γράφει ο Peter Drysdale
In this month’s Tokyo-based East Asian Insights, Hitoshi Tanaka, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and now Senior Fellow at the Japan Centre for International Exchange, argues that the dramatic transformation of the global system taking place as the distribution of power shifts from West to East, the ongoing crises over Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea, and the sharp rise of oil and food prices resulting from the swift upsurge in demand for primary commodities in the emerging economies have thrown systemic problems in the global community into sharp relief.
Viewed from Tokyo, these developments, together with the recent decline in US global leadership, cast doubt on the future sustainability of the existing network of international institutions. The G8 Summit in Hokkaido, which involved limited participation of a number of emerging economies and intergovernmental organizations, provided ample evidence, Tanaka argues, that the advanced democracies are no longer capable of solving global challenges by themselves.
Without a new order that incorporates China and India (as well as Brazil, Russia and South Africa) the system of global governance is flawed. East Asia, he argues, has to be at the centre of the reform of global governance.
The weakening of global governance derives from a number of causes, but two developments stand out as being particularly influential: the systemic shift in the global balance of power from advanced democracies to emerging developing nations, and the gradual evaporation of US leadership. Both of these trends have served to steadily undermine the efficacy of the global system.
The earlier post-war rise of Germany and Japan did not threaten the global order or American pre-eminence in the way that the new, emerging states do today.
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