The term ‘global south’ is in constant use nowadays. For example, some commentators warn that Israel’s incursion into Gaza is ‘alienating the global south’, and we often hear that the ‘global south’ wants a ceasefire in Ukraine. But what do people mean when they use it?

Geographically, the term refers to the 32 countries below the equator (in the southern hemisphere), in contrast to the 54 countries that lie entirely north of it. Yet it is often misleadingly used as shorthand for a global majority, even though most of the global population is above the equator (as is most of the world’s landmass). For example, we often hear that India, the world’s most populous country, and China, the second most populous, are vying for leadership of the global south, with both having recently held diplomatic conferences for that purpose. Yet both are in the northern hemisphere.

The term, then, is more of a political slogan than an accurate description of the world. In this sense, it seems to have gained traction as a euphemism to replace less acceptable terms. During the Cold War, countries that weren’t aligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union blocs were said to belong to the ‘Third World’. Non-aligned countries held their own conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, and there are still 120 countries constituting a weak non-aligned movement today.

Nonetheless, with the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991, the idea of a non-aligned Third World no longer made much sense. For a time, it became common to refer to ‘less-developed countries’. But that term had a pejorative ring to it, so people soon began to refer to ‘developing countries’.

Although that term has its own problems—not all low-income countries are developing, after all—it proved useful in the context of United Nations diplomacy. The Group of 77 now comprises 135 countries and exists to promote their collective economic interests. Outside the UN context, however, there are too many differences between members for the organisation to serve a meaningful role.

Another fad term that has come into vogue is ‘emerging markets’, which refers to countries like India, Mexico, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Brazil and a few others. In 2001, Jim O’Neill, then a managing director at Goldman Sachs, coined the acronym BRIC in a paper that identified Brazil, Russia, India and China as emerging economies with high growth potential. Though he was offering investment analysis, some political leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, seized on the grouping as a potential diplomatic platform to counter American global influence.

After a series of meetings, the first BRIC summit was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009. With the addition of South Africa the following year, the group became the BRICS. Then, at the 15th BRICS summit this past August, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that six emerging-market countries (Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) would join the bloc on 1 January 2024.

Ever since it became a conference-holding body, the BRICS has often been seen as representing the global south. But, again, Brazil and South Africa (and soon Argentina) are the only members from the southern hemisphere, and even as a political replacement for the Third World, BRICS is rather limited conceptually and organisationally. While a few of its members are democracies, most are autocracies, and many have ongoing conflicts with each other.

For example, India and China have fought over a disputed border in the Himalayas; Ethiopia and Egypt have disputes over Nile River water; and Saudi Arabia and Iran are competitors for strategic influence in the Persian Gulf. Moreover, Russian participation makes a mockery of any claim to represent the global south.

The term’s main value is diplomatic. Though China is a middle-income country in the northern hemisphere that is competing with the US for global influence, it likes to describe itself as a developing country that plays an important leadership role within the global south. Still, in conversations with Chinese academics on a recent trip to Beijing, I found differences among them. Some saw the term as a useful political tool; others suggested that more accurate terminology would divide the world into high-, middle- and low-income countries. But even then, not all low-income countries have the same interests or priorities. Somalia and Honduras, for example, have very different problems.

For journalists and politicians, the high-, middle-, low-income terminology doesn’t roll easily off the tongue or fit well in headlines. For want of an alternative shorthand, they will continue to rely on ‘global south.’ But anyone interested in a more accurate description of the world should be wary of such a misleading term.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has set out her government’s plan to avert war in the region and maintain peace using all the elements of Australia’s national power including diplomacy and development assistance, underwritten by strong military deterrence.

In a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra, Wong said strategic competition was operating in the region on several levels—economic, diplomatic, strategic and military, all interwoven, and all framed by an intense contest of narratives. This was nothing less than a competition over how the region and the world work, she said.

