A brief illustration of past interpretations of power is followed by alternative definitions of power as differential of potential, as barrier to entry, as relative weight. Webers ideal types of power (legal, traditional, charismatic) are combined with the main areas of power (economy, politics, culture) in a scheme for attempting a characterization of different societies and their evolution in time. Cumulative processes and balancing processes in the evolution over time of the distribution of power in society are then considered.

This chapter underscores the importance for obtaining a proper understanding of the outcomes primary education system in Bangladesh produces. It also emphasises that the provision of primary education is an important institutional issue as it requires effective mechanisms for the recruitment, training, and retention of teachers; the construction and maintenance of schools and other infrastructure; the design and implementation of the curriculum; the monitoring of progress, through inspections and examinations; and the creation of a learning environment. This chapter analyses the challenges related to the coexistence of various actors in the primary education system, the inadequate allocation of resources, the lack of incentives to attract high-quality teachers, the shortage of trained teachers, the low quality of the educational infrastructure, the poor curriculum design, and the flawed examination system. This chapter relates some of these challenges to the public sector in general in Bangladesh. Finally, it recommends relevant measures to overcome the institutional challenges of public spending in primary education and to improve the quality of services.

INTRODUCTION

Addressing a gathering at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in March 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping talked about the concept of mankind being a community of shared future or with a common destiny. This was Xi's first major foreign policy speech, during his first foreign visit, after taking over as president. Analytical and media discourse at the time paid little attention to this concept. Instead, much of the discussion was focused on what appeared to be the articulation of shared grievances and a convergence of objectives between China and Russia. From a policy perspective, the idea of people being a community of common destiny or shared future was rather vague. Moreover, it did not seem novel. In fact, in Chinese discourse, this concept can be traced back to the pre-Xi era.

As far back as 2007, there were references to people in the Mainland and Taiwan forming a community of common destiny. The phrase was also used by Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, in his report to the 18th Party Congress in November 2012. In Hu's articulation, the concept of mankind as a community of common destiny largely seemed to refer to the interconnected nature of the world. This implied that it was in China's interests to engage in mutually beneficial cooperation with other countries. At the same time, it encapsulated ideas of the need to pursue the construction of a global order featuring common security and common development.

However, in the decade that followed Xi's ascension to power, Chinese foreign policy gradually but decisively shifted away from the era of keeping a low profile towards more purposeful and proactive efforts to shape a favourable external environment. This was reflected in the description of Chinese foreign policy under Xi as exploring a new pathway of major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics. In this context, the concept of mankind being a community of shared future began to acquire greater salience. It implied the desire to construct “a new concept of morality and interests” in international affairs, with the focus primarily being on China's neighbouring countries and the developing world. Chinese scholars argued that the concept embodied China's responsibility and efforts to reform global governance.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• This paper discusses Chinese President Xi Jinping's flagship global initiatives’ normative implications for the world order.

• It argues that the Global Development Initiative (GDI), Global Security Initiative (GSI) and Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), which are key pillars of China's proposal to build a community of common destiny for mankind, are driven by Beijing's desire to cultivate authority in the international system.

• Analysing the speeches by Chinese leaders, policy documents, media and analytical discourse in China, along with policy decisions, this study provides an assessment of the Chinese leadership's worldview. It places the launch of GDI, GSI and GCI within this context, before detailing the elements of each initiative and offering a critical analysis.

• This study concludes that through GDI, GSI and GCI, the Chinese leadership hopes to shape an external environment that not only ensures regime security but is also favourable to China's development and security interests. In doing so, however, it is reshaping key norms of global governance towards a fundamentally illiberal direction.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Choi Shing Kwok

Series Editor:

Ooi Kee Beng

Editorial Committee:

Daljit Singh

Francis E. Hutchinson

Norshahril Saat

National money is a credit instrument issued by the state's bank, the central bank: money has everywhere been nationalised. However, in rich nations, the institutions that actually issue day-to-day credit remain private, for-profit banks. This contingent nesting of private banking within national money creates hybrid and potentially contradictory phenomena as public credit and private interest clash. This hybrid hierarchy is contingent, expressing a local political settlement. A conflict between private profit and public good is baked into such hybrid systems, the political settlement modulating the antagonists.

This chapter outlines some of the dynamics and contradictions of a hybrid credit system in the abstract and then illustrates how this logic has played out in the development of the post-war American system. In America, hybridity and marketisation combine to amplify the inherent instability of credit. While banks share the exorbitant privilege of ‘issuing money’, they are disciplined by the par constraint. Qualitative differences in public–private robustness are papered over by central-bank control mechanisms: bank regulation, deposit insurance, LOLR and bailouts.

The political settlement determines whether the central bank sets these mechanisms for elasticity or discipline. We read the development of American shadow banking as an instantiation of neoliberalism, the prevailing political settlement. Shadow banking developed through a contingent conjuncture of long-term marketisation processes, first of liabilities (c. 1960) and then assets (c. 1980). This confluence metastasised private money markets which dangerously amplified the inherent instability of the hybrid system.

