The Changing of the Guard. O Render da Guarda
«Since
1945 the United States has been the world’s dominant power. Even during the
Cold War its economy was far more advanced, and more than twice as large, as
that of the Soviet Union, while its military capability and technological
sophistication were much superior.1 Following the Second World War, the US was
the prime mover in the creation of a range of multinational and global
institutions, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and
NATO, which were testament to its new-found global power and authority. The
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 greatly enhanced America’s pre-eminent
position, eliminating its main adversary and resulting in the territories and
countries of the former Soviet bloc opening their markets and turning in many
cases to the US for aid and support.
Never before, not even in the
heyday of the British Empire, had a nation’s power enjoyed such a wide reach.
The dollar became the world’s preferred currency, with most trade being
conducted in it and most reserves held in it. The US dominated all the key
global institutions bar the UN, and enjoyed a military presence in every part
of the world. Its global position seemed unassailable, and at the turn of the
millennium terms like hyperpower and ‘unipolarity’ were coined to describe
what appeared to be a new and unique form of power.
The baton of pre-eminence, before
being passed to the United States, had been held by Europe, especially the
major European nations like Britain, France and Germany, and previously, to a
much lesser extent, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. From the beginning of
Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century until the mid
twentieth century, Europe was to shape global history in a most profound
manner. The engine of Europe’s dynamism was industrialization and its mode of
expansion colonial conquest. Even as Europe’s position began to decline after
the First World War, and precipitously after 1945, the fact that America, the
new rising power, was a product of European civilization served as a source of empathy
and affi nity between the Old World and the New World, giving rise to ties
which found expression in the idea of the West2 while serving to mitigate the
effects of latent imperial rivalry between Britain and the United States. For
over two centuries the West, first in the form of Europe and subsequently the
United States, has dominated the world.
We are now witnessing an historic
change which, though still relatively in its infancy, is destined to transform
the world. The developed world, which
for over a century has meant the West (namely, the United States, Canada,
Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand) plus Japan, is rapidly being
overhauled in terms of economic size by the developing world. In 2001 the
developed countries accounted for just over half the world’s GDP, compared with
around 60 per cent in 1973. It will be a long time, of course, before even the
most advanced of the developing countries acquires the economic and
technological sophistication of the developed, but because they collectively
account for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population and their
economic growth rate has been rather greater than that of the developed world,
their rise has already resulted in a signifi cant shift in the balance of
global economic power.
There
have been several contemporary illustrations of this realignment. After
declining for over two decades, commodity prices began to increase around the
turn of the century, driven by buoyant economic growth in the developing world,
above all from China, until the onset of a global recession reversed this
trend, at least in the short run. Meanwhile, the stellar economic performance
of the East Asian economies, with their resulting huge trade surpluses, has
enormously swollen their foreign exchange reserves. A proportion of these have
been invested, notably in the case of China and Singapore, in state-controlled
sovereign wealth funds whose purpose is to seek profi table investments in
other countries, including the West. Commodity-producing countries, notably the
oil-rich states in the Middle East, have similarly invested part of their newly
expanded income in such funds. Sovereign wealth funds acquired powerful new
leverage as a result of the credit crunch, commanding resources which the major
Western fi nancial institutions palpably lacked. The meltdown of some of Wall
Street’s largest fi nancial institutions in September 2008 underlined the shift
in economic power from the West, with some of the fallen giants seeking support
from sovereign wealth funds and the US government stepping in to save the
mortgage titans Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae partly in order to reassure
countries like China, which had invested huge sums of money in them: if they
had withdrawn these, it would almost certainly have precipitated a colapse in
the value of the dollar. The fi nancial crisis has graphically illustrated the disparity
between an East Asia cash-rich from decades of surpluses and a United States
cash-poor following many years of deficits». In Martin Jacques, Quando a China
Mandar no Mundo, 2009, 2012, Temas e Debates, Círculo de Leitores, ISBN
978-989-644-196-8, Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0-713-992-540.
Cortesia de TeDebates/CdeLeitores/PenguinB/JDACT
JDACT, Martin Jacques, Literatura, Economia, China, Conhecimento,
