U.S. and China in a historical context, the best way to start indeed is by appreciating what is at stake, both in terms of the choices at hand and, in particular, the possibilities for Global South nations within the realities of the existing international legal and political order as it has evolved over the recent decades. 

After the end of the Second World War, two very important facts came to reshape the global map. The first of those was that traditional imperial interests and modalities of governance were no longer possible to advance or execute. Even strong powers, like the British Empire, realized that imperial structures were too expensive to maintain and too difficult to control, and that they generated a huge amount of violence, within Europe and beyond, as was demonstrated painfully by the two world wars.

The second fact is that a different type of international order had to be put in place to attend to the increasing demands for independence coming from colonial peoples. Accompanying this there was a fundamental shift of power from Europe to the United States, the latter itself an ex-colony, with its own understanding of how to expand its political and economic interests abroad. After the Second World War, this generated a transition – by any means peaceful yet effective nonetheless – from a global order based on classic imperial interests and spatial configurations to a more contemporary international legal order rooted on the idea of peoples’ self-determination. This move from imperial logics and structures to a world organized around nation states emerged from the recognition, at least formally, of the right of peoples to have their own states and of nation-states themselves as sovereign equals, which enjoyed the right to non-intervention. This change came as a result of transformations in the macro-political ordering of the world after the war, as well as from ground forces across the (eventually called) Third World which fought for this transformation of the common sense regarding how the planet should be managed.

The problem was, as we know, that traditional imperial powers didn't want to give up easily their colonial possessions. What occurred in the years after the Second World War was thus an intense battle between still colonized peoples and European powers. By the early 1950s and, in particular from 1955 onwards, it was clear that the cards were already on the table and the future was for the nation state.

The year 1955 is an important moment as that’s when the Bandung Conference took place, in Bandung, Indonesia. It was the first time that leaders of non-white countries, from Africa and Asia, came together in a large international conference to decide on their collective position in relation to international organizations, international law, and the global economy. Interestingly, what they said in the Bandung Conference was not that they wanted a different type of world to the one they saw articulated in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

Far from this, what they said was that they precisely wanted that world; and, more than that, that they were the best-behaved actors in the international order, who respected and supported international norms. In their account, and in their interpretation of these instruments (which is very important), Western countries and the USSR were violating international law and the promises of radical equality that they, perhaps optimistically, saw in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration. 

The Bandung Conference came to confirm, in this way, an already existing tradition of progressive thinking within international law and diplomatic relations that dates back to the independence movements in Latin America and the Caribbean in the early 19th century and Pan-Africanism in the early 20th century. Next steps in this radical story of internationalism are the Non-Aligned Movement that was constituted in 1961, followed by the Tri-Continental Conference in 1966, which was less state-centric and more clearly committed to overcoming imperialism in all its forms. 

The new consensus resulting from all these efforts led to the establishment of the Group of 77 (G-77) in 1964 under the umbrella of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development  (UNCTAD), in which a large number of former colonial countries could now have a collective voice at the level of the UN General Assembly. Significantly, by 1975 this led to a call for a ‘New International Economic Order’ in order to address issues of ‘underdevelopment’ in the Global South and all those other inequalities that the post-imperial framework established after the Second World War had not resolved.

During this era, that we now know as the period of decolonization, some of the promises underpinning the post-war institutional settlement slowly consolidated. What is interesting for the conversation about the current debate between U.S. and Chinese global interests is that even though there was a clear sense of the broader features of this new international order at that time, the reality was, in fact, quite open ended.

It was not a simple, stable, pervasive set of legal and political institutions and commercial and trade interests that replaced imperialism with nation-states. The possibilities and horizons were diverse, and contingency was all around – in terms of both political and economic models and levels of international delinking or integration. This generated a huge amount of tension at the international level, expressed in its most overt form in the Cold War, but it also left enough room for emerging states to navigate this new setting advocating for and attending to their own interests.

One of the main points advanced by many international law and international relations scholars over the last 30 years has been, for this reason, that the negotiating space that the Cold War had opened for developing states was closed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama called it ‘the end of history’, by which he meant the ascendancy of the U.S.-liberal order as the final stage of international organization and human development. For Third World nations, what we call today Global South states, this meant that the only way to go, from now on, was to follow U.S.-driven policies.

