An observer of the world at the height of the first great era of globalization 150 years ago would have had little trouble determining its center. London was, as the Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle put it, “the center of the universe,” a “vast Babel” into which “the tide of human aspiration flowed violently in and out.”
Our century has no comparable place, no caput mundi, and probably never will. Power is too diffuse in today’s globalized world. Nevertheless, there are places where our present is distilled, where nodes emerge that can be used to determine the aggregate state of our world. These are the pulsating arteries of globalization on which we can place our fingers to feel the pulse of our time. One such artery is Dubai.
Dubai is known as the playground of the rich and famous. Those who like to flaunt their abundance of money are especially attracted to this land of milk and honey in the desert.
Wealth and Slavery
It is equally well known that this world of luxury hotels and sports cars has a dark side. For the glittering skyscrapers that characterize the image of this metropolis on the Persian Gulf are built on the backs of the tens of thousands of migrant workers who Dubai recruits from the world’s poorest countries, and who labor on its construction sites under inhumane conditions. Decadent wealth and modern slavery—this extreme contrast characterizes our image of the emirate.
It is an image that is painted in particularly stark colors whenever the media spotlight is directed on the region on the occasion of a major sports tournament or a climate conference. This cliché, however, falls short of capturing the emirate’s strategic importance as well as the fact that the city is more than just a curious eccentricity of our time—it is rather the most honest reflection of the world as it presents itself in the middle of the third decade of the 21st century.
Pounded Out of the Desert
After the United Arab Emirates gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1971, Dubai was literally pounded out of the desert in just a few decades. Not as rich in oil reserves as other Gulf states, Dubai had to think creatively and entrepreneurially early on in order to achieve the immense material wealth with which the city is synonymous today.
A long-term strategy was deliberately pursued to use Dubai's advantageous geographical location at the crossroads between Asia and Europe to transform the city into a global trading center. At the same time, Dubai attracted companies from all over the world by creating a business-friendly environment with low taxes and little regulation. The profits generated were invested in building a glittering tourist destination. It now attracts almost 20 million people a year from all over the world who indulge in luxury and glorious sunshine.
It is a city of superlatives, in every sense of the word. It is the site of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. It also boasts the largest fountain, the highest infinity pool, the deepest plunge pool, and the highest Ferris wheel in the world.
Even more significant is the fact that it not only operates one of the world’s largest deep-water ports, but also the airport with the highest passenger volume.
Immense Trade Flows
Immense trade flows pass through Dubai every day, over 100 million tons of goods of all kinds per year, in addition to the considerable oil shipments that also flow through the huge port of Jebel Ali.
As is typical of entrepots of this kind, however, Dubai attracts both legal and illegal business in almost equal measure. The same port through which European exports to China and rare earths from China are transferred to Europe is also a clearing house for international drug and arms smuggling.
Dubai is, moreover, a paradise for money laundering. Enormous sums of illegal money flow into the city from global organized crime and from the coffers of other international pariahs, such as Russian oligarchs or African despots, who are not allowed to park their kleptocratic profits in luxury apartments in London or Paris.
It is estimated that Russian citizens have pumped almost €6 billion into Dubai's real estate market since the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022. Real estate agents in Dubai enthusiastically tell stories of Russians turning up and buying huge luxury villas on the spot with bags full of cash.
Thus, the world can be found in all its shades in Dubai, a city that functions like a giant centrifugal drum, sucking in and spitting out again.
A Post-Western World
At first glance, the world that is solidifying in Dubai is one thing above all: it is non-Western, or, more precisely, post-Western. It is the world that has crystallized in the shadow of the liberal international order led by the United States and is now poised to replace it.
Dubai stands for the concrete reality of the shift in power, particularly in economic terms, from West to East that has been repeatedly invoked over the years. Almost 90 percent of Dubai's population are immigrants, mainly from South Asia—particularly India and Pakistan—and Africa. A small group of Western expatriates, about 5 percent of the population, make up the managerial class, but are increasingly being replaced by highly skilled non-Westerners who are willing to work more for less pay and benefits.
In fact, when visiting Dubai's hotels, shopping malls and restaurants, one is struck by how irrelevant Europeans and Americans seem—they are present, but on the sidelines. The people who drive business in Dubai are not the rich from wealthy countries, but the rich from middle-income countries; countries that were poor, even very poor, in their parents' generation.
