So much is written so often about power that it is surprising how little we seem to understand it. Important shifts in power often take place in the shadows, beyond our view. As a consequence, sometimes we fail to understand them as they are happening and it takes decades or centuries before we truly grasp what has transpired.

In 1991, the news story of the year was the fall of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over and the geopolitical balance of power of the world had shifted profoundly. Yet that same year, the recent brainchild of a self-effacing English physicist named Tim Berners-Lee, something that he called the “world wide web”, was made available to the public. Certainly, the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a sea-change in the global distribution of power, but 100 years from now, which of these events will be seen as touching more lives, empowering more individuals, changing the world in more ways? Indeed, even today it seems clear that one reason among the many for the downfall of Soviet communism was the impossibility of closed societies competing in the information age.

Obviously, 1945 is remembered for the end of the Second World War, but, following our reasoning above, might it also be remembered perhaps more than it is for the publication of an article in Atlantic Monthly by the prescient Vannevar Bush describing some of the core ideas that ultimately led to the internet? At the time, computers barely existed. Who could imagine the power of his ideas, or the power that his ideas would create or shift?

There are countless such examples throughout history. Could anyone have foretold that the ascension of Augustus as Rome’s first Emperor would have been transcended in terms of lasting impact upon the continent on which he was the greatest ruler ever by the birth of an obscure Jew somewhere in far off Judea? Or that with the death of Zheng He, the Muslim admiral who led China’s “age of exploration”, in 1433 that the Emperor of China would choose a course of isolation that ultimately would result in the decline of the Ming Dynasty and forestall China’s engagement in the world as a great power by almost six centuries?

Part of the reason that predicting the consequences of power shifts is so difficult is that power flows from so many sources. Political and military power may be pre-eminent in our thinking, but religion, science, technology, the environment, social trends and countless other drivers shape the fate of rulers, trigger conflicts and lead to the ebb and flow of the power of states, economic entities and peoples. In fact, the power structure of the world is much like that of a complex atom, whirring at many levels, with events at one often triggering changes at the others.

So it is today. Speaking about the changing global power equation, as participants will do at the upcoming annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, it is natural for thoughts to turn first to questions about the sustainability of a unipolar world and the limitations we have all learnt that constrain the sole superpower that survived the end of the Cold War — the United States. One can also wonder if a focus on the upheaval in the Middle East masks other developments of greater importance in the long term, distracting us from the rise of emerging Asia and China’s ultimate assumption of the role as the great power balancing the US. Or should we be looking at the interdependence of the US and China or the rise of India or the rise of the entire emerging world, likely to be the source of the world’s fastest growth and home to the vast majority of its people throughout the century ahead?

Perhaps an even more significant question is whether it is old-fashioned to continue to think in terms of nation states as the primary global actors when they are, after all, derived from ideas that are more than 350 years old and may be reaching obsolescence given the fading of borders and the rise of non-state actors from al-Qaeda to the corporations that now outnumber countries in the list of the world’s largest economic entities. Or is it more important to note that hierarchical corporate, traditional political entities and long-standing media powers are themselves already fading in influence as virtual networks can gather and recombine and mobilise action or translate new ideas into actions and beliefs more rapidly than ever before and do so without regard for borders and even without the need for significant financial resources?

For decades it has been a given that being an oil-producing nation granted great power. While demand for oil is growing and will do so for decades to come, reaction to high prices, global warming and unreliable supplies is fostering investment in innovations that have the potential to grant greater energy-producing power to the possessors of agricultural, wind, geothermal, wave and other resources. Indeed, if global warming is not reversed, how will that redistribute power, impact low-lying nations or increase the likelihood of natural disasters? What might be the consequence in terms of the distribution of power of enhanced global transportation networks? Or in terms of flows of immigrants and the reaction to them? Or in terms of the way that they might accelerate the spread of global pandemics? In such a pandemic, who might have the power? Those with vaccines? Those with secure borders or with advanced medical resources?

As thought-provoking as such questions are, taken together they offer at least one answer. The tectonic plates on which the global power structure is founded are shifting today, rapidly in some areas, imperceptibly but perhaps profoundly in others. And just as few could have seen that European power plays of the last century would assure America’s rise, we also know that the shifts of today will likely produce unexpected consequences that will be jarring and perhaps dangerous for the unprepared or the complacent.

David Rothkopf, former Deputy Under-Secretary for Commerce in the Clinton Administration, is president and chief executive of Garten Rothkopf and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Jonathan Schmidt is director and head of global agenda at the World Economic Forum.

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