It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters.The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalizing enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.
Maybe that long-heralded “end of the Washington consensus” is finally upon us.
Europe has always been a rather tenuous concept. A rump continent, Europe represented the barbarous hinterlands for the Greeks and Romans. The first use of the term “European” occurred in a chronicle describing the forces of Charles the Hammer that turned back the northward advance of Islam at the battle of Tours in 732. Long celebrated in Europe as a victory of civilization over barbarism, the Battle of Tours was, as historian David Levering Lewis reminds us in God’s Crucible actually the opposite: “the victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized, fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism, and hereditary aristocracy.”
On June 29, the Greek parliament ignored the huge protests in Syntagma Square and approved the austerity program. But the Greek movement that has emerged to challenge this unpopular loan package is not going away.
In four magisterial works, the historian Eric Hobsbawm divided 200 years of modern history into the Age of Revolution (1789-1848), the Age of Capital (1848-1875), the Age of Empire (1875-1914), and the Age of Extremes (1914-1991). The period after 1992 so far remains nameless. Let me rashly and prematurely propose a name for our era: the Age of Activism. Here’s a preliminary sketch for a history of the age in which we are currently immersed, as well as a diagnosis of where this activism is heading.
While the world’s attention is focused on the revolution in Egypt, street fighting in Libya, and the battle for Sana in Yemen, in democracy’s birthplace people are also taking to the streets, continuing to protest an austerity plan that many Greeks say will beggar them. On February 23, protesters conducted a 24-hour strike that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Athens.
Cafés are full in Athens, and droves of tourists still visit the Parthenon and go island-hopping in the fabled Aegean. But beneath the summery surface, there is confusion, anger, and despair as this country plunges into its worst economic crisis in decades.
