While the most focus on Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s visit abroad has been on his meeting with IMF MD Kristalina Georgieva, it should obscure the fact that the meeting itself was on the sidelines of the New GlobaL Financing Summit being hosted by France. The IMF is one of those institutions which will play a crucial role in the new arrangement, whatever shape it might take. The holding of the Summit is an acknowledgement that the present arrangement does not work, that the entire world order based on a financial hierarchy of rich states dominating poor states through the International Financial Institutions like the IMF, will no longer work, and is certainly not able to meet new challenges, like climate change.
If the IMF represents one of the IFIs, Pakistan is almost symbolic of a country in the debt trap, which moulds its foreign policy according to its pocket. Apart from the challenge of climate change, there is the threat to the international order posed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The debt trap was a good way for powerful states to bend weaker ones to their will, but now that the threat of default is having to be realized, the developed countries have realized that they too might be dragged down.
Perhaps the root of the problem was illustrated by Mr Sharif’s speech to the Summit, when he spoke about the South learning from the North and replicating success in industry and agriculture. The North’s model of development was based on colonialism and neocolonialism. The South, itself composed of ex-colonies, cannot follow it. The development model is flawed. Most importantly, in the nearly eight decades since the end of World War II, the world has tried the Northern model, and a pretty mess it has landed the world in. Apart from the fact that it has committed environmental depredations on an unprecedented scale, it has left the former colonies as poor as ever, and as dependent on the mother country as ever. Perhaps worse, it has left the North environmentally insecure, and realising that it cannot sustain its lavish lifestyle, based on the unjust exploitation of the ex-colonies. The South should realise that the Summit is not about proviiding justice, but about finding a way for the North to remain at the top of the pile.