‘Today, I want to talk to you about how we avert war and maintain peace, and more than that, how we shape a region that reflects our national interests and our shared regional interests.’

Those interests lay in a region operating by rules, standards and norms, where a larger country did not determine the fate of a smaller country, and where each country could pursue its own aspirations and its own prosperity.

‘And I want to talk about how we contribute to the regional balance of power that keeps the peace by shaping the region we want,’ Wong said.

Countries like Australia needed to sharpen their focus on what their interests were, and how to uphold them.

‘Our focus must be on what we need to do so we can live according to our own laws and values, determined by our own citizens, pursuing our own prosperity, making our own choices, respecting but not deferring to others,’ Wong said.

‘Our focus needs to be on how we ensure our fate is not determined by others, how we ensure our decisions are our own. And if there were any doubt, Russia’s illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine renders stark our interest in living in a region where no country dominates, and no country is dominated.’

The reality was that China would keep being China, Wong said. It was the world’s second largest economy, representing 18% of global GDP, and its growth had played a crucial role in alleviating poverty for its own people, the region and the world. ‘Like any country, China will deploy this strength and utilise this influence to advance its national interests. We know at times these interests will differ from our interests, and from others in the region.’

A great power like China used every tool at its disposal to maximise its own resilience and influence—its domestic industry policy; its massive international investment in infrastructure, diplomacy and military capability; and access to its markets, said Wong.

‘This statecraft illustrates the challenge for middle powers, like us and our partners in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Yet we need not waste energy with shock or outrage at China seeking to maximise its advantage. Instead, we channel our energy in pressing for our own advantage.’

Australia must deploy its own statecraft towards shaping a region that was open, stable and prosperous, said Wong. ‘A predictable region, operating by agreed rules, standards and laws. Where no country dominates, and no country is dominated. A region where sovereignty is respected, and all countries benefit from a strategic equilibrium.’

The region must safeguard nations’ capacity to disagree, preserve their agency and protect their ability to decide their own destiny.

‘When we talk about our interests, this is what we mean.

‘That kind of region doesn’t simply exist organically. It demands our national effort, especially as some seek to rewrite the rules.’

That effort could not be left to one or another arm of Australian government, Wong said.

‘Our diplomats cannot do it alone, nor can our military. And what we do in the world needs to reinforce and be reinforced by who we are and what we do at home. It takes investment in all elements of our national power.’

That meant developing a more diversified economy, making more things here, responding to climate change and making Australia a renewable energy superpower, strengthening trust in its institutions through the National Anti-Corruption Commission, facing its cybersecurity needs, investments in education and training, strengthening the services people rely on, growth in wages—all part of making Australia more robust and resistant to external shocks, Wong said.

‘Our economic security, our domestic resilience as a multicultural democracy and our international engagement combine as our statecraft,’ she said.

‘To avoid any possible misunderstanding, our job is to lower the heat on any potential conflict, while increasing pressure on others to do the same. The Albanese government does that here at home, and we do that in our diplomacy.’

Wong said the government was deploying all these elements of national power to make Australia more stable, confident and secure at home, and more influential in the world.

In the 11 months since her appointment, she has visited 30 countries, five of them more than once.

‘It’s clear to me from my travels throughout the region that countries don’t want to live in a closed, hierarchical region where the rules are dictated by a single major power to suit its own interests. Instead, we want an open and inclusive region, based on agreed rules, where countries of all sizes can choose their own destiny.’

Without these investments, others would continue to fill the vacuum and Australia would continue to lose ground.

All countries of the region must exercise their agency through diplomatic, economic and other engagement to maintain the region’s balance—and to uphold the norms and rules that have underpinned decades of peace and prosperity, Wong said.

And this balance must be underwritten by military capability, as in the plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, she said.

‘Just as we each have a responsibility to help maintain the conditions for peace through our diplomacy, we also have a responsibility to play our part in collective deterrence of aggression.’

If any country could make the calculation that it could dominate another, the region would become unstable and the risk of conflict would increase.

