As December is coming to an end, many columnists switch to a summing-up mode. I'm no exception. What kind of a year was 2006? For individuals, it no doubt varied. People marry, graduate, fall off ladders, win the lottery. Each year is a curse for some, a blessing for others and a bore for most. But what was 2006 like for the world?
Was it decisive? Predictive? Unfathomable? Uneventful? Did it foretell the 21st century as much as, say, 1906 foretold the 20th century, or 1806 the 19th?
1806 was certainly a predictive year (at least with the benefit of hindsight). It projected the future in miniature -- or even writ large when, for instance, on Jan. 10, the Dutch in Cape Town surrendered and the lands around the Cape of Good Hope became a British colony. Or when the Indian sepoys (native soldiers) first mutinied against the British East India Company (July 10). Or when the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist with the abdication of Francis II (Aug. 6) and even more when, having defeated the Prussian army at Jena, Napoleon's French forces entered Berlin (Oct. 24). And perhaps most tellingly when John Stuart Mill was born on May 20 -- though, admittedly, the baby cunningly hid his intentions and showed no sign he would grow up to be liberalism's leading philosopher.
1806 forecast the 1800s well. The 19th century would see the rise of Western industrial societies, the ascension of the empire on which the sun never set -- the British, that is -- along with the flowering of classical liberalism. It would also see the first stirrings of nationalism and anti-colonialism, forces that would eventually challenge the supremacy of the liberal-imperial-industrial West. The 19th was to be the century of Big Power rivalry, with the fading Ottoman and the rising American, Asian and Central-European powers joining the great Anglo-Franco-Russo-Teutonic contest for world domination. By 1806, at the high noon of the Napoleonic wars, the handwriting was on the wall.
A century later, things weren't as clear. Although 1906 was the year in which the eventual head clerk of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was born (on March 19), the coming seismic events in history were only hinted at in the reverse symbolism of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. On April 7, Vesuvius devastated Naples, and 11 days later San Francisco came close to being wiped off the map by an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale. The century of man-made catastrophes -- two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the atom bomb -- was ushered in by a series of natural disasters. Human folly, prejudice, anti-Semitism seemed, if anything, to be diminishing in the West: Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer falsely accused of treason and wrongly convicted by a French military tribunal in 1899, was exonerated and returned to his former rank in the French army on July 12, 1906.
The glitter, enlightenment and tolerance of the laid-back Edwardian era with which the 20th century began, soon gave way to the frenzy, hate and war-hysteria of the period that followed. 1906 would have defied a pundit trying to predict the news of 1914, let alone those of 1939. The year 1806 might have actually provided a better vantage point from which to glimpse the events of the distant future.
To paraphrase the poet Shelley, if the French are here, can the Germans be far behind? Once a Gallic conqueror's armies enter Berlin, as Napoleon's did in 1806, how long would it be before a Teutonic conqueror's armies enter Paris? The answer turned out to be 134 years: Hitler's forces marched into Paris on July 14, 1940. The panzers rumbled in from the northeast, past the Arc de Triomphe. "The next morning we got up to a city," reported the BBC's Edward Ward, one of the last three British journalists to file a dispatch from Paris, "that was the city of the dead." The occupation of Paris might have been easier to foresee in 1806 than in 1906. This is one reason summarizing the events of 2006 doesn't necessarily fill me with foreboding.
Yes, the United States may have dropped the ball in Iraq; and yes, Israel may have done the same thing in Lebanon. Yes, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmandinejad, did confirm that his rabid theocracy had successfully produced a small quantity of enriched uranium (April 11) and yes, enriched uranium is one of the ingredients of nuclear devices, and yes, President Ahmandinejad did then convene a conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran (Dec. 11). Yes, Kim Jong-il, the mad-dog dictator of North Korea's dysfunctional tyranny, in addition to possibly possessing a nuclear device or two himself, did test fire a long-range missile (July 5) and scuttled disarmament talks only yesterday. All this is true. But it's also true that the world seemed stable in 1906 when it was teetering on the edge, and out of control in 1806 when it was looking forward to a solid run of progress. Ahmandinejad is mortal, as is Kim Jong-il, and we have no idea who among the newborns of 2006 may be the next John Stuart Mill.
© 2006 George Jonas
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