Watch it on NIICE Nepal Youtube Channel

Event Report

In the webinar “Global order after COVID-19” organized by NIICE Nepal. Professor Stephen Miller Walt gave a talk about Global trends before COVID-19, Direct impact on the pandemic, the results of this and the future global order. The chair for the session was Dr. Pramod Jaiswal. Professor Walt’s 1st point was that COVID-19 is not going to alter the basic nature of world politics, we are not going to see a transformation of the International system, we are not going to see the emergence of some kind of effective global governance out as a result of this, in this sense it will still be a World that faces certain problems and insecurities similar to the ones we have seen in the past. Territorial states will remain the basic building block of world politics, they are going to continue to compete for Power and influence much as they have  in  previous decades, again in that sense we are not going to see a transformation. However the pandemic is going to accelerate several trends that were already underway before the pandemic  began, in a sense many of the things we already saw that were happening in 2012, 2015, 2018, 2020 are actually being intensified by the pandemic and in particular COVID-19 is going to reinforce the gradual shift in power toward Asia and lead to a world that is less open and less free than it would have been otherwise, again that's where those trends were already headed but this is likely to intensify them.

 Then professor Walt started explaining about Global trends before COVID-19, as we saw the end of unipolarity this period where the United States was really in a completely unchallenged position, the period mostly of 1990s what people used to call the unipolar era and that is gradually leading to a world of much greater great power competition, the obvious source of that is in part the rise of China also the recovery of Russia. All of this has sort of brought to an end the period of unchallenged American dominance and with the rise or the emergence of additional great Powers which is much more rivalry between them so, that's one trend.

A second trend is this gradual shift in power and wealth from west to east, for the past two hundred years or so world politics has being largely dominated by the United State or by the European Great powers before the United States, obviously there was more competition with the Soviet Union as well, but over the last 30 to 40 years we are seeing the gradual shift, the relative decline of Western dominance and the re-emergences of Asia, and this is most obvious in the   case of the rise of China but to some degree the rise of India has contributed to that economic growth in southeast Asia as well. The United States and its Western allies are still powerful and wealthy as well but in terms of the overall share of global power and wealth shifted back towards Asia in a sense almost reverting to the situation that one might have seen in 1700 or 1600 when China was the world’s largest economy.

A third trend in recent years has been a global backlash against what might be called hyper globalization. By hyper globalisation professor Walt means this effort to lower trade and investment barriers and to some degree barriers to the movement of people and create a seamless interconnected World that was dominated by market forces at the Global level. The backlash against this took many forms - the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was one sign of it, certainly the British decision to leave the European Union was in part a backlash against the globalization, the various trade wars now seen under President Trump and the decoupling of the American and Chinese economies in Europe and elsewhere a growing Populist opposition to refugees to immigration, a general tendency of countries to want to regain control over their own societies and over their own economies even if it what it means is less economic growth.

 Another trend has been increased in authoritarianism around the world back in the 1990s, many people believe that the democracy was going to spread around the world and eventually become only form of government that exists, according to the American think tank freedom House, 2019 was in fact the 13th consecutive year in which the overall level of global freedom declined and finally we see these sorts of trends in places like Poland, Hungary, Russia, Brazil, Turkey some have even pointed to India as illiberal democratic but moving in illiberal Direction so in a sense we are seeing a period in which democracy seems to now be at least impartial retreat in many parts of the world and authoritarian strong men people like Bolsonaro in Brazil or Victor Orban in Hungary have become more prominent and influential. The bottom line here is that even before COVID-19 began, even before we had a global pandemic to deal with, the world was already becoming less open with barriers starting to emerge less free as authoritarianism came back and less dominated by the west.

So what are some of the effects of the pandemic, well again most of we know all of this.  We now have about 30 million confirmed cases worldwide. The actual number of cases is undoubtedly higher and of course those numbers go up every single day. There have been 62,000 cases in Nepal approximately, 400 deaths and the numbers are rising rapidly in Nepal's case. We have about 953,000 confirmed deaths so almost a million dead now worldwide and of course that number is going to go up too. According to the international monetary fund the world economy is likely to shrink by about 5 percent in 2020 which is a huge decrease by historic standards and we are also likely to see slower economic growth in Nepal and Nepalese economy is likely to continue to grow but at a much slower rate than people expected. This has obvious effects around the world. According to the International Labor organization nearly half the global workforce is at risk of having its livelihood destroyed because of the shrinking of economic activity. Now governments are trying to deal with this in a variety of ways and so one of the things they are doing is of course spending lots of money to try and keep economies going but that means of course governments all over the worlds are taking on much higher levels of debt and that debt is likely to be a constraint on economic growth in the years ahead. Finally there were hopes a few months ago that perhaps if we could get a handle on the pandemic bring it under control you could get a very sharp rapid recovery and in a sense the economy had shrunk as a result of lockdowns but once you open things up again things would bounce back very quickly, and professor Walt thinks now most experts believe that economic recovery is going to be rather slow rather sluggish.

Event Report prepared by Mrinmoy Routh