It is hard not to see Dubai as a vision of where globalisation may be taking us, writes Colm Keena.
Huge glass and concrete towers shoot up from the flat desert landscape. Manual labourers and servants from some of the poorest countries on the planet toil alongside some of Earth's richest individuals.
Money is everything. Capital from all over the world is streaming into what was until recent years a small and relatively unknown town on the edge of the Persian Gulf, but which is now one of the largest construction sites in the world. Coming into the city from the airport, we got stuck in a traffic jam and I sat watching construction workers emerging from one of the many tower block building sites. As each blue-overalled man came out, he was quickly frisked by security guards before being allowed out through a barriered gateway. The men emerging looked Indian, while the men doing the frisking looked Arab.
My hotel was very much a 21st-century, high-spec establishment. A woman tinkled on the keys of a grand piano in the large lobby where men and women, Arabs and westerners, sat on low leather chairs sipping drinks and discussing business. Glass lifts shaped like capsules brought guests up to their rooms. On your way up you could look out through the glass front of the hotel and see the city there below you, stretching towards the sea.
The hotel was swarming with staff, all of whom, when they were addressing me, referred to me as "Sir". The staff I spoke during my short stay came from Burma, the Philippines, China, India and the Gulf. More than 80 per cent of the people living in Dubai are foreigners.
As I understand it, globalisation is creating wealth through trade and the integration of the world's economies. Wages globally are levelling out while owners, be they individuals or corporations, are, in the round, making increased profits. Global trade is closing the wealth gap between the developing and developed world, while increasing the wealth gap between the rich and the poor within individual countries and around the world generally.
Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, is ruled by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. There is no democracy. This offence to republican sensibilities is compounded by the huge gap in wealth that is so evident and pervasive. Culturally, the United Arab Emirates is a long way from Western Europe, but you can't help but wonder how long the rights of the citizen and the worker that currently exist in Western Europe would survive if the disparity in incomes here reached the sort of levels you see all around you in Dubai.
I didn't ask the staff in my hotel what they earned, but they surely are paid rates that are very low by western standards. Yet the room prices ranged from €320 to €1,000 a night, and dinner with a few glasses of wine cost about the same as it would in a low- to medium-priced restaurant in Dublin.
One night I dined alone in one of the hotel restaurants. I got talking to the waitress, who told me she was from a small town in the Philippines and was the single mother of a boy who was being raised by her parents back home. She had been in Dubai for most of the young boy's life, sending money home to support her parents and child. She told me she was allowed home for 30 days every two years. She liked Dubai, she said, but she missed her boy and her family. She said she spent a lot of time on the phone.
Another night, having attended a reception in a hotel for Irish people based in Dubai, a few of us adjourned to the hotel bar and chatted with some of Dubai's Irish expatriates. One woman said she tended not to socialise with the local men, as she believed many of them attended parties where there were prostitutes, and this put her off them. A sweeping statement, obviously, but she has a basis for her belief: there are thousands of prostitutes from all around the globe in Dubai. The CIA's world handbook says Dubai is a destination country for men and women who are used for "involuntary servitude and for sexual exploitation".
The woman told me there is no income tax in Dubai and if you have a good job and a place to stay where the rent is not too exorbitant, then you can have a good life there. She had been there for a number of years. She also said she had seen people come there and change for the worse, because they were unable to resist the effect it could have on your character to be surrounded by so many people who have so much less than you do.
Many people are impressed by Dubai, by the scale of what is being done, and the ambitious vision it implies. And Dubai is part of the shift in the balance of power and wealth in the world, away from the old economies and towards the new. Who can argue against a process that has lifted hundreds of millions of people around the world out of abject poverty?
Yet in Dubai you wonder if it is not so much towards a relatively richer East, and a relatively poorer West, that globalisation is taking us, but rather towards an upstairs, downstairs world where we will all live in identical cities and the gap between the richest and the poorest will be such that even Michael McDowell might have second thoughts.