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From Non-Alignment to Autonomy in the Global South: Revisiting
Fragmintegration in Africa and Latin America
Del no alineamiento a la autonomía en el Sur Global: revisitar la
fragmintegración en África y América Latina
Ngoie Tshibambe Germain
1
University of Lubumbashi -Democratic Republic of Congo
ORCID: 0009-0002-4411-570X
gngoie2013@gmail.com
1
PhD in International Relations from the University of Lubumbashi (UNILU) and Full Professor at the same
institution. His work focuses on African international relations, regional integration, conflicts, natural resources,
migration, and critical studies of politics in Africa. His scholarship addresses the geopolitics of knowledge,
dependency, decoloniality, and African epistemic autonomy through Global South perspectives.
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Abstract
This article focuses on three core conceptual sequences in the trajectory of the Global South since Bandung:
non-alignment, the quest for autonomy, and the investment in regionalism as a pathway out of structural
dependence. In this regard, the temporal span of postcolonial states’ history cannot be assessed through a
simple binary prism—neither as straightforward progressive emancipation nor as the outright failure of a
Third Worldist project—but rather as a dynamic of fragmintegration in James Rosenau’s sense, in which
forces of integration and fragmentation coexist and partially neutralize one another. Drawing on a
comparison between Africa and Latin America, the article shows that this fragmintegration is shaped by
distinct bias of concentration: in Latin America, the presence of the United States polarizes regional
strategies, whereas in Africa the continued centrality of Europe as a normative, economic and institutional
hub operates as a kind of “odor of the father” that affects the trajectories of autonomy. Furthermore, the
paper argues that the weakening of South–South solidarities can be explained by a “gaze upon and for
oneself” trap: some states in the Global South, having become privileged interlocutors or regional “big
brothers”, are courted by great powers and convert their relative success into bilateral capital rather than a
resource for coalition-building. The central claim is that the loss of autonomy in the Global South stems not
only from the domination exerted by core powers, but also from internal de-solidarization that undermines
collective agency.
Keywords: non-alignment, autonomy, international status, dependence, integration,
fragmintegration
Resumen
Este artículo analiza tres secuencias conceptuales centrales en la trayectoria del Sur global desde Bandung:
el no alineamiento, la búsqueda de autonomía y la apuesta por el regionalismo como vía para superar la
dependencia estructural. Se sostiene que la historia de los Estados poscoloniales no puede leerse en términos
binarios —como una progresiva emancipación lineal o como el fracaso de un proyecto tercermundista—,
sino como una dinámica de “fragmintegración”, en el sentido de James Rosenau, en la que coexisten y se
neutralizan parcialmente fuerzas de integración y de fragmentación. A partir de una comparación entre
África y América Latina, el artículo muestra que esta fragmintegración está atravesada por sesgos de
concentración distintos: en América Latina, la presencia de Estados Unidos polariza las estrategias
regionales, mientras que en África la persistencia de Europa como centro normativo, económico e
institucional opera como una “huella del padre” que condiciona las trayectorias de autonomía. Asimismo,
se argumenta que el debilitamiento de las solidaridades Sur–Sur responde a una trampa del “mirar(se) para
sí y por sí”: ciertos Estados del Sur global, convertidos en “hermanos mayores” regionales, transforman su
éxito relativo en capital bilateral más que en recurso para la construcción de coaliciones. La tesis central es
que la pérdida de autonomía del Sur global resulta tanto de la dominación de los centros hegemónicos como
de una des‑solidarización interna que fragiliza la capacidad de acción colectiva.
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Palabras clave: Sur global; no alineamiento; autonomía; dependencia; regionalismo;
fragmintegración.
TRABAJO RECIBIDO: 25/3/2026 TRABAJO ACEPTADO: 4/6/2026
Esta obra está bajo una licencia internacional https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Introduction
In 1955, the year of the Bandung Conference, the states of the Global South sought to move
away from the position of marginality in which the international order had long confined them,
and to constitute themselves as full subjects on the world stage (Delpin, 2015). Gathered from 18
to 24 April 1955 on the island of Java, the representatives of twenty‑nine countries from Africa,
Asia and the Near East claimed to speak on behalf of roughly one billion two hundred and fifty
million people, that is, more than half of humanity, a group that the economist and demographer
Alfred Sauvy would describe, by analogy with the Third Estate of the French Revolution, as the
“Third World” (Jouve, 1976). Bandung thus encapsulates the entry onto the stage, in the field of
international relations, of peoples seeking to project their historical and political being beyond
both the old imperial structures and the new constraints of the Cold War (Duroselle and Kaspi,
2004; Mougel, 2021). Read retrospectively, this sequence reveals a constitutive tension that would
continue to traverse the experience of the countries of the Global South: an ontological tension,
insofar as it concerns the very possibility for these states to exist as recognized subjects whose
international being is fully actualized.