Against this context it is possible to see how, thinking in a similar way as China, for many – if not most – nations it is not necessarily a good idea to have a world organized around only one single hegemonic power. It is better for them – for all of us, we could say – to have a world ordered around the interests of competing powers which opens space for a wider realm of possibilities.

VI: Let’s take a closer look then at the Cold War, which was an ideological struggle between the United States, the global public face of democracy and freedom, and the Soviet Union, the purveyor of global communism.. How important was that ideological struggle in the post-colonial era?

Luis Eslava: It was extremely important for at least three reasons. Firstly, the Cold War was, above anything else, a clash between capitalism and communism. In that sense, it created a constant and concrete clash around the broader features of the political economic model that should drive global life – regionally, nationally and locally. Ideological as well as practical debates about different economic arrangements were thus front and center at the time. And this was crucial for both the U.S. and the USSR, as well as for peripheral countries. In his milieu, not only debates about ‘ideal’ forms of communism and capitalism took place, most importantly perhaps, concessions had to be made on both sides in order to ensure spheres of influence and placating popular insurrection.

We know that American capitalism, especially as was understood in the 1950s and '60s, was very different from how capitalism is experienced today. It had a welfare orientation and a role for the state that is somehow long gone today. Similarly, when we say the USSR was a communist country, it was a particular kind of communism that actively used  law and regulation in order to activate private initiative and ensure its industrialization (an objective also shared by the U.S.). At the theatrical level, at the level of representation, however, there was a consistency about the importance of organizing political debates around the broader rubrics of capitalism and communism, which opened space, again, for negotiation, accommodation and experimentation on the ground. 

Secondly, the Cold War enabled the formation of alternative geopolitical blocks. This was important especially as the two superpowers, in order to expand their spheres of influence across their regions and internationally, had to effectively support governments, open their markets to friendly countries, offer military aid, etc.

That enabled the formation of entire new geographies in which Third World countries could then negotiate among themselves and advance their own interest. I am thinking here, for example, how large parts of Africa and Central and South Asia slowly aligned themselves with the USSR, while keeping an eye on the U.S., while large parts of Latin America came to be organized according to U.S. interests, while building bridges with the USSR. All of these arrangements were, of course, political, in the sense that resulted from weighting pros and cons and the distribution of material and political benefits.

One iconic example of this phenomenon is the famous Alliance for Progress (1961). It was President Kennedy’s development program for Latin America, which was explicitly put forward in order to contain, via the delivery of aid, the advancements of Soviet interests in the region. These types of concessions, effective concessions, were lost – as we discussed before – once the Cold War ended and was replaced by a system in which advancing financial and political favors was no longer needed. Debt recovery, market access and structural adjustment became, instead, a naturalized, necessary must.

VI: Going back to the Bandung Conference and the leaders of post-colonial countries who gathered there. Wasn’t their message that they were not so much interested in a new world vision as a desire to be part of the existing world economy? They wanted to be recognized as players, to participate in the economic realities of the world, to engage the global trading system and prosper from it. But these ambitions brought about governments in developing countries that in pushing such an agenda became authoritarian with the support of either the U.S. or the USSR. These emerging nations wanted to be players but were they just pawns on the Great Powers’ chessboard or, as you suggest, did they find a global environment where they could find space to achieve national goals?

Luis Eslava: What happened at the Bandung Conference was, as we were discussing before, that recently decolonized countries came out and said: ‘we want to be seen as actors’; ‘we want to participate in this new international order.’ It is important to remember that the way emerging nations saw the new post-WWII international order was in terms of the rights and the interest of ‘states’ – the protection of their self-determination and the right of their people to decide about their own present and future through their independent nation-state.

Now, that particular type of self-determination – that particular understanding of who is the main subject of international law (the ‘state’) and the main, the collective, actor behind self-determination (a represented national ‘people’) – was extremely important when we have in mind the immediate historical period before its appearance: the presence of very expansive and powerful European imperial regimes across the planet. So once those strong claims of self-determination were advanced, previously colonized territories and their representatives had to enter into a whole range of compromises with the ex-colonial masters as well as with the new two superpowers. The two superpowers, in particular, were ready to sponsor claims for self-determination, on many occasions without imposing internal conditions, as long as external alliances were respected. This created a system of governance that was prone toward the authoritarian side of things. 

