Thread: The world is facing epic change. How will we cope?

The world is facing epic change. How will we cope?

An America survey shows that US hegemony is over and that the centre of power is moving firmly to the east

Comments ( 88 )
Amit Chaudhuri guardian.co.uk,
Sunday November 23 2008 00.01 GMT
The Observer, Sunday November 23 2008

Late last week came the announcement from the intimidatingly named National Intelligence Council (the 'leading American intelligence organisation') that the end of American hegemony is imminent; that the unipolar world will, before long, cease to exist; that new locations of power are emerging.

The shift has been heralded for some time, if not by the US authority that provides 'unvarnished' intelligence to US policy makers; so we already have an idea of what those new locations are. Nevertheless, I found myself scouring the report in the paper to see if my country of birth had been mentioned. In the third paragraph, like characters in a frequently perused novel, I found the emerging economies of India, Brazil and China, which, predictably, seem to be a source of a great deal of the anxiety.

Two things, however, gave this fairly unsurprising assessment a new meaning and urgency. The first was that the pronouncement came from the National Intelligence Council and not from a liberal columnist or a developing-world economist. The second was that the familiar names of China, India and Brazil were being mentioned, in this instance, in the wake of calamitous damage to the market earlier this year. Not long ago, the emergence of the Chinese and Indian economies was a confirmation of the transformative powers of the free market and fitted in perfectly with its triumphalism. Now, with America and Europe set to borrow money from India and China, this reassuringly optimistic, self-congratulatory, but one-dimensional narrative may have to be reconfigured.

Yet, despite this subtle but decisive shift in the balance of power, it feels stupid to gloat, which is why I felt embarrassed to catch myself reading the news with a personal frisson and excitement, a lack of reflection and seriousness. It was as if there was, for a moment, a characteristic member of the India diaspora in me, waiting to get out; a diaspora which, in my waking moments, I am deeply wary of for its conservatism and its arriviste ambitions on the world stage. (As the report on page 28 shows, there are still shaming issues relating to poverty.) Yet reading about the National Intelligence Council's report, I was surprised to find in myself a haunting of the contemporary Indian's romance with power. But that excitement has a history.

Many things have been happening, some of them in the last three months, that would have seemed implausible 15 years ago. The great, unprecedented phase of calm and plenty we entered after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, marred, here and there, by some irrational and unpersuadable terrorists, appeared to be here to stay. No one expected it to be struck so hard at its heart - not by aeroplanes flying out of nowhere, but by the workings of its own institutions. Then there was the American election and Barack Obama. Six years ago I'd spent about four months in New York, and discovered that it was far less multicultural than London. It had educated neighbourhoods, posh neighbourhoods, black and Hispanic neighbourhoods, but having spent some months in America's most liberal city, I wouldn't have dreamt of the emergence of a figure like Obama.

Similarly, six years ago, despite the already growing economies of India and China, I could not have thought, as Afghanistan was being bombed and America and Britain co-authored justifications for entering Iraq, that a time may come when a greater parity between the so-called 'developed' and 'developing' nations would look increasingly like a basic, unigorable reality rather than a desire or a pleasant idea. Ten years ago, indeed, dispirited by constant travelling and its deeply discriminatory nature, I remember resigning myself to the fact that no such parity would emerge in my lifetime, that it was the lot of people who belonged to countries such as India to be second-class citizens in the world.

What was it to be a second-class citizen? It was, crudely, to be constantly judged and assessed by people less skilled and less competent than oneself. There was no innate marginality to being Indian; marginality was conferred upon you by nationalities that clearly had a proprietorial relationship to the world. The assessment of the more skilled by the less began long before you were employed; it began at the airport, the immigration desk. 'So you're a creative arts fellow,' said one of the more friendly immigration officials at Heathrow 15 years ago, as I was returning to Oxford. 'What are you creative at?'

Ten years ago, economist Amartya Sen, still an obdurate Indian passport holder, returned to England after collecting his Nobel Prize in Sweden, to resume his duties as Master at Trinity College, Cambridge. Seeing that the landing card said that Sen's address was the Master's Lodge at Trinity, the immigration official asked: 'Are you the Master's friend, then?' This is not a malicious interjection I'm recording here, but an anecdote about the vulnerability of the wise in a world without parity.

And what will happen to the old power centres when the new ones emerge? Will the English suburbs be overrun, for instance, by Bollywood and AR Rahman? Cultural infiltration has been happening for a long time, well before the idea of an altered world order became a feasible one: chicken tikka masala is not only a canonical fact of British life; it is a cliche of Britishness. And there has been relatively little resentment, partly because, one suspects, no national or racial group - not even the white bourgeoisie - is entirely at one or at peace with itself and that some part of it necessarily rejoices when its own identity or integrity is undermined.

On the other hand, there's a certain vengefulness that's been audible in some of the recent rhetoric coming from middle-class India. Not long ago, I heard an Indian diplomat and writer say in Delhi: 'Why should our call centre workers learn accents from Glasgow and Newcastle? I'd like to see the day when a person in a call centre in California learns how to speak English in an Indian accent!'

So there is comedy in this business of world parity, not least because there are people who take its literal aspects so deeply to heart. Bengali humorist Parashuram realised this in the Fifties, when he wrote 'Ulat Puran' or 'The Scripture Told Backwards', in which we are presented with an England colonised by Bengal; two English children are instructed by a Bengali governess, who is teaching them the correct way of eating mangoes, the correct pronunciation of Bengali words. This other world, which could, so easily, be the world, is, Parashuram seems to suggest, as self-obsessed and fragile as the one it has replaced.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... balisation

I'd like to see the day when a person in a call centre in California learns how to speak English in an Indian accent!'

...a little green-eyed or a lot?