original to: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/roger-cohen-feeling-uneasy-about-the-future.html More in the serie Turning Points 2015: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/turning-points-editors-letter.html
Feeling Uneasy About the Future By ROGER COHEN December 4, 2014 New York has always been a pretty good barometer of the state of the world. Its fortunes rise and fall. It will never be as manicured like Paris, or as comfortable as London, or as beautiful as Rome, or as moneyed as Singapore. In good times it hums, in bad it's a jangling mess of police sirens. Over the past 40 years, I've known the city's moods: dangerous and secure, anxious and confident, subdued and ebullient. These days, the mercury seems to be dipping. The streets are edgier, more aggressive. I recently saw a slim, well-dressed man take a covert look around before stooping to pick a cigarette butt off the sidewalk. There's a lot of scavenging in garbage. Desperation may be quiet, or just crazed. The other morning, for no apparent reason, somebody pushed a man off a subway platform to his death under a D train. That sort of thing makes New Yorkers eye each other in a different way. Fear has crept back. Perhaps it is not rational to view the world today with renewed anxiety. The happy half of humankind in Asia is still in the midst of a period of growth and optimism, whatever the looming perils of China's rise. Hundreds of millions of Asians have money in their pockets for the first time. They feel the 21st century is theirs to inherit from the West; they work longer hours to make sure that happens. Their focus is growth, whatever it takes, wherever the resources for it are to be found. Singapore's Orchard Road, mall central, is a gaudy monument to the aspirational and acquisitive drives of a new Asian middle class. Narendra Modi's India is on the march, broom in hand, with a mantra of self-made industriousness. The clean-up is physical (the paper-deluged offices of Indian bureaucrats are a Modi target) and moral (corruption). One slogan doing the rounds is "toilets, not temples." Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, is an equally vigorous leader. The landmark agreement on carbon emissions he signed with President Barack Obama could finally pave the way to a global climate accord by 2015. By historical standards, this is still an era of exceptional peace, as the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I has reminded us. Medical breakthroughs are extending life; dying has become arduous. The empowering possibilities of technology link individuals in new ways. For many young people the squabbling of states and the posturing of politicians is little more than a sideshow to the borderless networks that count. Still, I trust my dipping New York barometer. People are angry and worried, with cause. Their pressured lives are not getting better. Fundamental injustices grow more acute. This clouds judgment because global affairs look like a scam put in place by the privileged. I have never felt more uneasy about the state of the world. The rule book has been torn up. Russia's annexation of Crimea, violating the Ukrainian borders Moscow had recognized in 1994, marked a turning point. How far President Vladimir Putin will go in his determination to prevent Ukraine from pursuing its aspirations for closer integration with the European economy and European law is unclear, but the war he has stirred up in the east of the country shows no sign of abating. The danger is real that the heavily armed forces deployed and orchestrated by the Kremlin will advance westward, perhaps even as far as Kiev. In that case, I do not expect an armed response from cowed Western powers, but I do expect near-panic in Baltic countries and parts of Eastern Europe. The credibility of NATO will become paper-thin. Continue reading the main story The response to Putin in Europe is no less worrying than these events themselves. The Russian leader basks in significant sympathy. The "Putinversteher," or folk who understand Putin, as the Germans put it, are driven by a variety of motives, among them anti-Americanism, anger at the European Union, and identification with Putin's critique of Western values and societies as spineless and depraved. Beneath all this lurks something much simpler. Many people are restive. Europe is in the economic doldrums. Putin carries a banner called resistance. Everything is upside-down, which is how the spinners of fascist fables in Moscow (including the one that holds that Ukraine is a hotbed of anti-Semitic ideologues) want them to be. Truth is the first victim of war. The abrupt emergence of the jihadi movement calling itself Islamic State on a wide swath of territory straddling the Syrian-Iraqi border has been another sign of fragmenting order. The hopes of the Arab Spring have evaporated. It has proved impossible, outside Tunisia, to move beyond the sterile confrontation of quasi-military dictatorship and Islamist movements of various stripes; and equally impossible to forge a post-sectarian citizenship in societies riven by religious and ethnic differences. There is no consensus in the Arab world on the place of political Islam, which is to say on the central question of whether power and laws derive from the people or from God. This has proved an insurmountable hurdle. Syria sounded the death knell for the hopes of Arab youth, which centered on forging more representative and inclusive societies. The Syrian uprising against a dictator morphed into a jihadi-incubating vacuum. Outside powers did their manipulative worst. President Obama announced early in the conflict that the Syrian despot, Bashar al-Assad, should step down. He had no plan to achieve that objective. There is a price for inaction as well as action. That is not a fashionable thing to say in a time of post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan exhaustion. It is no less true for that. The killers of Islamic State are Internet-savvy and, like Putin, have been able to incarnate resistance to something; to what exactly is unclear, but broadly speaking the movement has channeled Sunni anger at America's tilting of the established Middle Eastern order in a Shiite direction, and has come to embody resistance to Western ideas in general, and the "infidel" presence in the Middle East in particular. In England, France and Germany, among other European nations, the movement has been able to find recruits. This is another sign of ambient anger and frustration, often more acute among new immigrants. For the United States and the European nations that have battled ever since 9/11 to quash jihadi terrorist movements, the failure embodied in Islamic State's emergence is evident. Five beheadings of Western hostages have constituted a nightmarish humiliation. I do not think it is a coincidence that these developments have come at a time when the world's ordering power since 1945, the United States, is seen to be in retreat and the credibility of America has eroded. Obama did not help the American cause by committing in Syria to goals for which he lacked the means or by setting red lines he declined to uphold. These things get noticed in places like Moscow and Beijing. The world seems unstable, up for grabs, and susceptible to sparks. Putin and Xi and Modi are widely seen as more compelling leaders than Obama. They do not have the power Obama has, but they have an aura. The flux in global power has induced a dangerous moment. It is dangerous in part because the liberal democratic idea is under such pressure. That pressure comes in part from the authoritarian capitalist models in Russia and China. Capitalism, as Michael Ignatieff of Harvard University has noted, has proved to be politically promiscuous, with damaging consequences. But there are also strong internal pressures in Western democratic societies. These find their roots principally in growing inequality. The top 0.1 percent in the United States now holds about the same share of America's wealth as the bottom 90 percent, according to some estimates. The earnings of this bottom 90 percent, in inflation adjusted terms, fell between 2010 and 2013, while top incomes alone rose. Yet the taxation system favors the rich. As the Wall Street financier and New York Times op-ed writer Steven Rattner has pointed out, "Income taxes for the highest-earning Americans have fallen sharply, contributing meaningfully to the income inequality problem. In 1995, the 400 taxpayers with the biggest incomes paid an average of 30 percent in taxes; by 2009, the tax rate of those Americans had dropped to 20 percent." This trend must be unsustainable. It is reflected today in the streets of New York, and it informs the dissatisfaction of the American middle class. There has never before been a economic recovery that passed the middle class by entirely; this one has. To confront the challenges they face, Western societies in general and America in particular must recover their vigor and fairness, through tax and educational reform above all. The yearning for liberal democracy is not dead, as recent events in Hong Kong have demonstrated, but democracies are under pressure. A violent tide could course across a disordered world if the United States does not once again demonstrate its extraordinary capacity for reinvention and renewal. ........... Roger Cohen is a columnist for The New York Times. His family memoir, "The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family," will be published in January. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