Australia must take responsibility for its own security and be able to deliver deterrent effects, Wong said. In an age of military modernisation, as other militaries can operate from increased range, with faster speed, and greater precision and lethality, taking responsibility for our security means being able to hold potential adversaries’ forces and infrastructure at risk from a greater distance.

‘We must ensure that no state will ever conclude that the benefits of conflict outweigh the risks. This is fundamental to assuring the safety and security of our nation and our people. Our foreign and defence policies are two essential and interdependent parts of how we make Australia stronger and more influential in the world.’

Wong said Australia must make its concerns clear when countries don’t respect Pacific institutions, when they impose unsustainable debt burdens, or when announcements aren’t followed by delivery that benefits communities.

‘We want Australia to be a partner of choice for the countries of our region. Partners, not patriarchs,’ Wong said. ‘We are helping regional partners become more economically resilient, develop critical infrastructure and provide their own security so they have less need to call on others.’

Australian foreign policy is characterised by the perpetual dilemma of grand strategy: aligning lofty aspirations (shaping the Indo-Pacific) with limited resources (a population of 26 million and relative economic decline). If Australia is to meet its ambitions, it must better marshal all its national assets. To this end, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade should develop a new policy capability to connect domestic policy agencies in Australia with those in the Indo-Pacific.

The provision of public goods is increasingly a domain for strategic competition. Those who can provide ways and means to address difficult challenges facing societies—economic development, climate change, governance and health, to name a few—can not only win favour, but also help spread and entrench norms. This is precisely why Australia, both independently and through groupings like the Quad, has made public goods like infrastructure and vaccines key elements of its regional engagement.

Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently said, ‘Given the circumstances we face, we really need to deploy all aspects of state power: strategic, diplomatic, economic and social.’ One of Australia’s greatest assets is its sophisticated governance, underpinned by a well-resourced and highly qualified public sector. Australian federal, state and territory governments hold world-leading expertise in all aspects of social and economic policy. This public knowledge is supplemented by universities and think tanks.

Australia should see its domestic public policy infrastructure as a foreign policy asset. While DFAT, and other agencies, already fund capacity-building and technical assistance in the Indo-Pacific, much of this is ad hoc, limited to discrete projects, and often contingent on the initiative of individual diplomats. There are no mechanisms to track and leverage the influence this work generates.

The Australian Electoral Commission and the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre show the significant value domestic agencies can add to foreign policy goals: boosting electoral transparency and combating illicit finance promote good governance and show Australia to be a constructive regional player. These examples are, however, the exception. Most domestic policy agencies at the federal and especially state and territory levels understandably have little capacity to extend their efforts to the international sphere.

A more structured approach, facilitated by DFAT, is needed. Imagine, for example, investigators from the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption advising their regional counterparts. Or domestic violence policymakers in state and territory governments sharing their knowledge and experience to help protect women and girls throughout the region. Or Australian experts in environmental and natural resource management being better utilised in countries threatened by climate change.

Focusing on technical assistance, capacity-building and governance plays to Australia’s strengths. It also provides a more sustainable way of competing with malign actors that have deeper pockets. If the current imbroglio in Solomon Islands over a draft security agreement with China has taught Australia anything, it should be that investing in long-term governance should receive equal priority to direct financial support.

So, what could a domestic policy capacity in DFAT look like? It would need to be a fully resourced division that’s well connected to federal and state bureaucracies, as well as to academics and think tanks. While based in Canberra, most of the division should be ‘forward-deployed’ to DFAT’s state and territory offices to be plugged into each jurisdiction’s capabilities.

The domestic policy division would serve three main purposes. First, it could provide a ‘screening’ function to advise subnational government agencies against relationships with foreign counterparts that are contrary to their national interests, complementing the foreign arrangements scheme. As a recent ASPI report showed, ‘paradiplomacy’ by subnational actors can contradict federal foreign policy.

