Global Power at the End of 2010

A suspicious world, without ideas or leaders. A world in the midst of the worst economic crisis in 80 years, which coincides with an unprecedented transfer of power from Europe and the United States to Asia, the like of which has not been seen for centuries. This was the year in which the change from a unipolar world to a multipolar one became clearly visible, in which the United States has had to negotiate with the new emerging powers, especially China, which is becoming more and more explicit in its ambitions.

Europe has been eclipsed against its will, looking inward at its ancient national traditions, anguished by the cracks in its welfare state. The United States has lost its authority and international pre-eminence, and the same holds for President Barack Obama, now dispossessed of the celestial grace that seemed to surround him until well into the first year of his term.

If one had to put a face on the newly emerging powers, two good examples would be Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, who turns over the Brazilian presidency to Dilma Rousseff on the last day of 2010, and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been the leading figure in the largest disclosure of secret documents in history, covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the State Department’s diplomatic communiqués, waging a global digital rebellion against his detention and the blockade of his accounts and website.

Lula is the very image of a multipolar world in which no single superpower is indispensable, and in which a country like Brazil has an ever-increasing role, with its favorable demographics, effervescent economy and strong vocation for taking the lead regionally and globally. Assange is the embodiment of informal power, not aligned with any country, which also has a part to play on the new global chessboard, exploiting economic and technological globalization to find its fissures and weak spots.

They are two symbolic and media-friendly faces. But this is not the case with the unknown faces of the truly ascendant powers, those of the nine members of the permanent committee of the Chinese Communist party, among whom is the president of the country, Hu Jintao, his prime minister, Wen Jiabao, and those who will succeed them in an orderly fashion if nothing goes wrong in 2012, when the fifth post-Mao generation comes to power: Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang. Their economic, political and military decisions, made by consensus under the utmost secrecy, have had a greater effect on the course of the planet than any grand vague international treaty.

The flip side of their opaque power is the colorful NASCAR-like shifts in power that took place this year. The speed is what is most surprising. The rise of some and the fall of others is much more rapid than anyone expected. In mid-2010, China passed Japan in its rate of wealth production. Now only the United States has a higher GDP than China. At the end of this new decade, in 2020, economists predict that China will have the highest GDP in the world. There is nothing strange about this; while the developed world is still growing slowly and losing jobs, China surges ahead at an annual growth rate of over 10 percent. If this pace continues, and the so-called “Western World” continues in crisis, China will overtake the U.S. much sooner.

China already passed Germany in 2009 as the world’s largest exporter and America as the largest producer of automobiles. It is the largest importer of steel and copper and the second largest importer of oil. It has four of the ten largest companies on earth. And it has two financial levers that provide it with power and influence in the changing poker game of world power: its currency, the yuan, which the Chinese authorities maintain undervalued with respect to the dollar, euro and yen, in order to increase the competitiveness of its exports; and its foreign currency reserves, which have made it into the West’s biggest lender and has allowed it to lend a hand to countries with sovereign debt that has been corroded by the financial crisis.

The prosperity of the Chinese economy during this period of European and American difficulty also motivates the global projection of its businesses and its capital, in importation of raw materials, direct investment and even in opening markets to the consumption of its products. The network that China is building pays off geopolitically, as manifested in the boycott of the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to dissident Liu Xiaobo, followed by some 20 countries from various continents. The Beijing regime proves to be more and more secure and firm in its political positions, in clear correlation with the strong state of its economy and the weakness of its Western partners.