There is nothing ‘essential’ about this hybrid nature of modern money and its attendant institutions (pace Mehrling, 2013). Hybridity between public and private banking is a contingent historical and political fact. It only appears essential, arguably because this particular formation, having grown up with capitalism itself in early modern Europe (Ingham, 2004), is now globally hegemonic and therefore naturalised. India and China, between them half the world's population, have nationalised both money and banking. These systems have their own specific set of contradictions. They are themselves hybrids of political and economic mutualisation, a form of hybridity that is in fact essential and compatible with different formal ownership structures (see Chapter 1).

All credit systems are inherently unstable, but the profit motive amplifies instability because it incentivises banks into ‘procyclical’ behaviour, making both booms and busts bigger than they would otherwise be. Yet money is also inherently hierarchical.

Introduction

The coverage and content errors identified in Chapter 3 are not randomly distributed across Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Content errors are mostly confined to the data on non-scheduled languages and Scheduled Tribes (STs). The nature of content errors, though, changes across the three regions of the erstwhile state. Coverage errors, on the other hand, mostly affect the headcount of Kashmir and the STs. Since conventional explanations fail to account for the errors, we will have to explore the larger context, including the politicisation of census, that may have affected the reported headcount.

Panandiker and Umashankar (1994: 96–97) argue that in states where Hindus are a minority – for example, Muslim-majority J&K and Sikh-majority Punjab – the majority views population control as a measure to reduce their political strength. They add that this is not true of Kerala because of the higher literacy rate and per capita income. However, it is not true that all such provinces are suspicious of population control. Christian-majority states of the north-east are cases in point. Further, in Kerala, the population is divided among Muslims, Hindus and Christians of various castes and sects, with only Muslims having a clear geographical concentration in the north. The fractionalisation and geographical dispersion of communities and strong linguistic ties transcending religions check persistent communal polarisation in Kerala. Even in Punjab there is no region exclusively populated by only one religious community, and despite militancy both the communities share a linguistic and regional identity. Polarisation is further mitigated by the presence of heterodox sects and Scheduled Castes (SCs) among both Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab.

J&K is different. It has two major geographically separable religious groups (Tables 4.1a–4.1c). The exodus of Hindus from Kashmir in the 1990s further hardened this divide. The strongholds of Kashmiri-speaking Muslims and Dogri-speaking Hindus do not overlap even though they share the old Doda district of the Jammu division with other communities. STs are spread across all districts of J&K. They are almost entirely Muslim except in Ladakh and parts of Jammu. On the other hand, SCs are entirely Hindu and confined to Jammu.

This book is both a collection and a synthesis. While some of the case-study chapters started as responses to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, the bulk of the theoretical section was written to synthesise the lessons learned from the cases and to connect them with all three major schools of monetary thought. The test of this synthesis, like all theories, is its generality: how many monetary contexts can it speak to?

The work synthesises elements from all three schools of monetary thought. Social theory is best seen as a resource from which we can select various elements from various theories to assemble our own social–theoretic machines fit to tackle our particular questions. Loyal adherence to a particular school therefore can end up damaging the work of social theory. As complex compounds assembled in particular contexts for particular questions, social theories are quite modular. Each element can in principle be recombined with elements from other theories. Theories are not infinitely recombinable, of course, and we will constantly argue over which elements are foundational, which are dispensable, which necessarily hang together and which are separable. But such arguments already concede the inherent modularity of theory.

The theoretical synthesis we attempt here combines elements from the Banking, State and Currency Schools with lessons from classical political economy and old institutional economics. The Banking School understands money as credit, as means of payment for settling debts public and private. It carries an implicit institutionalism because it recognises the futural orientation of all economic life: only institutions can help us collectively manage the uncertain future; institutionalism and futurity go hand in hand.

But the Banking School lacks an adequate account of hierarchy in money—why some monies are better than others—taking refuge in the nominal power of the law. This is the domain of the State School, which identifies the state as being central to money but does so by raising the state's nominal power to such a height that it ironically eclipses politics itself. This book seeks to improve upon the State School's understanding of money by placing it with a political understanding of the ontology of all social institutions including the state, an understanding inspired by Roberto Unger though it has many referents.

Finally, the book urgently insists on the materiality of money.

Introduction

More than three decades ago, when Amartya Sen flagged the problem of missing women (Sen 1990), India's overall sex ratio and child sex ratio (CSR) were 927 and 945, respectively. Since then sex-determination technology that ‘permits couples to resort to sex selection’ has played a major role in skewing sex ratio amidst ‘declining fertility and entrenched son preference’ (Guilmoto 2009: 524). Son preference also contributes to the neglect of the health of the girl child, which further aggravates the skewed sex ratio by increasing the girl child mortality. The union government introduced the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994, to prohibit the misuse of diagnostic techniques to identify the sex of the foetus. Yet, in 2001, ‘the child sex ratio (CSR) first dropped below that of the overall sex ratio’, and the problem spread beyond the north-western states (John 2011: 11). A decade later, the overall sex ratio increased to 943, even as the CSR further dropped to 918. The CSR has, in fact, steadily declined from 976 to 918 between 1961 and 2011, even as the overall sex ratio fluctuated between 927 and 943 (Figure 3.1).