Second, this policy area would generate connections between Australian and foreign governments in areas where links don’t already exist but would be advantageous. This dialogue could go both ways: sharing Australian policy expertise abroad while bringing international insights into domestic discourse. There’s a precedent here in the ‘first movers’ group formed in 2020 on reopening after Covid-19’s first wave. Reciprocal policy dialogue would also encourage domestic agencies to take part.

In these exchanges, DFAT would provide the diplomatic legitimacy and connections allowing subject-matter expertise to be exchanged. The department could also help build international engagement capacity and ensure interactions are cognisant of broader geopolitical considerations. While much of this work would be opportunistic, DFAT could proactively canvass the needs of Indo-Pacific nations and identify complementary capabilities in the Australian system. DFAT should also have a dedicated budget to subsidise the participation of domestic agencies.

The domestic policy division’s third purpose would be to systematically track connections between Australian and foreign governments and leverage them for strategic advantage. This could also include the multilateral engagement in technical forums that other Commonwealth agencies have responsibility for, such as in health, infrastructure and industry. By auditing these links, Australia can access more points of influence, collate a deeper well of personal and institutional ties with other nations, better understand the pressure points for partner governments, and respond quickly in crises.

With the Labor opposition linking domestic resilience to international influence, while also promising to rebuild Australian diplomacy if it wins the election, DFAT should dream big. Better harnessing Australia’s public policy apparatus is a good place to start.

As countries scramble to secure Covid-19 vaccines, ugly expressions like ‘vaccine race’ and ‘vaccine nationalism’ have entered the global lexicon. But, at a time when global cooperation in sharing vaccines is minimal, and the World Health Organization’s vaccine-distribution plans are yet to get off the ground, India has taken a different tack, quietly pursuing ‘vaccine diplomacy’. Its ‘Vaccine Maitri’ (Vaccine Friendship) campaign has shipped hundreds of thousands of Indian-made Covishield vaccines, manufactured under licence from Oxford University and AstraZeneca, to some 60 countries.

India is a global pharmaceutical powerhouse, manufacturing some 20% of all generic medicines and accounting for as much as 62% of global vaccine production, so it was quick off the mark when the pandemic struck. Before Covid-19 vaccines were developed, India supplied some 100 countries with hydroxychloroquine and paracetamol, and sent pharmaceuticals, test kits and other equipment to around 90 countries. Later, even before the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was approved, Adar Poonawalla, the 40-year-old head of the privately owned Serum Institute of India, audaciously decided to manufacture it—a billion-dollar gamble. When approvals came, the institute was able to churn out millions of doses, making them available to the government for both domestic use and export.

Indian vaccines have been flown to most of the country’s neighbours, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Myanmar and Nepal, and also further afield, to the Seychelles, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Pacific Island, Caribbean and African countries. Vaccines have helped mend strained relations with Bangladesh and cement friendly ties with the Maldives.

Meanwhile, China and Russia have been promoting their own vaccines, and Western drug companies are raking in a publicity bonanza (along with a share-price windfall). But in developing vaccines for its own use, the global north overlooked the prohibitive cost of the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines for poorer countries. Indian-made vaccines, on the other hand, are reportedly safe and cost-effective, and—unlike some others—don’t require storage and transport at very low temperatures.

India’s vaccine diplomacy is, of course, not purely altruistic. When the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, laid the foundations of India’s science and technology infrastructure, his intentions were expressed in noble, humanist and universalist terms. But his successors have long recognised how India can leverage its scientific and medical skills to enhance its geopolitical standing. At a time when most richer countries are criticised for hoarding vaccine doses, India stands out for having sent 33 million to poorer countries, with millions more in the pipeline.

There’s also an unspoken subtext: rivalry with China, with which tensions have intensified following clashes along the Himalayan frontier. Not only has India overshadowed China as a provider of cheap and accessible vaccines to the global south, but it has been quicker and more effective. For example, China has announced 300,000 doses for Myanmar but is yet to deliver any, while India quickly supplied 1.7 million. Similarly, Indian vaccines beat China’s into Cambodia and Afghanistan.

