During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 1

The global south, internationalism and history

Simon During

The “global south” is one of those concepts whose academic career has been
beset by queries about its own meaning and extension. Broadly speaking, this
questioning has occurred across two axes.
On the one side, the global south is thought to name a geographical region,
which has indeed been mapped through the imposition of a “Brandt line,” dividing
the globe’s hemispheres into north and south so as to approximate the
developed/undeveloped dichotomy.1 But divided thus, states like the PRC and
Singapore belong to the south so that, at least today, there seems relatively slight
political, economic or historical rationale for the partition. Certainly it’s a division
that makes no claim to the South having a unified cultural or historical identity even
if it attempts to fix what, borrowing from Carl Schmitt, I will call a “distribution of
earth”, that is, an inscribing of borders.
Schmitt’s concept becomes relevant as soon as we begin to think historically
and theoretically about politico-geographical partitions of the kind to which the
global south belongs. For Schmitt, the first distributions of the earth form the basis of
all post-nomadic societies, preceding formal law and recorded history. They go back
to the first agrarian plantings which needed to be protected from predators, human
and animal. From this point of view, all subsequent distributions of the earth—all
borders whatsoever, including today’s national, transnational and international
borders—were and continue to be embedded in work, appropriation and violence
(or the threat of violence). But from this point of view the global south, whose
drawing up under that name involved no immediate appropriation or violence,
belongs to a weak distribution of the earth.
Along the other path, the global south denotes a project, an energy, whose
other—whose enemy even— is the “global north”. In his The Poorer Nations: a possible
history of the Global South, Vijay Prashad puts it like this: “The Global South is this: a
world of protest, a whirlwind of creative activity…” and continues:
These protests have produced an opening that has no easily definable
political direction. Some of them turn backwards, taking refuge in imagined
unities of the past or in the divine realm. Others are merely defensive, seeking
to survive in the present. And yet others find the present intolerable, and
nudge us into the future.2
My talk today inclines to Prashad’s path. I am thinking here of the global south less
as a place than as a product of a dispersed drive to resistance. As Prashad suggests,
the drive which produces the idea of the global south may itself emerge from unjust,
even intolerable, situations. For that reason too, as Prashad notes, the global south is
partly structured around consoling myths, some of which refer to the past, others to
the future.
Yet, for all that, the global south’s two drives are not quite separable. After all
the global south inescapably also refers to a real as well as an imaginary geography.
Indeed I want to argue that the global south makes sense as a concept and force only
within a particular politico-geographical frame, which, ever since Jeremy Bentham
invented the word, we have come to call “international.”3 The global south is a

1 On the Brandt line and its context, see Miguel S Wionczek, “The Brandt report,” Third World
Quarterly, 3:1 (1981), 104-118.
2 Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: a possible history of the Global South, London: Verso 2012, p. 16.
3 See Hidemi Suganami, “A note on the origin of the word ‘International,’” British Journal of International

Studies 4/3 (1978), p. 226.

During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 2

distribution of the earth inside internationalism’s legal and political structures. As

