Shaping the Emerging World

Civilisational states will safeguard a multipolar world

- Zorawar Daulet Singh

THE decline of the collective West is a theme that has animated historians for the past century. The devastating implosion of old Europe in the first half of the 20th century did indeed bury the formidable European empires. At the same time, it also spiralled the US to dizzying heights after 1945, which then lifted the West along with it to wage a relentless Cold War.

Then, just when the rest of the world was catching up in the 1980s, the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene, providing another dramatic extension to US power. These two tectonic geopolitical shocks paved the way for the US, and thus Western primacy, on a global scale never achieved previously.

In the past two decades, another window of catching up has opened. This time around, the power shifts are real and spread across all domains of power. While the distribution of output and wealth might be uneven within each rising power, the national foundations of the economic and industrial apparatus are robust and yielding growth across a wide swathe of sectors. This also means the political economies are self-sustaining or acquiring that feature, that is, these states have domestic growth drivers and reliable access to strategic commodities that can cushion shocks from elsewhere.

The present pictures of the eight leading economiesGDP, Purchasing Power Parity-would have been unimaginable a generation ago: it includes China, India,

Russia, Brazil and Indonesia. Only the US, Germany and Japan represent the 'West'. The changing structure of global industrial capabilities is equally stark: in 2000, the West accounted for over 70 per cent; by 2030, it is the nonWest that is projected to account for nearly 70 per cent of global production.