independent state are relatively new (although most parts of the
South contain civilised cultures dating back as far as, or further than,
those of Europe). New state institutions and old social values can
sometimes conflict. In other cases, rapid industrialisation and new
waves of migration have created new ethnically mixed communities
which can be difficult to govern – or easy to disrupt with irresponsible
political agitation. Transition toward new styles of government and
the lack of an established democratic tradition has helped to generate
greater political instability on the whole than in the ‘North’. As we
shall see (chapters 6 and 7) both military governments and
experiments with single-party government are much more common
in the South than the North.
Having made some generalisations about the politics of the South,
it is worth cautioning readers about accepting too easily general-
isations put forward by Northern commentators about the nature of
these systems which may appear to condemn them all to a position of
permanent subordination and inferiority. Employment of huge
generalisations about the ‘rationality’ of Western forms of political
organisation (Parsons, 1957) and the prevalence of ‘kleptocracy’ –
government by thieves – in the South (Andreski, 1968) may, on
occasion, be little more than a mask for sophisticated ethnocen-
trism. It is worth bearing in mind that, as we have seen, ethnic
conflicts can be found in US cities, in Northern Ireland and in the
former Yugoslavia as well as in Africa or the Indian subcontinent.
Corruption, too, can be observed on a large scale in apparently stable
and rapidly growing political and economic systems such as the
nineteenth-century USA or twentieth-century Japan.
The range of social, political and economic systems to be found
in the South means that the prognosis for the future of these coun-
tries may well be equally varied. Already states like South Korea,
Singapore and Taiwan (the ‘newly industrialised countries – NICs –
of South East Asia) seem to have achieved massive, if not uninter-
rupted, economic growth. Japan has moved rapidly up the ‘league
tables’ of social and political indicators. Conversely parts of the UK
seem to be taking on many of the social and economic characteristics
of the South – for instance acting as a reservoir of cheap labour for the
assembly plants of multinational enterprises.
Rather than concentrating on the domestic political systems of the
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