Author(s): Jeffrey D. Sachs

Source: Foreign Policy , Spring, 1995, No. 98 (Spring, 1995), pp. 50-64

Published by: Slate Group, LLC

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1148957

Summary

The 1990s is one of the great watershed decades in economic history. The postwar division of the world economy into the First, Second, and Third Worlds has ended. Not only has communism collapsed, but other ideologies of state-led development that were prevalent in the Third World for decades have fallen into disrepute. If the United States and the other industrial democracies act with wisdom, they have a chance to consolidate a global capitalist world system, with profound benefits for both the rich and the poor countries. But the greatest foreign policy misjudgment of our time would be to assume that such a system will automatically fall into place. Weak U.S. leadership and fractious relations among the industrial democracies are already putting at risk the unprecedented opportunity to create a law-bound and prosperous international system.

The overarching benefits of the emerging world capitalist system, if it takes hold, will lie as much in global security as in economics. With a few notable exceptions, the market revolution has gone hand in hand with a democratic revolution. That is true in virtually all of Latin America, Central Europe, and the former Soviet Union, and also in parts of East Asia (South Korea and Taiwan) and Africa. The spread of democracy by itself almost surely reduces the risks of war, as do the increased economic links among countries. Careful scholarly work has bolstered rather than weakened the old claim that democracies do not wage war on each other, as Yale political scientist Bruce Russett has recently demonstrated in Grasping the Democratic Peace. It has been instructive, and no accident, that Russia's elected Duma has become the most ardent voice for peaceful rather than military solutions to the deepening conflicts among Russia's diverse regions.

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