India could help shape a whole new global consensus
Like most years, this year too commenced with the global business and intellectual elite making their way to the World Economic Forum at Davos this January in an attempt to demystify the world around and provide some answers to the challenges that abound. But by the time the Davos spectacle came to an end, there were more questions than answers for the world at large.
The Davos Consensus has been stuttering for the past few years, with the covid pandemic having made it abundantly clear that old assumptions about the world would have to be reassessed in fundamental ways. In some ways, this rethink should not be surprising, considering that Davos itself was a platform created to reflect the optimism of the global economic order that once prevailed around us.
Though more than five decades old, it gained particular traction during the days of irrational global exuberance over an emerging economic order shaped by hyper-globalization. For a large part of the world’s elite, it was the epitome of human evolution, a world where conflicts would become marginal thanks to increased economic interconnectedness, where identities would be global, and where global institutions would effectively mediate inter-state challenges.
But today’s world is one that is being shaped by the forces of geopolitics in more ways than one. The Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas conflict, the flaring up of threats to sea-lanes that are critical for global trade, and, of course, the China challenge—all these are forcing global policymakers to look at this crisis-ridden world through a different lens than what was used in the past.
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