Analysis: This year saw divisions on democracy, vaccines and climate. 2022 is unlikely to be an oasis of calm
The two events were suitable bookends for a year filled with turmoil and polarization — and not just in the United States.
In between them came the humiliating and chaotic end of America’s democratic experiment in Afghanistan.
In 1947, Winston Churchill famously noted: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” In 2021, its example as the model to which nations should aspire was buffeted and beaten.
Millions more died as a new variant, Delta, swept the globe, and vaccination itself became the cause of animosity, setting the vaccinated and the unvaccinated against one another, and highlighting both the inequity between rich and poor nations and the coercive power of government.
And 2021 was the year when the full and far-reaching impact of social media, its misappropriation and how or whether it could be tamed, was viscerally felt.
Above all, 2021 seems to have been a year of warnings — about our relationships with technology, the planet and those who govern us, whether elected or self-appointed.
Democracy falters
The invasion of the US Capitol on January 6, fed by conspiracy theories about a stolen election and incited by a sitting President, was beamed to a shocked world.
The democratic process held and the result of the 2020 election was certified. But the rejection of an indisputable result by a furious minority, mutterings about martial law and the deployment of 20,000 National Guard members for Biden’s inauguration were an unprecedented shock to the system.
The events of that day were emblematic of toxic divisions in the United States.
China and Russia were conspicuously not invited. Biden had told a news conference in March that Chinese President Xi Jinping “is one of the guys, like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, who thinks that autocracy is the wave of the future, [and] democracy can’t function in an ever-complex world.”
Whether the event has the impact Biden intended will have to wait until 2022.
But if the events of January 6 were a low-water mark for democratic institutions, the 12 months since have not offered much comfort.
The collapse of Afghanistan’s US-backed government was a blow to Washington’s credibility, raising questions about how reliable it was as a partner and protector.
One month shy of the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, it was also a shattering rebuke to America’s evangelizing mission for democracy and its technological superiority. The Taliban — allies of the group that brought down the Twin Towers — walked into Kabul without firing a shot. Tentative democratic advances — especially on women’s rights and media freedoms — were stifled overnight.
It said that in India, the nationalist government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi had “presided over discriminatory policies and increased violence affecting the Muslim population,” and that harassment of journalists and NGOs had increased.
The most profound challenge to democratic values came from an ever-more assertive China, where Xi’s steely grip tightened.
China, which denies rights abuses in Xinjiang, also intensified its ideological attacks on the West — advancing a new sort of international order as trust in democracy faltered.
China maintains it is testing space vehicles, not missiles.
But, he added: “They may be dangerously misjudging America’s capacity to change its mood.”
Doubts and discontent
As autocratic regimes went on the front foot, a mood of uncertainty and unease pervaded many Western countries. Survey after survey identified growing public discontent, frustration about corruption and inequality and the handling of the pandemic.
But a majority of respondents have little or no confidence that those changes will happen.
Even as the world began to emerge tentatively from the pandemic, it remained vulnerable to its divisive consequences — over vaccine access inequity, mandates and lockdowns. The tussle between the social good and an individual’s rights was unforgiving.
Vaccine hesitancy became one of the year’s catchphrases, especially in Germany, where deaths due to Covid-19 in December were at their highest since February, and the US.
And the debate became angrier.
First world problems, perhaps. In much of the world, health workers fighting the pandemic didn’t even have the chance of vaccination.
In 2020, the World Health Organization warned repeatedly of the risks and injustice of vaccine inequity. In 2021, that became reality.
‘Blah, blah, blah’
Those price increases stoked levels of inflation not seen in the West for a generation and also left Europe even more reliant for its liquid natural gas on Russia.
The idea of “building back better,” a slogan embraced by both the UK and the US governments, has suddenly come face-to-face with short-term realities that threaten to turn it a very pale green. After dipping in the first year of the pandemic, oil consumption is back to where it was in 2019.
Babies, barbeques and bar mitzvahs
Such is the reach of social media — Facebook alone has 3.9 billion users — that the first efforts at regulating Big Tech in Europe and the US have only now come to the fore.
In the US, legislation has been floated that would end platforms’ immunity from prosecution where they “knowingly or recklessly” promote harmful content.
Which leaves us…
2021 has set the stage for struggles that will persist into the New Year and far beyond.
Democracies will have to compete with their adversaries in the marketplace of ideas, while attempting to cooperate on issues such as climate change, terrorism, cyber-security and health (ahead of the next pandemic).
And we will be trying to put coronavirus behind us while grappling with its economic, social and psychological aftermath.
Don’t expect 2022 to be an oasis of calm.
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