such, it rests on the formalized relations between the sovereign nation-states into
which almost all the globe’s landmass is today divided. Let me put my case simply:
the category “global south” is a resistant function of that distribution of the earth we
call international, and its politics, histories and temporalities need to be considered
in that light.
When they come to think about the global south’s emergence and career as a
concept, historians routinely mention events like the 1955 Bandung Conference; the
1961 Belgrade Non-aligned summit; the 1964 establishment of the G77 under the
banner of “developing nations”; the New International Economic Order proposed by
non-aligned and poorer states through the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development in the seventies; or, more definitively, the Brandt Report produced by
the Independent Commission on International Development Issues in 1980 which
established the current “north/south” division. One might also mention later
events—the first BRICS meeting in New York in 2006 or the World Trade
Organization’s recent (failed) DOHA round—as further instances of the global
south’s performative articulation. We might think of its history, too, as tied to earlier
events: most notably the League of Nations “mandate system”, the context in which
the word “decolonization” first appeared, and in which, for the first time, an
international institution attempted to introduce a formal process through which
colonies and dependencies might become independent nation-states.4
These events or meetings between representatives of nation-states within the
framework of international institutions were based on two contestable,
presuppositions.
The first was that old colonial/imperial order was heading towards
obsolescence. This means that the global south belongs to an internationalism whose
temporality supposes that colonialism will become a mere moment in the longer
history of nations and peoples, a fading memory rather than a shaping force.
Modern internationalism’s second assumption was that independent nation-
states each sheltered their own set of cultural/religious traditions, identities and
values as covered by its own institutions, which were primarily legal, economic and
neutral.
The global south’s internationalism accounts, I think, for some of its rather
odd features: that it has no cultural identity as such, no meaningful geographical
extension, no concrete relation to experience. Likewise, from this point of view, the
global south concept, even thought of as a resistant drive, accepts modernity’s most
important governmental and abstract apparatuses: the nation, the state, international
law, the transnational market, global finance.
At the same time, the global south idea seems to be aligned to a certain
faltering in the idea of modernization. We are all familiar with postcolonialist
critiques of the eurocentricism concealed in the concept of modernity, but I am
thinking here of a different context. In the sixties and seventies, liberal Western
sociologists and economists produced a remarkable body of work explaining
international inequity and poverty, and proposing systemic and transnational means
for its overcoming. Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy:
Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) and Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian
Drama: an Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968) are two famous examples. But in
the era of the global south, books like those, preaching the doctrine of development
from the centre to the periphery, cannot be written. All nations are now bearers of

4For the mandate system and its imperial precursors, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Place, Princeton:
Princeton University Press 2009. See also Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: a Study in
Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999, pp. 22-45.
During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 3

their own destinies, albeit within a international framework as divided (partly

imaginatively) between north and south, and those destinies, although aligned to
global markets, need not involve a commitment to cultural modernity or even to
rationalized modernization at all.5
It seems useful then to think about the history of the particular form of
internationalism that underpins the global south idea, and to do so in terms that do
not from the very beginning emphasise modernization and colonialism’s roles.
Thinking in terms of a distribution of the earth that is not underpinned by
modernization and colonialism, in particular, will also help us recognise that
memories of colonialism in particular are becoming mythic in the era of the global
south. To understand our intolerable present as intolerable only because of
colonialism is to ascribe to one of those “imagined unities of the past,” against which
Prashad warns us. One might almost say that, as an international formation
beginning to turn its back on such myths, the global south is reaching towards a new
temporality, one in which all the epochs that preceded full internationalism seem
equally ephemeral, equally provincial, however much individual nations within it
attach themselves to particular myths and/or resist modernity.
I will broach this way of thinking here only in a very gestural way, and in
broad reference to three disparate bodies of scholarship and polemic. The first is the
post-post-colonialist work of public intellectuals like Vijay Prashad and, more
especially, Pankaj Mishra whose recent revisionary books Age of Anger: a history of the
present, and From the ruins of empire: the intellectual who made Asia have helped shape
my thoughts here. This work begins to develop a purposively non-eurocentric
history driven by reasoned protest against colonialism’s legacies, but looking beyond
them.
The second body of scholarship deals with global history.6 It also steadfastly
refuses eurocentricism, but as it engages history’s longue durée, it makes sobering
reading for those of us raised as engaged postcolonialists and whose thinking is
limited by postcolonial temporality. By provincializing the modern period; by
attempting to maintain academic neutrality; by telescoping historical time, global
history of this kind may call into question received notions such as “empire is an
essentially bad form of government,” or “violent settler expropriation of land were
just European phenomena” or “non-European societies did not engage slavery and
coerced labour.” Thinking across oceans and continents in the longue durée, anti- and
post-colonialist certainties dissolve.
The third scholarly resource I have drawn on is the recent scholarship on
internationalism itself: a scholarship which asks us to think of internationalism as a
legal and economic structure with a deep history. Carl Schmitt’s history of
international law and the distribution of the earth in The Nomos of the Earth is of
course a primary source here. But I am thinking also of Quinn Slobodian’s recent,
Globalists: the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism as well as of work on
international and public law by scholars like Nehal Bhuta and Martin Loughlin.7

5 The use of the world “rationalized” here is an oblique reference to Schumpeter’s argument that
capitalism produces and requires particular logical-pragmatic ways of thinking which he called
“rational” and which form the basis of modern science and technology. See Joseph A. Schumpeter,
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper Bros 1950, pp. 122 ff.
6 See, e.g. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the global history of empire, London: Allen Lane 2007; Sebastian