Legally speaking, the post‑1945 order proclaimed the sovereign equality of states and
non‑interference in domestic affairs, in continuity with a Westphalian referent elevated to the status
of universal norm: this is the content of the United Nations Charter, often seen as the manifesto of
international life. In practice, however, newly independent states came up against a denial of status,
caught in power asymmetries that relegated them to the periphery of global decision‑making and
compelled them to choose a camp. To characterize this phenomenon, Bertrand Badie proposed the
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notion of “campism”, referring to the reduction of any international stance to belonging to one of
the two blocs and the correlative disqualification of any autonomous posture as suspect or deviant
(Badie, 2018; Badie, 2014). It was precisely in order to escape this servitude of blocs that the states
gathered at Bandung sought to turn their fragility into a collective resource. In 1961, they extended
this common agency by meeting in Belgrade to lay the foundations of the Non‑Aligned Movement
(Mortimer, 1994). This period of striving for an autonomous initiative was marked by surprising
reactions on the part of both superpowers: at the very moment when the leaders of the Global
South were attempting to assert non‑alignment as a principle underpinning their international
presence, the Soviet Union resumed atmospheric nuclear testing, while the American
administration stepped up its vigilance regarding initiatives of Third World countries (Gutierez,
2025). This anabasis of vulnerable states calls into question the stability of international order and
the configuration of power relations.
In order to avoid what Martin Heidegger called “paths that lead nowhere” (quoted in
Mbembe, 2000), a significant part of this quest invested itself in the paradigm of regional
integration, conceived as a way of transforming formal sovereignties, exercised in isolation, into
a substantive capacity for collective action. From the Organization of African Unity to the African
Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area, and from Andean experiments to Mercosur,
the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and
Caribbean States (CELAC), Africa and Latin America have multiplied regional integration
schemes in the hope of making these respective groupings levers of autonomy and growth within
a still‑hierarchical international system. The adoption by African states of the Lagos Plan of Action
in 1980 paved the way for this path of integration as a horizon of development and growth through
continental self‑reliance, whose main contours were traced by Edem Kodjo in his seminal book
(Kodjo, 1980). Yet this integrationist dynamic unfolded in a context of turbulence and
globalization marked by what James Rosenau termed “fragmegration”, that is, the co‑presence of
forces of fragmentation and forces of integration (2000: 15–39).
The argument of this article is twofold. First, it seeks to show that the history of the Global
South must be read through the articulation between non‑alignment, autonomy and regionalism,
rather than through a simplistic opposition between success and failure. Second, it proposes a
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comparative reading of Africa and Latin America based on two complementary notions:
fragmintegration and the bias of concentration. The latter refers to the pull exerted by a dominant
external centers that polarizes regional strategies and diverts trajectories of horizontal autonomy:
the United States in the Latin American case, Europe in the African case. Finally, the article
contends that these external biases are compounded by a “each‑for‑themselves” trap: in their quest
for recognition as regional “big brothers”, some Southern states transform their relative success
into bilateral capital, to the detriment of collective solidarity.
Non-Alignment and Autonomy: Conceptual Frameworks and the Genealogy of the
Global South
The expression “Global South” refers neither to a mere geographical datum nor to a
homogeneous bloc, but to a historical‑political position within the international hierarchy, shaped
by several centuries of colonial domination, economic dependence and marginalization in
decision‑making arenas (Haug et al., 2021; Haug, 2021a and b; Pereira da Silva, 2016; Ngoie,
2016). It prolongs and reconfigures the category of the “Third World”, forged in the context of the
Cold War to designate peoples and states situated outside the two blocs yet refusing to be reduced
to the role of a passive periphery (Ngoie, 2016). Bandung and Belgrade give concrete form to this
category by translating it into the language of collective diplomacy: the Third World ceases to be
an object of discourse and manifests itself as a subject that speaks, articulates principles and seeks
to reshape the international order (Mortimer, 1994). Within the ontological density of the Global
South, a structuring element of collective agency was precisely the enunciation of non‑alignment.
