A visit to Western Europe in early March provided some slightly
different -- if unsettling -- insights into global economic
arrangements and their socio-cultural co-ordinates. As the crisis
unfolds, people everywhere are questioning current economic
institutions and processes, and naturally enough their fears,
insecurities and concerns also affect their visions for the future.
The fundamental issues relate to income and resource distribution
(don't they always?) but in this time of global crisis, the expression
of these issues can become sharper and even more openly divisive in
spirit.
Two features of some current public responses in
these societies are especially relevant in this context. The first is
the barely concealed animosity towards China and India (inevitably
clubbed together, despite all the huge differences) as perceived
beneficiaries of globalization and voracious consumers of global
resources. The second is the general inability to conceive of a way
out of the current global economic crisis in any way other than simply
replicating the past, even though those past trends clearly cannot be
sustained.
European attitudes towards Asia have long been characterized by varying combinations of fear and fascination, respect
and revulsion, competition and colonialism -- as studies of Orientalism
have made only too evident. But the current public perceptions are
somewhat different: fed by sensationalizing media that cannot waste
time or space on complexities, they move in pendulum swings from seeing
populous Asia as the breeding ground for poverty and terrorism to
believing that aggressive exporting based on underpriced labor is
causing more than two billion people to lead "middle class lives" that
draw unsustainably on the world's resources.
Of course,
sheer ignorance explains a lot. Among the general public in Europe,
and even in the more informed sections, there is almost no realization
of how globalization has adversely affected livelihoods and employment
of the majority of the population in the developing world including in
fast-growing Asian countries. The agrarian crisis is largely seen to
be history, supposedly vanquished by the rising prices of agricultural
goods in world trade between 2002 and mid 2008, even though farmers'
incomes continue to stagnate and cultivation is still barely viable in
large parts of the developing world. Because of the volumes of
manufacturing exports from Asia, there is still widespread perception
of shift of manufacturing jobs from North to South -- even though
manufacturing employment has declined in the developing world as a
whole, has barely increased in most countries of Asia and has actually
declined since 1997 in what is generally accepted to be the workshop of
the world, China.
A member of the audience at a public
debate in London asked whether China and India, newly enriched by
exploiting the globalization process, would therefore use the current
crisis as opportunity to ride through the global economic tsunami that
threatens to engulf everyone else and emerge stronger than the US and
Europe. A distinguished-looking and apparently eminent elderly
gentleman at a large conference in Berlin was even sharper: "China and
India", he claimed, "benefited from the Asian economic crisis in
1997-98 at the cost of their neighbors, and now they will benefit from
the global crisis". Another participant from the floor expressed it
slightly differently: "These countries are not poor, they are full of
billionaires and have four out of ten of the world's richest people,
and yet they come blaming us for the crisis and demanding assistance
from us".
These are obviously not politically correct
positions, nor are they necessarily even the majority view, since they
were opposed by other participants in each of these events. Yet the
sheer honesty of their expression is useful, since it provides some
idea of what must be a widespread underlying perception. And the
concerns do not relate only to potential shifts in geopolitical or
economic power. Even among more progressive people in Europe, there is
a palpable fear (sometimes unspoken and sometimes expressed only in
subtle and qualified arguments) that growing consumption of such a
large part of the world's population will put an unbearable strain on
global resources and therefore cannot really be supported.
There
is certainly some degree of truth in this -- there is no question that
current "Northern" standards of life cannot be sustained if they were
made accessible to everyone on this planet. This means that future
economic growth in the developing world has to involve more equitable
and sensible patterns of consumption and production. But that hardly
deals with the basic problem. Even if the elite and middle class of
the developing world, and particularly China and India, just stopped
increasing their consumption, simply bringing the vast majority of the
developing world's population to anything resembling a minimally
acceptable standard of living will involve extensive use of global
resources. It will necessarily imply more natural resource use and
more carbon emissions.
So the stark reality is that the
developed world must, on the whole, consume less of the world's
resources and reduce its contribution to global warming absolutely.
This in turn has effects on income as well. It is not immediately
clear why rich countries with falling populations necessarily need to
increase their GDP, and why they should not focus instead on internal
redistribution and changing lifestyles, which could in fact improve the
quality of life of every citizen.
The current crisis is an
excellent -- even unique -- opportunity to bring about such shifts in
socially created aspirations and material wants, and to reorganize
economic life in the developed world to be less rapacious and more
sustainable. But sadly, this message is not being heard at least among
the major policy makers in the core capitalist countries. In the
United States, even the relatively environment-friendly Obama
administration simply talks about promoting "cleaner, greener
technologies" rather than altering absurd and wasteful consumption
patterns. For example, it is still basing its transport strategy on
excessive reliance on private automobile use rather than more extensive
and efficient public transport.
In Europe, too, the focus is
on reviving and increasing the old (outdated?) patterns of
consumption. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy has just pleaded with his
people not to change their lifestyles because of this crisis, because
this would reduce economic activity immediately! The implication is
that wasteful and excessive consumption is socially desirable because
that is the only way to preserve employment.
Globally, too,
policy makers are displaying the same startling lack of imagination.
The focus is on the US and all eyes are on the Obama recovery package,
since direct or indirect dependence on exports to the US is so great
for most countries that this is seen as the only way for all economies
to recover. Yet the US simply cannot continue to be the engine of
world growth, given its huge external debt and current deficit, nor is
it desirable that it should do so. This creates an inevitable and
urgent need for other economies to redirect their trade and investment,
at least at the margin. And associated with that, it also creates an
opportunity for other countries to think about generating different,
more sustainable and possibly more desirable, consumption patterns.
Why
is it that so few people, especially those in a position to influence
economic policies today, are raising these rather obvious questions?
What we do not seem to realize is that unless we sort out these basic
issues, we will not only be marching with lemming-like intensity and
desperation to the sea, but we will also be squabbling, fighting and
even killing each other for the privilege of getting there first.