Davos WEF 2022 | Narrative That India Is A Pluralistic Western Democracy Is Dead, Says Adam Tooze
The narrative that India is a “pluralistic Western democracy is dead”, says Adam Tooze.
The narrative that India is a “pluralistic Western democracy is dead”. And it’s “dead by force of facts”, according to Adam Tooze.
There was always a way in which “the multicultural, plurally religious, secular vision of Indian nationalism was a bet against the odds”, the author and history professor at the Columbia University told BQ Prime’s Menaka Doshi on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum 2022 summit at Davos.
“It (that vision) was defying gravity to a certain extent, and that doesn’t mean you failed because we defy gravity in all sorts of ways, but it requires skillful willingness to suspend disbelief about certain fundamental, obvious facts about a society and a willingness to push against that.”
He said if a country has “major political players and entrepreneurs who actually want instead to reinforce those distinctions, and insist on the force of those facts as the founding, organising idea of their politics, then that project will fail”.
“There’s a need to ask questions that are not about democracy but concrete specific questions about delivery, practice, process, values, because a democracy which is simply one in which a populist nationalism or fundamentalism runs riot and roughshod over the interests of minorities is may be in some sense a democracy, but it’s one we would immediately want to qualify.”
Watch the full interview:
Edited excerpts from the interview:
How are you viewing what is going on? Economically, we seem to be confronting serious challenges.
Adam Tooze: That's right. We are in an incredibly precarious position right now. I don't know that anything could scare me as much as the moment of atomic nuclear saber rattling that we had in February, in direct response to the Western sanctions imposed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don't see a good outcome to that crisis.
Obviously, many of us are hoping for Ukrainian victory, but how we square that with the possibility of making peace with Russia, which we will at some point have to do, I do not know.
And in the meantime, the world economy is hugely on edge. We have a combination of interest rate increases, price increases for both food and key energy inputs. We know the pressure this is going to exert on the most vulnerable, both the most vulnerable in rich societies and countries and economies which are fragile, heavily indebted, especially those which are heavily indebted in dollars.
So, this is a real test in multiple different senses of the ability of elites all over the world to govern. To speak of a world order at this point already seems exaggerated. We have a variety of different challenges for Beijing, for Delhi, for the Europeans, for the United States, and Japan. I mean, it's really the polycentrism which characterises our current world that is made very, very manifest at this moment.
For almost a decade after the global financial crisis, we saw an almost leaderless world, and it seemed that way for the better part of the Covid-19 crisis as well. I am wondering if you see that sustaining over the next several years, and what the implications of that are?
Adam Tooze: I think we have seen nodes of leadership. I agree that there isn't a single leader and perhaps that's a relief. I mean the world is too complex for heaven's sake. I mean we do live in a world which is polycentric and that is right and proper. And the emergence of the major Asian powers, the proliferation of economic growth, the creation of the G-20–it should really be a G-30 but at that point, it becomes too big,
These are realistic adaptations to a world which is vastly more complex, also richer, more dynamic, more technologically empowered. So, at that level, we shouldn't bewail this greater complexity, and the fact that there is not a single leadership or moment of leadership.
But I think what we do have to ask is on the critical issues: where does guidance come, where does the possibility of crucial interventions come at the key moments. That could be in security policy where NATO has rallied very considerable resources to support Ukraine. It's not a global project, however, it's not a project of stabilisation. It's a project for throwing those resources onto the side of Ukraine, and then challenging other powers like India to line up with the West. So, you can think of that as ordering but it's a kind of violent ordering, it’s a pushback against Russia's efforts to disrupt the order.
In another sense, we see, for instance, the Federal Reserve acting in 2020 as a huge stabilising force for the dollar world. But now, of course, exerting a huge drag on that same world as it raises interest rates.
So, we have a world with a series of power fields, of power structures, moments of leadership in each one of those areas and those domains. But not a single overarching hegemon.