Non‑alignment first emerged as a political language before becoming a diplomatic doctrine.
At Bandung, Afro‑Asian leaders articulated a set of principles—sovereignty, equality of states,
non‑interference, the peaceful settlement of disputes, support for liberation struggles—aimed both
at the relations inherited from the imperial order and at the new forms of tutelage induced by the
bipolarization of international life, which had taken the form of rigid bipolarity, manifested in a
series of crises such as Berlin in 1948, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and,
in response, the establishment of the Warsaw Pact (Duroselle and Kaspi, 2004). In Belgrade in
1961, under the impetus of Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Nkrumah and Sukarno, the Non‑Aligned
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Movement was established as an enduring framework for consultation and joint positioning
(Jouve, 1976; Adekunle, 1973; Albane, 2006; Mortimer, 1994). Non‑alignment thus became less a
form of neutrality than a determination to preserve a margin for autonomously formulating
interests and solidarities. This is the view of Jean Barrea, who considers non‑alignment as a policy
in the full sense of a program of action whose voluntarism runs up against the actions and reactions
of the great powers (Barrea, 1978).
Raymond Aron clearly posits autonomy as a substratum that determines the being of the state
on the international stage. For this author, “A political unit posits itself by opposing itself. It
becomes itself by becoming capable of action abroad” (Aron, 1962: 60). This disposition of the
capacity to act externally forms part of the ontological nature of the state in its existence. When
this capacity is lacking, the existing state does not exist—or, better yet, does not count—on the
international scene: it is a negative sovereignty. The notion of autonomy thus makes it possible to
move beyond formal positioning and to interrogate the effective capacities of the state.
Heuristically, one may distinguish a legal autonomy, acquired through independence and
international recognition, and a substantive autonomy, which refers to an actor’s ability to define
its priorities, mobilize resources and shape its environment without being constantly
overdetermined by external constraints. It is in the interstices of this debate that the notion of the
“quasi‑state”, whose core concern is that of immaterial sovereignty, was forged (Jackson, 1991).
In the case of the Global South, such autonomy is rarely built at a strictly national scale. It
appears instead as a relational and collective project, which presupposes forms of aggregation
through the chaining of collective actions: non‑alignment, negotiating groups, the multiplication
of arenas of cooperation, regional organizations (Laurens, 2000: 887‑900). Regionalism thus
becomes one of the privileged pathways through which the quest for autonomy seeks to translate
itself institutionally (Hugon, 1993: 725‑748). The states of the area under study in this article have
thrown themselves into this endeavor.
Leaving Westphalia Behind? Disenchantment with Independence and the Myth of
Non‑Alignment
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The international order into which postcolonial states entered presented itself, at least
formally, as the planetary extension of a model developed in Europe since Westphalia: territorial
sovereignty, the legal equality of states, non‑interference and mutual recognition (Gross, 1948).
For the new states of Africa and Asia, this universalization initially appeared as a promise: that of
exiting the colonial status of administered objects and becoming recognized subjects within
international society (Badie, 2018). Yet Bertrand Badie has underscored the ambivalent nature of
this universalization: the Westphalian state was imported into contexts where it did not emerge
from a long internal historical sedimentation, and the promise of sovereign equality quickly came
up against the persistence of material and symbolic hierarchies (Badie, 1992; Badie, 1995). This
tension was also grasped by authors from the South. In Latin America, debates on dependence and
autonomy—among Cardoso, Faletto, Puig or Jaguaribe—highlighted the merely formal character
of political independence when it coexists with a subordinate insertion into the global capitalist
economy. This Latin American school, institutionally supported by the platform of the United
Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and the work of economist
Raúl Prebisch, proved highly fertile in conceptual and theoretical debates and developments
(Claudia Rougier; Dos Santos, 1969; Furtado, 1972; Marini, 1972; Passadeos and Gunder‑Frank,
1972).
In Africa, figures such as Nkrumah, Nyerere and Samir Amin insisted on the “truncated
independence” that resulted from the combination of juridical sovereignty, the maintenance of
colonial economic structures and vulnerability to external intervention. Kwame Nkrumah in
particular became the standard‑bearer of pan‑Africanism in its maximalist integrationist variant,
through the project of a United States of Africa; his statement “Divided, we fall; united, we stand”
has been remembered by generations of pan‑Africanists (Ngoie, 2008; Jouve, 1984;
Glélé‑Ahanhazo, 1986). One may therefore speak of an ontological tension: states of the Global
South are recognized as sovereign states and yet they struggle to fully realize themselves as
subjects endowed with an effective status in the international hierarchy.
