Perspectives of the "South" in the era of globalisation

This paper seeks to introduce an additional aspect into the established theoretical discourse on the problem of the "South". The globalisation debate has shed new light on the question of how to look upon the South: the well-known modernization and dependency concepts of the past are just as obsolete as are the positive or negative effects globalisation is supposed to take on the countries of the South. The notion of a metropolitan or peripheral capitalism that underpins these concepts has been replaced by the notion of globalised capitalism. This is why the assumption that developing countries could catch up loses whatever there was left of its credibility. Rather, globalisation - in the sense of unbounded competition - leads to manifold processes of fragmentation. They may in principle offer prospects of participation and advancement to everyone and everywhere. Yet, in the global context, they also trigger off at least as many processes of social and spatial exclusion. Consequently, global competition and its blessings are not accessible to countries or to people per se, but only to certain localities/regions and only to certain sections of their inhabitants. As a result, the era of globalisation puts an end to the earlier fixation on "North" (rich) and "South" (poor). The excluded residual world, the "new South", is omnipresent. It has assumed a global dimension.