What I read this week: Delinking
What might the global economy look like were the poor world to 'delink' from the rich world?
This week, I’m centring the whole newsletter around a recent article from Jason Hickel - What is Delinking? In the article, which you should go and read now, Hickel looks into the rebirth of the idea that poor countries should ‘delink’ their economies from rich ones.
What is Delinking?
In the mid twentieth century, many academics and policymakers from the global South argued that the rich world was keeping the poor world in a state of permanent ‘underdevelopment’. Powerful corporations, which grew into monopolies under the protection of capitalist states, came to dominate the world economy and exploit poor countries, underpaying their workers, capturing their resources, and depriving them of access to cutting edge technologies (a process I explain in Chapter 7 of Vulture Capitalism). As a result, the poor world could never develop in the same way as the rich world had – the development ladder had been kicked away, as Ha-Joon Chang puts it.
The idea behind delinking is that global South nations could band together and use their collective weight to create a kind of parallel world economy, insulated from western imperialism. By cooperating and trading with each other, while keeping out western monopolies, poor countries could pursue their own path to development. This rupture would give global South nations greater economic independence, which would allow them to challenge western dominance in the political and cultural spheres too.
This process was much easier to imagine in a bipolar world economy – one dominated by two major powers, the US and the USSR. Poor countries could play superpowers off against each other to ensure they were able to access the resources they needed to develop – but only if they cooperated and acted as a bloc. At the Bandung Conference in 1955, this kind of cooperation is precisely what many poor socialist nations attempted to achieve.
As Vincent Bevins shows in his incredible book The Jakarta Method, most of the leaders involved in the project at Bandung were taken down (and sometimes taken out) by a United States intent on demonstrating that the only alternative to US-style capitalism was USSR-style authoritarian central planning. Global South solidarity reached a nadir after the 1980s debt crisis and the fall of the USSR. The rise of neoliberalism firmly cemented the ‘free market’ consensus that development could only be achieved by opening up your markets and allowing western monopolies to ravage your economy.
Obviously, the ‘opening up’ thesis didn’t work. Workers have been exploited by western multinationals, land and natural resources have been enclosed, and odious debts have piled up. When the pandemic hit, many global South nations were unable to repay their debts, leading to a reversal of decades of poverty reduction efforts. In many parts of the world, development has stalled - one recent UN report showed that progress on human development slowed to a 35-year low in 2024.
But in this neo-colonial landscape, there are opportunities for poor countries too. With the rise of China, there is a sense that the delinking agenda might once again be viable - poor countries might be able to play two superpowers off against each other to advance their interests. In this piece, I’m going to analyse some recent news articles that can give us a sense of what this process of delinking might look like.
Articles
China’s trade surplus tops $1tn for first time – The Financial Times
