Every schoolboy knows that a week is a long time in politics – but we often fail to reflect on the truth in this truism. During the last fortnight, the United States has managed to formally extricate itself from two foreign wars; the European Union, however temporarily, has prepared a credible rescue package for its common currency; Tunisia has held a general election; Muammar Gaddafi has been killed – renewing hopes that the early promise of the Arab Spring may yet be vindicated; a relatively new civilian government in Myanmar has granted an amnesty to hundreds of political prisoners; the British prime minister has even announced new rules for that most hidebound of institutions: the English monarchy. Henceforth, first-born daughters can now inherit the throne and heirs can marry Roman Catholics without forfeiting their succession. Even the volatility of the financial markets – often the clearest verdicts in the courts of public opinion – seems to have settled on an optimistic upswing. History in all its confusion seems to be moving forward.
Yet most of this apparent progress comes with important caveats. In Iraq, the US made a virtue of necessity after failing to secure legal immunity for its forces; in Libya it succeeded largely because it ‘led from behind’ and allowed Britain and France to claim much of the credit – thereby allowing President Obama’s reflexive critics a few specious objections about his timidity (Romney spoke of the President’s “eloquently justified surrender of world leadership”); Gaddafi’s terror is certainly finished but most Libyans have known nothing except his tyranny, and the new Libya has no democratic institutions, is nearly bankrupt and must now come to terms with thousands of heavily armed former rebels who may not have the patience for democracy. Elsewhere in the region doubts abound. There is no clear endgame in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, and Egypt – for many the flagship of the new Middle East – has just been downgraded by Moody’s, partly out of concerns over “the continued unsettled political conditions and the uncertainty over the transition to a stable, civilian government.” In Europe the news is not much better. The euro’s rescue remains precarious and may falter if China is sceptical. In Myanmar scores of other political prisoners remain behind bars. Even in Britain, the changes to the centuries of tradition seem like a public relations effort more than anything else, at best only marginally relevant to questions of social and economic inequality raised by the recent riots.
From a different angle, there are good reasons to remain sceptical about the immediate future in all of these countries – in the US, especially, where a jobless recovery continues to haunt the Obama administration. Former Clintonites in the government know too well that the American public little notes nor long remembers successful military campaigns – higher taxes and a weak economy cost George H W Bush his presidency even though the elections followed hard on the heels of his victory in the first Gulf War. Meanwhile, contenders for the Republican nomination are outdoing each other to stay on the right side of the Tea Party’s angry populism. To date, the GOP front-runners have flaunted their mediocrity: Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, seems undaunted by his inability to articulate any complex thought, Mitt Romney speaks pure bureaucratese, and smiles evasively past his self-contradictions. The rest of the pack prides itself on childish plans for fences that will electrocute illegal immigrants, or tax codes that can be distilled into a few catchy numbers. Nearly everyone is proudly ignorant of anything beyond the American homeland – the pizza tycoon Herman Cain joked that he didn’t know, nor care to know, the name of the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” – a gaffe worthy of comparison with Senator McCain’s impish 2008 appearance at a public event, humming “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ song.
Endless news coverage tempts us to guess at patterns in the world, whether in the Middle East, the Eurozone or elsewhere. But despite the constant flow of information from these places, we know little more about the future than we did when Hegel first wrote his influential speculations on the course of history, noting that human actions often produce results “beyond that which they aim at and obtain” and that “something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.” These unpredictable side-effects, Hegel famously concluded, “can be called the cunning of reason.” Judging from the last month’s headlines, reason’s cunning is alive and well.
