I have been researching and writing about globalisation for over 20 years, inspired first by the rise, then fall and rise again of the Irish economy. In 2019, I published a book called The Levelling. It prefigured the end of globalisation and the untidy passage towards a multipolar world, which is now under way and likely to revolve around three established, old-power “poles”: Europe, the US and China.
However, as a regular visitor to the UAE, I am beginning to notice the makings of a different, more positive element of the evolving world order that I describe as the “Fourth Pole”, a geo-economic region centred around the fast-growing Gulf states and stretching to parts of India, its vast diaspora and beyond.
Individually, many of these states top the league tables for growth, are emerging as active investors in and consumers of new technologies and are arguably more geopolitically busy than the large European countries. What is new is that trade and infrastructure deals, migration and the consequences of great power competition are creating the conditions for a regional locus, or “pole”, of economic, financial and soft power.
Such a pole needs to have at least two criteria – a co-ordinated economic mass and a coherent method, or way of doing things.
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