When a credibility crisis consumed China’s vaccines in pandemic-ravaged Brazil, with polls showing 50% of Brazilians surveyed unwilling to take the Sinovac vaccine, President Jair Bolsonaro turned to India, which came through promptly. Tweeting his thanks, Bolsonaro illustrated his gratitude with an image from India’s Ramayana epic, depicting Lord Hanuman carrying an entire mountain to deliver the life-saving herb Sanjeevani booti to Lanka.

Indian vaccines are arriving even in richer countries. The United Kingdom has ordered 10 million doses from the Serum Institute. Canada, whose prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has riled his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, more than once, telephoned Modi to ask for two million vaccines; the first half a million were delivered within days. Trudeau effusively declared that the world’s victory over Covid-19 would be ‘because of India’s tremendous pharmaceutical capacity, and Prime Minister Modi’s leadership in sharing this capacity with the world’.

India is using the country’s capacity in this sector subtly to advertise an alternative to China’s economic and geopolitical dominance. While China has been secretive in releasing data about its vaccines, leading to controversies over their efficacy, India has organised trips for foreign ambassadors to visit pharmaceutical factories in Pune and Hyderabad.

The contrast with the behaviour of wealthier countries is no less striking. According to Duke University’s Global Health Institute, developed countries with 16% of the world’s population—including Canada, the US and the UK, each of which has guaranteed enough supplies to vaccinate its population several times over—have secured 60% of global vaccine supplies for themselves.

The world is paying attention to India as it shares its available vaccine supplies, instead of choosing the nationalist course of blocking exports. India has also offered 1.1 billion vaccine doses to the WHO’s COVAX program for distribution to poorer countries. As Modi has tweeted, ‘We are all together in the fight against this pandemic. India is committed to sharing resources, experiences and knowledge for global good.’

If there is a concern, it’s that India has exported three times as many doses as it has administered to its own people. The country is lagging behind its own target of immunising 300 million people by August, after vaccinating some three million healthcare workers in a campaign that began on 16 January. And mounting concern about rising case numbers, the emergence of Covid-19 variants that may not respond to existing vaccines, and an economy that has not yet fully recovered, will intensify the challenge India confronts in fulfilling its obligations to developing countries while also meeting domestic demand.

Meeting that challenge is a vital national interest. India’s vaccine diplomacy has been a boon to the country’s aspirations to be recognised as a global power. In combating the pandemic, it has gone well beyond the routine provision of health care or the supply of generics. To be sure, it is uncertain whether promoting soft power through healthcare exports significantly boosts a country’s position in the global order. But if and when the permanent seats at the United Nations Security Council are ever rearranged, grateful governments will know who has done the most to save a world reeling from the onslaught of a deadly pathogen.

Fifty years ago this month, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs was born, casting aside its old moniker, External Affairs.

The name changed as Australia changed. The switch from External Affairs to Foreign Affairs was a small expression of big shifts. Embracing new ideas about itself, Australia thought anew about its place in the world.

In 1970, migration policy was being remade, giving a different answer to a fundamental question: Who can be an Australian? The Holt Coalition government quietly began to inter the White Australia policy in 1966; full burial with loud fanfare was delivered by the Whitlam Labor government after 1972.

The External to Foreign switch responded to another primary question: Where in the world does Australia belong? From federation, a sense of vulnerability—the dread that Australia couldn’t cope alone—was a constant ache. The nation with its own continent embraced its geography with a tinge of fear.

External Affairs was originally modelled on the British Foreign Office, and the name was an artefact of an era when Australia thought of itself as British. Becoming Foreign Affairs was a small proclamation of independence, reflecting the vigorous growth and achievements of External Affairs from 1935 to 1970.

