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 globalisation 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 characterised 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 sensationalising
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
labour 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 realisation
of how globalisation 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 neighbours, 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 reorganise 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 realise 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.