The Penguin History of the World

This interconnectivity of contemporary history became very visible in the spring of 2011, when massive changes in the Arab world suddenly got under way. As do most great revolutions, this one began with a small event, but one that was meaningful to millions. In Sidi Bouzid, a small Tunisian town on the edge of the desert, a young vegetable seller reacted in despair against the local authorities having confiscated his cart and slapped him when he went to protest. He set himself on fire outside the governor’s office. Mohamed Bouazizi’s terrible death caused demonstrations all over town. They then spread to other towns. By the end of January Tunisia’s dictator, who had ruled for twenty-three years, had fled into exile, and the people who chased him out set about introducing democratic reforms of a kind the Arab world had never seen before.

The Arab Spring, as it was called, turned into a collective protest against dictatorship, human rights’ violations, corruption, economic decline, youth unemployment and widespread poverty all over the Arab world. The way it started was telling; this was first and foremost a protest against the indignity of the lives of the young. Its weapon was mainly peaceful protest, at least at first. But when dictators resisted change, rebellions broke out. In Egypt, the most populous Arab state and seen by many Arabs as the centre of their culture, President Mubarak was removed from power in February 2011, after having ruled for thirty years, by young people occupying the central square in Cairo. The changes seemed to go on and on. In Yemen the president was forced to resign. In Morocco and Jordan the kings agreed to the gradual introduction of full democracy. And in Libya the longest-serving dictator of all, Muammar Gaddafi, misjudged the public mood to such an extent that he was not only driven from power, but hunted down and killed in October.

The latter change, in Libya, only happened after months of fighting, and after NATO had intervened on the side of the rebels. The intervention was welcomed not only by most Libyans, but requested by the Arab League. Nothing could be more telling for how things were about to change: after a decade of worrying about Islamism in all its forms, the West intervened in Libya to protect local rebels – among them many who had an Islamist background – from a dictator who, belatedly, in his most lucid moments had made a point of co-operating with the West against ‘terrorists’. As President Obama wound down the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (not least because the United States could no longer afford them), the whole political spectre of the Muslim world seemed to be changing. Bin Laden, the head of the terrorist group behind the 11 September attacks, was shot in an American military operation in Pakistan in May 2011, while millions of young Muslims were in the streets clamouring for democracy and respect for the individual. History sometimes moves in ways that are very hard to foresee.

But some problems are even more intractable than stagnation in the Arab world. In Haiti, on the Caribbean island where Columbus created the first European settlement in the Americas, there was also a devastating earthquake, in 2010, which destroyed much of the capital and the regions around it. About a quarter of a million people were killed. But, unlike in Japan, the recovery efforts provided little relief for the Haitian population, in spite of the near $2,000 million donated by American relief organizations alone. While the earthquake and its aftermath brought Haiti to the top of international news reports for the first time, its problems are not new. The country is the poorest in the western hemisphere, with a GDP per capita of US $667. Most of its élite prefers to spend its time in the United States, less than two hours’ flying time away, where per capita GDP is $47,600. The ticket, economy class, costs about $300, roughly half the average annual wage in Haiti.