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A counterweight to Western pessimism

I wasn’t planning to write about Kishore Mahbubani‘s talk at SAIS this week, but it was too good to pass up.  He is the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.  He appeared at the Bernard L. Schwartz Forum on Constructive Capitalism (yes, that’s its name).  He is on a book tour promoting The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World.  This was a good performance:  clear and interesting, but not altogether persuasive.

Only 12% of the world lives in the West, the dean began.  The rest are now far more optimistic.  They have reason to be.  There is good news:  interstate war and poverty are declining.  Many of the millennium development goals will not be met, but poverty will be halved by 2015 and possibly eliminated by 2030 (one of the unpersuasive features of this presentation was its tendency to extrapolate present trends).  Infant mortality is also declining and the middle class is burgeoning, especially in Asia and Africa.  By 2030 it could be half of the word’s population.  Six of the world’s fastest growing economies are African.

Why is this happening now?  There is a global convergence on a “consensual” cluster of norms:

• Modern science, medicine and hygiene
• The spread of reason and logic
• Free market economics
• Social contracts requiring governments to serve citizens
• Multilateralism

But of course there are also problems.  The big one is that the international system has not kept pace with changes.  We still behave as if we are traveling in 193 separate and sovereign boats.  In fact, we are now all in the same boat without a captain.  The G20 worked well enough in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, but we are now back to business as usual, without global leadership.  There is no way we can meet the challenges of global finance, global warming and pandemics without stronger multilateral institutions, which the West (read the United States) has intentionally kept weak.

This is a mistake.  A rules-based international order is needed to constrain the next number 1 world power, which will be China.  America’s refusal to even think about this prospect is disturbing. The Chinese economy will grow larger than the American one within a decade or so.  There is no way to avoid this, but America’s leadership refuses to accept it.

National sovereignty as it existed from 1648 to 1945 is now outmoded.  We need to stop strangling international organizations:  the World Health Organization, which used to depend on assessed contributions for 75% of its budget, now depends on voluntary contributions for that percentage.  The UN Security Council needs to be reformed with the addition of three new permanent members and the subtraction (if I got it right) of one European seat (by giving the EU a single representative in place of the UK and French seats); there will also be a need to add other seats for the rivals of the new permanent members and for smaller states.

In response to questions, Mahbubani suggested that growth of the middle class may lead to disruptive political change, including in China (where nationalism may also be an issue).  But he doubted any fundamental failure in China, as it is run by capable technocrats (that struck me as the legacy of Lee Kuan Yew speaking).  Aging and inequality are also growing issues.  ASEAN is doing well, but northeastern Asia (China, Japan, the Koreas) lags in developing a political framework for cooperation.  Education is the key to the middle class, not consumption.  Development aid does not do much to help recipients and ends up mostly in the pockets of donor citizens.

This hopeful picture of the world from a thriving bit of Asia ignored a lot of current issues:  Arab spring, Iran’s nuclear program, Islamic extremism and cyber warfare, just to mention a few.  But it was a useful counterweight to Western pessimism, as Mahbubani intended.