Trends of the last 10 years

In case you have been cave-dwelling for the past decade, we present an overview of what you missed

ANDREW LODGE VOLUNTEER STAFF

F ive years have passed since the New Year’s celebrations marked the passing of one millennium and the dawn of a new one. The late ’90s were largely a time of optimism: the Cold War was over and to many, the world seemed to be a smaller, more reasonable — if not kinder — place. Back in 1995, Toy Story was playing in theatres, Coolio was at the top of the charts, and Microsoft released its groundbreaking operating system, Windows 95. Technology was helping to create a global village, and with the cumbersome ideological struggles of capitalism versus communism finally put to rest, that global village was ready to reap the rewards of a market-driven economy. Not surprisingly, not everything turned out according to plan. The past decade has lived up to some predictions and thrown some of its own surprises into the mix. In this, the first feature of the New Year, we take a look back over the past 10 years and some of the trends that lie behind the news headlines that have dominated since the end of 1995.
Globalization come and gone

At the end of 1995, the buzzword was “globalization.” Never well-defined, globalization was a blanket term, a conceptual framework describing variously the increasing integration of different societies along economic, political and cultural planes. The new global community was to be governed through consensus with supra-national bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Union mediating, just as a simultaneous and analogous erosion of national boundaries took place.

In a sense, globalization was a supremely hopeful — some would say naïve — outlook on the world. It arose from the ashes of the Cold War, with the idea that one world together would stride forward towards prosperity.

Despite what proponents argued at the time, the net direction of influence with the inception of this new global order was from West to East. Globalization, in theory, was based on the Western ideal of liberalism. It was liberalism, after all, that had conquered communism, and it was liberalism that offered the best of all possible worlds, so much so that the most popular philosopher of the ’90s, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the post-Cold War period the so-called “end of history.” In essence, this meant that through liberalism and its organizational corollary, globalization, we had reached the pinnacle of civilization.

Naturally, the export of “McWorld” raised concern in some corners of the world. Still, globalizing forces were popular among many Westerners, as well as business sectors in much of the Third World at the end of 1995.

In the coming years, however, cracks began to appear in the foundations of the global edifice. Governments and businesses in poorer countries noted that trade liberalization was something that poorer countries were forced into, while richer nations continued to safeguard their industries with tariffs and other protective mechanisms.

Then, in 1999, as a WTO meeting was set to take place, tens of thousands of protesters descended on Seattle, Washington, to protest the WTO’s lack of transparency and its penchant for privatizing anything and everything without popular consultation. The result was a tumultuous three days where images of the “Battle in Seattle” were beamed to TV sets around the world.

The Battle in Seattle signaled that the discontent was more than mere rumbling from some of the impatient rabble-rousers of the Third World or grumpiness from left-wing intellectuals; a broad swath of the mainstream was expressing it.

Subsequent protests in countries all over the world — from Milan to Quebec City and, more recently, in Cancun and Hong Kong — representing many diverse segments of the population, indicated that the upheaval in Seattle was no fluke.

And then, on September 11, 2001, the unthinkable happened. New York was attacked, followed minutes later by the Pentagon. Despite what some may argue, the era of globalization was over. With Sept. 11, all lip service paid to bridging boundaries and seeing the world through multilateral eyes seemed to dissolve. But, the death knell to the short-lived existence of globalization rang long before those planes smashed into their targets.

The planet groans

Recognition that human activities affect the world around us is by no means a new observation. For much of written history, a recurring theme has revolved around the man-versus-nature dialectic, often with no easily predictable victor in the ongoing conflict. As technology advanced and humans gradually became capable of controlling, harnessing and harvesting from the natural world, a certain self-righteous dominance attitude emerged. Indeed, such an attitude was endorsed by segments of the world’s religions, in that humans were granted a sort of dominion over nature.

Through the past decade, however, scientists, conservationists and other concerned citizens began sounding the alarm over the consequences that human behaviour is having on the planet. Over the past 10 years, the international scientific community has become increasingly united in its conclusion on two major points: the earth is getting warmer and human activities are making a significant contribution to this warming trend.

These conclusions also lead to other observations. A warmer and changing climate helps to explain why glaciers and mountainous icepacks around the globe have receded alarmingly over the past decades, threatening the world’s freshwater supply. It explains why the sea ice in the arctic no longer spans the same area it did 10 years ago. And some scientists are now saying that it helps to explain why we are seeing a greater frequency of so-called “extreme weather,” like the unprecedented hurricane season this past year, which included Katrina’s wrath on New Orleans.

