A global power shift is in the making, as the growing economic crisis takes hold

When the free market and deregulation are the means by which the Western world extends its global economic power over the developing world, then they are deemed highly virtuous. But it is a different matter when they become the instrument by which developing countries can extend their influence over Western economies.

Similarly, during a recession, the state is likely to be called into active service on a far more regular basis as Western governments seek to deal with the mushrooming effects of market failure.

It is not an accident that developing countries — virtually the whole of East Asia, for example — view the role of the state in a far more interventionist way than does the Anglo-Saxon world. Laissez-faire and free markets are the favoured means of the powerful and privileged. The decline of the Western world could well usher in a significant change in this mind-set.

The political terrain is shifting. Attitudes towards the US are a case in point. The move towards neo-liberalism in Britain was intimately bound up with the embrace of the US as the country to be aped and copied. The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, "Anglo-Saxon" embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world ignored.

How perceptions of the US have changed: a country living beyond its means, dependent on large helpings of Asian credit, characterised by huge inequalities, its great financial institutions guilty of huge folly, forced to rely for their salvation on the sovereign wealth funds of China and elsewhere. And, remember, we are only at the very beginning of the biggest geopolitical shift since the dawn of the industrial era.