When we focus too narrowly on what happens close to home — whether that be Guyana, Caricom, or the Americas — we tend to forget how difficult and uncertain political, social and economic progress has been in many other countries. The end of a year is a good moment to place some of our achievements, disappointments and frustrations within the context of the wider world.
During the first half of 2015 some of the world’s largest hedge funds looked set to earn handsome profits. Six months later many had sustained heavy losses after Greece’s near exit from the European Union and China’s plunging stock market complicated their forecasts. As the world’s economies ricocheted between one unpredictable event and the next the profits of an average hedge fund were eroded — despite thousands of analysts sifting oceans of data — to under one per cent. That miserly return is a good indication of how unpredictable the world has been this year, and of the folly of saying too confidently about what might happen next.
This was also a year in which seasoned analysts repeatedly misread the political tea leaves. Britain’s Conservatives won the general election comfortably, Liberal Democrats all but disappeared and Scotland’s nationalists routed the Labour party. Against pollsters’ predictions, in Israel, Greece and Turkey embattled incumbents won re-election, in some cases handily, yet Canada’s Conservatives were trounced after a decade of political dominance. In the US the race to the White House was dominated by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, as the GOP’s more-favoured mainstream candidates were sidelined by a proudly xenophobic and misogynist front-runner. Donald Trump’s campaign has shown that the world’s leading democracy can descend to the level of farce far more quickly than most of us would like to admit. Perhaps we should bear this in mind the next time we feel like complaining about the antics of Guyanese or West Indian politicians.
A year of terrorism also revealed how unevenly we absorb the news of atrocities in different countries. A little over a year ago Boko Haram killed up to 2,000 people in the Nigerian town of Baga. Four months later Al-Shabaab killed 148 people at Garissa University College in Kenya. Neither massacre received anything like the attention paid to the attacks in Paris, Tunisia and the United States, even though discussions of terrorism overwhelmed political debate in America and Europe after those killings.
As with climate change, no conversation about a global issue can afford to ignore such glaring disparities in the value we place on people who live in different countries. The Islamic State, which has claimed far fewer lives than Boko Haram, has controlled so much of the conversation about terrorism because it has ensured that its violence gets the full attention of the Western media. The result has been a predictable mix of ad hoc responses — like the largely symbolic bombing of IS targets in the wake of the Bataclan massacre — which do little to erode the reach and power of the terrorists, but use public fear to increase the reach of the national security state . After the Charlie Hebdo killings Western governments gave rousing defences of free speech, but their lack of a coherent approach to terrorism, has allowed autocratic governments all over the world to use spurious national security concerns to harass, attack and imprison their critics.
Related failures have informed responses to the unprecedented numbers of people who sought refuge within ‘fortress Europe’ this year. While thousands of ordinary citizens showed admirable compassion towards migrants at their borders, national governments have repeatedly stumbled when trying to arrive at a thoughtful response to the crisis. Sadly, there is no good reason to believe that the challenges posed by this year’s mass migrations will be solved in the next twelve months, nor that the conflicts and failed states which produced this exodus will be any closer to stability. Many of the same reservations apply to the ongoing efforts to relieve Europe’s debt crisis and to the Paris agreement on climate change. This year has shown, often agonisingly, that there are no quick fixes to complex political crises.
What might small and relatively powerless countries, like ours, learn from all this? Perhaps, that few people in the wider world care about local crises in places like this. That governments everywhere are disappointing. That politicians invariably overreach and promise more than they can deliver.
That countries which do weather crises successfully often do so because they have strong institutions, well-developed civil societies, and an educated and engaged citizenry. And that, perhaps, we should focus more on developing these counterweights to ineffective governance rather than rely on outsiders, or politicians, to do so.