Recognizing the danger of destroying the only home you have, governments from around the world produced the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The document called for a reduction in emissions to take place over a set timeframe. Nations ratified Kyoto last year, with the important exception of the United States, the world’s largest polluter. This, and the largely symbolic nature of the treaty itself, calls into question what effect, if any, the Protocol will have on emissions reduction.

While the evidence suggests that industry and the lifestyle of consumption has prospered growth in some parts of the world (namely in the West, but increasingly in parts of Asia), there has been a reluctance to curb industry in order to meet environmental protection standards. Governments around the world have grudgingly ratified Kyoto, but mainly only after stipulating that growth would not be affected. The U.S. went one step further, refusing to sign-on altogether.

The American argument against the Protocol was two-pronged: on one hand, it claimed that industry would be negatively affected, while on the other, it suggested that that the U.S. could do a better job of protecting the environment themselves without an ineffective treaty like Kyoto. Regardless, as George Bush Sr. pointed out back in 1991 at the failed Rio Earth Summit: “The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation.”

Meanwhile, the principal argument in the academic community over the last 10 years has shifted. Scientists are not asking whether or not climate change is occurring, but where exactly the point of no return lies. In other words, at what point does the damage to the planet become irreversible? This, of course, is difficult to say, but one thing seems to now be certain: an environment in flux has become the norm.

African tragedy

Following the decolonization period after World War Two, there was perhaps no area where expectations were higher than on the African continent. But, the formal withdrawal of imperial political power did not coincide with the prosperity popular expectations had in mind. And now, over the last 10 years, many parts of Africa have encountered a horror previously unimagined.

Coming off the Rwandan genocide, few (at least few from outside the continent) realized that conflict was only heating up in many parts of the region. From the blood and gore resulting from the long conflict in the Congo, to the genocide in Rwanda, the West has all but ignored bloodshed in the Sudan. There in the Darfur region, hundreds of thousands of innocent people have perished in a chaotic brutality brought on by a complex of factors that historians say find their roots in both the long- and the short-term.

Western intervention has been sparse in the peacekeeping department of Africa. While Western weapon manufacturers eagerly use Africa as a dumping ground for small arms, there have been little in the way of either soldiers or journalists stationed in the region. When the civil war erupted in the late ’90s in Sierra Leone, for instance, there was no one from outside the continent to witness the conflict. To illustrate the horrific nature of that period, the war in Sierra Leone was punctuated by the government slogan of 1996: “The future is in your hands.” The slogan referred to the use of one’s hands to drop a ballot into the ballot box. The solution that the rebels came up with? Cut off the hands of the citizenry to prevent the vote. Sierra Leone is now a nation of amputees.

Observers argue that the conflict in Africa is motivated by the quest for territory and resources on a continent where scarcity is the norm, and compounded by the open wounds left over from colonial upheaval. Whatever the motivation, more and more frequently the conflicts are enacted by children exploited as soldiers, whose legacy (for those who survive) is a generation who has known nothing but violence and death. Few would disagree that these are not the ideal ingredients for society-building.

As armed conflict continues in many parts of the region, the embattled continent has been attacked by a new and even more deadly foe: AIDS. While 40 million people around the world have contracted the deadly virus, over 25 million of them live in Africa, and it is in Africa where the numbers are continuing to rise sharply.

The United Nations Special Envoy for AIDS, Stephen Lewis, does not mince words when it comes to the bleak situation facing the continent. At this year’s Massey Lectures in Toronto, he opened with the line: “For four years I have watched people die.”

Lewis’s frustration comes from what he sees as a deliberate ignorance on the part of the affluent countries in the West, calling the crisis in Africa “mass murder by complacency.” He also bitterly argues that the advent of the “war on terror” has meant that much-needed funds are now being diverted in the name of security. “I would like to throttle . . . those who’ve waited so unendurably long to act, those who can find infinite resources for war but never sufficient resources to ameliorate the human condition,” he said.

So far, Africa continues to lose the war against AIDS; a war that, with the exception of Lewis and a handful of others like him, it is fighting alone.

It is no surprise that, given the armed conflict and the disease, Africa remains the poorest continent on the planet. According to the Millennium Goals report issued in 2005, it is the only region where the level of poverty as a whole has increased over the past 10 years. And for many observers, there are few signs that this will get better before it continues to get worse.

The African tragedy is so multifaceted that it is difficult to know where to begin. People displaced by war cannot produce food and have a difficult time finding work for wages to purchase sustenance. The refugee camps are teeming with people who have no place to go. AIDS has ravaged entire communities. In many places there is no one left to cultivate the fields. In Zambia, half the teachers have AIDS and many have already succumbed to the disease. Without education, it is difficult to see how the disease will be halted or how development will occur.

