Our world - the developed west - has plenty to fret about right now. Our financial system, led by over-exuberant banks, has got itself into a state of sudden and careless disarray. The store of spectacularly-rising value created in our houses threatens to crumble around our ears, as mortgages become harder to get and more expensive, too. The cost of heating and lighting our homes and filling up at the pumps continues to rise, as oil tops $120 a barrel. And that's before any serious efforts are made to price carbon at levels which might help curb on-rolling climate change. Food-price inflation has become a Daily Mail cause celebre, as even the middle classes notice the additional hit in basics, such as bread and cheese, each time they get the plastic out at the supermarket.

Our world - the developed west - has plenty to fret about right now. Our financial system, led by over-exuberant banks, has got itself into a state of sudden and careless disarray. The store of spectacularly-rising value created in our houses threatens to crumble around our ears, as mortgages become harder to get and more expensive, too. The cost of heating and lighting our homes and filling up at the pumps continues to rise, as oil tops $120 a barrel. And that's before any serious efforts are made to price carbon at levels which might help curb on-rolling climate change. Food-price inflation has become a Daily Mail cause celebre, as even the middle classes notice the additional hit in basics, such as bread and cheese, each time they get the plastic out at the supermarket.

Teachers in England and Wales have taken strike action for the first time in a generation. Even on their enhanced salaries, they can't make weekly ends meet. Civil servants are taking to the streets, too, over pay and job security.

And refinery workers at Grangemouth are reminding us all in Scotland just how fragile key supply lines can be in our supposedly-sophisticated 21st-century society, as they prepare to walk out in a dispute over changes to their com-pany pension scheme. Just imagine what chaos might ensue if supermarket delivery drivers refused to leave their depots.

The years of what Mervyn King once dubbed "The Great Stability" have suddenly given way to a time of economic turbulence and bickering social unease. No-one is very clear how long it may last. And in a world already finding it more and more difficult to squeeze greater collective contentment out of acquiring more and more possessions, a prolonged period of material uncertainty could have profound consequences for all our lives.

Politics seems to offer few antidotes. Gordon Brown, who, throughout his political journey, has manifestly championed ways of reducing poverty, has got himself into a right old mess over how much tax some of the lowest-paid in the UK should be paying. Now that he's blinked, in the face of a growing rebellion on his own back benches over the abolition of the 10p band, the consequential humiliation could yet cost him power.

Yet Brown's rival, David Cameron, is too busy rubbing the Prime Minister's face in it to project any considered alternative to the wider ills he might, in two years, inherit. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the latest polls put the Tories only five points ahead.

Across the Atlantic, the two Democrat contenders for the White House, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, seem intent on slugging it out to a standstill. In primary after primary, their supporters seem to be willing on that stalemate. It may well allow another Republican, John McCain, four more years as President. And, while the Arizona senator deserves respect for distinguished service to his country, notably when imprisoned in Vietnam, he is not the most obvious candidate to lead the United States in the multiple challenges it will face as this century rolls on.

For that is the crux of the matter. The challenges we are all now experiencing in the developed west may not be random shocks to life as we have come to know it. What if these are not unfortunate, but temporary, ripples before the old order reasserts itself? What if they are, collectively, signals of a world order which will one day soon appear changed utterly from what went before? What if the economic dominance of the north and west, buttressed over the past three centuries by industrial revolution and empire-building, shifts decisively south and east as this century advances?

What if the 21st century belongs to China and India, Russia and Brazil, not the US, the UK, the eurozone or Japan? There is no doubt rapid growth in these economies is powering the world economy forward, as the west stumbles and the US flirts with recession. It is clear the vast current account surpluses run up by these emerging superpowers - and by resource-rich states in the Middle East and Africa besides - is helping keep the heavily-indebted west afloat. And while the west ages and has to confront the daunting welfare costs that entails, the peoples of the east and south are much younger, hungry, like their western brothers and sisters before them, to experience the fruits of development.

In the early stages of this transition, the booming east and south have brought the west the £4.99 pair of jeans and the £2.99 bunch of roses, as well as plentiful cheap computers, toys, mobile phones and much else besides. They say China's Pearl River delta produces 80% of everything Wal-Mart sells. That inflation-busting source of consumer goods for western consumption may have eased the pain of comparative economic decline up till now.

But it also carries multiple challenges for the whole world. Western manufacturing capacity is sucked away, with more than half a million foreign-owned firms boasting plants in China already. As the cheap labour which helped attract such investment becomes more assertive and aspirational, costs are bound to rise. And the heavy environmental price of such intensive industrialisation is already clear.

Shifting demand patterns for raw materials, including grains and other food staples, are already sending prices spiralling higher. And even attempts to confront climate change - for example, through the development of first-generation biofuels - have had serious unintended consequences for another pressing global challenge: feeding every mouth that is hungry. The impact isn't just being felt in supermarkets and building sites in the west, it's an increasingly potent source of grievance in the developing world, too.

By the time all these forces are played out, there will be costs all round. But the momentum and the power may well have shifted away from our world. It may settle, instead, in parts of the world that barely registered on western consciousness for generations. And if it does, we may find it more and more difficult to embrace this process we now call globalisation. Suppose that process is accompanied by declining living standards here. Suppose the kind of financial crisis currently gripping our banking system triggers sustained falls in house prices. Suppose the era of cheap food is over.

Worst of all, imagine a job-shredding period of slowing growth or outright recession. In that kind of scenario, how many of us would continue to argue for an interconnected world with globalised trade? How many of us would retreat into sullen resentment of better times elsewhere? That may the real challenge facing politics in the west today. And it's far from clear that it is up to the job.