The Hague Group revives the possibility of a new internationalism

Mail & Guardian

a day ago

A vigil remembering journalists killed in Palestine held at St.Georges Cathedral in Cape Town on 28 January 2024. Photo by Leanne Brady
Imperialism is on a genocidal offensive in Gaza, and has recently bombed its way through Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran too. But there is also a growing international pushback. In the West, young people are standing with Palestine in growing numbers.
In Africa, the rise of anti-imperialist sentiment across West Africa and the Sahel marks one of the most significant political shifts in a generation. In Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and now Senegal, we are witnessing a rupture with the neocolonial order — a rejection of French military presence, International Monetary Fund tutelage and elite subservience to Western interests. The emergence of figures such as Captain Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso reflects a desire to reclaim sovereignty not in speeches, but through concrete acts of defiance.
While these new formations are uneven and at times militarised, they speak to a profound disaffection with the postcolonial consensus. There is a new assertion of a politics rooted in self-determination, resistance to external domination, and the urgent need to build new regional solidarities on African terms.
South Africa has, in a very different way, led a hugely important challenge to the West by taking Israel to the International Court of Justice and then, in January this year, taking a leading role in the formation of The Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations formed in response to Israel's genocidal attack on Gaza and committed to upholding international law and confronting impunity.
Nine nations — Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa — came together to commit to upholding the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, which found plausible evidence that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. They pledged to prevent arms transfers that could contribute to the genocide, to block military cargo from docking at their ports, and to begin building the legal and diplomatic mechanisms required to hold states accountable for aiding and abetting war crimes.
For the first time in decades, the postcolonial world stood together and spoke in a voice not dictated by Washington, Tel Aviv or Brussels. The presence of our government among those leading the charge signals a meaningful rupture with the status quo — a reminder that, at its best, the ANC tradition carries within it the embers of a once-vibrant internationalism. In standing against genocide, and in asserting the illegality of occupation and collective punishment in Palestine, the South African state returned to its historic alignment with the oppressed of the world.
Internationalism has never been a luxury for the oppressed. It is a necessity. Our own struggle against apartheid was not won through domestic action alone. It was carried on the shoulders of Cuban brigades, Swedish trade unionists, Caribbean intellectuals and Indian feminists. It was amplified by the voices of Latin American and African writers. It was supported by movements across the world that understood that apartheid was not simply a local aberration, but a node in a wider system of racial capitalism.
The same is true of Palestine today. To isolate what is happening in Gaza from the broader structures of occupation, imperialism and settler colonialism is to misunderstand its function in the world system. Palestine is not simply a humanitarian crisis — it is a political one. Its resolution will not come through diplomacy alone, but through the reconstruction of international solidarity as a material force.
In July, the Hague Group will reconvene in Bogotá, co-hosted by South Africa and Colombia, to deepen these commitments. Discussions will focus on expanding the group, developing regional enforcement mechanisms and coordinating legal and trade responses to states and corporations complicit in Israeli apartheid.
The growing power of the Hague Group gestures back toward Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement — not as nostalgic artefacts, but as unfinished projects: projects that sought to create an alternative axis of power among the formerly colonised.
Internationalism in Africa has deep roots. Kwame Nkrumah, in his speech to the Conference of Independent African States in 1960, declared: 'The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.' His vision of a pan-African future was inseparable from a global anti-imperialist alignment. In 1961, he helped launch the Casablanca Group, laying the foundations for continental unity rooted in anti-colonial solidarity.
Thomas Sankara insisted that internationalism without class politics is hollow. Speaking at the Organisation of African Unity summit in 1987, just months before his assassination, he said: 'The debt problem is a neo-colonial plot. We cannot repay the debt because we are not responsible for it. Instead, we must build solidarity among the peoples of the South to end this global system of plunder.'
Today, Africa faces the same global forces that Nkrumah and Sankara named: imperial domination, predatory finance and extractive trade arrangements. What has changed is the scale of the crisis — from climate collapse to mass displacement — and the growing realisation that no national project can resolve these challenges in isolation. A renewed African internationalism must begin from this understanding: that we are bound to one another not just by history, but by necessity.
Internationalism is not just about states. It is also about class. Gaza, like Marikana, like the imperialist stranglehold on Haiti, the brutal monarchy in Swaziland and the imperialist driven war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is nested into the system of global capital — a system that profits from weapons, from land theft, from forced displacement, from cheap labour. It is a system that organises violence through borders and banks, and calls it civilisation. To truly confront it, solidarity cannot be abstract. It must be rooted in the lived realities of working people — their dispossession, exploitation and resistance.
This means reimagining our role in the world — not as supplicants or junior partners, but as protagonists of a different future. A future in which justice is not calibrated according to proximity to power, but according to our shared histories of resistance.
When the Hague Group was formed in January this year, it immediately won the support of left formations and opinion across the spectrum of the often divided South African left. There was a universal recognition that this was a critical moment and one that all of us, including those of us with very strong criticisms of the ANC, must support. We will offer the same support to the meeting in Bogotá.
There is now a rare opportunity to begin rebuilding forms of southern multilateralism that are not captured by elite diplomacy or reduced to symbolic performance. This will require not only coordination between states, but active connection with movements, unions, and civic organisations rooted in material struggle. Without a real grounding in democratic forces below the level of state power, any new alignment risks becoming yet another site of compromise and betrayal.
The Hague Group is a critical step forward. It has shown that coordinated action by states in the Global South is possible — serious, principled and effective. But if this moment is to mark the beginning of a new internationalism, not just a high point of symbolic clarity, then its scope must expand. The same resolve brought to bear for Palestine must now be extended to the people of Swaziland, the DRC, Western Sahara and elsewhere — places where impunity still rules, and where silence has too often passed for diplomacy. The work of justice does not end in Gaza. It begins wherever brutal force is used to foreclose the future of the oppressed — and it must be carried forward with the same unity, courage, and clarity of purpose.
Mbuso Ngubane is the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and writes in his personal capacity.