Friends, we have been learning a lot of new things regarding collective action and cooperation. I hope that all of us appreciate the fact that collective action is not only related to a hamlet, a village, a district or a state. It has the potential to affect the nation or even the globe. It might not be apparently a CPR but it is in other sense "yes". Just having an overview of the current economical crisis, we can identify that this is a result of the collective action of the few capitalist economies or a mere lack of it on a larger scale. This fact is accepted even by the newly elected president of USA.
America's 44th President Barack Obama, at the historic inaugural in Washington DC , blamed America’s economic crisis on an era “of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also the collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” Addressing hundreds of thousands gathered in Washington’s National Mall to mark the inauguration of the country’s first African-American president, Obama said: “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility ... we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world ... We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things,”he said. He urged Americans to “choose our better history,” to make decisions according to science instead of ideology, to reject a “false choice” between safety and American ideals, to recognize that American military power does not “entitle us to do as we please,” he signaled a commitment to pragmatism not just as a governing strategy but as a basic value.
We have learnt that collective action is a tool primarily for the rich and the poor have a very little incentive for any such action. Now my question is " Can the poor nations afford to stand away from such economic crisis and not participate in the collective action that is being initiated by the rich countries?"
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Shankar, I would like to rephrase your question here. According to me it should be whether organisations like the African Union or say to some extent SAARC exert any influence as far as tiding over the global economic crisis is concerned?
Just have a look at what the meetings of these two organisations have achieved.They all have been centred towards meeting the internal security of these regions.So, how can we expect these "smaller" nations to work "collectively" against economic recession when at the same time their security is also at stake?
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