We live in uncertain times,” a Swedish emergency readiness pamphlet last month warned every household. The world is a more dangerous place, it might have added, and advice on what to do in the event of war or unexpected crisis, even nuclear attack, also circulated to increasingly nervous citizens of the region from Finland to Denmark and Norway.
It reflects a scale of conflict and uncertainty not seen since the middle of the last century. Nearly three years after the Russian invasion, the remorseless, bloody attrition continues in Ukraine , with the latest Russian attacks coming on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure on Christmas Day. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has spoken of 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed and 370,000 wounded. The Russians are estimated to have suffered 600,000 dead and wounded.
This year Russian president Vladimir Putin lowered nuclear response threshholds and ratcheted up threats to those willing to help Kyiv. Elsewhere, others like India, Pakistan and China are expanding their nuclear arsenals, while South Korea, Germany, Japan and Ukraine are suggesting they need their own.
Putin has thrown North Korean troops into the battle. Long-range missile exchanges, some into Russia, have escalated, as have Russian-sourced hybrid attacks on European states, from fire bombings and assassinations to cyberattacks and election manipulation, to allegations of mysterious deep sea cable sabotage.
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Populations from the Baltics to Romania and Georgia, both subjects of Russian election interference, have become palpably more nervous, while Nato leaders – now including the Swedes and Finns – warn of western unpreparedness and urge sharp increases in military spending.
In part that is also a response to the continuing carnage and regional instability in the Middle East. Israel’s war in Gaza – with over 45,000 now dead -– continued relentlessly. Ceasefire talks, also involving the release of Israeli hostages, are again underway though prospects of success are uncertain. The conflict was extended to Lebanon in an invasion which both decapitated the powerful Hizbullah militia and dealt a crushing blow to Iran’s axis of resistance, enabling the welcome overthrow of Syria’s brutal Assad dictatorship.
And yet, while the success of the Islamist HTS may have delivered Israel a temporary measure of security, it has also injected a new element of uncertainty into western strategic calculations about the new regional balance. History shows that the toppling of dictators, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gadafy in Libya, is often followed by violent chaos rather than peace and stability.
That uncertainty in Ukraine and the Middle East has been compounded by the October re-election of Donald Trump, whose previous hints at disengagement from European defence and Nato, and pledge to sort Ukraine out in a day, has caused alarm among European allies. Will the US now push Kyiv to accept a permanent Russian occupation of up to a third of its territory?
Trump’s re-election, and the continued resilience of the sort of populism and ultranationalism he represents, also has wider echoes in this year when 60 countries, representing over half the world’s population, held elections. Polling by the Pew Research Centre across 34 countries revealed wide disillusionment (54 per cent) with how democracy is functioning, and the year saw right-wing populist parties now firmly embedded in Europe’s political landscape. In seven EU states they are now part of governments.
The shock to conventional analysis of US politics was, as US political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, that Trump represented a “challenge to the New Deal realignment of 1932 as the most consequential election of the past 100 years… Conservative power is consolidated in a way that makes the Biden administration look like the fluke, the last gasp of a dying order.”
Voter disillusionment meant a hard year for incumbents of whatever shade. In June, South Africa’s ANC failed to win a parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of apartheid. Japan’s long-serving LDP lost its majority. In the UK, Labour won a stonking majority after 14 years of Tory rule. In France, President Macron’s failed gamble on a general election has left him with an unmanageable parliament. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party won a third consecutive victory but were forced into a coalition government.
Right-wing populist parties, many of which campaigned on anti-immigration platforms, gained ground in this year’s European parliamentary elections. And Alternative for Germany became the first far-right political party to win a state election in Germany since World War II. There were important gains for the far right in France, Austria, Slovakia, Romania and the UK.
Twenty five years ago Fukuyama optimistically forecast that with the demise of communism we were seeing “the end of history” and the enduring triumph of liberal democracy. 2024, a year of terrible wars and the re-invigoration of populist politics, would suggest that writing history’s epitaph generally turns out of be premature. Democracy is under strain in a way not seen for many years.