by SUNIL KHILNANI
It’s now 20 years—a generational epoch—since the 1991 economic reforms that have helped spur the fastest economic growth in our country’s history, and that have embedded us in an ever-more-complicated world. That 1991 also brought another pivot point, the fall of the Soviet Union, and seemed to signal a profound global switch: the victory of market capitalism and liberal democracy. But 20 years later, the meaning of 1991 looks more blurry.
Authoritarian China controls the world’s most dynamic economy, while the beacon of liberal democracy—the United States—finds its legitimacy chastened and its economic momentum checked, with no clear idea of how to renew that impetus. The neoliberal dream embodied in the ‘Washington Consensus’ has evaporated and, while China increasingly asserts itself as a powerful sovereign actor, the idea that there could emerge an attractive model that is styled around a ‘Beijing Consensus’ seems delusive.
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