Por Daniel Warner
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The glaciers are rapidly diminishing, even high in the Swiss Alps. AI executives and experts are warning that artificial intelligence could be the downfall of humanity as exemplified by the Hugging Face hack. Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, while horrific deaths and destruction continue in Gaza, the West Bank and the Middle East. The situation of hundreds of thousands of people starving in Sudan stretches our comprehension. Economic uncertainty is contributing to the rise of fascist and far-right movements. Can the old solutions cope when our world is turning upside down?
The term polycrisis has been used by experts to describe multiple crises. But the crucial point is that they are happening at the same time. Geopolitics dominates chronopolitics; space dominates time. The accumulation of crises stretches our intellectual and emotional capacities to respond, leaving us struggling to comprehend what is happening, let alone how to act in time.
Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan wrote recently in the New York Times about the new world order we are not ready for. MacMillan’s warning is that “we don’t expect our world to be turned upside down.” She solemnly describes our current situation: “Temperature records have been set and reset this summer, the earth has baked in droughts, and wildfires have raged. Debt across advanced economies is approaching historic highs. Cuts in medical and food aid, most significantly by the United States, have caused unnecessary deaths and helped the spread of diseases, one of which, sooner or later, could become another pandemic. Artificial intelligence continues its rapid, unregulated rise, threatening jobs, security and, in darker projections, human existence.”
MacMillan’s point is that there are signs that, like in Albert Camus’s The Plague, “there are dead rats all around.” Her analysis is that “We have arrived in a new stage of disorder” and that “We must prepare ourselves, beginning with being honest about the seriousness of the moment we’re in and accepting that our fragile system is faltering.”
All very dire for those who are comfortable with things remaining basically as they are. MacMillan, known as a historian of moments when the world changes direction, gives sobering evidence of those who refused to see the French Revolution coming. “The French kings and their courtiers misunderstood the depth of the discontent and assumed that nothing could shake them from their privileged position.” Tell that to the thousands of Parisians who stormed the Bastille in July 1789—and the millions of French peasants who were demanding an end to feudal privileges and aristocratic exemptions.
And the 1917 Russian Revolution? Although she maintains it was the result of defeat abroad, “Czar Nicholas II also insisted, against all evidence, that no reforms were needed because Russians still adored him.” Tell that to Russia’s roughly 10 million peasant households, many desperate for land, while just 30,000 great landowners controlled about 190 million acres of land.
There are parallels today. MacMillan quotes Trump’s response to a question about limits to his power with “My own morality,” his version of Louis XIV’s “L’etat c’est moi.” Certain economic factors give similar indications to pre-French and Russian Revolution situations. In the United States today, the concentration of wealth is striking: the top 10 percent of households held roughly $150 trillion in wealth in the second quarter of 2026, compared with about $4.3 trillion held by the bottom half. Globally, the richest 10 percent now receive 53 percent of all income, while the poorest half of humanity receives just 8 percent. The top 0.1 percent alone receives as much income as the entire bottom half.
These economic factors are relevant, but don’t give full focus to the polycrisis. What about climate change? What about AI? Elon Musk said that the risk of human extinction from robots in the very near future is up to twenty per cent. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock now stands at 85 seconds to midnight.
Whether Musk’s prediction is right, or the Bulletin’s 85 seconds to midnight is an appropriate warning, does not help us answer what to do. And MacMillan’s conclusion is most unsatisfactory: “The Panglossian road of unwarranted optimism is a dead end. But that doesn’t mean we cannot do what has so often been done before and embark on the laborious process of building something afresh.”
Where to begin? This is not a Versailles moment after World War I to try to establish an everlasting peace so that the war would be the war to end all wars. The League of Nations failed that geopolitical experiment. Nor is this a San Francisco moment when the United Nations was established with full recognition about what had been wrong with the League. Geopolitically, where is the U.N. in Ukraine? Iran? Gaza? West Bank? Humanely, what is it doing to change the situation in Sudan?
“Building something fresh” misses a subject that is at the heart of the polycrisis: we are not simply dealing with a broken geopolitical system that can be rebuilt. The League of Nations and the United Nations were created in the aftermath of major wars, just as earlier international settlements followed major geopolitical ruptures: the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the Congress of Berlin (1878) followed the Russo-Turkish War. We have had major international conferences and settlements that followed wars or major geopolitical ruptures. Now, we are dealing with several systems breaking down or changing at the same time—political, economic, environmental and technological. There is no single Vienna, Berlin, Versailles or San Francisco moment waiting to fix them.
Have we begun to understand the rapid changes taking place? All the major conferences cited above, as well as the institutions they created, were based on countries and national sovereignty. As a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department wrote about Secretary of State Rubio’s trip to the annual meeting of the United Nations: “Secretary of State Marco Rubio will travel to New York City from September 20–23 to advance an agenda of peace, prosperity, and the primacy of nations during the 81st session of the UN General Assembly. Joining President Trump, Secretary Rubio will advocate for the United Nations to return to its core mandate of maintaining international peace and security while respecting national sovereignty.”
“The primacy of nations” and “respecting national sovereignty” deny global interdependence and the role of civil society. It is the very notion of the primacy of nations and respect for national sovereignty that should be called into question. The current state system was crystallized in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Much has been written about how we are moving into the post-Westphalian era.
But that leaves the question of how to begin “the laborious process of building something fresh.” Maurice Bertrand had already asked a more fundamental question in 1995. A New Charter for a Worldwide Organisation?, edited by Maurice Bertrand and Daniel Warner (Kluwer Law International, The Hague, 1997) was not simply a proposal to rewrite the United Nations Charter. It questioned whether the existing international system was adequate, and explored the possibility of a different type of worldwide organization. This was before climate change and AI had become the systemic issues they are today.
There can be no one simple solution to a polycrisis moment. Perhaps not even one worldwide organization. Looking to the past can tell us much about how the world has responded to moments of upheaval. But rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic is futile. MacMillan’s warning is helpful: “It is possible to misread or even ignore these signs [when radical change is coming] – to insist that the drops of rain are just a passing shower – until it’s too late. That’s when the real trouble arrives.” That is the first step in the “laborious process of building something fresh.”
But what about time? If the process is so laborious, there may be no time left. As Jill Lepore writes about AI in The New Yorker, “Time seems to be flying by. How should humanity prepare? There is no time to prepare.” For, as she rightly notes, “the law takes its time in responding to new technologies….the law, a tortoise, can’t keep up with technological change, a hare.”
That’s what makes the current polycrisis so different, and so worrying. Political institutions operate according to geopolitical time—negotiation, laws, conferences, treaties, reconstruction, institution-building—while technological and environmental change may be moving on radically different timescales. It may be that we truly have “no time to prepare” if we continue to think only in geopolitical terms.
Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.
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