People in several countries can now expect to live less than 40 years: 32 years in Zambia, 33 in Zimbabwe, 34 in Swaziland — the list goes on. Thirty years ago, these life expectancies hovered around 50. Those figures alone, perhaps, illustrate in stark simplicity the crisis facing Africa. It is a nightmare, and it is getting worse. And so far, the global response has been disgustingly inadequate, despite feel-good projects by megalomaniacs like Bono and Sir Bob Geldof.

We are online

Ten years ago, computer geeks were hooking up to something called the Internet. In 2005, your grandmother was surfing the World Wide Web from her Blackberry. If anything exemplifies the mad pace of change of the past 10 years, it is the technological explosion. From desktops to laptops to cellphones to iPods and so much in between, like it or not, we are a wired world.

While not everyone on the planet actually uses computers, very few people’s lives are not affected by them in some way. Just under a billion people now regularly operate computers, and only slightly fewer are “online,” with these numbers growing rapidly. And, even if computers are not yet used by everyone, the vast majority of economic activity involves one aspect or another of this technology.

A curious feature about the technological explosion is that it has also given rise to the so-called “information age.” This is not a misnomer per se, in that there is little doubt that the actual volume of information out there is much greater than it was only a short time ago. Whereas 20 years ago a given population had access to perhaps one or two newspapers, as well as several news programs on radio and television, today there is a virtually unlimited amount of information sources. Whether or not the “information age” has generated a more informed population is up for debate. The evidence for this, as commentators have noted, is not very strong.

The dawn of computerized technology was also intended to be a massive boon for an over-worked population. Computers, it was predicted 30 years ago, would free up a great deal of time; some analysts even went so far as to question whether too much free time would be problematic on a societal level. After all, what would people do to occupy their time? Not to worry, though. Statistics from the U.S. indicate that over the last 10 years, the workweek has not been shortened at all, despite increasing automation. The picture is undoubtedly similar here in Canada.

In any event, for better or for worse, increasing computerization is virtually imminent. Computers and cyberspace will continue to play an ever-expanding role in the world in which we live, work and play.

Holy war and the struggle for dominance

Just as globalization came and went, the world order over the last 10 years has been shaped by what many understand to be a holy war. In 1993, renowned political scientist Samuel Huntington penned The Clash of Civilizations, in which he argues that, just as the post-World War Two world was fashioned by the struggle between capitalism and communism, the new order would be wrought by the conflict between the West and Islam. Many see the events of the last 10 years as evidence supporting Huntington’s argument: attacks in New York, Madrid, London, Bali and elsewhere, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, to name a few.

Others, however, argue that this so-called “clash” of cultures masks an underlying struggle for hegemony, a fight for influence and territory. Many, especially in the have-not parts of the world that have not reaped the prosperity of the West, see the current war on terror as another stage in the maintenance of dominance of the Western nations, particularly the United States. They point out that prosperity here in the West would most likely not be possible without relative deprivation elsewhere, and therefore, the war on terror is merely a continuation of the imperialist project. Eighty per cent of the globe’s resources are used by 20 per cent of the planet’s population, while the remaining 20 per cent of the good stuff must be spread out among the other 80 per cent of the people — and there is obviously a finite amount of resources.

Regardless, the geopolitical landscape is being increasingly shaped by extremes. The hopes borne out of a seemingly moderate ’90s have been replaced by the harsh reality wrought by a world at war with the concept of terror — an enemy without a face that is seemingly everywhere.

A fearful population is one that can be more easily persuaded to go along with measures that a more moderate time would not tolerate. The Patriot Act in the United States, anti-terror laws in Canada, the United Kingdom and elsewhere are evidence of this. Similarly, the election of hardliners in Iran, the resilience of the al-Qaida and the Taliban, and the strength of the harsh insurgency in Iraq indicate that extremism is being viewed by some as a legitimate response to the West’s actions.

Meanwhile, people in many parts of the world wonder just who gets to define terror. Few would argue that the World Trade Center attacks were not an act of terror, but many also point out that dropping bombs on people’s heads is also a form of terrorism. Still others point out that the misery and poverty in many areas are a direct result of a savagely unfair economic system, and that while the method is different, the results are similarly brutal and equally criminal.

Changing times

During the ’60s, a writer named Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, which went on to become one of the best-selling non-fiction paperbacks of the decade. His basic premise was that the rate of change had increased exponentially in the 20th century. The last 10 years seem to indicate that Toffler was indeed a visionary, at least on that point. Change is now the norm, and what the world looked like 10 years ago is very different from now. While there is a significant number of constants (and it is important not to downplay these), we live in very changing times. If recent history is any kind of predictor, the coming year will be no different.