AT the height of Washington’s power in the mid-1990s, with the so-called free market decreed the answer to all the world’s problems, very few people would have stuck their neck out and warned that globalisation would be beset by serious contradictions a little over a decade later. Indeed, the triumphalism associated with the victory of the capitalist West over Soviet communism was so deafening that the slogan ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) was coined to underline the unerring spread of the market and its political shell of pro-Washington liberalism.

The bubble burst spectacularly with the East Asian financial crisis in 1997 which partially destroyed the economies of Thailand and Indonesia. More substantive political shocks followed with the electoral victories of left-of-centre populists in Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia. It was in Latin America that the TINA bandwagon was dealt a stunning rejoinder encapsulated in the slogan: another world is possible.

A decade and a half on from the emergence of the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, the world feels like a very different place from that of the Clinton-Bush-Blair hegemony. China is demonstrating that Western hegemony is certainly on the wane. But whether China’s rise heralds the alternative world the left radicals of the late ’90s had envisioned is another matter.

China’s world order is no panacea.

Much has been made of the unviability of the heavily financialised economic model once known as the Washington Consensus that reached its apogee with the crash of 2006-8. The Latin American and Chinese-Russian challenges to that model emphasised delinking from the dominant Eastern financial institutional apparatus centring on the US dollar. But another equally dark side of TINA globalisation has been under-emphasised by the prospective challengers to Western hegemony; this has undermined the building of an alternative world.

I refer to the ecological imperative — the urgent need to rationalise the exploitation of our natural environment. The Latin American experience is instructive in this regard. Venezuela under Chavez symbolised the so-called ‘pink tide’ — the regime directly challenged Washington’s financial and political clout by mobilising the country’s immense oil resources in favour of its long-suffering masses and to create continent-wide financial and media institutions.

Since his death, the Venezuelan model has imploded, due in part to the leadership vacuum but more importantly because of declining global petroleum prices. Former Chavez supporters are turning against his successor and the country is struggling with exponential inflation and the collapse of its previously impressive public services. In short, the model has proven to be ecologically sustainable, therefore economically and socially unviable.

China’s rise is characterised by a similar overdependence on non-renewable energy sources. Beijing’s forays into Africa since the turn of the millennium have been driven by its need for oil, gas and other natural resources to sustain its industrial machine.

No one here should harbour any illusion about the prospective Chinese interest in our endowments of natural resources eg coal in Sindh, copper and gold in Balochistan, various deposits in Gilgit-Baltistan’s mountains. My question to all those who argue uncritically that Chinese investment in such primary sectors is more beneficial than the pillaging of Western multinationals is: why?

It is true that the Communist Party of China has in the past few years recognised the ecologically unsustainable nature of its post-Mao development model. Chinese cities such as Shengzen and Shanghai are amongst the most polluted anywhere, and the energy demands of Chinese industry cannot be met at the current rate, no matter how many African and Asian countries’ resources are made available.

But then, there is rhetorical acceptance of the ecological imperative all over the world. Innumerable global protocols — most notably Kyoto — target reduced carbon emissions, other greenhouse gases, climate change and many other urgent environmental problems. But serious observers recognise that there is as yet insignificant progress as compared to the scale of the challenge — and all because the ‘free market’ does not allow the allocation of resources on the basis of different considerations.

There is a body of opinion in countries like ours that the ecological imperative is a sham forced upon us by Western imperialist powers responsible for most of the world’s environmental problems. In fact, China, India, Brazil and other ‘emerging markets’ are quickly catching up as far as emissions and other environmental indicators are concerned. There is no anti-imperialism in rejecting the imperative of ecological change. Whether the Sharifs remain in power or not has little bearing on such questions, because none of our mainstream parties is bothered. All seem to believe that the emergent Sinic world order is the panacea to everything.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2017