But this is not the whole story.

The other part of the story is that the authoritarianism that we began to witness in the Global South was fueled by the fragile realities of these countries. Post-colonial nations emerged as a result of many centuries of European exploitation. Large sections of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America came out of the colonial experience with no real governing institutions, with no infrastructure, and with economic systems geared toward mono-production and the extraction of raw materials.

Already incapable of catching up with the advanced industrial-military complex in place across the Global North, post-colonial states also had to deal with societies that were impossible to manage according to clean ethnic logics. Many scholars who have studied the long-term effects of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which organized Africa according to European colonial interests, have made the point that it left a continent divided in territorial units ethnically extremely volatile, which became even more unstable as postcolonial countries faced their own economic limits.

What you had on the face of these precarities on the ground during the Cold War was the emergence of a form of postcolonial rule in which force became almost a logical corollary of it. This is extremely sad because we can then trace chronologically the ascendancy of self-determination in the Global South during the 1950s and '60s. But then it was not long until it became clear that self-determination as a political and legal principle was not sufficient to ensure substantive independence. What was required was a different international order. In the '70s, this took the form of a call – as we had discussed before – for a New International Economic Order, a call that fell on deaf ears in the Global North. At the same time, developing countries were already struggling with the accumulation of huge levels of debt, which lead to the 1980s’ debt crisis. And then it was during these years that we saw some of the nastiest forms of authoritarianism in the Global South. Rulers, frustrated with international pressures, increasingly indebted, responded by using force to cling to power – all of this together with the usual forms of international nepotism that had consolidated in previous decades. On other occasions, progressive governments were replaced by reactionary leaders and international allies in order to ensure political compliance and a form of economic disciplining which by that point was in ascendency. The rest is history…

VI: Clinging to power meant then that these leaders had to play an astute balancing game controlling rival domestic threats while securing support from outside interests. In addition to the superpowers, there were powerful international organizations that controlled much of global development policy and aid. There was the UN and all their sundry agencies as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Can you discuss these entities and the profound influence they had on the development model for emerging states? 

Luis Eslava: The new international legal order that emerged after the Second World War, and its focus on the nation states, can be mapped against the new international architecture that was also inaugurated at that point. This new institutional architecture embodied the potential as well as the limits of this new assumingly ‘post-imperial’ state-centric global order. 

The most famous of these organizations were the United Nations, which came to replace the League of Nations (the first international organization created after the First World War), and the two international economic institutions (the Bretton Woods Institutions): the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The idea was that there was also going to be an international organization in charge of questions of trade: the International Trade Organization. 

The purpose of the UN was to deal with questions of international politics. It was a space in which decisions were going to be taken collectively and, importantly, the deployment of force was going to be tightly controlled by a few powerful states – the permanent members of the Security Council (the P5: the U.S., the UK, France, Russia and China).

At the level of the economy, the World Bank was going to oversee reconstruction and development, in particular of Europe. That project never actually came to fruition as such because the U.S. decided not to lose control of that incredibly important geopolitical opportunity if it were given to a multilateral organization, choosing instead to carry out the job directly through the Marshall Plan (1948). After this decision, the World Bank turned slowly but surely its attention to the ‘underdeveloped’ world.

Then we have the IMF in charge of monetary stability. This was a key concern for the builders of these institutions (John Maynard Keynes on the part of the UK, and Harry Dexter White on the part of the U.S.) as uncontrolled inflation was understood as being one of the triggers of WWII. 

Then there was the International Trade Organization (ITO) that was going to oversee questions of trade. Its structure was decided on and approved at a UN conference in Habana in 1948. However, it never actually came into operation because the U.S. Congress did not ratify its Charter. As a result of this turn of events, we went from the 1940s all the way through to the beginning of the 1990s without an international organization dedicated to trade, which only became a reality with the conclusion of the Uruguay Round and the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994. During the intervening years, global trade was regulated through the General Agreements of Trade and Tariffs (GATT), a ‘preliminary’ set of trade rules established, without the input from Global South states, before the Havana Conference in Geneva in 1947. The idea was that the GATT was going to be administered by the ITO, which in many ways was a very progressive institution, in particular in relation to its mandate to consider together questions of labour and trade. But this, again, never happened. 

