Global, Multi-Polar Disorder
Jeffrey Sachs is a development economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University wrote in the Financal Times:
We have arrived in a multi-polar world. As German Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck put it in Berlin yesterday, “The US will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system.” Yet a multi-polar world not only makes sense (given that the US has only 5 per cent of the world’s population, and a declining share of its income), but can also bring forth countless areas of shared leadership and entrepreneurial creativity from all sectors of global society.
No doubt, we have entered a much more complex global scene. Success for the world – in finding peaceful solutions to huge global challenges – will depend mainly on our capacity to cooperate with each other across sectors, cultures, and regions. Despite the weighty absence of the US from most of this week’s UN proceedings, there are grounds for optimism that the world can and will find a new successful course. And after January 20, 2009, perhaps – and we must hope – the US will be back at the table, with its international peers in a new multi-polar setting.
At least they can move the UN to EU what not!
