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Without looking it up, can you pronounce “Embraer”? More to the point, have you ever knowingly been on one of the Brazilian manufacturer’s aeroplanes? Answering no to either or both of these questions isn’t unusual. But it is telling.
A generation has gone by since Jim O’Neill minted the term Brics. Twice as long has passed since Deng Xiaoping opened the door of China. The subsequent trickle of economic and political power from the north Atlantic has been the background noise of my lifetime. I nag people to visit Dubai because nowhere else brings home quite so unignorably the south-eastward drift of the world.
And still, after all this, civil aviation is such an Airbus-Boeing duopoly, such a Euro-American lock, that even prolific flyers have just the vaguest sense of the third force in that sector. (Turns out I’ve been saying Embraer with one syllable too few all this time.)
The decline of the west is a profound story. But so is the unevenness of that process: the survival of lots of pockets where very little has changed. The global luxury goods sector features the same Franco-Italian brands that someone in 1990 could have named. The best research universities are still American, as the Nobel Prizes annually attest. Although Saudi Arabia is doing its best, I can think of just one sports league outside the west, cricket’s Indian Premier League, that commands global interest. Judging just from the lingua franca, and from a pie chart of the reserve currencies, an alien observer to our planet would struggle to credit the so-called “rise of the rest”. It is happening, except where it isn’t.
One example of this strikes me as weirder and weirder as time passes. The human population has doubled since 1975. The total output of the world has multiplied, of which America’s share has stagnated and Europe’s declined. And still just two cities, both western, can claim to contain almost all nationalities in meaningful numbers, all the arts at a world-class standard and the top end of almost all professions, from finance to bio-research. You have guessed the two already, which suggests that this isn’t a controversial judgment. When I argued last year, more in sorrow than anything, that London and New York were still the only “total cities”, it was telling how few people quibbled. But given the overall swelling of humankind, this is a daft state of affairs.
Let me anticipate the response to all this. “Sit tight.” A certain lag is natural. Chinese cars didn’t have a global reputation, until they very much did. Why wouldn’t that be true of Latin American luxe brands or Vietnamese universities? Mumbai will be “total” enough, if it isn’t now. Airbus, Prada, Harvard: someone with a bear view of the west might dismiss these assets as vestigial, as hangovers, like the inherited silver of a déclassé family, bound to be frittered over time. They are protected for now by high barriers to entry, in the case of aviation, or by the prestige that attaches to countries that have been very rich for very long, in the case of fashion. All of this can be overcome.
But the lag is the point. Change is written about quite enough. The stickiness of things isn’t. Yes, in hard terms, the world has become post-western. (Look at the bluntness of US-led sanctions in recent times.) But what we might call the daily texture of life is unlikely to reflect that fact for decades to come, if ever.
This will read like a rich-world boast, but is in fact something of a personal dread. Having travelled a bit in recent months, I sense the west’s ongoing leadership in certain highly visible areas can fool its citizens about their waning clout in the world. I said the Gulf is an education in the global balance of power to come. Well, what an imperfect education. It is hard to steel yourself for a de-westernised future when you are served in English, paying in dollars and one male in three goes about with “BELLINGHAM” and “5” on his perspiring back.
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