We can start to see a pattern in my answer so far: an ambitious set of institutions being established to renew and revitalize global governance after the war, yet dependent on the strategic interests of powerful players. But leaving this critique aside for a moment, this new international architecture has proven to be extremely successful. Regardless of all the crises that we have experienced over the past 70 years and the emergence of new international actors – on many occasions more powerful than international institutions and states, I have in mind here multinational corporations – this architecture has set in motion a new era and a new style of management of global affairs. In their ability to mobilize something close to an executive power at the international level, with even its own administrative law (a point that Global Constitutional and Global Administrative Law scholars have demonstrated), they have set up a new roadmap to deal with international problems and discuss issues from socio-economic development and climate change to international conflicts.

Now… having said this, the success of these international institutions has not always materialized in positive outcomes - see for example the little progress that has been made in matters related to the environment, migration and the maldistribution of resources. In addition, international institutions on many occasions have not consolidated the promise of a system of equality at the global level. Instead, what we have is a system that often sticks very much to the principle of ‘formal’ equality amongst states, while letting substantive inequalities continue. Importantly, part of this ongoing inequality has been the result of these institutions’ own design (take for example the voting structure of the UN Security Council or the IMF and the World Bank’s voting system) and their actual operation (take for example the IMF structural reform policies imposed on developing countries since the 1980s and even today in the middle of a global health crisis!). 

I should mention here, though, that during the Cold War – and to connect things back to our previous discussion – these same institutions became, in some occasions, the very platform to advance ‘substantive’ equality at the international level. And this was because that openness was created for Third World countries by the clash between the two superpowers. As the Cold War receded during the 1980s and the 1990s, however, we moved properly into the terrain of ‘formal’ equality. The best example of this is within the context of the management and enforcement of international debt. After the Second World War, with the idea that everyone should have a chance, there was a lax system of sponsoring development in the Global South nations –  on many occasions just to fill the gap left over by the withdrawal of (direct) colonial capital and to help these nations  ‘catch up’ while remaining the providers of commodities through preferential trade access.

As time passed and as the system started to become a bit harder to work with, the North began imposing more draconian measures on Global South nations. This became quite clear during the debt crisis in the 1980s and the emergence of the already mentioned Structural Adjustment Reform policies during the late 1980s.

International organizations have been thus extremely important actors in the construction of the present, and they are incredibly important when we reflect on the concrete possibilities and challenges of less powerful players in the international order. 

And just to conclude with an often forgotten point, as the international architecture that we have been discussing here was emerging and consolidating, other actors were also rising. I mentioned multinational corporations and the clear role of the U.S. as the head of the ‘free’ world, and, after the 1980s, as the head of ‘the world’. But we need to remember that during that time, on the other side, there was the USSR and, coming beside it and superseding it even back then, there was also China. 

At that point China was already making a significant presence in part because it wanted to differentiate itself from the Soviet Union. The famous Sino-Soviet split expressed the possibility of different communist models, as well as different types of international relations on that side of the geopolitical equation. This was important for Third World countries because it gave them other doors to knock at and other coalitions to enter into – within and outside international institutions – in order to secure international aid, market access, security and technical assistance. This preceded, for example, today’s Belt and Road Initiative, which borrows from some of the alternative development programs that China sponsored back then.

VI:  Back then, you mean in the late '80s and early '90s?

Luis Eslava: Actually, it goes all the way back to the '60s . During the decolonization period, as I have already suggested, one of the main contentious issues was the question of development. How Third World countries could get that ‘development’ that they needed, and what development ‘meant’ for all these different actors. Basically, how can we make it happen? What do we want it to look like? 

A particularly interesting response to these questions came from China. On 15 January 1964, during a state visit to recently independent Ghana, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai outlined the Chinese Government’s ‘Eight Principles for Economic Aid and Technical Assistance to other Countries’. These principles were China's version of development which was, in many ways, different from the model underpinning the Alliance for Progress, in the case of the US, or the development model coming from the Soviet Union, based on state planning, close ties with Moscow, and a focus on commodity specialization.