In any case, the leading figures of non‑alignment—Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Nkrumah,
Nyerere, Sukarno, Ben Bella, and later Fidel Castro—precisely sought to assert a political
subjectivity that would not be absorbed into bloc logic. Hence an initial trajectory of
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rapprochement between Africa and Asia, which gave rise to the “Afro‑Asian movement” whose
broad canvas is traced by Henry Laurens (2000), followed by an extension of solidarity to countries
of the Americas. The group of the three “A’s” thus emerged on the international scene. Yet their
trajectory reveals the violence of “reminders to order”. In 1956, the Suez crisis erupted in a context
where the paths pursued by Nasser in Egypt in the name of greater autonomy disturbed the
“masters of the world”. The latter bared their teeth, multiplying destabilization maneuvers,
including a military intervention in Egypt (Laurens, 2000: 890–892). In Ghana, where Nkrumah
had made pan‑Africanism and non‑alignment instruments of continental transformation, the leader
was overthrown in 1966 amid strong Western interference. Tanzania under Nyerere, committed to
a self‑reliant African socialism and to supporting liberation struggles, remained trapped in
persistent financial and institutional dependencies.
In Latin America, the period of striving for autonomy and articulating non‑alignment is
strongly associated with the trajectory of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, while in other countries United
States multinationals effectively “made the rules” and, as in Chile, the CIA did not hesitate to
overthrow Allende, flexing its muscles to put an end to any perceived indiscipline in the region
2
.
Cuba in turn illustrates a more radical form of resistance: Havana claimed its belonging to the
non‑aligned camp while forging close ties with the USSR, thus fueling debate on the limits,
ambiguities and anti‑imperialist uses of non‑alignment (Laurens, 2000).
The disenchantment with independence did not, however, lead to the abandonment of the
autonomy project. Rather, it encouraged a shift in strategies: from the sole affirmation of
non‑alignment towards the search for collective configurations capable of compensating for the
weakness of states taken in isolation. This shift—from principle to diapositives—prepared the
ground for regionalism and coalition diplomacy. This dimension of reality had already been
theorized in debates within ECLAC around Raúl Prebisch and other dependency theorists
regarding strategies for overcoming “development of underdevelopment”, notably by recalling the
options of deeper insertion into the capitalist system or relative withdrawal, which Samir Amin
would later conceptualize as “delinking”. This strand of Amin’s thought does not imply a quest for
2
In Latin America, the force‑based diplomacy of the United States aimed at destabilizing other states is notably
illustrated by the failed Bay of Pigs operation against Cuba at the height of the Cold War (Evans, 2021).
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autarky, but rather an appeal for “polycentrism” and a renewed rationality of integration among
subordinated economies (Amin, 1986).
Paths to Autonomy: Regionalism, Coalitions and South–South Fault Lines
As the illusion faded that political independence would suffice to generate effective
sovereignty, the states of the Global South came to grasp the depth of their structural
vulnerabilities: weak economic capacities, technological and financial dependence, and exposure
to the strategic pressures of the great powers. This awareness crystallized in the efforts of Third
World states to campaign for the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO),
notably by investing in United Nations forums (Bedjaoui, 1979). When large‑scale multilateralism,
involving all states including those of the North, revealed its limits, regionalism emerged as a
rational response to this fragility: transforming postcolonial fragmentation into a collective
capacity for negotiation and action. Kwame Nkrumah powerfully advocated this path in his
book Africa Must Unite (Adekunle, 1971; Jouve, 1984; Ngoie, 2008). The aim was not merely to
emulate existing integration models, but to turn the region into a space where fragile sovereignties
could be pooled so as to enhance their political, economic and diplomatic density.
Robert A. Mortimer’s contribution is decisive in this respect. In The Third World Coalition
in International Politics, Mortimer shows that the Third World should not be understood as a
merely rhetorical category but as a diplomatic coalition historically constructed through practices
of consultation, coordinated voting and normative framing within international arenas. Its strength
unfolded most clearly within the United Nations, and particularly at the General Assembly, where,
by commanding a blocking third, Third World states were able to influence the content and
orientation of certain decisions
3
. The unity of the Third World rested less on sociological
homogeneity than on a strategic convergence among states seeking to offset their individual
weakness through collective action (Jouve, 1976). In so doing, the coalition generated a form of
3
The investment of the United Nations by Third World states was criticized by countries such as
France, where Charles de Gaulle is reported to have dismissed the UN as a mere “noisy
contraption” (machin bruyant). The “noise” in question was precisely that made by Third World
states.