The declining importance of the West can also be observed in another respect. In Europe, especially in Germany, we live under the illusion that a life in the West remains the ultimate desire of most, if not all, people. This is not true. Dubai is populated by young, qualified, and highly ambitious people—mostly men—who work in various service jobs.
They wait tables in the hotels, work as domestic helpers in the villas, drive the limousines, and clean the windows of the skyscrapers. In short, they keep the city running. They do this of their own free will. Very few of them would have to suffer acute poverty or hardship in their home countries, where they are often among the better qualified.
In Dubai, they find work quickly and easily. Although these jobs are often significantly below what they are qualified for, they are paid many times better than they would be doing the jobs that would be available to them in their home countries. This is how a trained journalist from Uganda ends up serving drinks at the poolside of a luxury hotel or an engineer from Sri Lanka sits behind the wheel of an airport shuttle.
They all leave their home countries not because they have nothing or too little there, but primarily because they desperately want more. They are the embodiment of an irrepressible desire for advancement that is hard to find among their European peers. It is in Dubai, not Paris, that Honoré de Balzac would today find the protagonists for his novels about the struggle of social strivers.
These are precisely the young people that Europe would like to attract with its immigration policy. But if you ask them whether their stay in Dubai could be a stepping stone on the way to a comfortable life in the West, it is not uncommon to see bewildered looks on their faces. They are not dreaming of a better life in the West, but of a better life for themselves and their children in their home countries.
Firm Ties to their Homeland
They have maintained their roots in their homeland despite, or perhaps because of, their entry into Dubai’s cosmopolitan maelstrom, in which over 200 nationalities are jumbled together and where it is easy to lose their footing and orientation. As a European born into the “end of history,” one listens to these passionate young people with a certain disbelief.
Love of country, sacrifice, the importance of family and religion, the belief that you can forge your own happiness through sheer will and hard work: hadn’t all these ideas been overcome, or simply rendered superfluous in the context of the universal prosperity narrative of the liberal West? It is important that we Europeans recognize that these values are by no means outdated, even if we have perhaps convinced ourselves that they are. It’s quite the opposite. They form a self-evident foundation of values, providing both incentive and support for large sections of the world’s young men and women.
This impressive desire for advancement, this striving to make something of one’s life, to “get ahead,” has a downside: In Dubai, it is primarily self-interest that guides people’s actions.
They all cultivate an instrumental relationship with the city based on cool calculation, which they know how to use skillfully for their own purposes, knowing full well that this juggernaut of a city is using them too. So, everything is transactional, everything is a question of price in a city where power is a zero-sum game and political values are negotiable.
The Trumpist City
Dubai, you could say, is Trumpist. And indeed, the city serves as a kind of harbinger of the post-liberal world into which we are currently being led at the instigation of the American president.
But the reality is that the functioning of Dubai is based on the currently still intact pillars of the liberal international order. The United States maintains a large naval base in Bahrain from which it secures the freedom of sea lanes in the region, including the flow of trade to and from Jebel Ali Port. Who will keep these sea lanes open against the threat of Houthi terrorists if Washington no longer does so? And at what cost?
And: Dubai’s financial center functions according to English common law. How smoothly can investments be made and deals concluded without a reliable legal framework to ensure that contracts are enforced?
The peculiarity of the current state of the international order can be seen in Dubai. The decline of the Western-led international order is greeted with joy, but there is no coherent alternative to replace it. The supposed new post-Western world, which is transactional and mercantilist at its core, only works because the remnants of the liberal international order still provide sufficient stability. It could hardly exist in this form in a new age of international anarchy, in which the arbitrariness of the great powers is decisive. It is therefore perhaps more of a transitional phenomenon than a new sustainable reality.
At the same time, Dubai illustrates the paradoxes of this era: While the West is becoming increasingly entangled in internal crises, actors are gaining strength who are profiting from the order it once created, but at the same time are working to dismantle it. But without clear rules, without a minimum level of reliability and legal certainty, this fragile balancing act threatens to tip.
The question therefore remains as to whether a multipolar world with many competing centers of power can guarantee long-term stability, or whether it will ultimately only usher in a return to an era of unbridled geopolitical rivalry. In Dubai, this may be viewed with indifference as long as trade flourishes. But history shows that order can never be taken for granted, and that its loss is often only painfully recognized when it is too late.
Lukas Paul Schmelter is a contemporary historian and was recently an Ernest May Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School (2021-2022).