Anyone living in a particular age believes that it's happening to them for the first time; but this kind of world, have we lived through it before and what have the outcomes been? At least for the last 20-25 years, I think we have lived in a world that was led predominantly by the United States.
Adam Tooze: In certain key respects, it clearly was. I mean America has an absolute dominance in military power which remains–despite the talk of the hawks in Washington–insuperable, insurmountable. And then a huge preponderance of the dollar. So, all of this is undoubtedly the case and tech, this is the other great story of the last 25 years.
These are vectors of American power but within that world, we also have radically new phenomena–the emergence of India as a major player, for the first time really on the global stage as a major economic powerhouse since independence.
This is not to say that during the non-aligned period, India didn't play a very prominent role in world affairs, but in a particular way, precisely as a nonaligned power sitting between the two cold war blocks, India’s position today is radically unlike anything we have seen before.
And the same can be said of China, the whole rollercoaster of the Chinese story, both its incredible rise and now the very fundamental problems that it faces and their implications for the world. To my mind, this does mark the current epoch as something different, something radically new.
Why should a world of 7.9 billion people not embrace that reality? Why should we constantly search to map this hugely more complex and diverse world back into the grid, say for instance, pre-1914 European power politics and China is like imperial Germany. This seems trivialising and reductive of this incredible globalised reality that has really taken hold in the last few decades.
I am not trying to push back the world into the grid that we have all been familiar with for the last few decades. I am trying to understand what this new world will be, and if it is likely to persist, what does that mean for trade and for economies?
I want to break up the next few questions into two. First, I want to know what do you think, or how do you think this war on Ukraine is going to end, and what the consequences are going to be politically and economically, because we have seen a variety of weaponry being used this time? And then, I would like to talk about a world in which China and the U.S. are both equally dominant.
First, how do you think this war against Ukraine is likely to end?
Adam Tooze: The Western powers, principally the United States, though it comes in the form of an alliance through NATO, have made clear that they will not tolerate and accept an outcome in which Ukraine is defeated by Russia. This is the first thing to anchor because beyond that everything else is radically uncertain.
There are two possible scenarios here that could be mapped out, one in which the Ukrainian military continue to humiliate the Russian military and at some point, the Russian military are really exhausted to the point where they have to retreat back to perhaps beyond the starting line from which they began, which would be back to the 2013 boundaries of Ukraine. This would be an extraordinary victory for Kyiv, and it would pose the question of whether Moscow can live with that.
And then, we open up the possibility of scenarios of escalation because it's very difficult to understand how Putin and his regime can tolerate the extraordinary loss of face that follows from that.
I know there are people who say ‘well, they manipulate the entire media environment, they can just purvey whatever happens as a victory’. That doesn't seem to me compelling as an account of how any totalitarian dictatorship I have studied ever worked. That wasn't how propaganda worked in the Nazi regime. You couldn't simply negate a defeat and turn it into a victory.
That seems unrealistic to me and if that's not the case, we have to worry about asymmetric escalation. In other words, a move into the realm of non-conventional warfare–chemicals, biological, or nuclear escalation–and that's a terrifying scenario.
The other scenario is one in which Ukraine runs out of steam and, in the end, Russia is able to stabilise its position and perhaps defend the boundaries that it established in 2014- 2015.
And that then becomes a scenario of an attritional struggle. If you listen to some American strategists, the more hawkish and cynical, they speak of this as “an Afghanistan” and then the question, of course, is can the wider region and the world economy live with the potential disruption of a prolonged slogging match in Ukraine? And this is a recipe for humanitarian catastrophe, the collapse of Ukraine's economy and permanent disruption to both energy and food markets, which will then ripple out through to the wide world.
So, to my mind, though the commitment of the West to ensuring Ukraine's non defeat is cast iron at this point–there's no way back for them either on that score. Whether anyone really has a constructive vision of how we get to re-stabilisation is an open question.