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relational power: lacking military or financial superiority, Third World states attempted to convert
their coordination, their numbers and their historical legitimacy into diplomatic influence. This
success was especially visible within the UN through the Group of 77 in the 1970s (Jouve, 1976;
Mortimer, 1994).
Yet this coalition remained fragile and incomplete. One of the paradoxes of Third Worldism
lay in the fluctuating relationship between Africa and Latin America: although the two regions
shared a historical experience of dependence and an objective interest in cooperation, their
interaction remained intermittent, marked as much by moments of rapprochement as by episodes
of indifference or misunderstanding (Mortimer, 1994). The literature on the G77 shows that,
behind the façade of unity, divisions persisted, notably over trade issues and the distribution of the
concrete benefits of South–South solidarity. Latin American countries, in some cases endowed
with more developed industrial structures and a longer‑standing insertion in world markets, did
not always share the priorities of African states more heavily dependent on primary exports. This
fragility was exacerbated by the fractures deliberately cultivated by developed states, which
introduced divisive categories within the Third World on the basis of income levels and promoted
North–South dialogue along lines that fragmented the coalition (interview with Professor Diur
Katond, 2020).
The Southern coalition was thus traversed by a combination of mutual need and relative
disinterest. Despite a widely proclaimed community of destiny, the two shores of the South Atlantic
did not manage to build a structured cooperation that could have transformed their political
proximity into a genuine economic and diplomatic bloc. This relative Afro–Latin American
distance constitutes a structural weakness of the Third World project: in the absence of a deeper
articulation between these two major regions, the Southern coalition remained partly theoretical.
The shift towards regionalism can be read, in this light, as an attempt to consolidate at continental
or sub‑regional scales what the global coalition had only imperfectly stabilized. In the field of
integration, however, two distinct postures emerged, producing a form of non‑parallel
convergence: Africa threw itself wholeheartedly into regional integration, while Latin America
combined a strong discursive stance against imperialism with more hesitant and fragmented
policies regarding regional integration.
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Africa: Integrationist Momentum and Structural Fragilities
The African project of regional integration emerged directly in the wake of liberation
struggles and non‑alignment. For figures such as Nkrumah, Nyerere, Sékou Touré and Haile
Selassie, the independence of African states was only a step towards a more ambitious horizon:
that of a politically united Africa capable of speaking with one voice on the international stage
(Glélé‑Ahanhanzo, 1978; Jouve, 1984; Hugon, 2007; Hugo, 2003; Ngoie, 2008). The Organization
of African Unity, created in 1963, nevertheless embodied a founding compromise between radical
pan‑Africanism and the prudence of states keen to preserve the sovereignty of the new entities and
the stability of borders inherited from colonialism (Jouve, 1984). At the normative level, the OAU
made anti‑colonial solidarity and the defense of “hard‑won independence” its central pillars (see
the preamble to the OAU Charter). The transformation of the OAU into the African Union marked
a turning point: the agenda broadened to include peace and security, governance, human rights and
economic integration (Ngoie, 2008). The creation of the Peace and Security Council, the
establishment of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and the launch of the
African Continental Free Trade Area all bear witness to a genuine institutional acceleration. In
parallel, Africa saw the emergence of a series of regional economic communities—the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Economic Community of Central African
States (ECCAS), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the East African
Community (EAC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the
Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), and the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU)—
which were supposed to constitute the building blocks of continental integration. For a continent
divided into five regions, the number of these RECs climbed to more than eight.
