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Has the West lost it? A provocation

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ia/iiz092

1468-2346

Sankalp Gurjar,

Economic Issues in Ukraine

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, the world has been grappling with the new reality of a declining West and consequent emergence of ‘the rest’. States like China, India and Indonesia are now attaining greater agency in the international system and are poised to play an even larger role in shaping world affairs. Fareed Zakaria has captured this changing international context by calling it the ‘post-American world’. President Donald Trump's election in the United States and Britain's exit from the European Union have fast-tracked the process of western decline in world politics. This makes the former Singaporean diplomat and strategic thinker Kishore Mahbubani's latest book, Has the West lost it?, a timely and valuable intervention. Mahbubani examines the underlying causes of western decline and recommends strategies for how the West could adjust to these changing realities. Mahbubani argues that the rise of western powers is a recent phenomenon. Until the 1800s, China and India were the two largest economies in the world and they are regaining this position today. Thus, western domination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was an aberration and it is now coming to an end. For example, in 2015, the share of G7 countries in global economic growth stood at about 31.5 per cent, which was lower than the 36.3 per cent the seven emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Indonesia and Turkey contributed (p. 7). Similarly, in the last three decades, real wages in western economies have stagnated, while most countries in Asia and Africa witnessed rising incomes, better education and health care facilities, upward mobility and overall improvements in the quality of life. The West has to adjust to this changing reality by crafting a ‘coherent and competitive global strategy’ (p. 7). However, the author laments that western elites, while garnering all the benefits of globalization, have not really explained the changing situation to their populations, who are facing job losses and falling standards of living.