A Culture of Dialogue for Our Emerging Polycentric World

Peter Isackson

Chief Strategy OƯicer at Fair Observer

Is the world becoming multipolar, polycentric or plurilateral?

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney upset the apple cart at Davos this year when he admitted that the vaunted “rules-based international order,” long cited in the West as the geopolitical norm ensuring everyone’s stability was always at least “partially false.” He noted that we were living through a moment of “rupture” and that the “the rules-based order is fading.” He spoke of “the fracture” and prophesied “the old order is not coming back.”

Here was the prime minister of a major nation in North America acknowledging an inexorable break with the transatlantic order that had governed the globe for the best part of a century. He wasn’t calling for revolution or claiming that Canada could step in and take over where the US had once reigned. That would be as presumptuous as unrealistic. He did however invoke “the task of the middle powers,” suggesting that we may be moving towards a global order organized around multiple centres of geopolitical power or influence. built around “the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality.”

At one point in his speech, Carney announced his policy of “pursuing variable geometry” to “help solve global problems.” We might call this a flexible consortium approach to contrast it with the traditional alliance orientation that pushed even non-aligned nations into working through blocs. He also cited Canada’s “plurilateral trade,” all of which he claimed is “not naive multilateralism.” More broadly he evoked a “web of connections across trade, investment, culture.”

The world Carney sees emerging does not exclude the rivalry of great powers, but it assumes that the diversification of influence among the other nations, each of whom will seek the means to ensure strategic autonomy, will reduce the capacity of any great power to impose its will through“ economic intimidation from one direction.”

Carney oƯered no clear vision of the future, but his speech will stand as a visible signpost along our current path of history at what has clearly become a fork in the road. The Canadian Prime Minister’s message signals a geopolitical turning point towards a freshly diversified and seriously redesigned alignment of political, economic and cultural forces. It stands as an invitation addressed, not just to “middle powers” but to every corner of the globe to reassess not only existing relationships but to begin the task of dynamic readjustment and flexible realignment that will give meaning to a polycentric world.

New wine and old wineskins

Old habits created during the Cold War and the unipolar moment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union must be reconsidered, including the tacit acknowledgement of the USA as the global hegemon. But discarding outdated ways of thinking isn’t enough. We need to review the language of geopolitics we’ve inherited from the past. We need to rethink and in a certain sense renegotiate the core values and guiding principles we continue to believe can apply to the global community. The first of which is the respect of diversity.

Diversity deserves its place at the top of the list not because it is more fundamental than other recognized human rights, but because even cultures that emphatically agree on the name they give to specific rights may interpret both its meaning and its political application in contrasting ways. Concepts such as democracy, life, liberty, security, or even property rights have no intrinsic meaning. Their meaning is mediated by history, tradition and internal debate. Cultures provide the context for understanding values and their practical application. The dialogue that cultures foster through their interaction as they seek to learn from one another permits the emergence of a consensus that will never be absolute. It cannot simply produce that consensus.

No one owns another people’s history. No nation can legitimately claim to possess or even understand values that they expect every other nation to embrace and practice by following their model. One of the problems with the concept of a “rules-based order” is that even when the rules are well defined, no two parties will interpret them in identical ways.

What our geopolitical landscape needs is a vision that recognizes multiple visions and strives to reconcile them through cultural rather than purely political innovation. Instead of a “rules-based order” that relies on one dominant source tasked with creating and enforcing the rules, the nations, regions and peoples of the world need to find pragmatic ways and possibly new institutions that will allow them to begin building their collective self-awareness.

Mark Carney showed himself to be more courageous than any recent Western leader when he denounced a system built on “great power rivalry” that allows the strong to “do what they can, and the weak to suƯer what they must. But his solution that consists of getting “middle powers” to work together is unpersuasive and may appear downright naïve. Constructing a new world polycentric order cannot be just about decisions made by powers, whether great, middle or small. It must be about cultures, which means thinking well beyond the question of political and economic rivalries. It means grappling with the multiple dimensions of human society. The focus must ultimately include, and even give priority to social values, collective identity, spirituality and ethics. Laws are part of it. Rules as well. But the very concept of polycentrism implies an eƯort directed at the dynamic of relationship as it plays out at the political, economic, professional, cultural, social and community level .

