ZAP // Mohammad Thoriq Bahri / National Library of Medicine
Brandt’s line
The “Brandt line” was designed in the 1980s by a former West German chancellor. The economic gap remains, but it is no longer fair for China to fall below, and there are countries in Europe that already deserve to “drop to the next level”.
The Brandt Report did more than draw the North-South division of the world on a map. It also proposed solutions to the global economic imbalance: The North should guarantee economic aid to the South, so that it can catch up and reduce this wealth gap, says .
Willy Brandt He was no longer Chancellor of West Germany when he drew this line. But in 1980, a commission he chaired published a report on international development that introduced the Global North and Global South as significant concepts not public speech.
The map that accompanies the report does not draw a straight line that separates the North and the South as if they were hemispheres, but rather follows the border between the countries that were more or less rich at the time.
In America, for example, in the North are only the USA and Canada: the rest of the continent is “poor”. Countries that have had a boom later economic development, like Brazil or Mexico, were poor countries in the 1980s.
Europe, on the other hand, is completely north of the line, with the exception of Cyprus and Türkiye. All the countries that were part of the former USSR are in the North, as is Japan. But China, one of today’s greatest economic powers, together with North and South Korea, is in the Global Southas well as the rest of Asia (including countries in the Middle East, such as the United Arab Emirates, major oil exporters, or India, whose economy has been climbing) and all of Africa.
In Oceania, Australia and New Zealand are left out of the South (although they belong there geographically).
Yes, the German Chancellor is out of date. But what would the correct map look like today? A Reddit user decided to draw one.
It was based on the UN (HDI) for 2023. The result was quite different from the 1980 map.
In truth, countries with an HDI above 0.8 are, as a rule, in the Global North and countries with a lower HDI are located in the Global South. An HDI of 0.8 is considered “very high”.
However, European countries such as Bulgaria are slightly below and Belarus does not cross the threshold. Countries like Argentina or Chile are above.
On the map published on the social network, the user draws a line that translates the colors of the HDI map. @ zzz_ch really focused on interesting details, such as the inclusion of all countries in the middle East in the “North”, with the exception of Yemen (a country economically devastated by war).
Big part two Balkans (Bosnia, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria), Moldova and Ukraine, as well as the South Caucasus (Armenia and Azerbaijan), moved “South”. Africa remains the only continent that is completely locked into one camp: all countries belong to the economic “South”.
It remains to be seen whether, in another 40 years, the situation will change, and whether we will need another “Brant line” to delineate who is rich and who is poor.
