Boao Forum: Global South urged to seize its moment as western ‘values’ questioned

The Russian speaker was only a couple of sentences into his presentation when the European businessmen next to me began to flinch and soon they were so riled up they were almost heckling him. We were at the Boao Forum for Asia, and Kirill Babaev from the Russian Academy of Sciences was part of a panel discussing The Rise of the Global South.

“There was a good book published exactly 60 years ago which was called The Rise of the West by an American scholar McNeill. It spoke about 500 years of the western civilisation conquering the world. Right now we see that this epoch, this era, has finished,” he said.

“We see that the Global South is growing. The east is growing. I would not even call it a global south or east. It’s the global majority which is now on the move, which is now growing as the new epicentre of the world’s civilisation, both in the world economy and in creating the vision for the future.”

Founded in 2001 by 25 Asian countries and Australia, the Boao forum is held every year on the tropical island of Hainan off the southern coast of China. Modelled on the World Economic Forum in Davos, much of the focus there this week has been on the Chinese economy but there were a number of sessions on geopolitical issues as well as on energy, technology and religion.

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Although most of the participants at Boao are from the Global South, which is usually understood to include developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, this was the first time the forum ever directly addressed the concept.

Former Indonesian foreign minister Marty Natalegawa stressed the importance of peace as a prerequisite for development and prosperity. He said the Global South could draw inspiration from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in changing the negative dynamics within and between countries.

When the 10 member states (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia, Laos, the Philippines and Brunei) signed the Asean Charter in 2007, the organisation appeared to be emulating the European Union. But what distinguishes the two is the “Asean Way”, a method of diplomacy based on the four principles of non-interference, quiet diplomacy, non-use of force and decision-making through consensus.

During an earlier session on the global geopolitical outlook former Slovenian president Danilo Turk said he had come to recognise the wisdom of the Asean Way during his career as a human rights expert and a diplomat at the United Nations.

“In the West, in Europe, we hear a lot about values, and that is also a problematic approach because it reduces the discussion on a complex political issue to some kind of moral choices, as if this was a moral competition: ‘I have certain values, you don’t have those values, and I am therefore superior to you’. That is the consequence of discussion about values.

“Now, I spent much of my life in the human rights movement and in human rights expert discussions and I firmly believe that there is such a thing as universal values. But we have to be careful how we approach them. We have to be careful about the right definition of those values and the understanding of the context of those values,” he said.

“Let us interpret history with respect and also with the understanding of complexity rather than rushing into condemnatory language which doesn’t help anybody, which, of course, satisfies a kind of psychological need to feel good. But as we all know, and one doesn’t have to be an expert in international relations to know that, feeling good is one thing, doing good is something else.”

Natalegawa said he was saddened that when countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, and the African Union, made suggestions for peace in Ukraine they were rejected as being too idealistic and not attuned to the real dynamics of the conflict. He said that if the Global South consolidated and got its own house in order it could become a strong advocate for diplomacy and dialogue.

“A role for the Global South cannot be given as an act of charity by those who feel that they are in a position of power to bequeath such a role. It must be seized, it must be earned, and the thought leadership must be demonstrated by countries of the Global South. Otherwise we will simply be talking of potential rather than the reality of Global South’s growth.”