Poised as we are near the start of a new decade, our glance is fixed firmly forward. We throw goals and targets at 2030 like halfhearted spitballs we hope will stick. There is a feeling that the worst is simultaneously behind and before us. Rarely in the last century has the future promised such a bizarre blend of salvation and dread.
In moments like this, I tend instinctively to look back. I can’t help it – I take a deep mental breath, flip through the pages of my recollections, do a little reading, and try to decide how we got here. What might have improved? What might have worsened?
This time around, I was prompted by the headlines from Ethiopia: rebel Tigray forces slowly making their way to the capital, the war escalates to a broader, bloodier plain. It appears, at least at the moment, that a formerly stable country – with a Nobel-prize winning head-of-state – is poised to collapse. Upon further reflection, I realized that this didn’t feel as unusual as perhaps it should have.
So, let’s look back.
For many countries around the globe, the last decade was treacherous. Each year brought some new national catastrophe, caused by a unique combination of short-term shocks and long-term decay. And each national catastrophe seemed to carry its own dark significance.
Indeed, the decade is littered with failed states. Countries that now seem a ruin, whose institutions, social services, and international standing have collapsed.
Perhaps most infamously and dramatically, there’s Syria; once a relative success story in the Middle East, Syria has now become synonymous with civil war, the Islamic State, and the refugee crisis. Another product of the Arab Spring, Libya, has been similarly embroiled in internal division and war. Then Venezuela grabbed the headlines for a couple months, a case-study in economic disaster coupled with corrupt, unresponsive governance. Then Myanmar, with its coup and junta, and then Yemen, a center for humanitarian concern before the pandemic came along. Another Arab country, Lebanon, has slowly dissolved for over a year, in a situation tragically exacerbated by an explosion in the port of Beirut and crippling inflation. Afghanistan went from a hopeful story back into the terror of the Taliban. And now most recently, there’s Sudan (democratic government overthrown in a coup) and Ethiopia.
All this is not to say that these countries never had problems or conflicts before 2010. They all did. They all faced civil wars and destructive times. These places were never rich, flourishing liberal democracies. But they were once fairly stable and prosperous. They seemed ‘normal,’ as imperfect a word as that might be. Then something, or usually many things, went wrong. And while the destiny of each of these states is hardly sealed – certainly, countries can recover and rebuild just as fast as they fall – for the moment newspapers and editorials mention them only in nervous tones, sad expressions, and urgent warnings. Much worse than this, whole generations have faced suffering and hardship.
There’s a whole list of other countries that, while not failed states per say, show troubling signs of political turmoil and multifaceted crises. India, Turkey, and Russia are all examples of this, as they face farmers protests and building ethnic violence, a slide into autocracy and a failing economy, and deepening petro-based authoritarianism, respectively. And make no mistake, Western countries aren’t immune to turmoil. Although of an entirely different scale and severity, here too are troubling signs of a general weakening. The U.K has been rocked and roiled ever since Brexit, and after January 6th it’s hard to feel like the U.S is as vibrant and healthy as it used to be. But I suppose that’s a topic for another essay.
Wrapped up in all of this, of course, is COVID. The pandemic has brought on waves of crises and long-term damage we probably have yet to fathom. Add that on top of climate change, fast-paced technological change, and shifting geopolitical tectonics, and perhaps it’s no wonder that so many states have failed. So when books start to be written about the last decade, I think at least one will be titled: ‘The Age of Collapse.’ Certainly there are enough gloomy titles about our times already floating around. As only one example, ‘How Democracies Die’ by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky comes to mind.
What’s the point of all this? States have failed before, and they will continue to do so: why emphasize the fact?
The point, I think, is that the world is a precarious place. Systems and institutions are fragile, and hard-fought progress is apt to fall away. This has always been true; if we flip back through the pages of recent history there’s an even longer list of failure and collapse, whether its Rwanda or Yugoslavia, Columbia or Cambodia (see also Europe 1939-1945 and again in 1914-1918). But certainly in my brief lifetime, the principle that everything can go wrong seems more widely accepted and embraced than ever before.
Maybe, if nothing else, Syria, Lebanon, Venezuela, Ethiopia, and the like prove that things have changed far less than we may be tempted to believe. And maybe it’s possible for the world to get worse before it gets better.
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