Conrad, Globalgeschichte. Eine Einführung, München: C. H. Beck 2013; Jürgen Osterhammel, Der
Wandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, München: C. H. Beck 2009 and James Belich et. al.
(eds), The Prospect of Global History, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016.
7 See Martin Loughlin, Foundations of Modern Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010, and Nehal

Bhuta, "The Mystery of the State: State-Concept, State-Theory and State-Making in Carl Schmitt and
During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 4

Some of this scholarship is Eurocentric in ways that need to be guarded against, but
its conceptual innovativeness and intellectual energy means that it remains essential
to anyone trying to think about how the globe is divided today. Its primary use here
is to help us understand how legal and economic policy played key roles in
internationalism’s, and thus the global south’s, emergence. I would add one rider
here, however: this body of scholarship needs to be brought into relation with more
materialist histories of global modernity—I am thinking for instance of Sven
Berkert’s Empire of Cotton—so as to avoid being swamped by either intellectual-
historical or merely theoretical presuppositions.
***
Schmitt’s analysis turns around two core oppositions: first that between land
and sea, and the second between what he called imperium, that is the order of things
in which governments rule over people, as against dominium, that is the order of
things in which land and things become property.
For most of human history, anyone has been able to travel unimpeded across
the sea. To put this a little more philosophically, the sea has existed as a Hobbesian
state of nature, and when, from the fifteenth-century on, European states began to
extend their territory across oceans, so-called “amity lines” were drawn up both to
delineate particular states’ spheres of jurisdiction and to formalize rules of war.8 For
Schmitt, that drawing-up process marks the beginning of international law. So, for
him, internationalism emerges as a framework not so much on solid ground as in
those Eurocentric rules of law which ordered rights on and across the ocean.
Historically from the fifteenth century on the sea’s freedoms and global amity
lines helped enable various European empires to begin to triumph over the other
empires that then existed, some originally richer and better organized than Europe’s:
one can think, for instance, of the Qing, Ottoman, Muscovy, Mughal, Safavid, Ghana,
Inca and Aztec empires. Europe’s rise to power was especially occasioned by one of
the richest and most organized empire of them all— the Ming dynasty— abandoning
seafaring around 1420 CE for complicated not yet fully understood reasons.9
After Europe’s 1714 Treaty of Utrecht (which secured Britain, the Dutch
Republic and Prussia’s victory over France), Britain was brought firmly into the
continental balance of power, and its navy awarded global oversight of the sea’s
freedoms.10 From this point on state power was dependent on access to finance
capital and explicitly interested in global trade. This is the context in what Beckert
usefully calls “war capitalism”—a combination of violence, state-power, commodity
production, trade, entrepreneurship and finance—emerged in global networks
grounded first in the cotton business, and which, by 1800, already connected South
Asia, East Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas.11 But as industrialization and mass
commodification proceeded, this regime war capitalism was gradually replaced by
an industrial capitalism (with its machine-technologies, organized factories and
access to finance-capital) that was committed (if only in theory) to free trade.
Between them war and industrial capitalism would enable what is variously called

Michael Oakeshott," in David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole, eds, Law, Liberty and the State: Oakeshott,
Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press, 2015.
8 Martin Loughlin, “Nomos” in eds. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole, Law, Liberty and State:

Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015, p. 79.
9 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Global History of Empire since 1405, London: Allen Lane 2007, p. 62.

This an argument especially associated with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Diamonds and Steel: the Fates of
Human Societies, New York: W.W. Norton 1997.
10 Brendan Simms, Europe: the struggle for supremacy 1453 to the Present, London: Allen Lane 2013, pp. 76-

