The North-South Dialogue: Britain at Odds

Abstract

Theorists and practitioners alike agree that precision is the essence of diplomacy. Yet there are few subjects on which it is more difficult to be precise than that of collective economic relations between the ‘developed’ countries of the ‘North’ and the ‘developing’ countries of the ‘South’. There are those who reject these terms as being effectively meaningless. It is undeniable, however, that the period which has elapsed since the end of the Second World War has seen the emergence, and indeed the flowering, of a phenomenon not previously observed in international relations: namely, the way in which a large number of smaller and less affluent countries, in many cases newly independent and emergent on the international scene, have banded themselves together for the conduct of their multilateral relations with their established, richer, more industrialised, more economically advanced, and mainly Northern, partners. At the risk of some imprecision, this phenomenon, particularly in its economic aspects, may be described by the term much in vogue in the 1970s, namely, the ‘North-South dialogue’.¹