Radical Shifts in Global Balance - Geopolitics, Surging Emerging Markets & a Wobbling G7 - RL Vol XI No XV, CXXIV, MMXVII

Radical Shifts in Global Balance: Geopolitics, Surging Emerging Markets & a Wobbling Group of Seven

Public Lecture – RL Vol XI No XV, CXXIV, MMXVII

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD

Professor of Public Policy, School of Graduate Studies,

College of Business and Economics, AAU

Abstract

By the year 2020, a great shift will have occurred in the worldwide balance of economic power. Emerging market economies will become some of the most important economic forces, and China will take the top spot in the list of the world’s largest economies by GDP, both outright and measured in terms of PPP, that will have broad implications for the world’s allocation of consumption, investments and environmental resources. Emerging economies are advancing while advanced economies are mature markets that are slowing aided by the 2008 global financial crisis. On the other hand, cyber-attacks on Western democracy. Countries and non-state networks are using the civil war to accomplish their political goals with uninhibited use of force. Menacingly, cyber warfare in the Ukrainian conflict and US elections in 2016 shows a new hotspot dimension of the conflict (Greenberg, 2017). The US, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia and terror networks are all using the Syrian conflict to wage their own fight making Syria a global battleground (Kassab, 2016:1-3). Elsewhere, China claims sovereignty of virtually all of the South China Sea, aggressively fortifying its foothold by turning seven mostly submerged reefs into island outposts that other claimants to the atolls oppose on a key waterway for world trade (Fox, 2017). 

Today, fluidity rather than order define economic and political security. Distinctions between foreign and domestic policy are no longer valid. Terrorism, cyber warfare, climate change, and refugee flows have removed the distinction between the internal and external, between domestic and foreign. changing ideas of legitimacy emerge as foreign policy is no longer a prerogative of the state but a central realm of domestic politics – one which is ripe for manipulation by outside powers - Mutually Assured Disruption. As frightening as Mutually Assured Destruction was during the cold war, it helped to take a particularly deadly option off the table. In today’s world, we need to develop norms around the internet, economic warfare, and new technologies – if not to achieve order, then at least to create some boundaries to chaos that can save the world from implosion (Leonard, 2017).

Key words: Emerging market economies, Syria, South China Sea, cyber-attacks, Mutually Assured Disruption, Mutually Assured Destruction,

See lecture here or https://www.academia.edu/34069174/Radical_Shifts_in_Global_Balance_-_Geopolitics_Surging_Emerging_Markets_and_a_Wobbling_G7_-_RL_Vol_XI_No_XV_CXXIV_MMXVII.pdf