11 Global Trends That Defined 2011

It was a year when tyrants ceded power, economies teetered on the edge of collapse, the world’s most wanted terrorist was killed and a tech icon departed. Here’s looking back at the key events of 2011

1. Euro zone alarms kept the world sleepless The sovereign debt crises in the Euro zone had already arisen before 2011 began, but this year saw a marked deterioration that demonstrated the limits of piecemeal solutions. The EU’s leadership duo of Germany and France were clueless as the markets came out baying for foolproof bailout guarantees in the form of a “big bazooka” rescue fund or ‘Eurobonds’.
    With austerity pummelling society across Europe with no prospects of economic growth, treaty changes for “more Europe, not less”, i.e. more doses of Brussels — and Frankfurt-based technocratic control over spending priorities of member states — will fuel disenchantment of citizens that they are being exploited by distant, investor-beholden policymakers.
    As 2011 ended, the allure of the EU had worn thin. A juggernaut that had absorbed 27 member states in two decades now looks febrile and dangerously close to disintegration. Tough love leadership that can steer the ship towards a ‘United States of Europe’ is the best we can hope from this region.  

 

2. The US economy descended into institutional stasis

The year began with talk of a faster-than-expected economic recovery for the US, which had gained momentum and shown some growth tendencies in exports and consumer spending. But this stimulus-induced effect evaporated in no time, partly due to the infectious Euro zone woes and mostly because of political paralysis caused by a divided government between a Democratic presidency and a Republican Congress.
    The politics of balancing budgets and reining in the runaway public deficit consumed America and left a wreck of indecisive policies in its wake. With stimulus drying up and unemployment soaring, Republicans butted in with proposals for across-the-board spending cuts and tax breaks. The resulting chaos behooved a failed state rather than the world’s largest economy, as a countdown began for a dreaded ‘government shutdown’ in September that was narrowly averted. Institutional torpor is all set to keep pegging the US economy back, as political brinkmanship becomes the ‘new normal’ in 2012, a presidential election year.

3. ‘Occupy Wall St’ refashioned the challenge from the Left If the global economic crisis revealed deep flaws and iniquities in capitalist societies, 2011 witnessed the rise of remodeled Left wing politics aimed at the financial elites who were swimming in a sea of profits and bonuses. Instead of targeting amorphous phenomena like ‘globalisation’ and ‘capitalism’, youth in advanced economies began to rally against the hated big banks which had dodged out of regulatory nooses.
Protests, camping and laying siege to public places in the vicinity of financial temples across America and Europe brought back memories of the anti-Vietnam era. 2011 looked a lot like 1969, with a gradually coalescing sense that ‘the people’ had common interests against establishments. Millions agitated and sacrificed personal comforts in ways unfamiliar to a generation that preceded them, implying that change is speeding and new paradigms of power are emanating from the indignation of the masses.
Social mobilisation with an economic justice platform was not as potent in recent history as it was this year, and it threatens to return in even bigger proportion along with the flowers of the spring season in 2012.

4. Arab dictatorial barricades were stormed TheArab Spring uprisings in North Africa and West Asia reaffirmed that political freedom matters as much as economic security for humans to lead dignified lives. 2011 will remain etched in memory as the year when crowds in Tunisia and Egypt shook off hitherto impregnable authoritarian regimes with the speed of lightning. The socially networked youth there accomplished ‘leaderless revolutions’ that were horizontal and non-violent, feats not seen since the fall of apartheid in the mid-1990s.
    Although the Arab Spring commenced spontaneously, it was usurped and tweaked in the later half of 2011 by other despots in the region and their foreign benefactors. The destructive wars waged by anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya and anti-Saleh tribal militias in Yemen forced more regime changes, but not without dragging in regional and extra-regional ‘humanitarian’ interventions. War displaced revolution as the central theme by the time 2011 ended, as status quo tyrants like Assad dynasty in Syria hung on with every sinew left in their armoury. Can people savaged by brutal dictators not only overthrow oppressors but also rebuild anew with institutions that distribute power more evenly between state agents and social actors? This is the most key question vis-à-vis the Arab world for 2012. 

5. The end of Bin Laden started a virtual US-Pakistan war The daring military operation by American Navy Seals in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, which killed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, is an unforgettable vignette of 2011. The world was transfixed by the news that a man who goaded many with the gospel of radical Islam and a clash of civilisations was eliminated right under the noses of Pakistan’s military, which was allied with the US.
    For international security in the coming year, the undeclared USPakistan war is going to pose more headaches than the declared war between the Americans and the Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The unswerving pursuit of institutional self-preservation by the Pakistani military, which has warned the Americans that it has nuclear weapons and is hence not a pushover, puts the US in a situation where it can only declare “victory” and pull out of Afghanistan if Pakistan is realistically tamed and democratised. Al Qaeda has enough traction left in Pakistan to make this a deadly proposition filled with terrorist violence in 2012. 