What I fear is certainly in Washington that the momentum is squarely behind the strategy which basically is driving towards the defeat of Putin. And that is a strategy of very high risk, and we should be clear about that. You can understand the attraction and the appeal of that strategy. But you have to ask whether or not they have understood the variety of risks that arise from it.
Do you think that's the strategy that will possibly prevail? In your mind and in your assessment, is it likely that eventually NATO and the alliance of Western powers and many other parts of the world will run out of steam?
Adam Tooze: Well, in this domain, America is driving the show. To go back to our earlier point, when you look at who is providing support to Ukraine, the Baltic states are making a vast effort proportionally speaking.
I mean Latvia and Estonia are making efforts which are 0.7-0.8% of GDP, like that's their entire aid budget which is going to Ukraine. But America has just voted $40 billion and it is game changing; $40 billion is 25% of Ukraine's pre-war GDP. So, America is essentially bankrolling a total war effort for Ukraine.
The G-7 leadership have agreed this backstop to the tune of 15 billion euros plus which will ensure that the Ukrainian government can continue to function. So, this is a total war effort on Ukraine’s part that is being supported and funded by the West.
That is a dramatic commitment. It seems to me to create an irreversible commitment–having made that you cannot fail and the driver of that is American politics and the significant thing about it is, it's completely consensual in Congress; barring one or two people, it is massively consensual. And you can tell from that, that it was driven by very powerful domestic political pressures in the United States.
No one wants to be on the wrong side of this issue, going into the midterm elections. So again, one has to ask oneself, how far is this really a grand strategy or how far is this essentially a kind of convenient foreign policy for an American political system that is riven to the core and teetering on the edge of these alarmist talks about Civil War, which I think is alarmist but nevertheless, it captures the reality of a very powerful political division.
Is it about a riven society and two very fractured sides looking for one issue they can possibly agree on? Or do you think that America is going to push this all the way to the end, and your big concern is what will be the reaction of Putin if he loses face and loses this war?
Adam Tooze: Well, I think there were two issues where you could see this rallying happening and they were both foreign policies–one was China and one was Russia.
The difference is that China is an unmanageably huge problem with world historic implications and the Russian problem with Ukrainians doing the work of actually attriting Russia’s military looked like a soluble problem from America's point of view.
They didn't anticipate this, in fairness to the Biden administration, this was not Plan A. The Biden administration’s Plan A was to open the door to a reset with Russia. In 2021, they were engaged in really very friendly diplomacy by the current standards, making concessions on arms control and things like that. They were not backing Ukraine. Zelensky’s government was not exactly persona non grata but certainly not in good standing in the West. It was treated with suspicion, to a degree of contempt to be honest, an incredible about-face that we have seen since then.
And then all of a sudden, Putin handed them this possibility which is that you could essentially eliminate one major piece of the geopolitical jigsaw puzzle that faces the U.S. or you could take one big piece off the board and that's what they are doubling down on at this point.
Longer-term, the view is all towards China, but China is a vastly greater challenge than finding the weapons necessary for the Ukrainians to destroy most of the Russian armoury.
I want to talk about China and India because these are the two countries that have taken no side in this battle. Some might argue that China is maybe a little bit closer to the Russian side than the American side at this point. So, this world where you have painted a scenario where the U.S.-led Western forces do their best to beat Russia out of Ukraine, what world does it leave us with, because India is somewhere stuck in the middle? China doesn't seem to be on any one side, but closer to Russia. What is that outcome going to mean for us?
Adam Tooze: Yes, and you use the full spectrum of weapons to do it too. You use the military forces, but you also use the economic sanctions and specifically, drastic financial sanctions. Really, the closing of Russia’s half trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves is a completely unprecedented step.
The Russians, it turns out, could ride it out because we continue to buy their oil and gas. If we weren't doing that, it would be a different picture. So, we have not severed all connections, but certainly any other major player in the global system has to ask itself, where do we stand in relation to this power complex, which if it chooses to will really summon the resources like this.
