New International Economic Order: What is the Range of Options

The contemporary crisis will produce changes in the international economic order. The crisis exits taken will determine the nature of the transformation and what countries and social groups will end up favored or harmed. Although the principles of sustainability and justice should prevail, the stark choices are, in essence, to give way to a new global economic system that maintains, replaces, extends, abates, or eliminates the privileges of the prevailing pre-crisis order.The process that culminated in the global crisis resulted from a combination of structural and circumstantial factors defining a course and a way of functioning that led to a growing concentration of income, knowledge and information, as well as to constant environmental deterioration, with the flip side of the coin being greater severe inequality among nations and social groups. Today, violent struggles have unfolded, some overtly and some covertly, to exert influence on the type of exit from the crisis to be taken and, hence, on the profile of the new post-crisis global order.

What is the range of possible types of international economic order? There are multiple options; yet they might be grouped in five main types.

(i) A global order that is a continuation of the one existing before the crisis. Once the risk of systemic collapse is left behind (at least in the short term), the central countries would manage to restore the pre-crisis situation: they would maintain the essence of the pre-existing dynamics, seeing to it that their privileges are reproduced, with the rest of the world remaining at a situation of subordination, backwardness or exclusion from global growth.

(ii) A global order that enlarges the club of the privileged ones by including the new emerging powers. The concentration-oriented process would not be changed, yet the number of those profiting from it would rise; the rest of the countries would still lag behind or be excluded from the benefits of the new global order.

(iii) A global order that replaces the pre-crisis privileged countries and social groups with other new emerging players without affecting, however, the essence of the global course and way of functioning. That is, the present concentration, inequality and environmental deterioration-prone pattern would be maintained, with the privileged players, however, being displaced so that other may take their place.

(iv) A new order that does not alter the prevailing concentration-oriented dynamics, yet implements significant countervailing measures to reduce environmental deterioration and inequality (among countries and within each country). That is, the geopolitical and economic dynamics would be maintained, yet significant offsets would be ensured via subsidies or transfers, which would attain the reduction, to some extent, of environmental deterioration, privileges and severe inequalities.

(v) A new order that changes the global course and way of functioning so that its normal and expected outcome be the elimination of inequality and environmental deterioration. The full human potential would be leveraged on the basis of values and criteria of responsibility, solidarity and creativity. This would eventually eliminate environmental deterioration, privileges and severe inequalities.

It is clear that any of these options may present infinite variations depending on the specific circumstances of each particular situation. It is also true that the consensus-building effort required for implementing transformations, as well as the privileged sectors’ resistance to change, increase as we move from choice (i) to choice (v). The reason for this is that as transformations deepen and encompass more countries and social groups, there is an exponential increase in the possible combinations of relations established among a greater number and diversity of interests, needs and emotions, which will be required to be reconciled or, at least, aligned.

Choice (v) is, no doubt, a utopian benchmark, i.e., a construction that is both ideal and desired. Nevertheless, it is a critical option because, even though its full construction is not practicable in the short, or perhaps even in the mid term, its choice will serve as a guide so that we can build from our present an ever more sustainable, safer and fairer global development path. It can also work as a compass at highly turbulent or overcast phases.

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