Looters bashing shop windows, gangsters burning down buildings, police running around madly to control the chaos, life coming to a standstill; in any given quiz, this scene would get the answer of being in Karachi or Damascus or Benghazi. However, the shocking answer is Tottenham, London and Birmingham. These scenes are reflective of the changing balance of socio political dynamics in the world. After a century of being the icons of affluence, prosperity and peace, the West is struggling to keep up with its image of being the disciplined and civilised world looked up to by struggling third world societies. The recent spurts of unrest in Europe are a subtle change in the way the new world order is going to be reordered in the future. Whether third world countries are positioning themselves to take advantage of this shifting balance is a question that still needs to be answered individually by countries that are contending to take up positions that may soon become vacant in the global power standing.
As is usually the case, it always starts with the economy. Europe, till recently, was the staunch second in line to the US in terms of economic policies and political support. Whether it was imposing sanctions on Iran or Iraq or it was the war in Afghanistan, the UK and Germany were always hand in hand with the White House’s action planning. However, the recession changed all that. As the financial sector of both powerhouses fell, the economic might that had given them this military audaciousness also became open to criticism both at home and abroad. While the US reels under a trillion dollar debt, the European Union (EU) is finding it very costly to sponsor country after country on the verge of bankruptcy, as part of a European bail out programme. The economic malaise is like a virus eating up a majority of economies. According to a recent analysis, the EU economy has shrunk for the first time since it united its currency in 1999 and the signs are all discouraging. The classic recession case will not only affect the 320 million consumer spending but, since they are interdependent for trade and half their exports are bought by each other, which amounts to 6.5 trillion Pounds, the prospects of even more unemployment are rife and real. Normally, the union’s big brothers would have enough reserves to rescue the smaller ones but the scary picture is that Germany, France and Italy themselves are trying to bolster up their own businesses and are thus not capable of pulling others out of their more dire straits. The typical catch-22 of lowering interest rates and losing control over inflation is rearing its ugly head to put fiscal and monetary policies into a quandary. Germany, though fittest of them all, is dependent on American markets for its exports and trouble in the US means trouble in Germany. France has been lax in its fiscal spending and is now finding it difficult to postpone its belt tightening to save its economy from getting worse. Italy is almost in intensive care and is asking for emergency treatment from its rescue team in the Eurozone — not to forget the already admitted patients in the ICU, i.e. Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland. With such economic distress in Europe, the public, which was not used to being passed on such heavy burdens and was unaccustomed to austerity, was bound to react.
React they did. It started with protests against an IMF prescription of cutting benefits in Spain through some organised protests but became more pronounced in the UK as the coalition government tried to make their citizens fall in line with the phenomenon of a cut in benefits and concessions. The recent riots that were triggered off by a confrontation between the police and a man called Duggan, who was allegedly shot down by the police unnecessarily, are not just a reflection of confrontation taken too far by a lack of effective strategy by the police, but was more of an eruption of socio-economic issues boiling beneath the surface for quite some time in the UK. The unrest over the student fees increase was the reflection of a society that had gotten used to a government not taking proactive measures when the going was good. Over a period of time, the variance between the rich and poor has also increased and this inequity has unbalanced society. The rich 10 percent are richer than the poor on a scale of 100 percent, which has created the same divide and resentment we experience in less developed countries, where the middle class is nonexistent and the poor revolt against the inequity in society.
Aside from the economic factors, social factors have had a role to play in this breakdown of law and order. The family structure in Britain has been under great stress of indiscipline and disorientation. The UK has the highest number of teenage pregnancies in the world. If girls are having babies at such a young age, without proper family units to take care of the mental and social growth of children, it is but natural that the children of such single mothers are bound to have serious social disabilities and a strong tendency for violence and disorder. This was substantiated by the fact that some looters in the current unrest belonged to rich families. Thus it was not just economic disparity but lack of proper growth and development for children that have created a generation of youth that has attention deficit disorders and will indulge in irrational behaviour that cannot be logically explained.
This is a real turning point in the history of the world. For the last century or so our role model was the West with its capitalistic consumer spending economies and societies based on freedom and equality. However, the recent past has seen these societies struggle with reining in their exaggerated interpretation of what freedom means. Any society that goes overboard is likely to find itself on the edge. What the Chinese and Russians discovered earlier in the last century with their excessive model of communism, the West has started discovering with its extravagant model of consumerism. The West now needs to take a few lessons from the East and thereby save themselves from being another era in history where their own lack of self-control made them lose control over the world.
The writer is a consultant and can be reached at [email protected]