And it's been very interesting to see how India has simply refused to line up because it knows it has bargaining power at this moment. I mean there was that entire ant trail of Western diplomats into Delhi. You have never seen anything like it. Everyone wanted to talk all of a sudden. And the smart thing to do in that situation is not commit. Why commit? You are empowered by this position.
And I think it would be fair to say that the vast majority of states in the world actually have an interest in upholding certain basic elements of the rule of law, international law.
And it's quite clear, for instance, that China had no interest in Russia engaging in this foolhardy, outright military assault on Ukraine at this point or possibly ever. Russia had plenty of ways of exerting pressure on Ukraine that worked perfectly well to its advantage and wouldn’t have driven Ukraine into the arms of the West in the way that they have managed to do, or for that matter Finland, Sweden…the whole works. It’s extraordinary.
But that's rather different, this basic understanding that major powers have an interest in upholding the status quo because they are the major powers within that status quo. it’s very different from being willing to underwrite a western-led order of liberalism which both India and China have every reason to be jaundiced about.
India has made its position on global trade very clear in the score. It is not available for WTO style deals, it's not even available for RCEP style deals. It is a tough player with very complex domestic politics in which there's very little to be gained by positioning itself as a liberal advocate of free trade.
And everyone in the world of global trade deals reckons with that fact about India at this point. So I think that's a matter of thinking about where we are going to end up with a pattern of recognised differences, where the whole does not aggregate, where you could maybe get a collection of very powerful interests to assert their interest in the status quo.
But where, if Russia chooses to shift it, you are not going to get what the West trades, which is somehow some sort of global affirmation of our vision of what that order is. And Putin has showed us that argument is dead. And the sooner the West realises that, that logic is over, the better.
I really feel that Western diplomacy is misunderstanding its position in the world at this moment.
If it makes those kinds of appeals, the appeals should simply be: is Russia or Ukraine in the right here? And the answer on that level is: it's obvious to everyone, Ukraine did not invade Russia.
This scenario that you have painted, how does it change or what is the impact when in a few years from now, China becomes maybe the dominant economy in the world–maybe not the dominant political force because of the autocracy issue but the dominant economy? How does that change the balance of power? Does that make things more complex or more equal because I know India is looking at these scenarios and wondering where would we stand in a world like that?
Adam Tooze: India’s perspective on this is fascinating because India is a rival of China. You have a contested border with China. China's a historic ally of Pakistan, India's great regional rival, so India's position in this configuration with China's rise is hugely complicated. But it does face difficult choices as to whether or not to align with the Quad, for instance, some sort of American Indo-Pacific construct. For a while, India perhaps imagined that Russia would be a partner, at least when it came to military hardware. It goes all the way back to the Cold War period. Those questions are very real.
This question of the timing is interesting because if we'd had this conversation two or three years ago, that was definitely our understanding. There was a clock running on the moment when China's GDP was going to exceed that of the United States. And that was the time horizon that we were thinking towards.
It has to be said that given the economic shocks that China has suffered in the last couple of years, and the serious impasse it faces right now on the real estate market, huge accumulations of debt in the private sector, the problem and the impasse over the No-Covid policy, etc. Predictions of China's imminent overtaking of the United States seem less relevant than simply weighing and coming to terms with China's existing weight in the world, rather than deferring this conversation to the point, and having everything overshadowed by this totally symbolic moment, when China's GDP exceeds that of the United States.
The fact of the matter is that China's existing level of development, its existing presence in tech, its dominance in raw material and energy markets already make it a key force in the world.
We are already at a point of multipolarity and we have already seen the answer, which is that America can’t live with it. America is patently unable and unwilling to accept that reconfiguration of the global structure and the way you see that is not so much in trade diplomacy, but in the tech wars.