84. Simms, however, supposes the Treaty was less decisive for a new balance of power than do most
historians.
11 Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: a new history of global capitalism, London: Penguin 2015, pps. 28-55.
During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 5

the “Great Divergence”, the “European Miracle,” the “Great Enrichment” or the
“Great Transformation,” as a result of which Europe’s productivity and wealth
would leave the rest of the world behind.12
So, after Utrecht, Europe’s global expansion was concentred on maintaining
and extending capitalist networks and opportunities. 13 Other motives for
imperialism, for example, the desire to convert the “barbaric” heathen to
Christianity, or to “civilize” non-Europeans into a full capacity for enlightened,
republican or democratic subjectivity and citizenship, or just to allow the Europeans
better opportunities to live prosperous lives in expropriated lands, were secondary
to, or cover for, globally-orientated economic motives.
For Schmitt, however, the Treaty of Utrecht also formed modern
internationalism’s historical condition of possibility. Modern internationalism? That
is the structure which I have begun to sketch in which, on the side of imperium, all
territories in the world are governed by nation-states, each sovereign and legally
equal to the other, each with its own cultural heritage and ritual traditions, while on
the side of dominium, property and capital are protected by international bodies
determined to extend and secure property rights and free trade access (as well as, in
some articulations, labour mobility) across national borders. 14 This is the
international order we know today, in which, in the putative interest of the global
economy, sovereign nation states concede power and control to bodies and treaties
like the WTO, GATT, NAFTA, the World Bank, and the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank. And it forms liberal capitalism’s carapace.
Modern internationalism came into its own in the post-Versailles era of the
League of Nations as formal European imperialism lost energy. Nurtured in free-
trade imperialism, it owed much, too, to concepts of “world federation” or “imperial
federation” that, as Duncan Bell has reminded us, emerged among liberal
imperialists in the nineteenth century’s second half even if it also has intellectual
roots in Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” and “Cosmopolitan” essays. 15
But, more significantly, this mode of internationalism was the first avowedly
neoliberal project, and, arguably, it was the neoliberals who did most to shape it. To
state this argument simply in the terms that Quinn Slobodian has put it: as formal
imperialism waned, neoliberalism (as we know it) emerged in its wake with the aim
of separating the orders of dominium and imperium, economy and nation-state, so as
to secure a post-imperial international legal order favourable to free movement of
commodities and finance as well as to protect property rights. Internationalism was
required to secure such a legal order because, so neoliberals feared, democratic and
independent nation states might put sectional or social interests against long-term
global economic interests. As a counter-nationalist movement, neoliberalism, we

12 For the “Great Divergence” see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making
of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000. For the “European Miracle”
see Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and
Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981. The “Great Enrichment” is a term used throughout
Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the emergence of capitalism beginning with Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for
an age of commerce, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2006. And the “Great Transformation” is Karl
Polanyi’s famous term in The Great Transformation, New York: Farrar and Rinehart 1944.
13 Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: a new history of global capitalism, p.89 ff offers a strong account of this.
14 As Schumpeter made clear in Imperialism and Social Classes, free trade became ideologically

hegemonic in Britain only in the immediate post-Napoleonic period. Joseph Schumpter, Imperialism and
Social Classes, Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1955, pps. 7-9. Although it was the official ideology of
19th century liberals, free trade could be conveniently forgotten about whenever it hurt Britain’s
interests, e.g. in the wake of US civil war which threatened the cotton industry.
15 This is a theme throughout of Duncan Bell’s Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire,

Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016.

During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 6

might say more generally, attempted, ultimately successfully, to universalize liberal