The Principles advocated by China emphasized mutuality and equality, respect for sovereignty, interest-free credit, provision of equipment, training of local officials, and living standards for Chinese experts not exceeding their local counterparts. The commitment to equality and the more substantive respect for sovereignty running across these ideas, in particular expressed in precise commitments like the parity between Chinese experts and locals, were significantly more progressive than other development models.

With relation to the Soviet Union, the Principles showed that China was not necessarily interested in a mode of international communist governance expressed in the formation of a global federation with the USSR in the driving seat. Instead they suggested an appreciation for the recognition of cultural difference and people’s independence – all of this, of course, as part of a transactional exercise. Not very different from today or from other models of development, these were China’s concessions from which they expected things back.

VI: While China was solving poverty at home, improving the Chinese standard of living, and industrializing with the Great Leap Forward,  were they doing the same thing internationally? Always playing the long game, China was developing their domestic economy while also securing foreign markets and international connections?

Luis Eslava: Definitely. This is because China was and is a key player regionally and internationally, with a long history of expansion behind it and with a massive territory and human and national resources to mobilize. The Chinese also understood that the way to secure a place at the table of conversations after the Second World War was to differentiate itself from Russia, while still staying on the Russia side of history. This is evidence again of the possibilities that are open to third party players when there's not only one big actor or two actors, but there are three, four, five different states and blocs wrestling amongst themselves along different visions of the world.

VI: A common narrative about the global intentions of the United States and other Western powers is one of exploitation - that they evolve relationships with developing countries in order to extract whatever resources they need as well as establishing markets for American goods. Aren't the Chinese interested in the same thing - securing vital resources and creating markets for Chinese goods?

Luis Eslava: The story of imperialism and postcolonialism is a multifaceted one. It would be too reductionist to characterize the actions of the U.S., Western powers and others as fully on the side of exploitation. The United States (inadvertently, perhaps) helped to inaugurate, for example, the postcolonial international order that assisted in the formation of many Third World nations. One clear manifestation of this is what is known, in international law and international relations, as the ‘Wilsonian spirit’. It was President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points (1918), who popularized the idea of self-determination as an organizing logic for a ‘new’ international order, the liberal internationalism, that we have been discussing in this interview.

Wilson was not necessarily thinking about territories in Africa and the Middle East under colonial occupation when he gave his Fourteen Points, but these were some of the territories that ended up using the ‘Wilsonian spirit’ in their fight for independence. And this is because it promoted the idea that things had to be different, that sovereignty had to replace traditional European colonial interests and imperial forms of governance… at least formally. This came to contribute to the already existing liberation struggles in the former colonial territories. 

It is important to mention in this context that the Soviets had made a similar and even earlier commitment to self-determination at the very inception of the revolution in 1917. This  contributed greatly, and even more perhaps, to the proliferation of the concept of ‘self-determination’ and the undermining of old forms of imperialism. And this is because the Soviets, like the U.S., were trying to advance their own conception of world ordering, with its own particular horizons and networks of interests. Once enacted, it pushed other players, especially the U.S., to adopt the language of self-determination. 

Again, we can see the same complexities in some of the initiatives that China is advancing in developing countries, which in many ways have been focused on substantive equality. However, that assistance, like any other form of international aid, carries with itself a presumption of an alliance to China and its economic and geostrategic interests.

Importantly, these complexities are crucial when we reflect, not simply, about the multiple objectives and forces shaping the international order but also the policies that are actually being debated by communities on the ground today. China, for example, is supporting local economic development through extractive industries, solving problems of public transport, helping countries all the way from Pakistan to Peru to solve problems of energy self-sufficiency. However, if environmental preservation is also part of your politics, it is not going to help you to have China – or any other country for that matter – on the doorstep of the presidential palace of your country, offering support to the next mining project.

I think this is really crucial because as we advance into the 21st Century and confront the effects of climate change and the ongoing maldistribution of wealth, it is not enough to talk about economic development or geopolitics in abstract state-centric terms and alliances. We need to think about systems of governance that give countries as well as communities the ability to secure a viable future.

VI: So, it is not only government representatives that are able to negotiate development needs with the U.S., China, and international organizations but also leaders of local communities need to be empowered to decide on what is best for their growth and sustainability and then be able to participate in the development dialogue and seek their own solutions?

