And then there were two. We now know that either Barack Obama or John McCain will be the first US president of the next phase of globalization.
Whichever it is, they will be the first US president whose foreign economic policy will be dominated from day one by a fundamental transfer of economic power from West to East and South.
The Atlantic world is no longer the center of the economic world, because the economic world no longer has a center. How Senators McCain and Obama interpret that fact matters to all of us.
The protectionist and anti-trade rhetoric in the US presidential primaries suggests that many Americans see global economic change in zero-sum terms. Asia rises, we decline. Economic inequality is reduced between countries, but widens within our own societies.
Globalization is no longer something we do, it is something that others do to us. An increasing number of Europeans feel the same way.
Nobody would disagree that globalization has its dark side. But the open markets and economic integration that drive globalization are still by far the best tool we have for increasing global economic welfare.
That in turn is an essential contribution to global stability. Only stable, cooperating states can manage the coming squeeze on resources like energy, food and water.
For sixty years, the US has underwritten economic internationalism with openness of its own. A crisis of American confidence in globalization could knock it off course.
The rise of India and China is not against American and European interests, so long as we continue to invest in economic competitiveness and focus on our comparative advantages.
In fact, growth in these economies is now a crucial source of global demand, not least for us. They are the fastest growing market for the goods we make and sell. The competitively priced goods we import from them have held down prices and inflation for ordinary Europeans and Americans for a decade.
In reality we should worry more about the possible failure of the developing world than its success. A stalling of growth in the developing world – especially in China – would make the world poorer and less stable. Attempts to counter the rise of the developing world would harm our own economic and political interests.
