panduranghari wrote:Viv S wrote:That's fair. To me, its a matter of some angst that when China was in the midst of its strongest economic expansion (2000-2008), the global economy was relatively stable, it had easy access to capital and there were no significant barriers to free trade, while a Modi-led India will have to face big hurdles on all three counts in a more uncertain unstable environment.
Given that the kind of capital/investment that India needs, over the coming few years, is measured in the trillion of dollars, stability should have trumped ideology for at least for BRFites.
Modi could have handled the Clintons just fine. Global uncertainty... is much bigger challenge. Nobody knows what Trump will do, not even Trump himself. That itself leads to an environment which is not too great for commerce.
In global perspectives, I posted a youtube video by Grant Williams called -Crazy:The story of debt.
When you say India needs access to capital. We have access to capital. Capital does not mean US dollars alone. This is important to internalise.
When you say India needs Free Trade. We HONESTLY dont. We needed internal free trade and GST has already done that. We dont buy much from other countries, neither do we sell to others much. Except OIL.
Economic expansion also called growth cannot be sustained permanently. Unlike what the western economists who think economy is a machine and can be continuous be improved by tinkering, Indic view is different. Economy is not a machine. Its a living organism. A super organism. It breathes in and breathes out. Breathing in is the expansion. Breathing out is the necessary contraction to expel CO2 so that fresh O2 can be inhaled again. This is important to internalise.
West as we know it collapsing under its own weight. On all measures- capital investments, debt growth, demographics, internal fissures.
We should stick to strategic ambivalence. I believe C Rajamohan has stated it. I am open to be corrected.
If west wants to engage India and derive benefit, they must accept Indian Exceptionalism. Trump will be more willing to accept this than Clinton ever will because as a businessman he understands the concept of letting the other party feel that they have won.
West should worry about stability. India does not. India gains much from disruption from the current status quo. I do find Rudradev ji's analysis that Westphalian model still has legs, a tad confusing because I feel the glue holding the westphalian model itself is loosing it stickiness.
PHji, very perceptive post.
I need to clarify re: your interpretation of my analysis, however.
I'm not a fan of the term "Westphalian nation-state/model" applied to the present day. To me it is one of those terms that accumulates semantic degeneracy (comes to mean more and more different things to different people the further you get away from the end of the 30 years war, in terms of applied context). It is useful when explaining the origins of Western "secularism" for example, but hardly relevant at all today IMHO.
In fact, as you will notice, I purposely avoided using that term in my original analysis for exactly this reason... preferring simply "majoritarian nationalism" instead. Ramana garu used it in response to my post, and because I think I know what specifically he means by it, I agreed with him
But to me it lacks the coherence and, more importantly, the currency to be useful in analysis going forward.
I would rather frame the argument in terms of idealism: definition of a state's identity, national culture and will in consonance with those of its majority population, vs. the cynical mercantilism of elites who promote globalist agendas benefiting only a privileged few while relying on minority identity politics to skew electoral equations in a direction orthogonal to the majority's identity, culture, and will (the "three nation theory", I called it somewhere else).