Luis Eslava: The idea of organizing an international agenda according to local needs is a very well-accepted principle (dating, for example, all the way back to the Stockholm Declaration of 1972). However, for that principle to be a reality, there is still a lot to be done. To realize the principle of local participation we need to aim for an international system that is open and diverse enough to give communities a chance to discuss their own agendas and secure the resources to satisfy their needs. And the reason for this is that, at the end of the day, everything is a political struggle. The objective then is to ensure that these battles over ideas and resources are not shaped by narrow hegemonic interests. This would give local communities the possibility to internally debate what people want, while at the same time being able to access international support and to form coalitions that suit their agendas. 

Obviously, local consideration is not a reservoir of wisdom and purity. And it is not going to save us. There is something to say, however, about the value of communities reflecting and acting on their needs. This is critical in a time of environmental collapse, and at a time when the global economic order is increasingly dispensing itself from labor and production as the main form of wealth creation. Addressing the always localized effects of climate change  and finding solutions to face the ongoing reorganization of the global economy through the processes of automatization and the financialization of the economy (and their tangible effects in terms of sub- and unemployment and generalized precarization) requires active local participation to search for new solutions and to form alternative networks and alliances.

VI: On a practical level, Global South countries that are looking at the possibilities of getting aid and assistance for their development projects have limited prospects. They can petition to get USAID support, agree to participate in China’s Belt and Road initiatives, try to access EU development funds, or qualify for NGO funding. How do they navigate that world? How do they get their voices heard and be part of a conversation among all of these large and often competing entities? Can they remain non-aligned, but get what they need for their agendas?

Luis Eslava: The international aid world has transformed significantly over the last 70 years. Today it is a world much more technocratic and crisscrossed by many more mechanisms of accountability. The Paris Declaration (2005), the Accra Agenda for Action (2008) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015) are all good examples of this transformation. It's still, however, a world that very much depends on the geopolitics of the time and the interests of key actors. Recent years have been a testament to this in a big way.

We went for an entire presidential period in the U.S. where many of the things that we had taken for granted in terms of international aid, as well as international trade, global security and a commitment to international institutions were contested in such a profound way that took many by surprise. In this context, it is not surprising to hear that it was difficult for many recipient countries of U.S. aid – directly through U.S. agencies or via its support to international institutions – to see that support halted or reshuffled.

Here it is important to note that while international aid often tends to be associated with corruption and the misuse of money, it is a way to close the gap of inequality at the global level - a gap that is the consequence of a very asymmetrical global order. International aid is a very much needed global safety net that, even though clearly insufficient, helps to advance important agendas from women's rights, to social-economic rights to environmental preservation.

The politics of international aid is important to always keep in mind because it speaks clearly about the difficulty of governing developing countries. These are countries that came out of the colonial experience, as we have said, with fragile economic structures and political systems, and in many occasions with internal ethnic tensions. In these conditions, and with development aid being in many occasions seen as ‘charity’, medium and long term planning is an impossible task.

What would be the ideal? That international aid and international organizations were there to provide that ‘long-term’ support required for countries to effectively enjoy their right to self-determination. This sounds very much blue-sky thinking, but it is interesting to consider, for example, the lessons that the current pandemic has given us. Even though the World Health Organization has been criticized at some points, it has become clear the crucial role it has played during the pandemic given its capacity to speak across the board about health measures that could be only effective if multilaterally taken. 

Now, the previous months have also taught us how different it would have been if we have had a World Health Organization able to provide, not just global public health advice, but also coordinate a fair and effective global vaccination program. We can see in this example the potential of international action, with clear benefits for everyone, yet we can also see the ongoing disparity with regards to long-term alternatives for many countries. 

VI: In the competition between Great Powers for influence in the Global South nations, much depends on leadership. Many Global South governments are controlled by authoritarian governments, but we also see more progressive forces represented in leadership positions. What trend do you see in terms of leadership in the Global South?

Luis Eslava: Sadly, authoritarian governments are a reality both in the Global South and in the Global North. But recent months have given us also an interesting lesson about not just progressive forces in the South but also a level of maturity and civility that we have not seen in many places in the North. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments in developing countries have demonstrated that, because of years of struggling with regional health crises, they were much better prepared to embrace the challenge and to keep rates of infection and deaths to the bare minimum. There are excellent examples of this across Southeast Asia, as well as across Africa.

