ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter 1 is to examine four generations of developing solidarity among Third World states comprising the global South, with a greater emphasis on the coalition between global Africa and global Asia, in the twenty-first century. First, Afro-Asianism emerged in the 1950s as the Third World reaction to the racial order in the world system. Second, nonalignment developed as a response by Third World leaders to the Cold War and the bipolar power structure of the world system. Third, the East–West conflict was replaced by the North–South conflict as the most salient issue confronting the global South in the 1970s. The quest for a new international economic order (NIEO) became the raison d’être for Third World solidarity from the 1970s to the 1980s. Fourth, dialogue among these actors developed in the 1980s as an important catalyst for community building in the global South during this period of global restructuring. Collective self-reliance in the South had possibilities of degenerating into sub-imperialism within the global South as the semi-periphery or the newly industrializing countries sought to carve out their own niches in the changing international division of labor. During the 1980s South Africa was the only state in the South pursuing a sub-imperial role. Until very recently, most of the other semi-peripheral states, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, etc., sought access to the lucrative markets in the United States, Europe and Japan rather than launching a sub-imperialist project (Thomas, 2001:xi). We are now witnessing a resurrection of a fifth generation of Afro-Asian solidarity with the growing political, economic and cultural collaboration and cooperation between global Asia and global Africa in the twenty-first century. This chapter poses the following question: does the new and developing friendship between Africa and China (and the rest of Asia) epitomize a manifestation of the Bandung Spirit or a facade of neocolonialism (Quan, 2012; Thomas, 2013)?
