ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that current trends in the world economy and global politics provide evidence that the global South has now arrived at 'normal' capitalism, at last, bringing with it new patterns of uneven development, inequality and injustice. Its newly confident elites, now fully engaged in global circuits of trade, investment and finance, and in global governance too, appear to have left behind their previous colonial-comprador role. The chapter situates the present crisis in the context of the post-1945 period, which for this purpose can be divided into two: from 1945 until 1982, and from 1982 to 2007 when the current crisis began. It sketches these two periods as the rise and fall of developmentalism as a unified global process. The chapter argues that the present crisis reveals that the unravelling of developmentalism since 1982 can be reinterpreted as the transition to what the author calls normal capitalism in the global South.