Countries in the Global South have  also been demonstrating  a renewed interest to come up with alternative international orderings and arrangements. For example, Africa is currently going through a large process of regional integration: the African Continental Free Trade Area. It is happening, of course, on the back of years of internal problems but, because of that, we need to appreciate and celebrate the value of these efforts.

More globally, we need to appreciate the importance of having good leaders in Global North countries too. It's a very different world when you have a president in the White House willing to appreciate the importance of having an international system organized along the principle of friendly relations. Similarly, it is crucial to have governments in the Global North committed to environmental preservation, debt relief, and the type of long-term development that we were discussing before. It's very different, for example, when you have in 10 Downing Street, a British prime minister who is ready to work with developing countries, in contrast with the current government who has decided to suddenly cut international aid in the middle of a pandemic – abandoning longstanding development projects and leaving both the scientific as well as the international aid community with unfinished projects. 

We need to celebrate efforts by governments in the Global South to enact progressive programs, and to continue ensuring that Global North countries are ruled by leaders who can see the importance of letting countries in the South make their own decisions and support them with the assistance they deserve.

VI: These leaders in the Global South must be able to stand up to an aggressive China. China now has a forceful foreign policy that includes sending millions of doses of their COVID vaccines throughout the World. But don’t the Chinese expect recipient countries to become part of team China and distance themselves from team America?

Luis Eslava: I think our conversation today has demonstrated that this competition between powerful countries over the South has always been constant, and that Global South countries win more when that competition is there. Right now, across Latin America, Asia and Africa, people are being vaccinated with Sinovac: ‘the Chinese vaccine’. These people are my mom, my dad, my uncles and aunties. Many have been vaccinated with Sinovac - others later with Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

The question now is - what are the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union going to do in order to ‘regain’ (if that term is even adequate in this context) the hearts and minds of those who have received Sinovac? And this is because what is at play here is not just simply a matter of people in the South deciding between good and evil. What they are deciding is about questions that are important for every single human on the planet: their health, their family, their future, their incomes, their communities. If China or any other is offering viable solutions to their problems, they would like to hear them.

For a long time, it was believed that the role of powerful countries was to ensure formal equality amongst nations, and the assumption was that thanks to this everyone was going to achieve, at some point in the future, similar income and welfare levels. In fact, the opposite has happened. Equality has deteriorated across the planet - even in the Global North. The time has clearly come for another way of conceptualizing and conducting global relations. 

VI: Luis, this has been quite an informative conversation. I think we can conclude that the statement by the Chinese diplomat, that everyone's is going to align with one Great Power world view or another, is not the way the global community is going to evolve. It will be particularly interesting to see how Global South nations navigate their futures in the next 5 to 10 years.

VI: Luis, this has been quite an informative conversation. I think we can conclude that the statement by the Chinese diplomat, that everyone's is going to align with one Great Power world view or another, is not the way the global community is going to evolve. It will be particularly interesting to see how Global South nations navigate their futures in the next 5 to 10 years.

Luis Eslava: Indeed… the next 5 to 10 years are going to be incredibly important for the Global South and the international order more generally. Hopefully what we will witness is not Global South nations being trapped in a ‘new’ Cold War, but instead they, and everyone else, benefiting from a broader and more generous and caring world for all.

Dr. Luis Eslava is Reader in International Law and co-director of the Centre for Critical International Law at the University of Kent, UK, Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, Australia, International Professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia, and a core faculty at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) Global Workshops, Harvard Law School. Luis is also a member of the steering committee of The IEL Collective, coordinator of the initiative Ruptures21: Towards New Economies, Societies and Legalities, and co-organiser of the International Law and Politics Collaborative Research Network at the Law and Society Association. Bringing together insights from anthropology, history and legal and social theory, his work focuses on the multiple ways in which international norms, aspirations and institutional practices, both old and new, come to shape and become part of our everyday life, arguing that closer critical attention needs to be paid to this co-constitutive relationship between international law ‘up there’ and life ‘down here’. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, his most recent books include Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and the co-edited collection Bandung, Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts, Pending Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2017).