As Australia remade the face of its people in 1970, it was changing the diplomatic face it turned to Asia. Over the 50 years since then, Asia has morphed from a looming threat to the vibrant neighbourhood where Australia has a natural place. That’s quite a journey for any government department.

A fresh label described broader purposes: on 6 November 1970, Prime Minister John Gorton announced that executive council approval had been given to change the name of the Department of External Affairs to the Department of Foreign Affairs.

So was completed the checkered life of External Affairs. As the constitution gives the Commonwealth power over external affairs, the first executive council minute of January 1901 established the department by that name (although Alfred Deakin thought it was ‘an ugly title’).

Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, was also minister for external affairs, an early expression of a central truth of that checkered history: the gravitational impact of prime ministers.

After losing functions to the PM’s department, External Affairs was killed off (merged into PM’s) in 1916. The separate External Affairs department wasn’t resurrected until 1935. For the first third of the 20th century, Australia had no diplomatic service; internationally, the Brits spoke for us. Australia had overseas trade representatives before it had its own ambassadors. The first Oz diplomatic missions—in the US, Japan and China—were established in 1939.

Up until World War II, Australian diplomacy was conducted through Britain, and was controlled by the PM’s department. Not until 1971 did Foreign Affairs manage to extract from PM’s the British relationship and control of Australia House in London.

The creation of External Affairs in 1935 and Foreign Affairs in 1970 share rhyming elements.

When Britain was handing over executive and diplomatic independence in the 1920s and ’30s, Canada and South Africa pushed while Australia resisted all the way. Ultimately, in Canberra’s eyes, External Affairs had to be resurrected because Britain abdicated. The Brits forced us to start doing our own foreign policy, a reality given the most emphatic point by the arrival of the war.

In the birth of Foreign Affairs, the Brits still figure; many in the Oz polity felt bereft and betrayed by the British turn to Europe in the 1960s and the military withdrawal from east of Suez. Canberra only deleted the title ‘British passport’ from the cover of Australian passports in 1967, while retaining the symbol of the crown.

In 1970, as in 1935, Australia’s diplomats grappled with two linked questions: What will Asia become? How will the US respond? A dawning realisation in 1970 was that the US was about to lose a war in Southeast Asia: Canberra feverishly sifted omens and runes to gauge ebbing US power, just as it does today.

The switch to Foreign Affairs was high policy with plenty of low politics. The historian Geoffrey Bolton grants that the name change perhaps reflects ‘a greater sense of national autonomy’, but also the pressure being applied on foreign policy by opposition leader Gough Whitlam.

In 1970, Gorton was discarding traditions as he tried to puff fresh life into a government both haggard and haunted by 21 years in office. By the following March, Gorton was deposed in one of Canberra’s most amazing party room coups: with the caucus vote on the confidence motion tied at 33 all, Gorton used his casting vote to kill his own leadership (‘I must be the first prime minister who has voted himself out of office.’)

Give most personal credit for the name switcheroo to Keith Waller, the diplomat who became secretary of External Affairs in April 1970, coming back from nearly six years as ambassador to Washington.

Waller joined the public service in 1936 and quickly became private secretary to External Affairs Minister Billy Hughes; two years working for Billy (mercurial, mendacious and magnificent) gave the young diplomat an education in the black arts of politics.

Waller was a thrusting innovator, a contrast in personality and style from his predecessor, James Plimsoll, secretary of External Affairs from 1965 to 1970. Plimsoll was a superb diplomat but a poor manager: a believer in letting problems moulder, shoving troubling papers into the bottom drawer to file and forget. My comparison of Plimsoll and Waller as two founding mandarins, present at the creation of Oz foreign policy, is here.

Waller, a consummate bureaucrat, returned to Canberra ready for all manner of turf wars. Finding that the secretary’s office still had the same furniture and antiquated switchboard it had used when he joined the department, one of his first changes was to refit his office.

After changing the furniture, he banished External Affairs, a name change responding to the many ways the game was changing.