At Christmas we are meant to embrace the better angels of our nature, learn from errors in the recent past and prepare hopefully for the future. Nowadays the religious character of the holiday has become quite obscure despite the persistence of carol singing and midnight masses; for many of us this week means little more than a few days of frenzied decorating, shopping, and overconsumption. Yet even the moments of exhausted relief between these activities give us the chance to step back from daily life, contemplate the wider world, and imagine what the future might bring.
Uncertainty was the dominant theme of 2011. Three years after the global financial crisis the world’s richest economies clearly remained wary of their immediate prospects. The US sidestepped a full-scale depression, but a jobless recovery only allowed few beyond Wall Street to feel secure. The rest of country – the notional 99% in the Occupy movements – looked on angrily from the sidelines. Stripped of the high rhetoric that galvanised his candidacy, President Obama often seemed as flawed as the president he replaced, and had the Republican candidates not been so comically inept his re-election hopes would be far less robust.
Europe continued to wrestle ambivalently with a debt crisis that might end not only the dream of a common currency but the political will necessary for the Union itself. The Germans blamed the recklessness of the lesser European states, the Italians blamed Berlusconi, and everyone dithered over the hard choices needed to restore confidence in the system. Many negotiations seemed to take place in a parallel reality. For while EU bureaucrats debated whether half a trillion euros could forestall further panic, the UN announced that it was scaling back its global fund for AIDS treatment in Africa due to a shortfall in funding of around half a billion dollars. This comes at a time when many experts agree that current treatments have begun to turn the tide of AIDS in Africa, and stop its spread altogether. In other words, we are collectively passing up the chance to stop a pandemic in one continent because doing so would cost a small fraction of the money needed to repair the financial system in another.
The revolutions of the Arab Spring produced some form of regime change in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya and struck fear into autocrats throughout the region. After the fall of Mubarak and Gaddafi, Arabs seem to have lost their fear and despite severe crackdowns elsewhere, particularly in Bahrain and Syria, further change seems imminent. In Egypt the worsening confrontations with the military showed that the “birthpangs of a new Middle East” – to use Condoleezza Rice’s infamous phrase – will continue to confound and alarm many Western observers. And in a curious feedback loop, Western protests began to adopt strategies from their Arab counterparts, creating the sense that the whole world — even the British rioters — had suddenly decided to fight “the system.” Time magazine even went so far as to name “the protester” as its person of the year.
Perhaps the most interesting echoes of the Arab Spring were heard in China where the village of Wukan organized a full-scale rebellion against a group of corrupt officials. This has attracted enormous media attention in the West and is often seen as a sign that pro-democracy movements are alive and well in the People’s Republic. (Official figures indicate China has as many as 80,000 ‘mass incidents’ each year.) However it seems quite plausible that, far from losing control, Beijing has learned the value of using the discontent stirred up by popular protests for its own ends, especially when this helps to reduce local corruption. The party maintains a firm grip on the national press and carefully controls the directions of political conversation. This Machiavellian approach is sometimes called “adaptive authoritarianism” and traces of it are discernible not only in the politburo’s savvy management of coverage of the Wukan protests but in its wider diplomacy as well. Here, too, the future is very hard to predict.
In the context of so much upheaval, life in Guyana has been relatively calm and its future seems reasonably hopeful. A minority government presents its own challenges and we too will undoubtedly face political and economic uncertainties in the year ahead. There is always room for improvement here, as the letters column in this newspaper points out every day, but looking beyond ourselves at the wider world and some of its more daunting problems, we still have much to be thankful for.
