Larvatus Prodeo

Following up on my musings on the art of political prediction as the year turns, I’ve just noticed that Open Democracy has published forecasts by 48 of its distinguished contributors, which you can read here and here.

Ramin Jahanbegloo begins his piece with this striking remark:

That history might not repeat itself is one of the promises 2006 holds.

Jahanbegloo also picks up on one of the biggest stories of the last decade or so - the increasing demands for democratisation from below, a phenomenon that accelerated in the late 90s and is spectacularly instanced in the Latin American turn to the left. Jahanbegloo thinks that 2006 will see a continuation of pressures for democratisation from within civil society in the Middle East and internationally. Let’s hope so!

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett writes on predictions about predictions.

Torie Bosch at Slate looks at what American blogs are saying about the year in review and the year in prospect.

Update: Liam polls stoushers on the most likely events of 2006…

It’s that time of year again. In the pleasing absence of any horrendous stories like the Tsunami last year, the Australian media sinks into its holiday torpor (and pauses only to recycle no doubt long prepared paeans of praise to Kerry Packer), and commentary turns to reflection on 2005 and predictions for 2006. Personally, I miss the stories that used to feature in the tabloid press with astrologers’ tips - most seemed to feature predictions about Mother Theresa and Princess Diana, though none as far as I can recall picked the near coincidence of their deaths. Australian politics must be so tedious, or its reporting so personality driven, that columnists both at Fairfax and The Australian turn their attention to pointing out how they were right and everyone else was wrong. That’s not too difficult if you cite yourself and others selectively, I guess. I didn’t notice that any of the pundits picked the Howard Senate majority, an event you would have given very long odds on. The time scale of some of the commentary is amazingly narrow, with the assumption that the starting off point is - say - the events of the last month. Recently, I noticed a slight change in the polls seized on by the commentariat leading to numerous (and nearly identical) pronouncements that the public were coming round to acceptance of the IR laws. That’s almost certainly a premature call. Similarly, some of the longer term trends can be missed, as Michael Costello points out, lost in the pack mentality of the media and its seemingly infinite ability to respond to government spin. And what’s rarely remarked on is the underlying ways in which all our lives are changing. Surface froth and bubble, and the horse race, come first, and often without even the recognition that race callers have of its dynamism.

Prediction is inherently a risky business, because the future builds on itself incrementally, as it were. I’d have been totally gobsmacked if you told me in 1993 on the night of the Keating victory (ah, memories…) that 2006 would see the 10th year of John Howard’s reign. Similarly, I think most people watching the fall of the Eastern bloc states in 1989 would not have expected that a decade and a half later, war would have become perennial, if not eternal, and shrill voices of doom and civilisational collapse would haunt us daily. Even neo-cons like Francis Fukuyama caught the mood and decried the end to glorious narratives while triumphantly claiming history had reached its end in liberal democracy. This decade, yet to be given a satisfactory name, has had a very different feel to the 90s, when the big story was the putatively peaceful process of globalisation. Globalisation elides itself into Empire and War, and what does 2006 hold?

You tell us.

Elsewhere: A lot of the blogosphere is on hols, it would seem, but Anonymous Lefty doesn’t think 2005 was a fabbo year for all of us, and Andrew Bartlett links to a 2005 democracy quiz. Ms Fits worries about the predicted imminent demise of her liver, and has also noticed something about the newspapers, who’ve returned the compliment by way of an Age op/ed. Amanda has the good oil on gigs early in the new year.