Coincidence or not, on the day the leaders of the world’s twenty largest economies met in Bali, the world’s population passed the eight billion mark. According to UN estimates, that symbolic baby was born on Tuesday. Most likely in Asia, good for over four billion people, or else Africa, the fastest growing continent.
We in ‘the West’ are a shrinking minority on the planet, while ‘the rest’, as it is sometimes derogatorily called, are slowly catching up with us in prosperity.
It is good to keep these demographics in mind when looking at the G20 summit. War in Europe, so how should we deal with aggressor Russia? For European diplomats, this was the core issue in Bali.
President Zelensky knew it well: by video he addressed the company as “dear G19”. It was a sneer at Russia’s minister Lavrov, who filled in for the absent Putin. But also a wish: just as Russia was expelled from the G8 after the Crimean annexation of 2014 (which has since become the G7 again), you should now throw the country out of the G20. However, that will not happen soon.
The G7/8 was and is the stage of wealthy industrial powers, that is, of the West, including Japan. Under Yeltsin and the young Putin, Russia also wanted to be included. The G20, on the other hand, was established in 2008 as a discussion table for everyone. China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and other non-Western countries also had a say in the global economy, it was realized during the banking crisis. What dawned then will be evident in 2022: it will not work without China.
That is why the issue of Russia in Bali is a sideshow. Much more substantial was the summit meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. For three hours on Monday, the leaders of the incumbent and incumbent world powers discussed how to avoid a new Cold War. So it was about Taiwan, the strategic focal point of their relationship. Acute escalation danger seems averted. The climate dialogue, canceled by China after Nancy Pelosi’s provocative Taiwan visit this summer, is being reinstated. There will also be new communication channels and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will soon visit China, Biden said. Positive signals.
At the same time, economic tension is increasing rapidly. Washington has long wanted (like the EU) an end to technological piracy and unfair favoring of Chinese state-owned companies. Beijing, for its part, is outraged by last month’s tightening of US export restrictions on semiconductors and other technology. That is indeed correct. Keeping China one generation behind is no longer enough, the Biden team has decided, the rival must be technological be “pinched off”. Since Taiwan is home to the world’s highest-quality chip factory, this move increases the chance of a Chinese invasion or blockade of the island.
The other leaders have to navigate between this great power violence. China is now one for almost all Asian, African and South American countries important trading partner than the US. However, the same is true for many European countries: without the Chinese market (or without chips from Taiwan), their companies face misery.
For example, concerns about an abrupt ‘decoupling’, a splitting of world trade along geostrategic lines, are growing, including among America’s allies. IMF boss Kristalina Georgieva fears that “we are sleepwalking into a world that will consequently be poorer and more insecure.” Australia’s trade minister cited the recent US export ban “draconian”. In Germany, where the energy decoupling of Russia is being processed these days, the chief of the security service: “Russia is the storm, China is the climate change.”
Back to demographics. In his posthumous book factfulness from 2018, the Swedish doctor and speaker Hans Rosling came up with the “pin code of the world”. In four figures you can conveniently read how the world’s population is distributed over the Americas, the wider Europe, Africa and Asia. For seven billion Earthlings, the pin code was 1-1-1-4. For the year 2100, Rosling predicted 1-1-4-5, so demographic stability in America and Europe, and growth in Africa in particular, but also Asia. That’s where the markets, the innovation, the dynamics will be in the future.
We in Europe can hope that Biden and Xi (and their successors) will keep the world together for a while longer. If we are economically thrown back into the US-protected Atlantic space, while China dominates all of Asia and Africa, perhaps even South America, the balance will shift, and the West itself will become ‘the rest’.
Luke of Mediator is a political philosopher and historian.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 16, 2022