In 2020, the United States declared economic war on China in the form of the outright surgical strike on Huawei. Huawei is not just a cell phone manufacturer; it was the fourth largest private investor in R&D in the whole world.
And America's entire state machine was mobilised to surgically eliminate that company. America has basically announced that it sees a limit, an absolute limit on China's technological development, and it does not want China to progress rapidly into very high levels of sophistication in AI. It does not want China to be a global player in communication.
Things don't always go the way America wants it to.
Adam Tooze: They absolutely don’t. But the question of course is what price China will pay for overcoming that hostility and resistance.
You don't think China will pay a price or be willing to pay a large one to overcome it?
Adam Tooze: No, it will, and it already is. The question is how high will the price be. I think the Chinese determination to break this obstacle must be absolute.
If there's one thing that the Chinese regime is committed to, it is sovereignty. Whatever one may think about its broader ideology, it is a sovereigntist project. It's overcoming centuries of humiliation. That's the entire project.
So to be told, ‘This far and no further in tech’ by the U.S... This is why I call it a declaration of war because it really is basically constraining. It's not about seizing territory in the Donbas or one of these rather primitive territorial projects, it is saying that China will not progress at the cutting edge of industrial and technological development, and so will therefore not be a leading player in humanity's great adventure and that cannot be acceptable to Beijing.
So we will have America reclaiming its rightful place in the world. We will maybe have a defeated Russia, we will have a different order, and maybe if I was to try and fit things back in the grid, China will be taking Russia's place in a bipolar world. Is that how you see it play out?
Adam Tooze: Yes, but no. With all due respect to the Soviet Union, China is one sixth of humanity. China and India are in a special category of world historic development.
The Soviet Union was the czarist empire in multiethnic, multinational empire of European proportions for the land version analogists, say to the Ottoman Empire at its fullest extent supercharged by Soviet and Stalinist economic development. That was a mighty thing capable of competing with the United States in high tech and in military hardware, but still, essentially that–a relatively small group of people with a very large amount of land. That is the legacy of Tsarist imperialism in the 19th century, the most rapidly expanding empire. So in a sense they are the continuation as Churchill understood it of the great game between the British empire and the Tsarist empire.
China, like India, when unleashed as a nation state force is sui generis and not comparable with each other either really, as a result of their very different histories and different trajectories, and not comparable to any previous European or Western-derived experience of state power because they operate on not just continental scale geographically, but on one sixth of humanity.
This is the continuous correction that we have to make, especially as people of the west but anyone as it were entrenched in western modes of thinking about power, about the scale of these operations in both cases, whether it's Indian democracy and its various modern modifications or development of the tech stack in America.
So India's experiments with various forms of welfare on the one hand or just the awesome mobilisation capacity of the Mao derived apparatus in China. These are something new under the sun that we have to come to terms with.
And so, yes, China will be an antagonist to the United States. It already is but no, it will not be the antagonist for the Soviet Union. It is much more fundamental to my mind, it’s much deeper. It doesn't make the ideological claims on the other hand.
Outside frankly India, there is no very powerful Maoist movement that has any kind of purchase in any part of the world.
So, that is different from the Soviet model but in terms of a material challenge, in terms of its significance for the rest of the world economy, it's incomparably larger and more transformative than the Soviet Union, even at its height.
When you say transformative, what do you mean? How is it going to transform the world?
Adam Tooze: Look at Australia, look at Indonesia, look at its entire environment. All of those places are being physically transformed by the demand for raw materials and energy from China.
Look at the climate equation in the 1980s and the early 1990s, we did climate politics, quite legitimately as though it were a problem created by the West and therefore also the responsibility of the West to address it, because climate justice demanded that the world that we have been inhabiting since the early 2000s, as a result of China's stupendous unprecedented growth is one where China is responsible for 29% of global emissions, and its per capita emissions are higher than those of most European countries at this point. So, in that sense, it changes the parameters for all decision-making in that vital sphere for humanity's survival.