This impressive institutional density should not, however, obscure the limits of effective
implementation. African RECs are marked by numerous overlaps, at times contradictory normative
regimes, often weak administrative capacities and very limited financial commitments on the part
of member states. Added to this are armed conflicts, state fragilities, dependence on external
partners and leadership rivalries between continental and sub‑regional powers. African integration
thus advances in a context of severe constraints, where legal and political ambitions are constantly
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confronted with forces of fragmentation. The African experience readily lends itself to an
interpretation in terms of fragmintegration, thereby corroborating James Rosenau’s insights into
deep‑seated trends on the global scene (Rosenau, 2000). Integrative forces are undeniable: the
multiplication of treaties, the growing role of continental organs, and the aspiration to a single
African voice in international forums. Yet the forces of fragmentation remain powerful: the
socio‑economic precariousness of populations on the continent, conflicts, dependencies, rivalries,
and persistent gaps between formal commitments and effective implementation, not to mention
patterns of political governance that tend towards autocracy. Achille Mbembe has used a striking
expression to describe certain African regimes as “military autocratic principalities” (Mbembe,
2019). In short, Africa has sought to become an autonomous pole, but it has been continually
pulled back both by its internal fault lines and by external centers that shape a significant part of
its choices.
Latin America: Cycles of Integration, Dependencies and Fragmintegration
In Latin America, the project of regional integration has its roots in an old political imaginary,
that of the Patria grande championed by Bolívar, Martí and other figures of independence (de la
Reza, n.d.; Sberro, n.d.). This imaginary sustains the idea that the republics born of Iberian
colonization can preserve their sovereignty and carry weight in the world only by uniting (Sberro,
n.d.). Yet the region has historically been built on a strongly statist foundation, which has
complicated the institutional realization of this aspiration. From the 1960s onwards, several
projects of economic integration emerged, such as ALALC, ALADI, the Andean Community and
later Mercosur. All of them sought, in different ways, to move beyond dependence on Northern
markets and to stimulate industrialization or regional coordination. However, these projects have
met with mixed fortunes, alternating between phases of dynamism and blockage according to
economic crises, changes of government and strategic divergences among states.
At the turn of the 2000s, UNASUR, ALBA and CELAC embodied a new, more explicitly
political sequence. UNASUR sought to create a South American space for autonomous
coordination in the fields of security, infrastructure, energy and regional mediation, in order to
limit dependence on external arbitration. ALBA, driven notably by Venezuela and Cuba, presented
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itself as an alternative to hegemonic free trade and promoted solidarity, complementarity and
anti‑imperialist cooperation. CELAC, finally, aimed to bring together all Latin American and
Caribbean states, excluding the United States and Canada, in order to assert a political space of
their own (García Canclini, 2007). These experiences reveal both the ambition and the fragility of
Latin American integration. UNASUR has suffered from its reliance on favorable political
conjunctures; ALBA has been hindered by strong ideological politicization and the concentration
of resources in a few states; CELAC remains a flexible forum with limited coercive capacity. Latin
America thus offers a case of fragmintegration marked by high political intensity but low
organizational stability: projects of union are real, yet they are continually traversed by ideological
alternation, economic crises, external dependencies and the resilience of the national framework
Africa and Latin America in Comparison: Between Fragmintegration and Biases of
Concentration
The notion of fragmintegration, proposed by James Rosenau, makes it possible to grasp the
entanglement of integrative and fragmenting forces in the international system (Rosenau, 2000).
To capture more precisely the specificities of the African and Latin American cases, however, it is
useful to supplement it with the idea of a bias of concentration. By this term, I refer to a force of
attraction, polarization and strategic fixation exerted by a dominant external pole, which steers
regional behavior to such an extent that it diverts or curtails the pursuit of autonomy.
In Latin America, this bias is produced by the structuring centrality of the United States. The
Monroe Doctrine, the inter‑American system and Washington’s hegemony have established the
United States as the inescapable center of gravity of the hemisphere (Sberro, n.d.). Latin American
states therefore rarely define themselves in terms of absolute autonomy; they almost always
position themselves in relation to the United States, whether in a logic of accommodation,
resistance, or shifting combinations of the two. Regional integration—whether UNASUR, ALBA
or CELAC—often appears less as the expression of a fully self-centered project than as a response
to this pervasive presence. On the strength of the polarization around the United States, Sberro
thus wrote:
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“Its history of integration is nothing but a succession of failures, punctuated by
continual fragmentation and border wars. These divisions and wars greatly contributed
to consolidating the hegemony of the United States in the Western Hemisphere, which
in turn altered the terms of the debate on regional integration. The issue now became
determining to what extent the integration of Spanish America could be pursued in
order to protect itself from American power, and then whether such protection might
not be more effective through integration—at least economic integration—into that
very American power. For a century, Pan‑Americanism (the integration of the entire
continent, including the United States) supplanted Latin‑Americanism.” (Sberro, n.d.:
50).
