Published :
Updated :
For all latest news, follow The Financial Express Google News channel.
If the year 2019 looked like having resolved all the problematic inheritances of 2018, one might be in for a rude shock. Breakthroughs made in key areas still look flimsy, but it may be the sheer weight of deals and compromises that may ultimately pull, more in the wrong direction than the right. Even more astounding is how different episodes have begun to forge relations or linkages of sorts among themselves, further complicating consequences.
Of course two of the year's biggest and most constant pieces of news related to the China-United States, directly over trade, and in the absence of any meaningful agreements spilling over into other areas. Another was Brexit, and though the pathway was cleared with Boris Johnson's resounding victory in the first December election in the United Kingdom since Stanley Baldwin's hung parliament of 1923, the expected juicy aftermath is already beginning to daunt even wholehearted supporters. Both carry enough global implications to begin this essay with.
Not for the first time this year, a China-US trade deal has been announced, this time just as the year is closing rather than in springtime, when flowers bloom. Needless to say, it is stop-gap: halting more damage, at the worse, buying more time, at the best. None of the fundamentals have changed: Chinese economic policy reforms have not happened at a rate necessary to soften US concerns, and the leverage being sought by ramping up farm-tariffs, among others, is finding its greatest opposition within the United States: the farmers. For yet another year, they have incurred net losses. The political consequences of this in an election year in the USA look more slippery: will they vote Republican, as always, before because of their value-infused hearts pitter-pattering, or will their pockets begin to make more noise? No wonder the touchstone 21st controversy over Huawei, was not even on the agenda, an issue that sheds more light on comparative economic might than any other.
Other than the constrained global trade because of these stalemated, implications elsewhere may be making a return to the rosy 1990s less and less likely. First, China has taken a leadership step in the World Economic Forum (WEF) that the United States abandoned. Second, as the United States not only abandoned but actually denigrates environmental protection against climate change, China is fast filling up the vacuum with some extraordinary 'green' campaigns. Third, as US partnerships across the world begin to fray, even among more likely allies as across Europe, with Japan, and courting India, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), even in its most fearful manipulative form, is actually gaining friends: the stock of US allies, with the exception of India, have peaked in productivity, evident in the demographic constraints increasingly restricting their future projections from being progressive enough; while, contrariwise, China's global network largely consists of a younger, more materialistic, and far less nuanced breed. Finally, China is plunging into troubled areas, like Iran, Turkey, and Venezuela, in a way that has been unnerving the United States; and with the tacit support of Vladimir Putin's Russia, effectively neutralising any harsh or militaristic US moves. The gun-powder may remain dry, but let's not fool ourselves that sharpshooters are not being placed unnecessarily where these two countries differ: navies have been more mobilised since the Vietnam War than ever, and customs officials may be more up to their neck with ledgers than before.
Leaving the 'hot' Pacific scene for the relatively 'cooler' Atlantic zone, we find, again, Brexit hanging like a Damoclean sword. Johnson's victory was made possible by an electorate fed up of three years of sniping by their own leaders in parliament, a socialist agenda at a time of materialistic upswings, and a curiosity to find out if their passion to leave Europe, as Britons have historically done happily, was pragmatic enough for the island to survive.
Here again, a Johnson victory does not necessarily mean automatic or even a prolonged exit. The devil will lie in the details, and Johnson has chosen, by becoming prime minister with a majority, to face the music: his popularity is less likely to climb the longer the withdrawal terms take to enforce. One might keep in mind, the European Union (EU) is itself becoming populist, particularly as the decision to retire from politics by German Chancellor Angela Merkel indicated. Even with populism spreading across the English Channel, chances populists will bandwagon seem less likely over progressive causes, like integrative economic policy choices, than retrogressive, even belligerent prompters, as the 1930s so vividly indicted.
One is tempted to say Britain has opted to be thrown to the wolves, since few trading partners will prefer tiny Britain's market over a slightly more vibrant and possibly expanding and larger European. At least the United States will, if preliminary indications materialise, but the outflows of business enterprises, headquarters, and transactions from Britain to Europe may prove too costly for Johnson's Britain to bear for the December 2019 glow to persist. Britain re-digging African and Asian countries is as inevitable a move that Britons will now have to find an answer to on the social front, given the huge non-Anglo British population proportion. The less said about Scotland, where the December 2019 victory resounded even more loudly than in London, the better for now: but if not a can of worms, challenges lurk ahead for Johnson.
Trade enhancement is unlikely to follow, leaving non-European and non-US initiatives more back-seat gestures to those sprawling across the southern Atlantic, or crawling out of the woods across Africa and Asia: those countries will find more robust partners among themselves, with China as a better fall-back option than Britain, and West Europe a better choice, again, than Britain. This is the price the Atlantic zone has paid by believing the post-World War II order still functions after the Soviet demise, may be even better so because of it, only reaffirming western values, practices, and institutions when the rest of the world demands to be seen and heard.
Nowhere else can a more grievous interpretation be made. The term 'empowerment' says it all: there is more behind that dynamic across Africa and Asia than the Atlantic zone, and give or take the perpetually deteriorating future Middle East prospects, that is, from the Mediterranean fringes to the Indian subcontinent, the rest of the upcoming world seems better fit for the unfolding 21st century than the wheelchair-bound west.
One, and perhaps the most convincing evidence of that, is the growth of populism. Where this has sprouted, immigration has stoked part of the fire. History is replete that immigrants become a threat, not necessarily upon arrival as much as the state of the economy: a competitive liberal economy invariably finds a spot for them, if only to remain competitive, albeit through lower wages than is the norm, but a sinking economy cannot; and it is in this battle right here at this economic stage between natives and immigrants that populism lights a fire that eventually gathers moss by spreading in every direction, from job un-competitiveness to value protection and service-stealing complaints against free-riding outsiders. Once we wade through this setting against the declining demographic fundamentals, the picture clears up: invading 'hordes' taking away the vitals of a supposedly civilised society.
Ophthalmologists use the term 2020 as a reference to clear vision and progress. We might have to wait a little longer, but the seeds are in place for that clarity to come in the changing of developmental guards: the west will really become the confirmed symbol of where the proverbial sun sets, and the east where it effusively rises.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.