Since the early 1980s, the slowing growth of OECD economies has been a major concern for development economists. The leading World Bank economist and author of the Human Development Index, Mahbub-ul-Haq, enumerated the advantages of SSC in its various facets in ‘Beyond the Slogan of SSC’, a paper published in 1980. Quoting Professor Arthur Lewis, he articulated the need for the South to organise its countervailing power on political, economic and intellectual fronts in order to maximise domestic agricultural development, enhance import substitution and explore South–South trade opportunities. The tenor of his argument seems close to the Singer-Prebisch theory of unequal exchange, echoed in the work of the US sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. M. Haq stressed that all the diplomatic skills and rhetorical eloquence, taken together, offered no substitute for tough decisions needed within the South.

According to him, such decisions were essential because developed countries were expected to adopt protectionist trade policies to safeguard their domestic employment and therefore developing countries needed to think beyond their previous reliance on those countries so as to ensure their own economic growth. For that, the South had to overcome weaknesses in its negotiating stance. Within a year, another paper with the same title appeared, this time by Arturo Goetz (1981), an economist who at one point had been with the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). In his paper, Goetz pointed out that weaknesses in the proposals from the South were largely because the idea of SSC was based on the myth of an aggregate ‘South’, which no longer held water and should have matured out of the sloganeering stage.

The question now presents itself of whether or not in the twenty first century, SSC has overcome the fears and apprehensions of the 1980s or moved beyond them. How has the South responded at political, economic and intellectual levels? In what ways has high economic growth in emerging economies of the South influenced patterns of SSC? Is there a lexicon that captures the full nuances of SSC?