I mean, the West still has the onus to act and to lead and especially in the super high consuming societies of North America, but the problem has no solution unless China acts. There's simply no possibility. We have also to that extent entirely forfeited our ability to, we don't control our destiny, it doesn't matter what we do, we have to make the right moves in the West. But even if we do, unless Xi’s regime can as it will drive the largest decarbonisation imaginable, that entire question is odious.
How do you hold China accountable to this? It’s not a democracy; it is too big but it’s not a democracy. No pressure seems to work against the government. We saw that with these Covid shutdowns.
Adam Tooze: Well, this is going to be very interesting to see because pressure does work against the Chinese government.
In the past, it's been over pollution and the main reason why they have moved to embrace the environmental agenda is that both India and China suffer these incredible coal power driven environmental disasters every year, in which tens of thousands of people die. They are major sources of death in both countries. In fact, it's far larger than that, hundreds of thousands of people die of respiratory diseases as a result of this pollution.
And the regime is highly sensitive to those pressures and has shown a willingness to move on them.
But I completely agree that the No-Covid situation right now is precisely for that reason also a huge challenge, because the regime does–and this goes to the same point, it was hugely invested in its own success–feel answerable to the Chinese population.
American-style essential herd immunity strategy, where a million Americans died–that’s the low side estimate–would not have been acceptable to the Chinese regime. They don't have a way of just fobbing that off and walking away from it.
It is an interesting contrast. Here's an autocracy that you are saying can't afford to let that happen.
Adam Tooze: I think it's better to think of China as a developmental dictatorship or developmental authoritarianism, and this has always been a contrast with India.
So, India's nationalist political order after World War, after Independence, did not successfully deliver on basic developmental promises to its population for decades, and was able to not deliver. It wasn't central to the project to deliver. This was always the critique of the subaltern studies of the Indian left, the failure to conduct a truly revolutionary transformation of Indian society meant that chronic abject poverty and basic metrics of health, education, was totally persistent.
It's only begun to shift dramatically in recent decades, whereas the Chinese regime already by the 1980s had delivered basic health care and basic education to its entire population.
The World Bank when it went into China in the ‘80s was staggered by what they saw because they saw infant mortality that was comparable to middle income European countries, life expectancies that were like those in parts of Italy in the 1980s, because the regime understood that the thing that sustains its legitimacy–and it's not just a cynical bargain–these people are transformational nationalist communists who are driven by the project and modernising their society to an incredibly powerful degree.
They needed to deliver and did and to my mind, epidemic control is a part and parcel of that project. This is something that is essential to the regime's mission, is a kind of output legitimacy that can be inserted into a national narrative of recovery renaissance and modernisation.
And you cannot have a disease breaking out from a traditional source of pandemic disease and the intersection between the rural, the wilderness, the countryside and the city and then spreading from there to the rest of Chinese society. This would be a profound shock to the claim of the regime that it controls a modern and prosperous country.
It is largely as a result of our failure outside China to contain the disease, it’s now facing a variant which it can’t address with its first best strategy. Zero Covid is the first best strategy and they implemented it successfully. It was the rest of the world–India, the United States, Europe, Latin America which let this thing run out of control.
I am not sure if they implemented it successfully given what we have read and heard about the strict controls.
Adam Tooze: Those in the current version. They are missing a component, and its culpable failure is vaccination.
What you have told me is that the two will be equal powers–the U.S. and China? It will wage its powers in different ways?
Adam Tooze: The world will have two major powers in it, more than two, and they will search for metrics and the metrics will never quite align.
There will be certain metrics on which one can assert dominance and other metrics on which the others can claim preponderance.
And I no longer think we are in a world in which all of the metrics align in a kind of stack as it were–economic dominance, financial dominance, soft power dominance, hard power dominance– they are all part of the same configuration of power.
You think of America's political legitimacy, where is that right now? At rock bottom, even with Biden as President.
