The Browser is raving about this succinct analysis of the current situation by the BBC’s Paul Mason, covering the G20 summit:

In Cannes, amid torrential rain, many of the leaders have adopted the Gallic shrug: what can you do? They had come to work on the fine points of a tactical adjustment to the crumbling world order – but instead, as one markets contact put it to me – all the stories on the news are merging into one big story.

Here is the big story: there is a crisis of globalisation.

Europe and the United States, having handed over to China, India and Brazil the baton of industrial leadership, have spent 20 years failing to adjust their economies, or the expectations of their people, to the consequences. Now – because the impact of the Lehman collapse was never properly contained – those consequences are rapidly unfolding.

You can see it in the gait of the politicians and their officials as they march through the deserted secure zone between the big hotels: the only confident body language comes from people with money. And who has money? China, Singapore, Russia, Brazil, the Saudis.

Are you noticing a pattern there? Each of these countries is an export giant, has experienced rapid-fire modernisation and income growth, has a heavily statised economy, practises some form of covert protectionism, and has – with the exception of Brazil – either zero or attenuated democracy.

The countries in crisis, by contrast, are experiencing a crisis of democratic legitimacy for the chosen political-economic orthodoxy: finance-driven free market economics.

Read the whole thing.  Mason points out at the end that in Europe, “because nobody is offering to inflict significant losses on the banks, or taxation on the rich, or credit easing for the poor, there is nothing out of which to construct a narrative.” That’s true in the United States too, isn’t it?