Technology’s changing role in a fractured world

Digital technology, originally created for military purposes, began seriously transforming the economies and eventually the cultures of the developed nation in the 1980s. With the advent of the internet in the final decade of the twentieth century the trend accelerated ans spread across the globe. In the past three years the availability of generative AI has further transformed a cultural revolution that took form with the advent of social media twenty years ago.

We call these tools now at everyone’s fingertips LLMs, large language models. They use their access to all recorded instances of language that humanity has produced in the past to generate coherent discourse that make statements about the world and any topic humans wish to explore. They also provide other services such as powerful statistical analysis and coding of original digital tools.

Language is, of course, the source of all codified behaviour in human societies. Our uniquely human capacity to create and share the widest variety of perceptions, techniques, ideas, narratives, laws, rules, values and personal ambitions is what makes human cultures possible and justifies our belief in “civilization”.

Only a few decades ago, when our means of communication were far more limited than today, sharing took place essentially in two ways: on a regional or even global scale via broadcast media and locally through direct communication. The latter could be one-to-one or one-to-a-small number.

After its emergence in the 20th century, modern broadcast media – television, radio, entertainment, alongside more traditional newspapers, magazines and books – served to generate and reinforce widely accepted norms. Local communication, principally in the form of spontaneous dialogue between small numbers of people, resulted in specific social and economic organization and action, with permanent but evolving consequences for the community. In other words, in their daily lives, most people were regularly exposed to two forms of communication: the monologue of broadcast media and the dynamic dialogue of local communication.

Paradoxically, social media has consolidated the role of monologue as our dominant mode of communication. While it has emboldened and empowered numerous talented communicators – now called “influencers” — by providing them with a platform for their intelligence and creativity, its overall eƯect has been to atrophy the role of dialogue as a major factor in building social coherence.

A notable victim of the triumph of a culture of monologue on the world stage is the practice of diplomacy. Ongoing conflicts as well as recent “forever wars” demonstrate a curious historical anomaly. Engaging with potential adversaries to resolve conflict in a timely way appears to have disappeared from the diplomatic toolbox. In the world of geopolitics, we have seen in recent years, especially among the dominant developed nations, a preference for competitive monologue. This has led to the neglect of the art of dialogue, spawning a culture of confrontation, division and ideological polarization. The eƯects on diplomacy have proved catastrophic, creating several situations that could easily degenerate into nuclear conflict.

There is a strong cultural component that helps to explain this potentially dangerous reality. It derives from the underlying logic of the model of civilization known as “the consumer society” in which social identity reflects what each competitive individual manages to conspicuously consume. A serious consequence of consumer culture is that the binary thinking associated with individualism has instilled the idea that competition is the key to increased productivity to the point of trumping and even cancelling the instinct for collaboration.

From multipolar reality to polycentric virtue

Throughout history collective understanding has been facilitated by our human capacity for flexible dialogue. The ancient Greeks were particularly ambitious when they asserted that the self-expression of philosophers – those who seek to understand what constitutes “the good life” – must be the starting point for authentic dialogue. But if self-expression becomes the goal rather than the means to sharing and understanding, cultural anarchy and social disorder will inevitably ensue. On a major scale, we see that logic playing out today in the politics of our Western democracies.

After centuries of European colonial domination, followed by the creation and enforcement of the vaunted post-World War II “rules-based order”, Western powers, led by the US, assumed what the believed to be their historically ordained duty to regulate the global economy. This functioned eƯiciently for many decades, though its most obvious eƯects, focused on economic exchange, tended to be superficial. By the start of the 21st century, the center of gravity of the global economy had shifted progressively away from the North Atlantic east and south. The trend clearly accelerated with the precipitous rise of China, preceded by the rise of the “Asian Tigers” and accompanied by the more gradual economic transformation of India. The notion of an active and dyanamic“Global South” replaced the traditional and more static label of “the third world”, a concept that implicitly divided the nations and regions of the world according to the logic of a European class system.

