Preparing for 2021

The writer, a Chevening scholar, studied International Journalism at the University of Sussex.

History will remember 2020 as one of the most consequential years that turned the world upside down. Never before has the foundations of the world been shaken as terribly and its vulnerabilities exposed as spectacularly as now. Some of the age-old assumptions that have marked our understanding of the globe were challenged and found to be wanting.

While the pandemic will continue to be the highlight of 2020, and rightly so, there are other issues of great import, a residue from the yesteryears that are equally capable of shaping the world in 2021.

The key question is whether those mandated to navigate the stormy waters and keep the ship steady are aware of the onerous responsibility placed on their shoulders. More importantly, it is fair to ask whether they have the vision and the will to eschew their narrow differences and work together to stop humanity from being consumed by a set of raging crises.

One of the greatest assumptions has been that liberal democracy – a system that was described as a sine qua non for stability and economic development – is the best thing to have happened to the world, particularly after the collapse of the USSR. The template of democracy was sanctified in a way that any country thought to be following another path was condemned to a future of ignominy, poverty and underdevelopment.

The capitalistic model of democracy was conveniently employed to shout down any voices of dissent questioning the efficacy of neoliberalism as a panacea of our socio-economic ills. Beneath the veneer of the profit-driven corporate greed evolved a shoddy welfare system to endow legitimacy on the greedy capitalistic enterprise.

Those working on expanding the reach of capitalism in the garb of the democratic project criminally used the power to attack countries, destroy civilisations and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people – from Afghanistan to the Middle East to Africa.

What is even more shameful is how they had the audacity to employ moral justifications to sell their sordid agendas, secure in the thought that they will continue to act with impunity since corporate media was in their pocket. Little did they know that nature abhors a vacuum.

The first major jolt to the system came in the form of the global recession in 2008. It highlighted the sick reality of a deep and unbridgeable divide between economic haves and have-nots away from the fantasy world projected on our TV screens and minds by the corporate media.

However, instead of addressing the systematic, structural flaws by way of a much-needed mid-course correction, the leaders of Western democracies injected a total of $3 trillion into the global economy to help it recover from the setback. The narrative around economic recovery, bailouts and stability was carefully woven to soothe the people incensed by the glaring criminality and predatory economic elites.

What the world is experiencing right now in the form of an unending sway of popular nationalism, spearheaded by the emergence of a new crop of right-wing populist leaders, has its origins in the policies in the run-up to and aftermath of the global economic crunch.

These leaders have effectively capitalized on the wide-ranging discontent to push through the narrative that the systems were gamed to benefit a tiny elite that is hand in glove with politicians and corporate media.

The resonance of this message is endorsed by the gradually narrowing space for centrist parties to hold on to their politically correct positions on a wide range of domestic and global issues.

Trump may have been voted out of power but the fact that he got millions of more votes than what he got in the presidential elections in 2016 speaks to the strong base of supporters whose unquestioned loyalty he commands. With Trumpism recognised as a fact of political life, the US will never be the same again, irrespective of the White House occupied by a Democratic president.

The surge in popular nationalism represents one of the most potent challenges to the idea of liberal democracy as well as the economic model that has so assiduously been sold as a natural corollary to it.

The year 2021 will be confronted with the global crisis of democracy and resultant retrenched freedoms. The way the system has been worked has chipped away at the confidence of the people at large. Popular disenchantment with it is pervasive and expressly articulated. This factor alone will considerably weigh in on the year 2021.

While Covid-19 has successfully made its way into 2021 with the second surge proving to be far more deadly than the previous one, it has imparted critical lessons to humanity in its search for answers to some of the fundamental questions plaguing its existence.

As the pandemic wreaked havoc – particularly in the developed countries – and brought the global economy to a grinding halt, it was described as an equaliser between the rich and the poor. The experience of grappling with the virus, however, busted this theory.

If anything the pandemic showed in crystal clear terms was how socio-economic inequality remains at the core of our world and shapes its scary reality. The lockdowns and other policy instruments adopted by the political leaderships to fight the contagion only deepened the inequality, pushing the poor back by decades.

The lockdowns also exposed global citizens to their inadequacies and imperfections. The idea that the immense material advancement on which humanity prided itself could run into the ground when faced with contagion as minuscule as a virus sent shivers down the spine. It also raised questions on the efficacy and effectiveness of modern-day education to prepare the future generations capable of facing an interregnum like the present one.

The year 2021 will continue to be characterized by the after-effects of the Covid pandemic whose full measure has yet to be grasped. The only glad tidings to come through has been the making of different versions of vaccines. The triumph of science must partly reinforce our faith in the bright future of mankind as well as its capacity to stand its ground in the face of the heaviest odds.

The vaccines that have begun to be rolled out hold a significant lesson. Our collective causes are best served through cooperation and the sharing of knowledge. The fact that the politics around the pandemic that was weaponised sought to slow down, if not hinder, the medical response, an act whose consequences would have been hugely fatal.

As the world cautiously welcomes the new year, the need for global cooperation cannot be emphasized enough. The era of cold wars is long past and any attempt to revive it will only plunge humanity into a deeper hole.

The year 2021 affords a rare window of opportunity to world leaders to look at the litany of crises afresh and pool their intellectual resources to rethink a rule-based international order. A big power rivalry to establish an individual leadership ascendancy on the globe is a non-starter, the failure of which already brought the world to its present predicaments.

A mindset steeped in the past is unable to explore the answers of the contemporary age. Let us hope that 2021 becomes the watershed year for fresh thinking on the state of the world we live in. Hello to 2021!

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Twitter: @Amanat222