(a) Critically examine the impact of Globalisation on the developing countries of the world. 20 (b) What do you mean by…

Impact of Globalisation on Developing Countries

Globalisation has fundamentally restructured the Global South across economic, political, and cultural domains, acting simultaneously as an engine of modernisation and a vector of systemic vulnerability. Economically, trade integration and capital mobility have spurred Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows, infrastructure modernization, and technological diffusion. India’s post-1991 integration exemplifies this, transforming its services sector and lifting millions out of absolute poverty; globally, the World Bank's measure of extreme poverty fell from over a third of humanity in 1990 to under a tenth by 2019, driven largely by China, India and East Asia. However, this has been accompanied by premature deindustrialisation in parts of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, widening intra-state inequality, and acute agricultural distress resulting from asymmetric WTO subsidy regimes and commodity price volatility.

Politically, globalisation has constrained state sovereignty through the structural conditionalities of the Washington Consensus—reflecting Dani Rodrik’s political trilemma (The Globalization Paradox, 2011): a country cannot simultaneously have deep economic integration, national sovereignty and democratic politics, and must give up one of the three. Yet, this erosion of top-down authority has concurrently fostered transnational civil society networks, empowering grassroots mobilisations around human rights, labour standards, and environmental justice. Culturally, fears of Western homogenization have been countered by processes of cultural hybridization and the resurgence of local identities. On balance, while globalisation has amplified external vulnerabilities and socio-economic disparities, states with robust institutional capacities have successfully leveraged it to achieve developmental transitions, whereas fragile states have suffered dependency.

Offensive and Defensive Realism

Within structural realism, offensive and defensive realism diverge on how the anarchic international system shapes state incentives for power accumulation. Defensive realism, rooted in Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979) and elaborated by Robert Jervis, Stephen Van Evera, Charles Glaser and Stephen Walt, posits that the international system encourages states to maintain security rather than maximize power. States are security-maximisers seeking an appropriate balance of power. Because expansion invites counter-balancing coalitions, and because the offense-defense balance generally favours defense, systemic structural constraints reward moderation, restraint, and the preservation of the status quo.

Conversely, John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001) contends that because states operate under anarchy with pervasive uncertainty regarding others’ intentions and possess offensive military capability, security is scarce. Consequently, states are power-maximisers driven by hegemonic ambition. The ultimate guarantee of survival is regional hegemony while preventing peer competitors from dominating other regions. Empirically, while defensive realism effectively explains the balancing behaviour and structural stability among nuclear powers, offensive realism captures great power revisionism, such as China’s assertive power projection in the Indo-Pacific.

Constraints on American Hegemony and Future Trajectory

American hegemony currently confronts four major constraints. Structurally, the transition toward multipolarity, driven by China’s economic-military rise and Russian revanchism, challenges US pre-eminence. Institutionally, legitimacy deficits arising from unilateral military interventions have eroded the normative authority of the US-led order, prompting the rise of alternative frameworks like BRICS and the SCO. Internally, profound domestic political polarization and protectionist impulses undermine predictable foreign policy, as the sweeping tariffs of 2025 on allies and rivals alike, and the withdrawal from the WHO and the Paris Agreement, showed. Geopolitically, alliance burden-sharing frictions have strained traditional partnerships across NATO and East Asia.

In the future, the relative decline of US economic dominance will become most prominent. Accelerating trends toward alternative reserve currencies, bilateral settlement mechanisms, and fragmented global supply chains will weaken Washington’s geo-economic leverage, though slowly: the dollar still accounts for well over half of global foreign-exchange reserves, and the likelier near-term constraint is self-inflicted, as unpredictability leads allies to hedge. Nevertheless, the US will maintain persistent advantages in military power projection, alliance networks, and foundational technologies like artificial intelligence. In this emerging landscape, India occupies a crucial role as a pivotal swing state. Through strategic autonomy and multi-alignment, India resists unipolar hegemony while partnering with Washington to balance Eurasian power dynamics, ensuring a multipolar Asian equilibrium.

Ultimately, globalisation's uneven dividends and the resurgence of geopolitical friction reaffirm structural realism's core tenets. As the liberal international order fragments, international stability will depend on accommodating rising powers through institutional balance rather than unipolar dominance.