For most Guyanese, at home and abroad, this Christmas is one of great uncertainty. As the global financial crisis ripples out from Europe and America into what used to be called, optimistically, “emerging” markets, few of us seriously expect next year to usher in the sorts of positive change that might have been hoped for even six months ago. The serial implosion of the financial and credit systems in the world’s leading economies is unlikely to recur for generations, but the growing momentum of what may yet become America’s second Great Depression – massive layoffs, widespread bankruptcies and catastrophic loan defaults − presages far greater hardship in countries like ours, that are less able to bargain their way out of neoliberalism’s spectacular demise.
Watching helplessly from the sidelines, it is hard not to sense a growing indifference in the developed world towards the near-constant stream of bad news elsewhere. President-elect Obama has already been forced to shift his attention away from foreign policy and refocus on emergency measures for his shrinking economy; Europe and Asia’s leaders will, no doubt, find themselves prone to similar bouts of introspection. Occasionally the narrative of economic decline in the world’s wealthiest countries yields to horror stories from the Congo war, Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic or the terror drama in Mumbai, but these are increasingly marginal to the developed world’s domestic concerns about its immediate economic future.
Grim as this future may seem, it is not without transformative possibilities. George Soros, the legendary hedge fund manager who foresaw a year ago the paradigm-ending quality of the gathering financial storms, wrote presciently about what might be learned from our current crises. Reflecting on how much of the Global War on Terror had been premised on a wilful misreading of the facts, he observed that: “The public is now awakening, as if from a bad dream. What can it learn from the experience? That reality is a hard task master, and we manipulate it at our peril: The consequences of our actions are liable to diverge from our expectations. However powerful we are, we cannot impose our will on the world: we need to understand the way the world works… In short, understanding reality ought to take precedence over manipulating it.”
That verdict is as true of the stratospheric speculators – Tom Wolfe’s ‘Masters of the Universe’ − who led Wall Street towards its earthshaking collapse as it is of the warloving neocons whose imperial hubris seems to have informed the Bush administration’s worldview from the start. The devastation wrought by their beliefs may limit possibilities in the months ahead, but a return to the real world will also bring with it a chastened respect for old-fashioned political ideals like social and economic justice. In the new reality, developing countries will have another opportunity to reconsider the wisdom of depending solely on large trading blocs, to debate whether they might take their chances with more modest regional initiatives and decouple themselves, as far as possible, from the shocks of the global economy. After the food shocks of 2008, governments in the developing world will be forced to ponder agricultural policies that protect small farmers from their growing irrelevance to the global food supply. In our current straits the long-delayed green revolution may well be redesigned as an economic stimulus for developed economies, and carbon offsets could become a lifeline for countries like Guyana that still have large standing forests. A post-petroleum economy could also quickly diminish the importance of traditional troublespots like Iran and Saudi Arabia and reshape the region in ways that could make current US ambitions of democracy in Iraq seem quite pedestrian. Also, after its three-trillion dollar humbling in Iraq, US diplomacy is likely to be far more inclusive and multilateral; forced to carry a smaller stick, Obama’s America will have to speak more softly.
Even after the battery of all of our recent crises, there are still reasons for cautious optimism in the new year. Recalling the sea-change his generation underwent in the Great War, the English poet Robert Graves called his autobiography Good-Bye to All That, for although the conflict all but destroyed an entire generation of European society, it had swept aside many of the morally bankrupt ideas in the dominant culture. If 2008 does turn out to be the end of free-market absolutism and arrogant great power unilateralism then we too will also have said Good-bye to a great deal of unnecessary baggage, at a fraction of the cost.
