The dying year may one day be seen as a period of tectonic change in world affairs, writes Tony Kinsella.
On St Stephen's Day 2004 a powerful earthquake triggered a 1,200 kilometre long landslide almost 3,000 metres below the surface of the Indian Ocean. The earthquake itself drew little attention. The tsunami it triggered, killing some 300,000 people from Sumatra to Somalia, grabbed the headlines, provoking an unprecedented outpouring of universal solidarity.
As 2007 draws to its close, another Indonesian island, Bali, offers us a different image of tectonic change. Papua New Guinea's ambassador to the UN Climate Change conference, Kevin Conrad, speaking for many more than his country's six million inhabitants, admonished the US delegation: "We seek your leadership, but if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way."
In 2004 the actual moment of tectonic shift passed unnoticed, but the consequences were rapidly clear. Conrad gave voice to the 2007 shift, but its consequences are still rippling outwards as I write.
The US has been more than willing to lead - it is just that few are willing to follow. As the presidential election season gears up, the question as to whether it is any longer capable of leading is now posed.
Back in 1992 president George Bush, the current president Bush's father, famously told the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit that "The American way of life is not negotiable". Fifteen years later, his son's representative, under-secretary of state Paula Dobriansky, was obliged to accept the inevitability of just such negotiations at Bali. President Bush snr is reported to be far from happy with her acceptance but, fortunately for our planet, he is shuffling around his last lap.
The reality of the threat from global climate change became universally accepted in 2007, offering us the intellectual framework within which difficult political choices can be made - choices that must involve the individual, the private sector, the state, and the whole planet. Practical responses to real challenges often take us further, faster, than lengthy theoretical debates, however useful.
The Bali UN conference with its casually-dressed booing, hissing, and applauding delegates was not the stuff of classic diplomatic interchanges, but may have given us a glimpse of what planetary governance might resemble.
It is a governance which the United States has chosen not to participate in, much less lead. Two of the central planks of Washington's global reach, military power and globalised finance, look either outmoded or flimsy as we head towards 2008.
The Iraqi shambles has demonstrated the limitations of raw military power as a tool of political change. Even the most critical of us never foresaw just how counter-productive the planet's last classic inter-state war would be. Military conquest as a central tool of statecraft may have worked in the days of Julius Caesar or Napoleon, but no longer does in a world which at least acknowledges the concept of human rights.
Making a convincing argument for launching an international war of aggression is now a very uphill task, and one on its way to obsolescence - a truly tectonic planetary shift.
Dollar-based world finance was one of the midwives to our globalised economy. Our few global financial institutions are part of the 1944 Bretton Woods dollar-dominated international structure.
Banks, and even more importantly other financial institutions, developed a range of interlinked credit and investment instruments to fund takeovers and mergers. Global brands and corporations were suddenly "in" even as smaller businesses continued to provide, as they always have, the lion's share of innovation, growth and jobs.
Rather like medieval alchemists, financial services traders developed an impenetrable and incomprehensible maze of hedge funds, subprime mortgages, collateralised debt obligations and ever more esoteric derivatives.
In the field, unscrupulous and often unregulated US mortgage advisers made handsome commissions either selling mortgages to first-time buyers, or refinancing existing mortgages without the slightest hint of due process in terms of evaluating the borrowers' ability to service their debts.
The ink was hardy dry on these dodgy deals, before the mortgages were diced and sliced and sold on in small slivers as secure property-based debt throughout the global financial system with city traders picking up significant bonuses along the way.
Many US borrowers have not been able to meet their repayments once the initial low interest holiday ran out. The mortgages were based on property values in the middle of a housing bubble. Some experts estimate that many of the properties concerned were over-valued by up to 30 per cent.
Such was the speed of the system that much of the paperwork lagged behind. Deutsche Bank National Trust Company has had 14 foreclosure claims refused by a federal district court in Cleveland, Ohio, because, although it was the trustee bank, it could not furnish documentary proof of ownership.
Banks now have no way of knowing which of the securities they hold are solid. They have therefore effectively stopped lending to each other - who wants to lend money to a bank that may not be solvent?
Northern Rock collapsed because it depended on the inter-bank market for funds, a source that has now gone dry.Union Banque Suisse (UBS) has made an €8 billion bad debt provision for the US mortgages it may hold, and has drawn in a further €12 billion in fresh capital to keep its show on the road.
At the core of all this lies the ancient concept of magically materialising something out of nothing. One of the financial magicians was Andy Fastow who claimed his financial engineering "could strip out any risk". Such was Fastow's prowess that in 1999 the US Chief Financial Officer Magazine named him CFO of the Year and gave him its Excellence Award for Capital Structure as a "master of creative financing".
Andy Fastow was the chief financial officer of the Enron Corporation. He is currently also known as inmate number 14343-179 at the US Federal Detention Centre at Oakdale, Louisiana.
Most of his peers won't be joining him, but the collapse of the system they helped build is far from over. Greed played its usual role, but like medieval alchemists the traders were chasing a self-defeating dream. Had the alchemists succeeded in transforming lead into gold, the resulting metal, being no longer scarce, would have lost its value.
Many of the economic, social and political certainties we are familiar with are either vanishing or in need of significant overhaul. Quite what we are going to replace them with remains unclear. Denial may be the initial human response to change - necessary perhaps, even comforting - but a phase we now need to move beyond.
That move will require new structures, working patterns and institutions at the global level. Willy Brandt in his 1971 Nobel lecture reminded us that "neither states nor ideologies are ends in themselves but are there to serve the individual in his efforts to live and develop his life meaningfully . . . "
One of the foundations for our global future is the European Union, with its 500 million citizens and 27 often fractious member states - with more to come.
In 2008 Irish electors will have a unique opportunity to approve the Treaty of Lisbon and equip the fledgling EU to help build a more stable world.
I hope they seize it with both hands.