Fund, of which he was Chair until 2011.
He was awarded the OBE in 2002, and blogs on international
politics at www.dansmithsblog.com
8
Introduction
Ours is a period of change – continual, multi-form, and
multi-level – technical, scientific, economic, and political.
Scientific discovery feeds into technical innovation at dizzying speed,
changing how we communicate with each other, what we can know about
far-flung parts of the world and how quickly we can know it, how we do
business, what we understand about the natural world and how the human
brain works, how many diseases we can cure, and the kinds of energy supply
we can utilise. In every corner of our lives as individuals and as communities
and societies, there is change.
THE THREE GREAT CHANGES
The theme is repeated in the big global picture. Five major issues and how
the world – its leaders, governments, companies, international organizations,
individuals, everybody – responds to them will define our future. To take
them on, change is needed. And three great changes at approximately ten-
year intervals over the past two decades will set the terms and the tone of
how that response shapes up.
In the 1980s, the Cold War seemed stuck fast, likely to be a long-enduring
feature of world politics. Yet in half a year in 1989 its basic components
unravelled, and in a second series of events the Soviet Union came to an end
in five swift months of 1991.
For the 1990s, then, the USA seemed set to enjoy a golden age as the
sole superpower while its allies basked in the security it generated. Those
comfortable assumptions were detonated in 2001, not only by the force of
the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon, but by the wide-
reaching, aggressive, and ultimately self-defeating, US “war on terror”. The
golden age was gone and there was a widespread sense of insecurity as the
9/11 attacks were followed by others in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere,
as well as by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Underneath that, however, was a different kind of security. Economic growth
and prosperity seemed broadly dependable. There were winners and losers as
always, but for most people in the rich world times were pretty good, and for
many people in poorer countries conditions were also improving a little.
Much of that was destabilized by the third great change of the recent era,
as unsustainable patterns of lending and borrowing fed a shattering credit
9
crunch in 2007 and 2008, triggering recession and a financial catastrophe
whose full effects had not played out some four or five years later.
If we look back over those 20 years, we can see how quickly confidence about
the future can be generated and then lost. We need something rather better
than that moodiness, something more stable and persistent, if we are going
to be successful in facing up to the five big challenges we face as a global
community: wealth and poverty, war and peace, rights and respect, and the
health both of the people and of the planet.
WEALTH & POVERTY
The world is marked by large inequalities of wealth. Multiple further
inequalities flow from that starting point – dramatically different degrees
of access to education, health care, good food, clean water, sanitation,
reasonable housing. Though the proportion of the world’s population that
lives in the extreme poverty of less than $1 a day is declining, progress is slow
and more than one-third of all people live on less than $2 a day. The benefits
of economic growth are not being distributed evenly or anything like it, and
at the same time the model of economic development is environmentally
unsustainable.
At the start of the century, world leaders undertook to make a major new
effort to help developing countries move forward. In the confident spirit of
that time, more money was committed and targets were set with a fixed date
of 2015. These Millennium Development Goals have guided Western countries’
official development assistance ever since. In the much less confident spirit in
which these donor governments are working a decade on, still reeling from
the economic aftershocks of 2008, it is clear that there has been progress
but the targets will not be met. And some of the most significant economic
development and alleviation of poverty in the last decade seems to have
owed very little, if anything, to the Millennium Development Goals.
Above all, on the economic front, the events of 2008 and since have
generated a growing realization of another axis of change. For a long
time it has been recognized that the economic output of China and India
was growing much more quickly than that of Europe and the USA. China’s
eventual assumption of the position as the world’s largest economy – and
India’s as the third largest, with the USA staying second – has been long
anticipated. Whether that makes them in a meaningful sense two of the
three wealthiest countries is another matter, because their output per person
remains much lower than in the USA and Europe. There is, nonetheless, a
distinct political weight that comes with economic size. And the effect has
been emphasized because, while the USA’s recovery from 2008 has been
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halting and uncertain, Europe has faced a serial crisis and renewed recessions.
The contrast with China has only served to emphasize its rise. The European
Union’s combined economic scale remains huge; it is the largest single market
in the world. But the combined political weight of its member states, which
has always seemed less than the sum of its parts, has diminished because of
the political