Summary
In an Indian Express essay, Pratap Bhanu Mehta asks whether the busy calendar of international summits is making the world safer against war, climate change, pandemics, nuclear risk and AI. He draws on Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities to describe a civilisation that knows the dangers and still carries on normal routines.
He argues the problem is structural as well as a matter of weak leaders. Without a hegemon, powers constrain one another but cannot produce collective action. Domestic accountability also makes rising above national interest costly for any leader.
His conclusion is that conventional rationality, keeping what we have, may itself lead to catastrophe.
WHY IN NEWS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS
The essay appeared during the high-level week of the 81st UN General Assembly, soon after the BRICS summit in Delhi, the SCO meeting at Bishkek and the launch of the P4M forum and ahead of a Xi-Trump meeting. It questions whether this activity matches the scale of risks from ongoing wars, climate change and AI.
Standard News
Knowing About a Danger Does Not Mean Acting on It
The world is not short of meetings or warnings. The UN General Assembly, BRICS, the SCO and P4M are all active. Climate scientists, AI researchers and security analysts have published extensive warnings. Almost everyone knows the risks and yet the response rarely matches them. Why do societies that see catastrophe coming carry on as normal?
First explanation:
power without a leader After the Cold War, one power could set the rules. Today no one can. China and the United States constrain each other and so do middle powers and that prevents any single country from imposing its will.
It also means no one can lead collective action. Every leader answers to voters who care about food prices, fuel, jobs and national pride. Giving up territory, slowing down on AI or accepting costly climate commitments brings immediate political costs at home, while the benefits are global and far off.
Each government acts rationally for its own citizens. Taken together, those rational choices can still lead toward disaster.
Second explanation:
the psychology of normal life Musil's novel describes Vienna before the First World War. Its elite was sophisticated and well informed and busy planning a grand patriotic celebration. Mehta's point is that these people were not ignorant or "sleepwalking".
They knew about the tensions. But warnings of catastrophe had become one more topic of conversation, given about the same attention as everyday matters. The pattern has recurred. In early 2020, the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency and many governments and publics carried on as usual for weeks. Familiarity with a warning makes it feel less urgent. Summits add to this.
Each communiqué creates a sense that the problem is being managed, whether or not it is.
Comparing the
two These explanations are usually treated separately: one is about how power is distributed, the other about how people perceive risk. They are more useful together. History shows that collective action happens when both barriers fall at once.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, leaders who had come close to nuclear war agreed within a year to a hotline and a treaty limiting nuclear tests. When scientists found the ozone hole in 1985, a visible and alarming discovery, the world agreed the Montreal Protocol within two years.
In both cases, the danger became concrete and cooperating became less costly for leaders at home than doing nothing.
Quick Facts
Key numbers & takeaways — revise these first
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Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities was first published in 1930.
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The novel is set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of the First World War.
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One of its characters, the industrialist Paul Arnheim, replies to the idea that diplomacy keeps what we have by saying that keeping what we have leads to war.
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The 81st session of the UN General Assembly is meeting in September 2026.
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The BRICS summit was recently held in Delhi and the SCO met at Bishkek.
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P4M, Partners for Multilateralism, is a new forum whose co-sponsors include India, Brazil, Canada, the EU and Kenya.
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Pratap Bhanu Mehta is a contributing editor of The Indian Express.
Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.
Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:
A full account of the first domain: why a world without a hegemon can block domination but cannot produce collective action, with the July Crisis of 1914 as a reference point.
A full account of the second domain, from Musil's Vienna to early 2020: how familiarity with warnings makes societies less likely to act.
A synthesis built on comparing the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Montreal Protocol, showing when structural and psychological barriers fall together.
What this means for the purpose of summit diplomacy and a framework for an essay on inaction in the face of risk.
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