Today Europe’s economy is threatened. Its leading nations have descended into rudderless chaos. At the same time, the US has been reduced to making a desperate gamble by confiding power to a clearly unstable political personality, Donald Trump. In the meantime, the BRICS alliance has risen to oƯer what is, at the very least, a symbolic representation of a historical transition that is already taking place.

Governments of the world’s traditional powers – those who remain oƯicially committed to enforcing the vaunted rules-based order established 80 years ago – have clearly lost the capacity to inspire their own populations with a belief in their moral authority. At the same time, the United Nations has consistently failed in its global mission and is now openly defied on multiple fronts, nowhere more openly than by the Trump administation.

By 2020 the most serious observers of the international scene had concluded that the world had already become multipolar, or was at least moving in that direction. The real economy had moved east and south, well beyond eastern Europe and far into Asia, even if the financialized economy shared by London, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Frankfurt was still intact and powerful in terms of sheer weight, volume and influence. The sudden growth in the visibility of BRICS indicated that a resistance to the status quo had begun spreading across all continents.

The metaphor of a multipolar world implies that, like the poles of the earth itself, there can only be two. Were we heading for a new binary divide similar to that of the Cold War? Instead of the US and the Soviet Union, this time it look like multipolarity would be dominated and possibly even monopolized by two actors: the US and China.

The binary model may have made some kind of symbolic sense when a clear ideological opposition existed between capitalism and communism. But all that has changed. The evolution towards a multipolar order will not be binary. It may be preferable to think of it as polycentric. Rather than imagine it as a configuration of spheres of influence designated as “poles”, we should think of what is now emerging as a multiplicity of gravitational focal points, based on the specific economic, cultural, scientific and civilizational strengths of a variety of diƯerent regions.

The future of dialogue

The geography of power across the globe has changed. But much else has changed as well. We now possess infinitely powerful technological as well as human means that should encourage dialogue among people and nations. But that requires a serious eƯort aimed at retrieving the fundamentally human instinct for sharing accompanied by the humility that allows us to listen and react. It means shifting from a culture of monologue to a culture of dialogue.

There is a new actor on the stage, an actor with a powerful voice. We have begun to acknowledge AI as a purveyor of language, which means it has a capacity for dialogue we may not yet have learned to exploit. Instead, our media prefers to assess its performance as a purveyor of monologue.

A polycentric world can only thrive if it fosters and nourishes a culture of dialogue, exchange and collaboration. That dialogue must include humans in the diversity of their cultures, but also the cold intelligence of machines. Refusing dialogue amongst ourselves and with emerging superintelligences will ensure the emergence of the dreaded dystopia of an AI that takes over our lives and decides our fate.

Some have predicted that autonomous AI agents have already acquired the capacity to replace humans at work. They will execute tasks traditionally conducted by humans with increased eƯiciency, speed and accuracy. The risk is real, but only if we continue to neglect our own capacity for dialogue.

Once we accept that dialogue is the key to geopolitics, politics, the economy and culture, we can begin to construct a polycentric world in which the default value of a revised ethical system, adapted to the complexity of reality, is collaboration. Competition can then become a specific means of strengthening the eƯects of collaboration.

A renewed sense of dialogue will permit a vibrant new phase of our collective history. It will permit us to build, reconfigure and refine our global, national, local and human relationships. For a changing world, we need new landmarks and especially a renewed sense of collective values focused on respecting the diversity of human cultures and harnessing their collective spiritual force.

The Sapience Network’s global community of changemakers, visionaries, and thought leaders has formally launched its mission of engaging leaders, influencers and engaged citizens alike in crafting the new culture of dialogue that will define the parameters of our emerging and evolving polycentric world.