capitalism against the efforts of post-imperial more or less democratic nation-states.
This was the situation too in which (as we can say looking back) the global
south first emerged. The global south can be said to begin when poorer, less
industrialized nation-states, most victims of the era of war-capitalism and
imperialism, most situated in industrialized liberal capitalism’s “periphery”,
grouped together in the new international order for their own economic interest.
They sometimes did so, as Slobodian reminds us, by joining the neoliberal critique of
first-world trade barriers, but more often and more definitively by asserting
Keynesian policies of import substitution and state-supported industrialization
against open markets and free trade.
Admittedly the global south’s emergence also belongs to other histories. On
the one side it drew on localized identity-movements that had already appeared
alongside but against the modern international era—pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism,
pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. Looking back one can say that these movements
failed, or were marginalized, just because their primary focus was precisely not on
economics and production but on culture and identity. And, on the other side, it
drew an alternative form of internationalism—communist internationalism whose
primary purpose was, as Marx put it in his instructions to the Delegates of the 1866
Geneva Convention of the so-called First International, to “make the workmen of
different countries not only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army of
emancipation.”16 But, after Stalin took control of the Soviet Union around 1927,
communist internationalist hope of that kind belonged just to nostalgia.
Once we concede that the ideal of the global south is inseparable from
modern internationalism and liberal capitalism’s global triumph over war capitalism,
we can also recognise that today’s internationalism is divided in other terms than
that distribution of the earth which separates south from north. Indeed it may be
that, today, concentrating on that politico-geographical division obscures more
important breaks and tensions in the global order.
Indeed current internationalism’s primary divisions are no longer
geographical. As Pankaj Mishra’s recent books contend (and I am thinking
especially of Age of Anger), the resistant passions and protests that mark the current
global order cannot be confined to any particular geographical configuration or to
any localizable cultural, ethnic or religious identity or set of identities at all. This
ebbing of geography’s causal agency was foreseen by Schmitt. In Nomos of the Earth,
he argued that “internationalism” has long ago ceased to be able to be understood as
what he called a “concrete order”.17 It may have begun in negotiations between
particular European powers who shared cultural and political norms and also an
understanding of the history in which imperial borders could be negotiated. But in
the early twentieth century, as institutionalized European colonialism began to be
abandoned, and as efforts to separate the nation-state from the international
economic order were formalised, the domain of the international became abstract
and autonomous, detached from lived historical relations and shared values. As such
it began to hatch rebellions and resistances which cannot be understood through the
lens of nationality and imperialism. Which have to be understood, in fact, first in
terms of trade, markets and property and only then in terms of government, culture
and politics.

16Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach. London: Penguin Books 1974: p. 86.
17See Martin Loughlin, “Nomos,” in David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (eds.), Law, Liberty and the
State: Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015, pps.
74-76.
During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 7

I don’t have time to explore this argument’s implications. Let me finish just by
returning to our theme of temporality, and to Mishra’s Age of Anger. Mishra argues,
as I am doing here, that from a global perspective, today’s political resistances or
protests wherever they happen, need to be understood in the context of capitalism’s
global triumph. Let me put the familiar argument this way: today international
capitalism, as it unevenly moves past industrialism, may at last be redistributing
capital and income from north to south, but in the process it is also extending both
new cultural forms of inequity/precarity along with secular and “liberal” norms and
subjectivities.18 And just because it is global/international, this process cannot be
understood as a particular distribution of the earth.
Mishra is interested in what this fading of geography’s agential powers means
for historiography. He appears to be fairly neutral in regards to the two narratives
that in our post-post-colonial moment divide thought about the global past.19 These
are: on the one side, a story in which Europe ruthlessly and cruelly expropriated the
fruits of the earth from peoples of different colour and culture around the world and
has never fully accounted for that; on the other a story which points to how in
mutating from war capitalism to globalized and internationalized liberal capitalism:
famines have (at least for the time being) disappeared from most of the earth, life
expectancies are today generally higher around the world than ever before,
productivity has increased exponentially; leisure has vastly expanded for billions of
people; cultural experiences are almost universally more various; communication
networks have defeated distance…etc, etc.20
As a post-post-colonialist who implicitly accepts the provincializing of colonial
history, Mishra seems to be fairly neutral in regard to the quarrel between these two
perspectives. What marks him out is that he argues that, as a result of capitalism’s
triumph, the historical frame of contemporary resistance movements, including
terrorist resistance movements in East and West Asia and Africa, is European. This
is not just because Europe is where capitalism, internationalism, secularization were
originally established or, at least, first became symbiotically connected. It is not
because Europe is the home of the most powerful recent imperialism. Rather it is

18 Perhaps the best way to think about this is through statistics like this: the percentage of the world’s
population living on $1 a day (in PPP adjusted 2000 dollars) declined from 26.8% in 1970 to 5.4% in
2006. See Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pindovskey, “Parametric Estimations of the World
Distribution of Income,” VOX 22 January 2010 http://www.voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-
world-distribution-income. For a more general argument for “convergence” between North and South,
see Michael Spence, The Next Convergence: the future of economic growth in a multispeed world, New York:
Macmillan 2012.
19 This division also involves opposing accounts of capitalism’s history. One school of (whitewashing)
economic historians argues that what lies behind the emergence of capitalism in the West and thus its
rise to comparative prosperity are, not a la Schumpter for instance, the popularization of rationality, but
rather a particular set of ideas, cultural norms and virtues. See, for instance, Deirdre McCloskey’s
trilogy and John Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth: the origins of modern economy, Princeton: Princeton
University Press 2016. This school’s basic claim is that material factors cannot by themselves account for
the Great Transformation/Divergence: ethical and institutional factors are involved. Another school
insists on the importance of violence and slavery for capitalism’s development. See, e.g. Edward E.
Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and Making of Modern Capitalism, New York: Basic Books
2014.
20 The statistics on life expectancy are complex and uneven: over the past couple of centuries there have