Very low CSRs were first reported in some of the north-western states, but Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) was not among them. However, defying conventional wisdom, the state, which was above the all-India CSR until 2001, reported a sharp decline in 2011 that placed it among the worst-performing states in the country (Figure 3.2). This development has not received adequate attention in academic and public debates, possibly because insurgency-hit J&K is widely seen as an exceptional state, and, in any case, it accounts for about 1 per cent of the country's population and less than 1 per cent of the national income. In other words, J&K does not have a large impact on national figures and is not among the major states that are indispensable for national (policy) debates and academic analyses.

Researchers and policymakers have uncritically used the results of the 2011 census for J&K. In fact, census officials, too, did not critically examine the data (see, for instance, Government of India [GoI] 2011d: 81–84). The joint director of census operations (Jt DCO) observed that ‘child sex ratio was equally worrisome as it has dropped by 100 points from 963 in 1981 to 863 in 2011.

In 2014, a resurgent NDA government under the prime ministership of Narendra Modi came to power. Neither was India going through an economic, political, or international crisis nor was there a substantial change in economic policy marked by this period. However, the period was significant due to the historic domination of the BJP. This final chapter is different from the previous chapters: the logic of periodization in previous chapters of crisis and change does not explain this one. The reason for including the NDA in a separate chapter was because its politics were in stark contrast to the INC, and I wanted to explore whether they had a different philosophy or ideology for economic reforms and welfare policies than the INC. At the time of writing this chapter, the BJP has entered its second tenure as the central government on the back of a successful election campaign. I have decided not to write about the second NDA government, as it is difficult to analyze contemporary events with objectivity, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdown crisis.

How did the BJP come to power when there was no historical precedence of a non-INC party getting majority votes (the NDA government of 1998 was a coalition government)? Political analysts credited the BJP's victory based on their political ideologies referred to as Hindutva politics (Sharma 2003; Madhav 2021; Ananthamurthy 2016). While Hindu nationalism or Hindutva politics is perceived as the main identity of the BJP's voters, this does not completely explain how they dominated elections in 2013–14. I take recourse to Nalin Mehta's (2022) comprehensive analysis of electoral data to explain the BJP's electoral success, which, as Mehta has argued, cannot be simplified as Hindutva politics. His counterfactual for this was that much of the BJP's Hindutva politics based around the Ayodhya movement and L. K. Advani's Rath Yatra were in the 1990s. However, even at the peak of Hindutva popularity, the BJP lost the 2003–04 elections. What explains their return in 2014? Mehta empirically demonstrates that a key part of the BJP's victory was based on its ability to capture electoral seats in Uttar Pradesh – the biggest constituency in India. It did so by changing the caste composition of its party and leveraging the use of digital technology in its campaign.

In the last chapter, we saw that credit is not epiphenomenal but constitutive of political and economic life. The economist's fiction of a barter economy ‘veiled’ by money leads to a thing-based monetary science of quantities, velocities and value from scarcity. But a monetary economy is ontologically distinct, a social entity that requires a social science.

Yet the economist's intuition is not entirely misguided: money does in fact behave like a thing with value, a commodity. The question is how it does that, and why different money-things have different values.

Money is the outcome of an institutional process by which creditary promises acquire the attributes of things, commodities with value. This of course recalls Marx's idea of the commodity fetish whereby social relations between people take the necessary form of appearance of relations between things because the social element, ‘value’, being abstract cannot be perceived as such. With money, this process occurs through a particular kind of institutionalisation, ‘mutualisation’, a ubiquitous socio-economic relation which is at the core of the social technology of banking—namely the business of dealing in credit. The relation with bank money especially is obscured; given its form of mutualisation, we never encounter it as such.

The magic of credit, and the outcome of mutualisation, is the functional thingification of promises: promises remain promises, but they can move about the world like value-bearing things. So successful is this process that common sense takes money to be a fiat-thing, a token rather than a credit-promise. Mutualisation is the variable process of making promises operate as things. Erroneous as an account of money's essence, ‘fiat’ nevertheless refracts the institutionalised source of money's power.

One of the main ways in which a money fetish is created in the credit system comes from hierarchy itself. One level's credit (inside money) is simultaneously another's money (outside money), and outside-ness confers thing-ness. We consider this first before outlining four further elements of fetishism: ‘lending to the bank’ appearing as ‘depositing’, system-wide flows of liquidity appearing as localised stocks of cash, and credit creation appearing as dishoarding cash. Finally, we consider how the ‘exchange rate’ of 1 between bank money and central-bank money, the par constraint, amplifies the money fetish. We conclude by discussing the irony of the cryptocurrency enterprise attempting to copy the fetishised projection of the credit system by trying and failing to make bare tokens work as money.