Karl Marx said in 1852, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” We would all prefer a farce to a tragedy, so let us hope that Marx was right. But he has been wrong a few times in the past, so we must entertain the possibility that what awaits us is tragedy.
The “first time”, in this instance, was the 1930s, when the painfully slow recovery from a global financial crash led to political polarization, beggar-thy- neighbour trade wars, and the rise to power of anti-democratic, ultra-nationalist leaders in a number of countries. The consequences included the World War II, death camps, the first and only use of nuclear weapons, and 40 years of Cold War.
Well, we had our global financial crash in 2008, and the recovery has certainly been slow. Average incomes in many Western countries have still not recovered to pre-2008 levels, and the growth of nationalist and racist sentiment is evident in major countries like Britain (the Brexit vote), France (the rise of the National Front), and, above all, the United States of America (Trump).
The wave of non-violent democratic revolutions that transformed so many developing countries at the end of the Cold War ended with the failure of the Arab Spring, leaving a new dictatorship in Egypt and civil wars across the Middle East. In parts of Asia the process has even gone into reverse (military rule in Thailand, death squads run by populist, elected governments in the Philippines and Indonesia).
Authoritarian, ultra-nationalist governments hostile to the European Union have come to power in post-Communist Eastern Europe. And a trade war is brewing between the US and China no matter who wins the US elections in November.
You could add to the list of worries a new ruler in China (Xi Jinping) who is more autocratic than any other Chinese leader since Mao, and a Japanese pr
