The Arab Spring, as it was called, turned into a collective protest against dictatorship, human rights’ violations, corruption, economic decline, youth unemployment and widespread poverty all over the Arab world. The way it started was telling; this was first and foremost a protest against the indignity of the lives of the young. Its weapon was mainly peaceful protest, at least at first. But when dictators resisted change, rebellions broke out. In Egypt, the most populous Arab state and seen by many Arabs as the centre of their culture, President Mubarak was removed from power in February 2011, after having ruled for thirty years, by young people occupying the central square in Cairo. The changes seemed to go on and on. In Yemen the president was forced to resign. In Morocco and Jordan the kings agreed to the gradual introduction of full democracy. And in Libya the longest-serving dictator of all, Muammar Gaddafi, misjudged the public mood to such an extent that he was not only driven from power, but hunted down and killed in October.
The latter change, in Libya, only happened after months of fighting, and after NATO had intervened on the side of the rebels. The intervention was welcomed not only by most Libyans, but requested by the Arab League. Nothing could be more telling for how things were about to change: after a decade of worrying about Islamism in all its forms, the West intervened in Libya to protect local rebels – among them many who had an Islamist background – from a dictator who, belatedly, in his most lucid moments had made a point of co-operating with the West against ‘terrorists’. As President Obama wound down the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (not least because the United States could no longer afford them), the whole political spectre of the Muslim world seemed to be changing. Bin Laden, the head of the terrorist group behind the 11 September attacks, was shot in an American military operation in Pakistan in May 2011, while millions of young Muslims were in the streets clamouring for democracy and respect for the individual. History sometimes moves in ways that are very hard to foresee.
But some problems are even more intractable than stagnation in the Arab world. In Haiti, on the Caribbean island where Columbus created the first European settlement in the Americas, there was also a devastating earthquake, in 2010, which destroyed much of the capital and the regions around it. About a quarter of a million people were killed. But, unlike in Japan, the recovery efforts provided little relief for the Haitian population, in spite of the near $2,000 million donated by American relief organizations alone. While the earthquake and its aftermath brought Haiti to the top of international news reports for the first time, its problems are not new. The country is the poorest in the western hemisphere, with a GDP per capita of US $667. Most of its élite prefers to spend its time in the United States, less than two hours’ flying time away, where per capita GDP is $47,600. The ticket, economy class, costs about $300, roughly half the average annual wage in Haiti.
Haiti’s problems are endemic poverty and extensive social inequality. And first among the many reasons for its poverty are the lack of education and infrastructure. Political stagnation plays a role as well, but whether that is a by-product of corruption or it is the other way around is hard to say. What is clear is that all the help in the world could not alone rectify Haiti’s problems. Such a transformation there and elsewhere with similar troubles will have to come from within. But how to break the cycle of misery is a difficult question, especially in a country where poverty-induced illness is rampant and infant mortality is a staggering 90 per 1,000 live births (in Canada it is 5 per 1,000). Haiti will stagger on, now led by President Martelly, a former Kompa music star known as ‘Sweet Micky’. Its problems will not go away anytime soon. History often seems to turn most slowly when human need for change is greatest. But if history teaches us anything, it is that the capacity for change is always there, even in its darkest corners.
6 Whole World History
The story told in this book has no end. However dramatic and disrupted, a history of the world cannot pull up short and come to a halt at a neat chronological boundary. To close with the year in which the author ceases to write is merely formal; it can say little about the future of the historical processes then under way and thus severed in mid-life. As history is what one age thinks worth noting about another, recent events will acquire new meanings and present patterns will lose their clear outlines as people reflect again and again on what made the world in which they live. Even in a few months, present judgments about what is important will begin to look eccentric, so fast can events now move. Perspective is harder and harder to maintain.
This does not mean that the record is no more than a collection of facts or just a succession of events constantly reshuffled like the images of a kaleidoscope. Discernible trends and forces have operated over long periods and wide areas. In the longest run of all, three such interconnected trends stand out: the gradual acceleration of change, a growing unity of human experience, and the growth of human capacity to control the environment. In our day, for the first time, they have made visible a truly unified world history. Blatantly, the expression ‘one world’ remains little more than a cant term, for all the idealism of those who first used it. There is just too much conflict and quarrelling about, and no earlier century ever saw so much violence as the twentieth. Its politics were expensive and dangerous even when they did not break out in overt fighting, as the Cold War showed only too clearly. And now, just into a new century, new divisions are appearing still. The United Nations is still based, ironically (even if a little less firmly than fifty years ago), on the theory that the whole surface of the globe is divided into territories belonging to nearly 200 sovereign states. The bitter struggles of the Balkans or Burma or Rwanda may yet reopen and the simplicity upon which many would like to insist of an Islamic–western clash of civilizations is cut across in half a dozen ways by the ethnic divisions of even so Islamic a country as Afghanistan.
Much, much more could be said along the same lines. Yet that does not mean that humanity does not now share more than it has ever done in the past. A creeping unity has seized mankind. An originally Christian calendar is now the basis of governmental activity around most of the world. Modernization implies a growing commonality of goals. Clashes of culture are frequent, but were more evidently so in the past. What is now shared is at the humdrum level of the personal experience of millions; if society is a sharing of references, our world shares more than ever before, even if, paradoxically, people feel most acutely the distinctions between them in their daily experience. Yet when those who lived in neighbouring villages spoke significantly different dialects, when in the whole of their lives most of them would only exceptionally travel ten miles from their homes, when even their clothes and tools might provide in their shape and workmanship evidence of big differences of technology, style and custom, that experience was in important ways much more differentiated than it is now.
The great physical, ethnic and linguistic divisions of the past were much harder to overcome than are their equivalents today. This is because of improved communication, the spread of English as a global lingua franca among the educated, mass education, mass production of commonly required artefacts, and so on. A traveller can still see exotic or unfamiliar clothes in some countries, but more people over most of the globe now dress alike than ever before. Kilts, kaftans, kimonos are becoming tourist souvenirs, or the carefully preserved relics of a sentimentalized past, while in some areas traditional clothing is seen by others as the sign of poverty and backwardness. The efforts of a few self-consciously conservative and nationalist regimes to cling to the symbols of their past only bear this out. Iranian revolutionaries put women back into the chador because they felt the experience pouring in from the world outside to be corrosive of morality and their image of tradition. Peter the Great ordered his courtiers into western European clothes, and Atatürk forbade Turks to wear the fez, to announce a reorientation towards a progressive, advancing culture and a symbolic step towards a new future.