Globalization began in earnest in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War. It accelerated dramatically when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. By the time of the financial crisis of 2010 the world looked for financial stability not to the US or Europe but to China, which by then owned most of those countries' debt. It
has been a remarkable, and remarkably quick transformation. But global politics has not followed global economics. Global political structures seem to belong to the 1950s, an era in which Western dominance was presumed and Asia almost entirely absent. Mahbubani shows that in global institution after global institution power is skewed in favor of the West, and argues that it is no longer just or sustainable. Moreover, he sees the main risks to the globe in the twenty-first century in the unresolved contradictions between the need for a one-world view and the ever more local, and locally shrill politics of national self-interest.