In Africa, the bias of concentration takes a different form. It stems from the historical
persistence of Europe as a pole of reference, evaluation, financing and standard‑setting
(Kodjo, 1980; Mudimbe, 1982; Mbembe, 2000). Europe acts as an extended paternal
presence—an “odor of the father”, to use Mudimbe’s term (1982)—in the sense that it
continues to structure the continent’s economies, institutions, administrative norms and
diplomatic imaginaries (Kodjo, 1980; Hugo, 2007; Hugo, 2003). Even when Africa builds its
own integration mechanisms, these are frequently embedded in partnership, funding or
validation frameworks in which Europe remains central.
The comparison thus reveals two distinct configurations of a similar difficulty. In Latin
America, the bias is geopolitical, immediate and frontal: the presence of the United States
imposes a constant polarization of regional choices—the very dilemma between
Pan‑Americanism and Latin‑Americanism discussed by Sberro (n.d.). In Africa, the bias is
more historical, diffuse and institutionalized: Europe endures as a persistent matrix of norms,
dependencies and external validation. In both cases, this bias undermines the capacity of
these regions to constitute themselves as fully self-centered poles and restricts the
development of horizontal openings to other areas of the Global South, notably Afro–Latin
American relations.
To this must be added an “each‑for‑himself” trap. As some states in the Global South
improve their relative position, they tend to be courted by the great powers as regional “big
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brothers”. Their trajectory of relative success then becomes the basis for a new internal
hierarchy within the Global South. Instead of being invested as a resource for
coalition‑building, this intermediate position is often converted into bilateral capital:
privileged access to markets, financing, security mechanisms and diplomatic recognition.
This dynamic culminates in the adoption of tendencies towards peripheral sub‑imperialism,
with certain states seeking to dominate others. The result is a progressive de‑solidarization:
the quest for autonomy ceases to be a shared project and is transformed into a series of
individual strategies of controlled ascent within the global hierarchy.
Conclusion
The Bandung–Belgrade–G77–African and Latin American regionalisms arc tells the
story of an ambition: to transform non‑alignment into genuine autonomy for the Global South
by turning coalition‑building and regional integration into instruments for becoming
autonomous centers of decision‑making and coercive capacity, in the sense articulated by
Jean Barrea (1978). This ambition was forged against the campism of the Cold War, against
the denial of status suffered by postcolonial states, and against the reduction of the South to
a mere arena for great‑power projection (Chaliand, 1980; Badie, 2014; Badie, 2018). It
generated a language, institutions and concrete dispositives, yet it never fully culminated in
a consolidated form of collective autonomy.
The comparative analysis of Africa and Latin America shows that this quest for
autonomy has remained trapped within a dynamic of fragmintegration: integrative and
fragmenting forces advance together, intertwine and partially neutralize one another.
Introducing the notion of a bias of concentration refines this diagnosis: in Latin America,
regional strategies are polarized by the presence of the United States; in Africa, they continue
to be shaped by the enduring weight of Europe as a normative center and structuring partner.
These biases do not make autonomy impossible, but they distort it by refocusing regional
efforts on the reactive management of relations with the center, rather than on a more
substantive horizontal construction.
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To this bias is added an “each‑for‑himself” trap. States in the Global South that are
relatively successful and rise to the status of regional “big brothers” are tempted to negotiate
their own place in the international order by converting their success into one self’s capital
rather than into a resource for coalition‑building. The Southern coalition thus fractures under
the effect of progressive de‑solidarization: each seeks to rise above the others instead of
lifting the whole configuration upwards. From this perspective, the central question is no
longer whether the Global South has succeeded or failed in its integration, but whether it can
invent forms of autonomy that are neither captured by external biases nor dissolved into
internal hierarchies. It is in this inquiry that fragmintegration—revisited through the lenses
of biases of concentration and de‑solidarization—finds its strongest theoretical and political
resonance.
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Author Contributions (CRediT)
Authors' Full Names
Academic Contribution
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Ngoie Tshibambe
Germain
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
1 — Project administration; 2 — Funding acquisition; 3 — Formal analysis; 4 — Conceptualization; 5 —
Data curation; 6 — Writing – review and editing; 7 — Investigation; 8 — Methodology; 9 — Resources; 10
— Writing – original draft; 11 — Software; 12 — Supervision; 13 — Validation; 14 — Visualization.
