The 21st century’s greatest challenge: to live together in peace

A very wise Latin American statesman remarked at the Emerging Markets Forum in Paris this month, quoting the Nobel laureate writer Octavio Paz, that after the French revolution, the 19th century was all about the search for liberty, the 20th century about equality and the 21st century should be about fraternity.

The concept of liberty and individual freedom was sparked by the French revolution but it became embodied in the American constitution that individual freedom was almost absolute in its right.

Before then, rights were communal and determined by the state, or at least by an elite. With the rise of American might, the primacy of individual rights became widespread, because it appealed to the individual ego and the right for self-determination. But man does not exist alone – he lives in a community in which rights come with responsibility. Self-respect must be tempered with respect for others.

The 20th century was a flowering of the capitalist spirit, the idea that individual greed can lead to public good. This drove unprecedented prosperity, unfortunately unequally shared. The saving grace was the narrowing of income and wealth differences between the rich nations and the developing economies, but in almost every country, income and wealth gaps widened. This has reached the stage where views are increasingly polarised, with huge gaps in understanding between genders, generations and geopolitical powers. Gandhi was the one who rightly pointed out that the world has enough for all our needs, but not for our greed.

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The global financial crisis of the 21st century exposed all the flaws of the dominant thinking that the American dream was sustainable. It was already doubtful that it could be sustainable for a few, but if the population of the world reaches 10 billion by 2050, we will be so crowded and in each other’s faces and spaces that how to achieve fraternity without war will be the question of the century.