What does that mean for democracy? Nations are struggling with the ability to push democratic values. I am not sure people are buying into it everywhere anymore. What does that mean for trade? So many people have said globalisation is dead. What does that mean for the dollar? What does that mean for our economic future?
Adam Tooze: We have to stop thinking in these big, lumpy categories of democracy. It was totally ideological even at the time that it was current, and everyone accepted it.
We knew that America was a democracy, and India was a democracy and they were all democracies together and it was as simple as that.
India was the biggest, America was the oldest and most successful. These stories don't work. What we need to ask ourselves is things like, what does democracy deliver in a democratic sense? In other words, does it reach the majority of its citizens, say for something like healthcare, does it enable participation? Can we speak free speech, are our basic rights protected?
We need to ask questions which are not about democracy but concrete specific questions about delivery, practice, process, values because a democracy which is simply one in which a populist nationalism or fundamentalism runs riot and roughshod over the interests of minorities is may be in some sense a democracy, but it’s one we would immediately want to qualify. A democracy in which you have a totally polluted media system is perhaps at some level still a democracy, but what kind of a democracy is it?
What do we do when the judiciary becomes, as in the American case, radically politicised? Well, that's actually in some cases more democracy, but it may be intolerable to live under, and it may be hugely divisive and lead to an escalation of social tensions of a very radical kind.
Maybe we want more liberalism or maybe we want more defensive rights in a more fundamental and basic sense. Maybe we want more social democracy. All of those questions are going to be interesting questions.
Do we have political processes which are capable of thinking strategically about the climate, for instance, and warding off climate denialism as remarkably as the Asian states have because climate denialism would be really convenient for the Asian states, but they have not embraced it in a way the Republican Party has in the United States.
So, this is where I think the conversation gets interesting, and is much more complex. It reduces aggregation to a big idea but that's where we'll actually be able to say meaningful things about where the project of freedom, of rights for free speech, of collective action in a freeway where that project is headed. And, I don't think it's necessarily an optimistic story, but nor is it one of blanket doom.
So, you're saying erase everything about the way the world worked in the past, because we are navigating uncharted territory?
Adam Tooze: What we need to do is enormously increase our armoury of concepts and increase the depth of our understanding. This is happening across the board.
If you think about the way economic policy is flailing right now and unable to really grasp inflation because we need to know about supply chains like individual nitty-gritty, individual processes, which will determine whether you do get the vaccine or you don't, or whether you know what impact would result from Germany switching off gas supply from Russia.
This is not something you could answer in the aggregate from the vantage point of a central bank. You need to understand some very specific things. Likewise, with energy transition. Carbon comes from five basic sources–food, transport, industry–we need each one of those to understand how they work, and we can only really evaluate the success of policy against that kind of concrete detail.
So, it's a demand not to give up thinking, not to give up concepts, but to recognise how broken so many of them are, faced with the scale and the radicalism of change that's undeniably going on all around us.
I understand carbon is the subject of your next book.
Adam Tooze: It is one way of thinking, given the huge dissensus we have over values, given the huge conflict we have in so many other realms.
To my mind, climate is a huge challenge. It's terrifying, if we don't manage to deal with it, it has disastrous implications, but there is also in some sense something promising about it, in that Chinese scientists, Indian scientists, European American scientists and technicians and a broad swath of public opinion and politics in all of those places can actually agree on what CO2 is and what the likely solutions are, and we can see some elements of those and they will be in common.
We need to move away from internal combustion engines to EV. It's going to be a hotter world, like you are experiencing in India and Pakistan right now. It's brutally hot, you are going to need air conditioning. You will not be able to live without it. So how are we going to make that possible?
These are questions which collectively we can work on and think through the politics of. We have to embrace the democratic politics of cooling. We cannot allow the poor, disadvantaged groups in society to be exposed to these kinds of risks. It will literally be lethal. People will die in hundreds of thousands and then in millions if we do not solve these kinds of issues. So that to me is where climate is energising, because it gives us an agenda.
