A changing world - Warnings from failing societies

THOUGH replacing one profoundly conservative, middle of the road, Christian democrat, pro-business political party with another, as we will this week, may represent a shift of the tectonic plates in terms of domestic politics it hardly even registers as change when compared with the great upheavals around the world.

Authorities — as often as not dictatorships — in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Sudan and China are trying to hold back the demands of brutalised and impoverished populations.

Right across the Levant — to use that dusty old phrase — and even in the world’s second largest economy, a great mass of people are encouraging each other to confront the autocracies that control their lives and keep them in poverty.

They are testing the theories of Noble laureate nominee Gene Sharp who has inspired peaceful revolution around the world. His core argument is that dictatorships’ power depends on the willing obedience of the people they govern — and that if the people decide to withhold consent, regimes will crumble and dictators flee to take comfort in their Swiss bank accounts. Hundreds of lives have been lost testing Sharp’s theory and many more will be lost before conclusions are reached.

Undoubtedly each bloody outrage committed to try to extend Col Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year dictatorship, and others like it, will provoke protest in the West. These, though justified, will be undermined by hypocrisy as Gaddafi has been a tyrant and supporter of terrorism for decades but our love of his oil made it easier to pretend he was something other than an unhinged tribal warlord made powerful and dangerous by huge oil revenues. It is ironic that as his grip on power slips away the descendents of the terrorists he armed to challenge our democracy will, we are warned, record their greatest electoral success in modern times later this week.

Already these huge upheavals are having an impact around Europe, especially along the continent’s southernmost shores. EU foreign ministers are holding crisis talks about illegal migration from North Africa. More than 5,000 Tunisian refugees arrived at the Italian island of Lampedusa in the past week.

If population predictions are even close to the mark then immigration — the flight from poverty — will be an issue for Europe for the foreseeable future. The UN predicts global population will reach seven billion this year and nine billion in three decades. Just this weekend the American Association for the Advancement of Science was told that “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000”. The scale of this challenge cannot be underestimated.

Recognising potential for chaos even here Ireland’s Catholic bishops warned yesterday violence could erupt “if wounds generated by the economic crisis are allowed to fester”.

In the last days of an election campaign our focus is naturally inward but if we look at the turmoil around the world we get a glimpse of what happens if societies fail. In that context it is ever more obvious that the next Government cannot try to remake the past but that it must focus on building a new Ireland. In the face of this it is hard to understand how Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil can sustain the vanity that suggests they have differences so deep that co-operation is impossible.