What surprises does the world have in store for us in 2012? Judging from the last 12 months we might well be in for another bumpy ride. But we have seen so many remarkable twists and turns that we have now become almost desensitised to both the pace and sheer bizarreness of recent change. The extraordinary has become ordinary.

As I write this, the eurozone fiasco and the pending banking crisis continue to dominate the headlines, even though the public is totally fatigued by a situation that economically they struggle to understand and politically makes them despair. In the US, many people are now too despondent to watch television news. A few weeks before he died, Steve Jobs’ Apple Corporation had greater cash resources than the federal government, simultaneously a tribute to Jobs’ commercial genius and an indictment of a political system falling into disrepute.

Western liberal democracy seems to be a tarnished brand given the economic woes and anaemic political response on both sides of the Atlantic. But ironically in a year when large numbers of people in the West have become almost terminally frustrated by their system of government, huge numbers of people in other parts of the world have risked – and given – their lives to rid themselves of incompetent autocracies. [Read more…]