The Role of the Global South in Multilateralism

Multilateralism has emerged as an international system structuring relations between states since the second 20th century. Although French historiography of economic history and the history of international relations largely reflects the concerns of Western actors and the context of the different stages in the establishment of multilateralism on a global scale, it has opened up only fragmentary fields of research on the place and role of the countries of the South in this global dynamic (see the two volumes on History of Multilateralism, published by the Presses de Sorbonne-Université in 2014 and 2018). The delay in this historiographical field has recently been partially made up for, notably by the work resulting from the Workshop organised in 2019 on The Countries of the South and the WTO, demonstrating the relevance of this perspective in shedding new light on a problematic that is mainly the subject of synthetic works. The contextual and dynamic association of the countries of the South with multilateralism as a whole from the time of decolonisation onwards represents a major historical and anthropological turning point in the history of the generic notion of development and their emergence on the international scene, testifying to profound transformations at the economic level, of course, but also at the political, military, legal, social and cultural levels.