ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the central observation and the organising principle of the analysis: the irony of the role reversal that has occurred between the developing and the developed economies on fears of integration into the global economy. It highlights that the fears of the developed countries are heavily, and destructively, focused on integration with the developing countries, just as the fears of the developing countries in the postwar decades were focused symmetrically on the imagined dangers of integrating with the developed countries. The chapter argues that the fears are, at best, exaggerated and, at worst, ill-informed, and suggests that the current, fear-fed demands in the major developed countries for changes in the rules and regimes that govern the world economy are much too often ill-designed. The dominant feature of the world economy is its increasing globalisation and the growing fear of its consequences in the developed countries.