Climate change summit must reflect the new world order

The climate change talks in Paris from November 30 to December 11 exemplify how the West sets the global agenda. As in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the United States changes positions frequently, breaks past commitments and pressurises developing countries to fall in line. Most do. China and India don't.

Consider the current summit on climate change in Paris. The narrative from the West (and its embedded media) is this: China is the world's largest polluter, India the third largest. They must reduce carbon emissions - even at the cost of their industrial development and mitigation of poverty.

The western narrative never highlights this: on a per capita basis, the US is the biggest polluter. India's per capita carbon emissions are barely 10 per cent of the US. The chart below rarely finds a place in Western media or in the speeches of Western climate change diplomats.

Developed countries - which polluted the world for two centuries as they industrialised, causing today's global warming - promised developing countries both funds (over $100 billion) and technology to fight climate change with greener alternatives. Neither the money nor the technology has been forthcoming.

Much the same chicanery infuses trade talks at the WTO where India's firm stand last year on farm subsidies forced the Americans and Europeans to back down. True to type though, the US has shifted its position again - giving its rich farmers heavy subsidies while placing a subsidy cap on impoverished, drought-hit Indian farmers. A newly confident India has begun to stand firm against such bullying. Commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman has been a particularly strong and astute negotiator on trade talks at the WTO.

Much more though needs to be done to rebalance not just world finance, trade and security but the fundamental equity of power between the West and the East.

During the ongoing climate change conference in Paris, it is important India sticks to its principled stand: India will cut carbon emissions but without compromising its development priorities. The West made its transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy between 1750 and 1950 by polluting the world with its coal mines, steam engines, cars and factories. They spewed carbon using the resources appropriated through 200 years of slavery, colonialism and the invasive settlements of Australasia, South Africa and north and South America.

In 1700, as I wrote in my recent book, the British Empire was a distant gleam in the eye of traders from the East India Company who had set up mercantile posts in India's busy port towns. India was a prize catch. Though fragmented after the collapse of the Mughal Empire, it had a population of 165 million and the world's largest economy at the time. China was the world's second most populous nation with 152 million people and was the world's second largest economy after India. Together the two Asian giants produced over 50 per cent of global economic output. The yet-to-be United States was still a smattering of thirteen British colonies.

And Britain? It had a population of 8.6 million and produced a mere 3 per cent of the world's output. Colonisation and the industrial revolution changed the world dramatically over the next 150 years. By 1870, the average Briton was six times richer than the average Indian or Chinese.

New world order

Beyond the numbers, however, lies the real story. For the first time since the West became the world's dominant geopolitical, military and economic force 200 years ago, the tide has turned decisively. The rise of China and India, the relative decline of the United States and the fall of Western Europe will establish a new world order. For India, the next few years present great challenges but even greater opportunities.

The Ottoman Empire, Ming China and Mughal India were the pre-eminent global powers in 1550. In less than 200 years, each had plunged into terminal decline. The West, till then a warren of pre-nation states plagued by wars between Saxons, Jutes, Celts, Visigoths, Gauls and Slavs, forged decisively ahead in the mid-1700s.

Till 1707, Britain did not even exist as a country; It was formed when England and Scotland signed the Acts of Union on 1 May 1707. Similarly, modern-day Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy all evolved or devolved, merged or demerged, from allomerations of sundry kingdoms.

Following the defeat of its German allies in the First World War in 1918, the Ottoman Empire lost its Muslim lands - in the arc from Egypt to the Balkans - to the US, Britain and France. Only the rump, Turkey, remained.

By the 1920s, therefore, the West had eliminated the last threat to its global hegemony. The Ottomans at their zenith had reached the gates of Austria, deep into Western Europe, a few hundred miles from today's Germany. They were defeated by a combined European army in the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

Much of south-east Europe (Albania, Bosnia, Serbia) and Spain had fallen under Islamic rule for centuries. This only partly explains the visceral animosity of Europeans to the recent flood of Muslim migrants from war-wracked Syria and Iraq. Central and eastern Europe, which felt the sword of Islam from the 1400s, have been the most hostile to the migrants, sealing their borders to the influx. Countries in Europe further west and north, which did not experience Islamic invasions, have been more hospitable - notably Germany, parts of Scandinavia and Scotland. (Most long-settled Muslim immigrants in France are from Francophone Africa, especially former French colonies in North Africa like Algeria.)

New western strategy

Having won the military, scientific and industrial contest against the rest of the world by the 1940s - and having settled their bloody internecine battles in the Second World War - the West needed to rethink its strategy. Colonialism was ending. The Atlantic slave trade had long gone. These two horrific crimes had given the West land and labour. They exploited both with great efficiency and cruelty.

Lord Hugh Thomas, one of the world's most accomplished historians on the Atlantic slave trade, describes the hellish journey as hundreds of slaves were packed on the slave ships: "The slaves were usually secured by placing the right leg of one and the left leg of another onto the same pair of fetters. If the fetters were connected by a string, these men could walk, though slowly. Every four slaves might be fastened together by the necks, with a strong rope of twisted thongs and, at night, additional fetters would be put on their hands. Sometimes, a chain would be passed round their necks. Those slaves who protested were imprisoned in a thick billet of wood about three feet long and a smooth notch being made upon one side of it. The ankle of the slave was bolted to the smooth part by means of a strong staple, one ring of which was passed on each side of the ankle. All these fetters and bolts were made from African iron."

Meanwhile, in the Asian and African colonies, brutalities were common: man-made famines (in Bengal, for example), genocide and  pillage. But as the world freed itself from the chains of Empire, the West engineered new instruments to control world affairs. At the epicentre of it all was the control of global finance and the use of overwhelming military power.

The Bretton Woods accord in 1944 between groups of largely Western nations created the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). For the next 70 years these institutions would be run by the West to ensure its vice-like grip over the world economy. By an unwritten agreement the president of the World Bank would always be an American; the president of the IMF would always be a European. (That tradition was broken only partially in 2012 by the appointment of a Korean-American, Jim Yong Kim, as president of the World Bank.)

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) was similarly commandeered. Of its five veto-carrying permanent members, four were victors of the Second World War (the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union). Through the UNSC, World Bank and IMF, the West controlled the levers of both global finance and global security. Asian and African members of these institutions had muted voices.

But even this was not enough for the West. As post-war global trade burgeoned, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was formed in 1948 which morphed into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995. The body makes and unmakes the rules of inter-country and inter-bloc trade.

More institutions and treaties, with the West dominating the discourse, were created to solve new problems: climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC), nuclear proliferation (Nuclear Non-poliferation Treaty - NPT) and intellectual property rights (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights - TRIPS) among others. 

That era is over. As China and India reclaim their historical place as the world's two leading economies over the next 25 years, the time has come to reform global institutions of finance, trade, security and the environment to reflect the new world order.

The climate change summit in Paris this week should mark the beginning of a decisive shift in the global balance of power.