Opinion The year the world changed
This was the year the world finally changed. You may not think it haswhat with prices so being high,the Telangana riots and the Ruchika Girhotra case....
This was the year the world finally changed. You may not think it haswhat with prices so being high,the Telangana riots and the Ruchika Girhotra case. Yet,get your mind off the urgent but daily problems and you will see a pattern emerge. When the USSR disintegrated in 1991,the world became unipolar with only one hyper-powerthe US. Even the European allies of America had no control over its activities. Bush Sr was explicit about how America wanted to shape the world and Operation Desert Storm- Iraq Mark 1 was the result. For years after that,the international community was clamouring for a multi-polar world. As G5 became G-7 and then G-8,the lead was still with G-1.
What happened at Copenhagen shows how far the world has come. Once the financial crisis hit the US and the rest of the OECD,the new balance emerged. Thanks to nearly twenty years of globalisation,China and India are no longer just emerging countries. Goldman Sachss label BRIC was a mistake since Russia is neither a well run economy nor a stable polity. But the message was clear that a new economic order was about to replace the old one. For many years the international diplomatic status of both India and China did not match their economic presence. Chinas position in the UN Security Council was above its economic strength and Indias below. Chinas veto based on the old 1945 settlement allowed it to play the role of a spoiler. Indias premature attempt to bid for permanent power status was brushed aside since it was not yet ready in view of the world.
But as recession hit the West,it was China and India who became stabilising forces in the global economy. They both suffered a growth recession but both were able to bounce back. The three G-20 meetings in Washington,London and Pittsburgh made the new balance clear. China was putting in the maximum reflationary push and it was pivotal to any solution of the financial imbalances problem. The world began to speak of G-2 as the fulcrum of the global structure. India did not have the financial surpluses to match Chinas,but it reassured the world of its stability in a dramatic way with a clear verdict in the May 2009 elections. Indias economist-Prime Minister was going to be around when problems had to be tackled. Indias reflation was deftly managed and the rebound was faster than predicted.Thus,it was that when COP15 met in Copenhagen,the bargain was not between US and the European Union but between the US and BASIC countries (Brazil,South Africa,India and China). No one should have been surprised that it did not meet the expectations of its enthusiastic supporters. The IPCC is after all a specialist body. Its injunctions came down from above and convinced many governments. But the larger voting public everywhere remained uninvolved. The COP15 process was an elite process since the voters in many countries were not involved in it. We know how difficult it has been to finish the Doha round of the WTO talks. Why did anyone think climate change could be wrapped up in a single fortnight? Economists have been arguing the case for free trade for 200 years and still there are sceptics who doubt its benefits. The intellectual case for tackling climate change is barely a decade old and few countries are convinced. EU nations signed up to Kyoto but cheated once they came home.
What happened in the final stages in Copenhagen was dramatic. It came down to the new G-5US plus BASIC. This was a direct North-South showdown. The EU countries were kept out. The issue was of growth and redistribution. China played hard ball,using its new economic clout to good effect. It had in its company India,Brazil and South Africa. Ten years after Kyoto the power map in climate talks is totally changed. So it is a new multi-polar world. The poles are of unequal size but India is one of the poles. The world will never be the same again. Next decade will make that clear.
Happy 2010.
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