The global governance is not structured to deal with inequalities within and between countries and regions of the world.
There is need for a common understanding of how rich-poor gaps tie in locally with geopolitical, economic and demographic dynamics fuelling tensions and conflicts along class, ethno-racial, gender and sectarian lines.
With the global economy’s gravity shifting from the Euro-American West to the Eurasian East, there is an inexorable aging and demographic shrinkage in the West and among northern hemisphere populations interacting with deindustrialization, thus causing growing wealth gaps among them along with emerging minorities they view competitively resulting in a reactionary politics of xenophobic populism and racial polarization.
Similar dynamics are underway in much of the global South as well, within emerging market economies, with the future global population axis reflecting an Afro-South Asian nexus: Africa eventually equalling all of Asia by the end of this century and India soon out-stripping China so that converging demographic expansion, urbanization, poverty and unemployment interacting with ecological degradation looms as an explosive time bomb in much of the world while generating migratory movements aggravating already existing internal contradictions in so-called northern ‘advanced’ societies.
As such, global economic governance must increasingly be accompanied by global political and security governance within what can be termed ‘Global Economic Federalism’ wherein the sovereignty of nation-states evolves toward sharing and pooling of sovereignty in a manner collectively addressing challenges that know no sovereign boundaries. In other words, the Westphalian state system no longer sustains global order.
Overcoming poverty and the rich-poor gap within and between societies and regions of the world will also have to be predicated on demilitarizing international relations involving far-reaching UN Security Council reform wherein the P5 contribute to a decentralizing UN military build-up coupled with military downsizing among them under the multilaterally negotiated aegis of the US, Russia and China and the European Union. This Washington-Beijing-Moscow-Brussels quartet could take shape in negotiating an eventual Eurasian Grand Settlement while adding other countries on a rotationally permanent basis from the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in East Asia – in effect regionalizing the Security Council.
This may be the only way sufficient resources might be redeployed to deal with the economic, ecological and non-military threat challenges animating various forms of inequality and gaps between those better and worse off in the interest of sustainable global security.
In conclusion, a Global Equality-World Peace Equation might be considered for overcoming rich-poor divides while socialism and capitalism are viewed as interlinked complementary rather than as rival systems of social and economic governance.
