End of the decade: Global events

(c) slagheap

My first memory of what one might call a world-changing event, a moment where you remember for the rest of your life where you were when it happened, was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I was five years old, and watching live clips on TV late in to night of thousands of people taking to the wall with pickaxes, hammers, pretty much anything they could get their hands on. My next clearest memory after that was New Year’s Eve 1999 as the world welcomed the new millennium, bursting with hopes and expectations. So, how did the first decade of the 21st Century measure up?

What follows is a personal account of the global events that defined the noughties. To be sure, I will almost certainly miss several moments that many of you will claim to have been crucial, but then that’s why I have chosen to write my review of the decade this way. Seeing as I am not a historian and the full ramifications of everything that has happened over the last ten years are yet to be fully understood, it seems pointless to pretend that this is anything other than a subjective interpretation. So, I have picked out the few events which to this day I still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when they happened, and which I feel embody the sweeping changes that have made this decade different from any other.

The calm before the storm

The world in the 1990s was a strange, but relatively pleasant place. The 20th Century, characterised by almost endless conflict, driven by fierce imperial and ideological rivalries, seemed to have ended on Christmas Day 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The decade that followed was one of growth, stability and optimism, especially if you lived in the West. The U.S stood tall as the world’s only super-power and the likes of Francis Fukuyama told us that the victory of capitalism over communism represented the “end of history”. The hot-spots of those years, such as the genocides in Rwanda and Srebenica and a nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, seemed like mere blips in an otherwise prosperous era. As the clock struck midnight and December 31st 1999 became January 1st 2000, we had little reason to believe that the good times would not simply continue rolling on.

September 11th 2001 – Al Qaeda strikes Twin Towers

It may seem something of a cliché to describe that fateful Autumn morning in New York when two passenger planes were hijacked and flown in to the twin towers of the World Trade Centre killing almost 3000 people, as a world-changing moment. It is true that in retrospect this horrific atrocity was one of many: London, Bali and Madrid still mourn their dead to this day. It is also arguable that it was far more a symptom than a cause of America’s obsession with the Middle East that manifested itself in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, it is impossible to deny that the sight of the towers that were once a quintessential symbol of American dominance and prosperity, bellowing with smoke and flames, will forever remain one of the most iconic images of this decade.

It was roughly 2pm London time that day and I had just sat down to my A-level politics class when my teacher ushered us into the staff room where the rest of her colleagues had assembled, oblivious to their teaching schedules, to stare at the gaping hole in the second tower. I really had no idea what I was looking at until the voice of the BBC news presenter started to slowly explain exactly what had happened. Some people failed to disguise their horror at the carnage and some made jokes, while most just stared blankly ahead. You couldn’t blame any of them – they had no idea how to react as simply nothing like this had ever happened before.

December 26th 2004 – Boxing Day tsunami

It is easy to focus purely on man’s battles with himself when writing up the history of a decade. Our relationship with nature, however, must not be overlooked especially as our leaders return empty-handed from Copenhagen. There are few better reminders of the tempestuousness of the natural world as the underwater earthquake that shook the earth on Boxing Day 2004. Measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale and lasting almost ten minutes, its epicentre off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean, it caused to entire planet to literally vibrate, generating tidal waves as high as 30m (100ft) and killing nearly 230,000 people in 11 separate countries.

Like many people across the UK, I was just waking up to Boxing Day morning after a relaxing Christmas with my family. The clips of holiday makers and local residents in Sri Lanka running for their lives away from the unstoppable tsunami dominated the news channels for the entire day. We sat transfixed to the television for most of that day, waiting for updates as the death tolls were being continually revised upwards. The severity of the earthquake clearly put a lot of things into perspective for many other people too as an almost instant fundraising appeal generated aid donations from states and people across the world totalling over $7bn. It was a fitting reminder of the benevolent human spirit that the festival we had all just been celebrating was meant to embody.

August 8th 2008 – Opening ceremony of Beijing Olympics

This might seem like a strange choice to some people, but like 9/11 it was not the event itself that made history, but rather what it signified about the way in which the world had changed. Needless to say it was an absolute spectacle, costing over $100m to organise and featuring no less than 15,000 performers. The games had been surrounded by controversy following the pacification of protests in Tibet with many human rights campaigners urging their respective leaders to boycott the opening ceremony. Ultimately, however, more world leaders turned up for the event than at any other Olympic Games with more than 100 heads of state in attendance.

I remember watching the games from the home of the Olympics, Greece, while enjoying a much needed summer holiday. I had been astonished by the public pressure on western leaders to boycott the opening ceremony only for each head of state to put their tails between their legs rather than risk offending their hosts. It was at this moment that China had finally arrived and taken its place on the world stage alongside the United States of America. Its acceptance in to the World Trade Organisation, a bastion of the liberal international economic order, seven years prior, had meant to bring China closer to the West. Far from it, this single ceremony made clear how China had instead brought the rest of the world closer to them.

Conclusion:

A word first to the events that didn’t make the cut: I know there are many I could have included, but did not. Some I left out simply because I know there are several other reviews of decade being written that would be more appropriate for subjects such as the Copenhagen climate change summit, swine flu and the global credit crisis. I could have talked about the hanging chads of the 2000 election and the even more remarkable election of Barack Obama in 2008. I did not because I was wary of making this short history too America-centric as tempting as it was. Also, the impact of the Obama administration, still in its infancy, is yet to be seen. The Iraq war was a hot contender, but its routes lay in the unfinished business of the first Gulf war in the 1990s. In any case, the Kosovo war was the first real example of the reach of American power and a determination to act unilaterally without UN approval.

So, how might we summarise the effect of the global events that defined the noughties? Crisis would be my word of choice because it doesn’t just mean a state of instability, tension and catastrophe, but one of sudden change. The end of the Cold War established the full reach of American power in the 1990s and its limitations in the 2000s. The rise of Al Qaeda brought home the dark side of globalisation as a diffuse but organised network of extremists succeeded where  fascist Germany and Communist Russia had failed, inflicting the first and deadliest attack on American soil in 60 years. In a decade that exposed the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the world’s only super-power, China exceeded all expectations, followed closely by India, shifting the global balance of power eastwards. Finally, the worst natural disaster in recorded history reminded the world of its extreme vulnerability to forces beyond its control as well as its capacity for collective action.