16.7: Toward the Present

Climate change unquestionably plays a role in destabilizing politics, as extreme weather events undermine regional economies, lead to dearth or even famine, and cause mass migrations. In the United States, both the CIA and the leaders of the American armed forces have acknowledged that fact publicly, and in all likelihood those political disruptions will only grow in scale unless climate change is somehow held in check. Simultaneously, political crisis has been endemic across many world regions for reasons that are not necessarily linked to climate change. While Europe has suffered from economic and, to a lesser extent, political instability since the 1980s, that instability pales in comparison to the instability of other world regions.  In particular, the Middle East entered into a period of outright bloodshed and chaos as the twenty-first century began.  In turn, the shock waves of Middle Eastern conflict have reverberated around the globe, inspiring the growth of international terrorist groups on the one hand and racist and Islamophobic political parties on the other.

To cite just the most important examples, the US invasion of Iraq in 2002 inadvertently prompted a massive increase in recruitment for anti-western terrorist organizations (many of which drew from disaffected EU citizens of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry).  The Arab Spring of 2010 led to a brief moment of hope that new democracies might take the place of military dictatorships in countries like Libya, Egypt, and Syria, only to see authoritarian regimes or parties reassert control.  Syria in particular spiraled into a horrendously bloody civil war in 2010, prompting millions of Syrian civilians to flee the country.  Turkey, one of the most venerable democracies in the region since its foundation as a modern state in the aftermath of World War I, has seen its president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan steadily assert greater authority over the press and the judiciary.  The two other regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, carry on a proxy war in Yemen and fund rival paramilitary (often considered terrorist) groups across the region.  

In Europe, fleeing Middle Eastern (and to a lesser extent, African) refugees seeking the infinitely greater stability and opportunity available to them abroad have brought about a resurgence of far-right and, in many cases, openly neo-fascist politics.  While fascistic parties like France’s National Front have existed since the 1960s, they remained basically marginal and demonized for most of their history.  Since 2010, far right parties have grown steadily in importance, seeing their share of each country’s electorate increase as worries about the impact of immigration drives voters to embrace nativist, crypto-racist political messages.  Even some citizens who do not harbor openly racist views have come to be attracted to the new right, since mainstream political parties often seem to represent only the interests of out-of-touch social elites (again, Brexit serves as the starkest demonstration of voter resentment translating into a shocking political result).

While interpretations of events since the start of the twenty-first century will necessarily vary, what seems clear is that both the postwar consensus between center-left and center-right politics is all but a dead letter.  Likewise, fascism can no longer be considered a terrible historical error that is, fortunately, now dead and gone; it has lurched back onto the world stage.  A widespread sense of anger, disillusionment, and resentment haunts politics not just in Europe, but in much of the world.

This, however, is not an exceptional state of affairs from a historical perspective, nor is it cause for despair. History, western or otherwise, has been shaped by people who struggled for survival, for improvements in their lot in life, and in the name of concepts of justice and morality, all without the slightest assurance that their struggles would be successful, and all in historical circumstances that were not of their making. As the current generations in the process of creating history, we have the ability to shape it through our actions, for better or for worse.

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Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):

Margaret Thatcher - Public Domain

Mikhail Gorbachev - Creative Commons, RIA Novosti

EU Map - Creative Commons, CrazyPhunk

 

Climate Change Chart courtesy of NOAA

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