id21 viewpoints

Should we dump the North-South Lens?

Jon Tinker, executive director of Panos Canada (www.panoscanada.ca), was the founder and president of Earthscan in 1974, which later became the Panos network. He looks at whether the North-South paradigm should become a thing of the past.

The development community is visually challenged. Our analyses and policies are suspect because we do not see the world as it is, but how it used to be. We are half-blinded by our 50-year-old eyeglasses.

The North-South paradigm dates from the 1950s. Then, the world could be roughly divided into three groups. The First World was Western Europe and North America. The Second World was the Soviet Union and East Europe. The Third World was everything else. The 1955 Bandung Conference re-formed the Third World into the Non-Aligned Movement, which some then began to call the South. Even in the 1950s this classification contained uneasy anomalies. In which of the three ‘worlds’ did China, Israel, Yugoslavia and apartheid South Africa belong? Were Cuba and Saudi Arabia really non-aligned?

But for some decades ‘the South’ did have some overall meaning.  Not any more. Politically, militarily, and economically, today's global divisions no longer follow simple geographical patterns. Globalisation has created large ‘Southern’ minorities in most ‘Northern’ states. And some Southern countries now have their own super-rich elite, who steal their nations' resources like post-colonial robber-barons.The North-South lens implies that the North is industrialised, skilled and rich, and that the South is developing, unskilled and poor. These assumptions now contain more exceptions than ever. Today, the world's 500 richest people earn more than the poorest 400 million. Four people in five live in countries where income inequality is widening. The North-South lens, which is state, not people-based, blinds us to such social injustice. It hinders us from seeing, let alone addressing, these unsustainable imbalances of wealth and power. Today's gross disparities of income and wealth between countries are dwarfed by those between individuals.  In the North, our antique eyeglasses encourage an ‘Us-Them’ approach, reinforcing the stereotype that the South is almost a different planet, whose peoples do not mind poverty and disease as much as we do. Our response is too often mere patronage, a sense of moral obligation towards the less fortunate, uncomfortably rooted in an illusion of superiority.

It is high time we start to see and to analyse the world as it is now. Panos Canada has begun to explore a ‘commonalities lens’: instead of looking for differences between countries and cultures, we are focussing on what they share. We field-tested this approach in 2006, when with Panos Caribbean and AIDS Vancouver we created ‘AIDS in Two Cities’, a photo-analysis by Pieter de Vos comparing Port au Prince, Haiti with Vancouver, Canada.  In one of the richest and one of the poorest cities in the world, the face of AIDS looks remarkably similar. How we see determines how we feel – and how we act. The North-South lens emphasises what divides us and creates alienation. The commonalities lens helps us realise what we share, creating solidarity and the space to learn from one another as equals. It spotlights marginalised and deprived people in all our societies.

The North-South lens is blurred, cracked and warped. At 50 years old, it is long past its sell-by date. Isn't it time we threw it away.

Jon Tinker

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Further Information
Jon Tinker
Panos Canada
Liu Institute Building
6476 NW Marine Drive
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6T 1Z Email jtinker@panoscanada.org

Panos Canada

See also
A longer version of this article was published by the Communication Initiative in Drum Beat #401 on 2 July 2007

'AIDS in Two Cities’, photo analysis, photographs by Pieter de Vos

'AIDS in Two Cities’, Jean-Claude Louis, Port au Prince, Haiti and Jon Tinker, Vancouver, Canada, 2006Useful links

'‘Phantom aid’: why technical assistance is ineffective, over-priced, imposed and outdated'

July 2007

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