6. China’s Rise: It sneaked past the West and riled Asians
On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11, some wondered whether the West’s war against “Islamofascism” was a strategic blunder or diversion that allowed China to close the power gap with the US. The China of 2011 was much more formidable than the China of 2001 in economic and military means to compete with and outplay the US. While America and its allies were busy battling Al Qaeda, China conserved its vitality, and focused on growth, military modernisation and global relations.
    In 2011, the drumbeat of an “Asian century” sounded ever louder as China put to rest speculation that it would stutter from global downturn and clocked 9.3% GDP growth. 2011 also showcased a China that was combative in disputes with its neighbours, evoking fears of a new dominion in Asia. The theory of China’s “peaceful rise” was met with growing cynicism and hand wringing that no one, least of all the US, is able to restrain Chinese aggression any more. With the EU in a shambles and rest of the ‘BRICS’ not yet in China’s league, 2011 could be the year when we settled into a bipolar world order with Washington and Beijing as the two axes.

7. The Iraq war folded while war with Iran still loomed As 2011 closed, the US withdrew all its combat troops from Iraq, with few positive outcomes to take home. The colossal costs in Iraqi and American lives might still be justified ex post facto if a stable and non-discriminatory political system emerges in Baghdad. But authoritarian impulses remain rooted in Iraqi politics along with the vicious strain of Shia-Sunni-Kurdish enmities.
Did America “liberate” Iraq after all or has it abandoned it to the machinations of wily Iran? Suspenseful shadowboxing between the US, Israel and Iran continued in 2011, stoking fears of a regional or even a world war. With the Palestinian statehood drive stalemated, chances of a fireball of military conflicts engulfing West Asia remain on the cards for 2012. Iran’s oppressive polity could also generate internal mass discontent of a scale that could put the Arab Spring to shame. 

8. A media mogul’s empire creaked & new media arrived
The travails of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch overflowed in 2011, triggering a climate of introspection about unethical press practices and concentration of information power in the hands of a connected few. Calls for regulating the media echoed from Murdoch’s English heartland all the way to developing countries like India.
    2011 was the year of popular pushes for democratic accountability of states, corporations as well as media houses. Internet-based whistleblower journalism of the WikiLeaks variety mushroomed and took on old media stalwarts, powerful militaries, privileged diplomats and corporate bigwigs. Media democracy was a phrase increasingly thrown into the public arena. 

 

9. A nuclear disaster unleashed new energy politics
Just as more and more states were moving in the direction of developing nuclear energy sectors, 2011 introduced a dark shadow of doubt in the form of the Fukushima accident in Japan. Its aftermath saw feverish campaigning against nuclear energy and pushed countries like Germany to declare abandonment of this source.
    The role of nuclear lobbies in bending regulatory strictures and flouting safety standards came for intense scrutiny, adding fuel to an anti-nuclear mood in countries as far apart as India, Mexico, Italy and Taiwan.
    Will the post-Fukushima blowback give wind to wind and solar energy technologies and help them leap past the nuclear energy sector in 2012? The politics of industrial lobbies, environmental activists and green political parties hold the answer. 

10. The world’s largest democracy coped with new democratic currents India’s economic bandwagon slowed in 2011 under the duress of policy drift; the central government scored self-goals while trying to usher in fresh reforms. The flip-flop made by the government on opening the retail sector was one manifestation of what former Malaysian strongman Mahathir Mohamad termed as “too much domestic politics and abuse of freedoms to protest and argue at will”.
    Yet, anti-corruption movements and exposure of governance failures that abounded in 2011 happened, thanks to new, non-electoral democratic stirrings in Indian society. They held out hope that the ‘India story’, which was a leading global narrative alongside China’s rise, may return to track in 2012.

 

 11. A business icon shed mortal coils and gave capitalism back its good name The death of Apple’s saintly genius, Steve Jobs, produced a subtle counternarrative to the anti-capitalist mass protests that swamped 2011. Here was a daring entrepreneur and an innovative business leader whose products and services not even ‘Occupy Wall Street’ could skewer with honesty! Karl Marx grudgingly admired the creativity and revolutionary nature of capitalism. In contrast to the ‘greedy bankers’, Jobs’ exemplary life conveyed that not all was lost for the free market in a seesaw year.
    2011 is special because it spawned conditions that would define the rest of this decade. Such transformative years come at rare conjunctures in history when existing forms and principles of organising economies, polities and societies become untenable and adjustment or change are inexorable. We can look back at 2011 with the thought that it was the year when the wheels of time took fateful turns.