A volcanic decade in global politics ends amid deep unease about the world’s ability to rise to key 21st-century challenges. openDemocracy writers draw breath and look ahead by reflecting on three questions:

1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?

2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?

3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?

Their reflections and prognostications can be found here and here.

Reading through the responses, a number of common themes emerge. One is the rise of China and the end of a unipolar world (and in this context, it’s interesting to observe more evidence surfacing about the snubs Beijing has been giving Barack Obama). Associated with this theme is the end of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, the decline of effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and the rise of the anti-terror security state in the 2000s. Whatever the views of the ideologues of globalisation, it’s difficult not to conclude that the first decade of this century saw the state come back. While much could be written critical of the emergence of international human rights law and international co-ordination which was one of the important trends of the 90s, conversely urgent problems like climate change are insoluble without concerted world action (while the last years of the late decade showed that the global financial sector could be bailed out at all deliberate speed).

Here too, it might be germane to observe that the sort of authoritarian state led capitalism characteristic of the Chinese model has both its parallels and echoes in the West (as civil liberties decline and torture becomes an acceptable subject of public discourse) and that its rise challenges the 90s end of history/democratisation thesis that market activity brings civic virtue in its wake. For many of the writers, the 2000s were a somewhat dark decade, characterised by rising inequality. Notable is a focus on the practice of multinationals buying up huge swathes of agricultural land in developing countries (particularly in Africa); for instance the leasing of almost half Madagascar’s arable land by a South Korean corporation. This issue warrants more attention than it’s received. It’s in stark contrast with pronouncements such as the Millennium Goals, and symbolises the end of the discourse of development and the entrenchment of a core/periphery model in the global economy, aside from its obvious human and ecological implications.

There’s much to ponder here.

Interestingly, only a small number of contributors referred to the rise of social media and the dissemination of the internet as a key development of the 00s. That’s something I’ll take up presently in another post.

Elsewhere: Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

Update: Thread continues here.

Even when development and enlightenment stare them in the face, their instinct is to destroy them pretending to safeguard their honor, the mechanics of which supersede all else including a happy life of fulfillment and accomplishments.

Ostensibly, the writer, Farid Ghatry, is accusing Hamas and Hizbollah of being ruled by “instinct”, but it doesn’t take him long to elide those organisations with “Arabs” collectively:

Their poisonous rhetoric of violence feeding a frenzied mass of ignorant Arabs leaning on their extreme religion to honor their incapacity to compete with the West is destroying future generations of hopeful saviors of our culture and traditions.

I don’t want to discuss the specifics of this conflict in this post – this thread is still open for those wishing to do so. I do want to observe that peace appears to have few champions at the moment. Endless dissections of history and propaganda claims and counter-claims seem to leave debate stuck in the same morass – of friends and enemies, and the only logic of that cycle – on both sides – is a drive to extermination. It seems to me that since the Cold War ended, the peace movement has more or less disappeared from view – at least in this country – and there are very few voices prepared to prioritise humanitarianism and conflict resolution over picking sides.

There’s a huge irony here – in an age where humanitarian war and “the responsibility to protect” are both lodestones of political discourse – both options, of course, involving the application of violence. It would appear that the easiest thing to do for many is to demonise those who are seen as “unlike us” – and one of the many cards the cheerleaders for the Israeli state play is to invoke the claim that Israel is “the only advanced democracy in the region”. In fact, Israel is not a secular state (not that it’s a religious state either… but that’s part of the problem). And it’s rarely mentioned that it’s the only nuclear power in the region. But clearly one of the rhetorical effects such a claim has is to increase the identification we are supposed to have with one side of the conflict – or more properly, with the government, political class and military/intelligence apparatus of one side of the conflict, because there is certainly still a peace movement within Israel itself.

One of the difficulties humanitarian impulses have is the gap between abstraction and concrete situations. It’s actually inherent in the whole notion of humanitarian universalism because there’s always going to be a tension between a particular and a universal, and this is where philosophy itself stops being a parlour game or a learned discipline, and shows us something about the very messy world of political violence and making distinctions and judgements. One can rightly be sceptical about violence in the name of humanitarianism, and in fact we ought to be, because it can never be divorced from all the other calculations, strategies and investments which accompany any exercise of political power – and the use of force is the ultimate political decision.

But we can resist the dehumanisation of civilians caught up in conflict zones, or in zones which are subjected to cruel and inhumane blockadesm, or civilians targeted by rockets. They might not all be “like us”, but we need to recognise that humanity itself has ethical claims to make – on all of us. What we need to do is to give up the habit of accepting far too blithely the dehumanisation and thus alienation of others, and begin to look above the parapets of a tragic history and the particulars of political advantage being sought on both sides and refocus our efforts – and our imagination – on the one goal that should be truly paramount – peace itself.