Since the 1990s, the world's economies have become
ever more globalized and interdependent, but political
power has not readjusted. Mahbubani shows why power must
shift, reflecting the new global realities, to avoid
disunity and conflict in our future. Globalization began
in earnest in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War. It
accelerated dramatically when China joined the World
Trade Organization in 2001. Buy the time of the
financial crisis of 2010 the world looked for financial
stability not to the US or Europe but to China, which by
then owned most of those countries' debt. It has been a
remarkable, and remarkably quick transformation. But
global politics has not followed global economics.
Global political structures seem to belong to the 1950s,
an era in which Western dominance was presumed and Asia
almost entirely absent. The US and Europe have a
majority of votes at the International Monetary Fund,
which is how a disgraced French president of the fund
was succeeded not by a Mexican or Indonesian, but by a
compatriot Frenchwoman. The President of the World Bank
is traditionally an American. Why? In G8, and even G20
meetings, the West usually has a majority of voting
members. Why? Mahbubani shows that in global institution
after global institution power is skewed in favor of the
West, and argues that it is no longer just or
sustainable. Moreover, he sees the main risks to the
globe in the twenty-first century in the unresolved
contradictions between the need for a one-world view and
the ever more local, and locally shrill politics of
national self-interest. There are the grounds for
disunity, incomprehension and even disaster.
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