been periods of sudden increase and decline in particular places. See Angus Deaton, The Great Escape:
Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality, Princeton: University of Princeton Press 2013, and the classic
contirubion to this field, Robert William Fogel’s The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100:
Europe, America and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004. As to famines: Africa
remains prone to famines and the twentieth century also knew major famines in China, Russia, South
Asia, the Netherlands (during German occupation in 1944-5), Poland (in the Warsaw Ghetto) and North
Korea.
During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 8

because Europe was where resistance to modernity happened first: it was where local
traditions, culture, and religion, were first weaponized against capitalism. Or to put
this slightly differently: where resistance movements against modernity’s processes
emerged among those whose attachments and possibilities were felt to be
jeopardized by modernity itself, which at the material level means jeopardized by
capitalism and its various governmentalities.
Thus, for Mishra, early counter-progressivist thinkers in this mode, among
whom he includes Rousseau and, in particular, the German romantics, stand at the
origin of the genealogy to which even al-Quaeda or Modi’s BJP party belong today.21
In this genealogy then, traditionalist rebellions against Western imperialism like, say,
the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the 1860s Maori wars, the 1880s Mahdist revolt in Sudan or
China’s 1900 Boxer Rebellion are intertwined with, say, de Maistre’s radically
conservative rejection of the French revolution or the Action Française’s early
twentieth century uprising against Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum’s modernizing
socialism or indeed, on the other political side, the kind of nostalgic organicism that
haunts William Morris’s communism.
Mishra’s argument seems too global to me. Reflecting capitalism and
internationalism’s world-historical triumph, it too quickly universalizes the past
along European lines.
How to avoid this problem? 22 I’d suggest that the new global history is
valuable here just because, in provincializing all events, structures, networks and
communities whatsoever, it makes it harder for us to use contemporary universal
capitalism and precarity as a hermeneutic for understanding either the past or the
present.
So let me end this talk just by mentioning two recent violent events. First, the
Punjab insurgency of the seventies and eighties in which Sikh militants engaged in
terrorist acts and dreamt of an independent Sikh theocratic state, Kalistan, an
insurgency which may have helped inspire Arabian Sunni Islam’s ISIS, and which
might thus seem to belong at the heart of Mishra’s counter-modern genealogy of
resistance. Second, the so-called Rwanda genocide, facts about which are by no
means clear, but in which up to a million people died, most Tutsi, but many also
Hutu and Twa, the latter the region’s indigenous people, the Tutsi and Hutu being in
effect long-standing settler colonialists. I mention these events because, although
significant irruptions of violence, they do not fit Mishra’s “age of anger” paradigm.
They were not rebellions against the precarity and inequity that attach to capitalist
modernity. Their causes were local and indeed only partly shaped by anything
proceeding from the West at all.
Events like these are important when we come to think about the global
south’s temporality. The global south may itself belong to the time of capitalism and
internationalism’s triumph, it may have formed in what we might call compliant
resistance to that triumph, its radical wills may now be best understood in terms of
larger battles between capitalism’s precariat and elites, but actual events in its
region—to the degree that it is a region—often still have local histories and local
timings. When they do, they can show us that the global south knows no single

21 For accounts of German romantic nationalism which substantiate Mishra’s argument, see Karl
Mannheim, Conservatism: a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, London: Routledge 1986, and Liah
Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1992, pp.
322-352.
22 It is worth noting that Mishra’s argument would lead one to conclude that reformist responses to

today’s global, neoliberalised capitalism have themselves to be internationalist. And in this context it
seems clear that Pierre Bourdieu was right to speak of the left’s “vital need for internationalism” almost
a generation ago. See Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, trans. Loïc Wacquant. New York:
The New Press 1999, p. 63.
During, The Global South, Internationalism and History 9

temporality despite its belonging to the internationalist era ushered in after 1919
whose temporality is, as we might say, evenly modern.