The Budapest Global Dialogue reconvenes for its third edition, offering a space for dialogue at the crossroads of Europe and Eurasia. As great-power contestation intensifies, emerging actors find a voice, and the global economic order is reconfigured, the Dialogue will once again look unflinchingly at the hard questions confronting decision-makers: The future of coexistence, of solidarity, of security and of growth.
The grammar of globalisation is being rewritten by technological shifts, economic nationalism, and ideological exhaustion. Institutions designed for an earlier age are under unprecedented stress – will they survive, be reformed, or be replaced? A reforged multilateralism must take into account both democratic aspirations and the growth of new centres of power.
A discredited post-War order has caused nations to find other sources of resilience. Driven both by the need for economic autonomy and to capture the engines of future growth, powers are reconfiguring old partnerships and developing new ones. The Global South demands increased energy access, while older industrialised powers seek security in their own supplies – even as geopolitical tensions threaten to intervene in both quests. They seek, too, to re-imagine global security in an age when the institutions and deterrence frameworks that anchored the world order have come undone. Conflicts from the margins of Europe to the heart of Africa serve as visible examples of the need for new guarantors of peace and prosperity. These have revealed new doctrines and battlefields; they have shown the salience of new ways of war-fighting – and fresh forms of peace-making. A search for sovereignty defines economic policy-making and technological competition in this fractured era. Cutting-age tech has become the currency of power, and technological monopolies risk embedding today’s power imbalances in tomorrow’s economic structure. Meanwhile, the assumptions that underlie global trade are being questioned and reworked.
In the best traditions of open inquiry, the Budapest Global Dialogue will investigate these questions, and search for common ground. It will seek out ways to bring the world order back from the brink, and to remake it in a manner that respects both cultural uniqueness and shared values. To step back from the brink is to recover the art of dialogue – to find the courage to disagree, and yet to persist together.
Former Senior director, European and Russian Affairs at the NSC , United States of America
