India gets by right now: a microcosm of globalization itself
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
FRONT PAGE: "India Defies Slump, Powered By Growth in Poor Rural States," by Peter Wonacott, Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2009. Link
In the global economy right now, what keeps the financial collapse in the Old Core from weighing everything down is the capacity of rising New Core pillars to retain some modicum of growth (largely internal) and the fact that the Gap is largely cut-off from such connectivity and therefore suffering only the slowdown in demand for energy and commodities from the New Core pillars. No, the whole thing doesn't come close to constituting a de-coupling as was previously imagined, but, as muddle-through scenarios go, it's not okay. India, which I've long described as a sort of a globalization-in-microcosm, is doing better than muddling through. Its rural areas continue to develop at a pretty good clip, Old India is managing to buttress Shining India--the connected parts now suffering the West's downturn in demand for its services. India has roughly the same number of immensely impoverished rural people as sub-Saharan Africa, so watching this development process--largely driven by state initiatives--will be instructive. Our aid models simply do not work. But translating the development strategies of countries like India and China makes a lot more sense for most African economies. We shouldn't see any ideological threat in that, rather an ideological opportunity to shape the thinking of an emerging global lower-middle class. |
