The G7 annual summit for 2023 was convened in Hiroshima, Japan, over the weekend and it has taken three key resolutions that should concern all of us in the Global South.
The G7, firstly, is an intergovernmental political forum that consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US. The EU is regarded as a strategic friend of this alliance, a “non-enumerated member”. All these nation-states have a common history that binds their interests in present times.
They are major colonial powers who have subjected the world to slavery, apartheid, invasions, settler colonialism, wars and imperialism. The current world order in economic and political terms grew from the seeds of the violent conduct of these nation-states – with the purpose of having monopoly control and domination of the world.
The colonised territories of the world in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands have all been subjected to the settler colonialism, resource extraction and the dehumanisation of the G7 member states.
This colonial bloc has also reconfigured itself in modern society by creating new world bodies, alliances, concepts and media landscapes to mask its original imperialist intentions on the Global South.
For instance, the post-World War II period in the late 1940s saw the birth of international institutions such as the UN, Nato, the IMF, the World Bank and later the World Economic Forum – whom all sponsored the concept of a free market neoliberal democracy as a gateway to enable invasions, eEurocentrism, unequal free trade agreements, privatisation and security of foreign private property in colonised territories.
As a result, there has been a series of revolutionary struggles waged by these oppressed territories of the Global South to resist colonisation, World Wars and the unipolar domination of the world by these Western forces of Empire.
Although democratic independence has been declared in the Global South since the 1960s, the practice of imperialism, neoliberalism and neocolonialism still persists.
The wealth of the Global South remains in the hands of colonial Empire – and the Empire uses economic sanctions, regime changes, wars and nuclear genocide as a tool to silence, intimidate and control the affairs of nation-states in the Global South. In this context, the right to sovereignty and self-determination that each independent nation state is entitled to remains a façade in the Global South.
There has been continuing resistance from the Global South against this colonial international order of the G7 regime. For the past 30 years, China and Russia plus courageous African and Latin American states have been leading resistance and tabling an alternative world based on mutual benefit, peace, freedom, economic independence, decolonisation and self-determination.
Nation-states such as Cuba, Venezuela, Burkina Faso and Tanzania, to name a few, have boldly confronted neocolonialism by anchoring their independent states on anti-imperialism and democratic socialism. Other Left-aligned nation-states such as Brazil, SA, India and the progressive Middle East region have also challenged Empire with emerging economies based on Global South solidarity.
This emerging growth of the Global South in the past 10 years has been met with fierce violence by Empire. We have witnessed proxy wars and economic sanctions in the Global South and Eastern Europe being weaponised to maintain the old world domination of Empire. The recent invasion of Ukraine by Nato, the US and the EU as a gateway to destabilise Russia, China and the Global South is the latest example of imperialist behaviour of Empire.
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