Dueling Consensus on the G20

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I was struck  – indeed almost made dizzy – by the contrasting interpretations the media delivered following the London G20 meeting.   In the end I wasn’t sure whether the media was even covering the same event.  This confusion continued till I realized that the contrasting commentary arose from more than a single consensus that Leaders, and in turn the media, concluded for this now completed meeting.

I should, before continuing, express abject apologies from my lengthy absence.  I cannot at this moment go into what we were ‘cooking up’, but I’m hopeful that my absence was worth the lengthy silence.

So back to the G20 London meeting.  As I was suggesting, the media was commenting on more than one consensus. Continue reading →

India’s Dilemma I

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I had the pleasure recently of reading two very valuable papers on India.  Both examine the challenge for this emerging great power, and the challenge for the traditional great powers, in India gaining great power leadership in global governance.  The first piece is written by Barbara Crossette, formerly of the New York Times and George Perkovich, Vice President for Studies and Director of the Nonproliferation Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  In addition there is a commentator, C. Raja Mohan, a Professor of South Asian Studies at the S. Rajaratram School of International Studies at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore.

The article and the accompanying commentator article are entitled “India: The Ultimate Test of Free-Market Democracy.” This piece is one in the series “Power & Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World,” commissioned by the Stanley Foundation.   For anyone concerned with the emergence of the great powers in global governance, this series is well worth tackling.  As the Stanley Foundation describes it, this series “is designed to identify plausible actions and trends Continue reading →

The ‘Pathway’ To a New Liberal Internationalism?

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The evolving international order and the role of American leadership in that order were taken up recently by G. John Ikenberry in our Global Institutional Reform Workshop (GIR).  John is Princeton University’s Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs and a leading proponent of liberal internationalism.  His After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restrain, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (2001) is a much-cited examination of the rise of liberal internationalism.

The GIR Workshop is a partnership in part between CIGI and Princeton University.  This past August (August 25-27, 2008) at Princeton we held the second biennial Princeton Summer Workshop.  John produced a most interesting paper, “The Three Faces of Liberal Internationalism.”  This, like many of the other presentations, (other chapters will be reviewed here at the Rising BRICSAM blog in the next few weeks) will be brought together, and in, the second Continue reading →

The Collapse of Demand! The Case of China

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We know, or at least think we do, that world demand is ‘collapsing’.  We’ve seen emerging power currencies fall significantly; equity markets deflate; and governments planning and then announcing fiscal stimulus packages.  But assessing the state of the BRICSAM economies is not easy.  None is more difficult to gauge than China.  It remains a rather daunting task to get a handle on the growth/lack of growth of the Chinese economy.

When I was last in China in December, it was impossible to get a ‘read’ on where growth was; or was going.  Could one identify growing domestic demand in China? Was this domestic demand beginning to sop up the ‘over capacity’ Continue reading →

Clubs, Clubs Clubs – How to Lead the Way to Better Global Governance?

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Much discussion of new international organizations has accompanied the recent examination of global governance reform in the light of the completed US Presidential election and now the global financial meltdown.  There is much contention over the nature of reorganization.

There appears to be three distinct models that advocates of global governance reform have raised.  The first is: the ‘Universalist model of the UN – everybody gets in, everybody has a voice.  This universalist consensus model is modified at least in the security realm (but not only)  by the Security Council that sits atop the universalist Continue reading →

‘Entangling Alliances,’ Global Governance and US Sovereignty

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It has become rather commonplace for US ‘opposition’ to raise the early perspectives of American political leaders in discussing American foreign policy.  Yet such references to these early alliance warnings and the threat to US sovereignty have become overused and are often offered in an unreflective way.  Those who rely on these early cautions, often call on these nostrums abstractly and without any acknowledgment of the context in which they were expressed and the state of the United States at the time such figures as Thomas Jefferson expressed them.

So it is that the new opposition – read this as those who had influence in the last US Administration but appear to have little cache now –  have begun the campaign to limit US global governance leadership.  Two rather well Continue reading →

‘A Plan for Action’ – Managing Global Insecurity (MGI)

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The MGI Project, begun in 2007, is the joint initiative of the Brookings Institution Foreign Policy section – led by Carlos Pascaul,  the Center on International Cooperation at New York University – led by Bruce Jones, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University – led by Stephen Stedman.  The Project has recently produced it’s major Report – A Plan for Action: A New Era of International Cooperation for a Changed World: 2009, 2010, and Beyond.  This Report will be followed by a book from the three directors, out sometime this year, entitled, Power and Responsibility: International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats.  The Report and the Project is directed to, as the Plan suggests, “[to] build international support for global institutions Continue reading →

Brazil’s new Vision: Imagining a Great Power?

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Brazil is thinking big.  I mean Big!  On December 19, 2008 President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva – Lula in other words, released a new national defense strategy. This document called for: upgrading Brazil’s military forces and for remaking the defense industry.  And – contentiously for the Brazilian public, it called for Brazil’s mandatory military service to be enforced on all Brazilian classes.

As noted by Alexei Barrionuevo’s New York Times piece: “The new strategic vision, more than a year in the making, calls for Brazil to invest more in military technology, including satellites, and to build nuclear-powered submarine fleet that would be used to protect territorial waters and Brazil’s deepwater oil platforms.  The proposal also calls Continue reading →

A Crowded World

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The first Leaders G20 is now history.  A communique of marked substance was released  This to the good.  Former Canadian Prime Minister Paul has taken some pride announcing that this was the first G20 Leaders meeting – what he’d called for for the short time when he was Canadian Prime Minister a few years back.  As Martin commented in an “Introduction: The Challenge for the First L20 Summit” to the electronic publication, edited by Professor John Kirton, head of the G8 Research Group’s the G20 Leaders Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy: “This is the beginning of a new era — one in which rising great powers are not invited for lunch and then dismissed. It is the beginning of an era where true dialogue between indispensable nations occurs as they seek to reconcile Continue reading →

Sideswiped

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Well now that the theory of ‘decoupling’ has been assigned to the history bin as a fanciful assessment of the global economy, we need to analyze the impact of the global financial crisis on the Rising BRICSAM.  It appears to be – not good.

Most analysts have commented on the efforts most BRIC countries have undertaken to defend themselves against financial instability.  The BRIC countries have all built large surpluses of foreign reserves.  Examine the figures on foreign exchange reserves below.

  • China      $USD 1.9 trillion (September 2008)         +33% change in year 2007
  • Russia     $USD 485 billion (November 6, 2008)
  • India        $USD 253 billion (October 2008)            +65%
  • Brazil       $USD 205 billion (August 31, 2008)       +106%

These figures, by the way, come from a presentation by Prashant Pathak the managing partner of ReichmannHauer Capital Partners here in Toronto.  This week Prashant gave a marvelous presentation to  our (Jim de Wilde, Jonathan Hausmann and myself) undergraduate commerce course from the Rotman School of Management entitled, ‘Globalization, Global capital markets and the Structure of the International Political Economy’ (more on that in the future).

The point here is that each of the BRIC countries had taken steps to defend their economies.  Bitter lessons of Continue reading →