It's not a total agenda. It gives us an agenda that incredibly wide groups of people and society across huge parts of the world can actually agree on and recognise the similarity of problems.
You see India from the outside. Where do you think it is going to end up in this new reordered world?
Adam Tooze: Well, it is one of the simple stories that we have to let go of that India's democracy is a pluralistic western democracy. That narrative is dead. And it's dead by force of facts.
There was always a way in which the multicultural, plurally religious, secular vision of Indian nationalism was a bet against the odds. It was defying gravity to a certain extent and that doesn't mean that you failed because we defy gravity in all sorts of ways, but it requires skillful willingness to suspend disbelief about certain fundamental, obvious facts about a society and a willingness to push against that.
And if you have major political players and entrepreneurs who actually want instead to reinforce those distinctions, and insist on the force of those facts as the founding, organising idea of their politics, then that project will fail.
It will come crashing down and then you have to renegotiate and you have to figure out where as it were, how we make a liveable, stable society in the wake of that. And that, I think, is India's challenge in the current moment.
And no one who cares about India or has any interest in it can but be concerned because at the very least, it's a new situation. It's novel. We don't know how this works. There’s very good reason for thinking it harbours extraordinarily serious risks.
India is not as economically powerful as China, definitely not first world as America. So where does it fit in, if there were to be a hierarchy? It's unique with its historical alliance with Russia.
Adam Tooze: It challenges us to broaden our concepts in economic terms of developed and undeveloped. You say it's not a first world, I agree. It's not third world in any conventional sense. So those categories aren't helpful anymore.
It's a developing society. Yes, but very substantial parts of it are developed by any reasonable standard of the world. So, it's common to large parts of Latin America at the current moment, and indeed, even some countries, the most successful countries in Africa exhibit rather similar patterns.
This ought to be thought of as productive. I mean China, for instance, turned its success story of modernisation into something it exported, through One Belt One Road. It seems to me that India does have a role to play in thinking about how you do projects, for instance, of public sanitation, how you do projects of rolling out basic electricity supply to genuinely poor societies and reaching not a few million people here or there, but hundreds of millions of people with electricity supply.
These sorts of issues are places where I think India can really pioneer. The energy transition is potentially a very promising field for India with its considerable science base.
There is really no reason why India, for instance, couldn’t be a pioneer of low cost photovoltaics or wind in the same way as the Serum Institute has become an absolutely leading example of what a lower middle income country expertise in manufacturing capacity could be.
We need seven other serum institutes around the world And if one thing that India could do is a kind of not One Belt, One Road but an Indian vision for export of how you do that–how in a society which struggles with basic water sanitation, you nevertheless build a Serum Institute that can do world-class vaccine production.
We need one in West Africa and one in East Africa, and we need at least one in Latin America as well. That's just the start. We need one in Indonesia, and we need to keep replicating that package. So, India has huge expertise and huge potential in pioneering a form of development and a vision of economic growth refuses.
Is India ever going to overtake the United States GDP per capita is not a sensible question to be asking. The question is can you escape? Have hundreds of millions of people really escaped absolute poverty? We are getting close to the situation where that's absolutely within reach and any basic measure in India is something that needs to be welcomed, it’s something that needs to be thought through and made available also for others to learn from.
I think the question is, can journalists change the framework within which they ask questions and expect answers, not just of economists and historians but politicians as well. I don't think any of the old answers apply. I think it's becoming clearer because it's becoming so difficult to define who India is, where it lies in this complex system. That probably is the best way to summarise everything that you have said, that everything we knew does not exist in the same way anymore.
Adam Tooze: We know where we came from. So, we know what we are after. You know what you are after, and that may be agonising in some way and may be very difficult for folks who are invested in the secular national narrative to face, because it's a loss and it's probably irrevocable, but that at least does give us some determining sense of where we are.