Ideas
Introduction: The Starbucks And The Shanty
Conceptualizing without Defining
Colonialism, Modernity, And The Creation Of Global
Inequality
Challenging The Colonial Order
Summary/explanation
The chapter situates the historical emergence of the
term ‘global south’ and its antecedent forms like the
‘Third World’ by looking at how inequalities have
been produced through political projects like
colonization and present-day neo-liberal
globalization. The chapter ends with a discussion on
the contemporary global south, examining how
contemporary globalization has reshaped some of
its contours and partially prefigured its future.
Drawing lines between the global south and the
global north, the developed and the developing first,
the first and the Third World, has a powerful
political function: It allows critics and activists to
make distinctions between the beneficiaries of
uneven systems of global power. This is more
pronounced in the context of the global south,
where an economically activist state is a necessary
response to forces such as international business,
international financial institutions, and foreign state
power – none of which citizens in the global south
can easily influence.
Since the global south is a metaphor for interstate
inequality, fluid and evolving, it is not so important
to distinguish the term ‘global south’ from its
antecedent forms. Colonial logic, however,
continued/continues to seep into the grammar of
world politics through theories that either
homogenize the global south or present its
development in linear terms. ‘The notions of
’“underdevelopment” and “Third World”,’ notes
Arturo Escobar (1988: 429), ‘emerged as working
concepts in the process by which the West (and the
East) redefined themselves and the global power
structure’. The tendency to over-determine and
reify the global south can also be found in the
metaphors through which conservative political
scientists and economists view the tensions of
globalization.
Reflecting in 1960 on his road towards Communism,
the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh
(1998: 75) remarked, ‘What I wanted most to know
’– and this precisely was not debated in the
meetings [meetings of the French Socialist Party] –
was: Which International sides with the people of
colonial countries?’ Upon reading Lenin's ‘Thesis on
the National and Colonial Questions’ shortly after

Conclusion: The Global As New Internationalism
Ideas
Asia Pacific And South Asia And The World
An Externalist View Of Globalization
the First World War, Ho found his answer. It was
through associating imperialism with capitalism that
the international left, which had hitherto ignored
national liberation in favor of the international class
struggle, made adtente with the nationalisms of the
colonized world.
Greece, the birthplace of Western democracy, is
starting to resemble the ‘backward’ economically
underdeveloped countries of the global south as
more and more citizens lose jobs and government
continues to scale back public spending. The
economic prescriptions to Greece by Germany and
the IMF are the same as the ‘cures’ routinely
recommended for countries of the global south. The
ills of the global south are being globalized, and the
Greeks seem to be sharing our struggles. A global
protest phenomenon began when peoples of the
global south protested against dictatorial regimes
propped up by Western states. Perhaps most
importantly, a similar globalization of the south's
concerns is arising in discussions of the global
environment. The governments of the global north
have proven too beholden polluters to promote
swift and decisive action against global warming.
Summary/explanation
The essay proposes a framework along three
trajectories, the region as an object impacted by
globalization, the region as a subject pushing
globalization forward, and the region as an
alternative to globalization. The essay chooses
breadth over depth and presents a series of
snapshots as a way to offer a larger, if incomplete,
tapestry of the relationship between process and
place, between globalization and the Asia Pacific and
South Asia. Occasionally, it refers to an even broader
area as evidenced by the regional grouping, APEC
(Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation), which includes
economies of the ‘Pacific Rim’ such as Canada, the
United States, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. Sometimes,
Asia Pacific includes South Asia and even Central
Asia, though usually it does not.
One thesis about globalization in the Asia Pacific and
South Asia is that it is an external phenomenon
being pushed into the region by world powers,
particularly the United States and Europe. While
interpretations vary, one argument is that Japan and
 other East Asian states including Korea and Taiwan
were able to adapt their economic policies in line
with what they understood as an increasingly
globalized economic system and benefitted from
export-oriented growth policies in the 1980s and
1990s. In sum, one way to view the relationship
between globalization and the region of the Asia
Pacific and South Asia is as a largely one-way process
whereby outside forces have brought fundamental
and far-reaching changes to the region, for better or
for worse, in ways that would not have occurred
otherwise.
Generating Globalization: The Asia Pacific And South An alternative way to see the relationship between
Asia As A Spring Board globalization and the Asia Pacific and South Asia is
one where the region is more of an autonomous
agent serving as an engine for globalization. One of
the distinguishing features of regional institutions in
the Asia Pacific and South Asia has been the
adoption of ‘open regionalism’ which aims to
develop and maintain cooperation with outside
actors. While there is little doubt that the Asia
Pacific and South Asia have very much been on the
receiving end of globalization, it is also true that the
region is generative of many aspects of the
globalization process.
The Anti-Global Impulse Regional Alternatives To A third and final paradigm to understanding the
Globalization relationship of the Asia Pacific and South Asia to
globalization is as a regional alternative to
globalization. This section views initiatives for
regionalism through this lens in part because the
rising critical discourse of globalization resonates in
much of the region and because the idea of Asian
exceptionalism has been prevalent both historically
and in contemporary times. Japan's colonization of
the region and the building of a supposed East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere merely replicated imperial
relationships in East and Southeast Asia with new
masters. Another way the region serves as an
alternative to globalization is through the lens of
regional arrangements.
Conclusion Because this chapter focuses particularly on the
concept of a region and the way to understand its
relationship to globalization, it has done less to
question the category of the region and the
delineation of the region vis-avis other areas of the
world. The essay has proposed a view of the Asia
Pacific and South Asia as an object of globalization, a
subject of globalization, and an alternative to
globalization.