Some years really are turning points: 1492, 1789, 1914 and 1989, for example.
Does 2011 belong in the company of Really Important Years? Probably not, but it definitely qualifies for the second tier of Quite Important Years.
Three big stories ran right through the year, any one of which would have qualified 2011 for membership status.
The Arab Spring is an epochal event, even if democratic revolutions may fail in some countries in the end.
The euro crisis threatens the European Union with collapse and confirms the shift of economic power from West to East. And the struggle to prevent climate change was abandoned for the rest of the decade.
The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were not just about elections. They were revolts against the ruling elites, against poverty, against the reign of fear that underpinned those regimes.
But there was and still is a genuine democratic idealism at the heart of these revolutions, and despite all the disappointments and detours that will inevitably follow, something profound has changed in the Arab world.
We should have learned not to underestimate people by now. The Arab Spring was the culmination of a wave of non-violent revolutions that started in Asia in the 1980s. There was a decade-long gap, but now they’re back, and not just in the Arab world.
The ruthless Burmese regime is retreating from power under relentless pressure from the pro-democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi, and even Vladimir Putin in Moscow must suddenly feel vulnerable.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. The decade-old euro, which aspired to become the common currency of the European Union and even a rival to the US dollar, is in acute danger of collapse, and the efforts of European leaders to save it have been comically inept.
Seventeen of the 27 countries in the EU, including all the big economies except Britain’s, use the euro, but that number may drop sharply in the next few years. It might even drop to zero.
There are three possible outcomes to this mess. One is that the poorer countries simply bail out of the euro and revive their old separate currencies, which would cause some serious bank crashes in Europe and collateral damage elsewhere.
The second is that the euro as a whole collapses, causing severe damage to all the Western economies including the United States. The third is that the European Union itself falls apart.
Option one is almost certain to happen. Option two is getting more likely by the month. Option three is still relatively unlikely – which is just as well, given what a disunited Europe used to be like.
And so to the really bad news. The Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than even the pessimists feared, massive floods are devastating huge areas (Pakistan, Thailand, Australia), and the sea level is rising at twice the predicted speed, but nothing will be done about it for the next 10 years. That, effectively, was the decision – or rather, the non-decision – taken at the annual climate change summit in Durban in December.
It has been clear since the debacle at Copenhagen in 2009 that a global agreement to curb the warming was in grave trouble.
The only existing agreement, the Kyoto Protocol of 15 years ago, has been extended for another five years, but it only limits the emissions of the developed countries.
The world’s population reached the seven billion mark in 2011. It passed one billion around 1800, and was only two billion in 1940.
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