‘We are living in the age of the mega-crises,” declared UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. Speaking at an event in Dubai, he was attempting to draw attention to a massive funding gap in humanitarian aid. The needs are great today because the past decade has witnessed conflicts on a scale unrecalled since the conclusion of the Second World War. There is, of course, Syria, but also a range of crises that don’t show up daily on social media newsfeeds.
Though Mr Ban was speaking of humanitarian needs, his worries need to be placed in a wider context. They are really about how to order the world. And to do this requires – more than money – a new way of thinking. After 1945, there developed a consensus in the West over how relations between states should be conducted. It would involve respect for national sovereignty and diplomacy and a particular interpretation of individual liberty. The Soviet Union, of course, had other ideas. But the consensus was eventually vindicated as echoes from the fall of the Berlin Wall reverberated across the world.
While the old challenges were predicated on differences in ideas and ideologies, our crises today have more varied antecedents. We have a global problem over the availability of clean water, and sometimes just any kind of water. And though many cities such as Los Angeles and Tokyo have cleaned up their air, it almost seems as if the problem has only been transferred to the developing world. Then, there is the hopelessness of bad economics that has launched millions across the world in search of work – too often illegally, too many times through the agency of human traffickers. And with this wave of humanity are also refugees from failed states. For this we might be tempted to blame that old nemesis, an uncompromising ideology. Yet in truth, the self-styled “caliphate” that ISIL represents, for example, offers nothing close to an idea, only a dogma of nihilism to propagate fear and terror.
We shall need to consider anew how to arrange for the virtue of nations and states. It is a thought, but given how the world has of late been coming to Abu Dhabi to discuss issues from security to sustainability, could we not be the locus of an accretion of new thinking to shape the future? As the influence of traditional metropolises such as Washington and London wanes, we can surely expect to see the testing of fresh solutions in new centres. In fact, the Abu Dhabi Consensus does have a nice ring to it.