The Great Convergence

Since the 1990s, the world's economies have become ever more globalized and interdependent, but political power has not readjusted. Mahbubani shows why power must shift, reflecting the new global realities, to avoid disunity and conflict in our future. Globalization began in earnest in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War. It accelerated dramatically when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Buy the time of the financial crisis of 2010 the world looked for financial stability not to the US or Europe but to China, which by then owned most of those countries' debt. It has been a remarkable, and remarkably quick transformation. But global politics has not followed global economics. Global political structures seem to belong to the 1950s, an era in which Western dominance was presumed and Asia almost entirely absent. The US and Europe have a majority of votes at the International Monetary Fund, which is how a disgraced French president of the fund was succeeded not by a Mexican or Indonesian, but by a compatriot Frenchwoman. The President of the World Bank is traditionally an American. Why? In G8, and even G20 meetings, the West usually has a majority of voting members. Why? Mahbubani shows that in global institution after global institution power is skewed in favor of the West, and argues that it is no longer just or sustainable. Moreover, he sees the main risks to the globe in the twenty-first century in the unresolved contradictions between the need for a one-world view and the ever more local, and locally shrill politics of national self-interest. There are the grounds for disunity, incomprehension and even disaster.