This is exam week at UC Berkeley and many of my students have elected to write their final research papers on the concept of economic convergence, the process wherein local, regional, or national economies converge with one another, forming a coherent, consistent, and comprehensive whole or totality of laws, regulations, and institutions.
http://nyti.ms/1GqqAXe
But what about power and culture? What roles do politics and rhetoric play enforcing or contesting convergence?
One way to interpret the trials of the Russian economy is through the lens of convergence, but obviously not economic convergence alone. In Russia’s case, the EU, the UN and the US are using macroeconomic mechanisms to compel Russia’s political establishment to permit Ukraine’s integration into the global economy. Obviously, these entities would also like to see Russia’s political authorities shed their relationship with Russia’s oligarchs and adhere more rigorously both to its own and with foreign laws governing property rights, trade, and commerce.
Ideally, what these international actors would like is for Russia to shed its dependence on local and regional laws and regulations, including long-standing cultural regulations and informal laws. Yet what would this entail?
Is it realistic for the EU, the UN and the US to anticipate that Russia will embrace the bulk of the social and cultural canon presumed in the US, western Europe, Japan, India, and, increasingly, China?
In this case it may be valuable to consider the actual mechanisms operating in Russia’s resistance to convergence; or, in the alternative, its proposal for an alternative path to convergence. For, clearly, given Mr Putin’s popularity, not only in Russia, but among right-leaning opponents of American economic domination throughout Europe and Asia, broad swaths of cultural habits and social norms are offering Putin a deep bed of velcro into which he can sink his hooks. One of the reasons for this support is surely the belief that what we understand as convergence is no more than a poorly concealed instance of good old fashioned hegemony.
To the extent that this is how many Russians and right-leaning Europeans view Russia’s seizure of eastern Ukraine, we might then wonder how the macroeconomic mechanisms applied by the EU, UN, and US might push Russia toward (or repel Russia away from) global economic convergence. For there is simply no question but that convergence, in the case of Russia, will entail the elimination of purely local or regional laws, practices and regulations that many Russians take to be a part of their national heritage.
My best guess is that Russians — and not Putin alone — will view the imposition of these macroeconomic tools and the hardships they must endure on account of them through a lens of hegemonic overreaching by the West. The result will therefore likely be the opposite of convergence; divergence.
At the same time, this likely response places in a new light, the rationale used to justify these mechanisms in the first place. It begs the question, but no more, of the cultural, social, and political dimensions of the movement toward global convergence. What is it in fact that we want if what we want is the elimination or eradication of all purely local, regional, or national laws, regulations, customs, and practices?