The Brandt Line gave us the Global North and South. It needs an update.

Historically, things don’t end well when German Chancellors start drawing lines on maps. Could the Brandt Line be the exception that proves the rule?

To be fair, Willy Brandt was no longer Chancellor of West Germany (as he had been from 1969 to 1974) when he drew this line. In 1980, a commission chaired by Brandt published a report on international development that introduced the Global North and the Global South as meaningful concepts in public discourse.

The line that divides both — indicating a large gap in GDP per capita between the two parts of the world — became known as the Brandt Line. As this map shows, it divides the world into two parts, but it doesn’t neatly separate the north from the south.

In the Americas, the Brandt Line follows the jagged U.S.-Mexican border and leaves all of Latin America and the Caribbean in the Global South.

Europe is entirely to the north of the line, except for Cyprus and Turkey. All the (now former) Soviet republics are in the Global North, as is Japan. But China, along with North and South Korea, is in the Global South, as is the rest of Asia, and the entirety of Africa.

Despite bends and curves, the Brandt Line clearly separates a richer north from a poorer south, with one glaring exception — or rather, two: Australia and New Zealand, both advanced economies in the Southern Hemisphere, hence the hedging terminology that allows those countries to be in the Global North while being in the actual south.

The Brandt Report did more than highlight the world’s North-South divide — it also proposed solutions to the worldwide economic imbalance: The Global North should give economic aid to the Global South, so it could catch up and narrow the wealth gap.

Obviously, that hasn’t happened, and you could argue that is either because the aid has been insufficient or because aid is not the right instrument to help economies mature.

Whatever the right answer, things have changed since 1980. While the global wealth gap persists, the Brandt Line no longer reflects the reality of the divide.

In the four decades since the former Chancellor’s report, an almost continuous economic boom has transformed the economies of both China and South Korea, lifting most of their populations out of poverty.

The transformation has been equally impressive in parts of the Middle East. Just put a picture of Dubai in 1980 next to one from today. The rapid economic development of Mexico, Brazil, India, and other countries in the so-called Global South belies the use of that term as a euphemism for the “Third World,” incapable of closing the gap with the First World economies in Europe and North America. (The Second World, in that particular Cold War-era taxonomy, were the communist countries.)

Perhaps the Brandt Line was always too blunt an instrument to understand global inequality. These days, it certainly is outdated. But could it be overhauled to reflect today’s reality? Reddit contributor zzz_ch has drawn a revised version of the map, using data from the UN’s 2023 Human Development Index (HDI) as a yardstick.

Countries with an HDI above 0.8 are in the Global North, and those with a lower HDI are in the Global South. An HDI of 0.8 is considered “very high.” Bulgaria falls just below, and Belarus just makes the grade.

The Reddit map is even less straight-lined than the Brandt one, indicating areas of both progress and decline.

• In the Americas, Chile and Argentina have joined the Global North.
• In Europe, Turkey is in, but large parts of the Balkans (Bosnia, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria), Moldova, and Ukraine, as well as the Southern Caucasus (Armenia and Azerbaijan), have gone “South.”
• With the exception of war-torn Yemen, the entire Arabian Peninsula has gone in the opposite direction.
• In East Asia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brunei, and South Korea have joined the North.
• Africa is the only continent that remains entirely stuck in one camp — unfortunately, the one below HDI 0.8.

Not that we don’t trust zzz_ch, but perhaps there’s an out-of-work German chancellor available to make a more memorable version of this map — and tell us how to fix it.

Strange Maps #1261

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