Tick-tick-tick--click! Tick-tick-tick--click! Tick-tick-tick--click!
Imagine you're living in a major European city in the summer of 1914. Paris, Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia - it doesn't really matter which one. How would you react to news about the Archduke's assassination? Would you immediately start preparing for the coming war, or would you keep going about your daily life as usual? It seems counter-intuitive now, based on how inevitable World War I looks in hindsight, but at the time, a lot of people weren't concerned about the assassination setting in motion the events it did - partially because there had already been a handful of crises already, and they ultimately ended civilly, without a larger war breaking out.
* In 1908, Austria-Hungary annexed part of Bosnia, Russia then menaced Austria-Hungary, and Germany menaced Russia in response.
Tick-tick-tick--click!
* In 1912, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia teamed up to acquire territory from the Ottoman Empire.
Tick-tick-tick--click!
* In 1913, Serbia and Greece turned on their former ally Bulgaria, in a dispute over the spoils of their victory from the previous year.
Tick-tick-tick--click!
* Then, in 1914. . .tick-tick-tick--BANG!
Treating the Archduke's assassination as an unimportant event seems more understandable now, doesn't it? That's the tricky thing about historically significant events: you usually don't know which ones will end up being minor tremors and which ones will blow up into unmanageable crises until later. Maybe much later. And even when times are uneventful and dull, there are always multiple parts of the system at risk of careening out of control. Think of it like driving an old, high-mileage car. It's been through a lot of wear-and-tear, so because of its advanced age, there are multiple potential points of failure. A belt at risk of snapping, a frayed wire, a leaky gasket. Every time you drive it somewhere, you're adding stress to an already strained system.
Nations are like that. There are countless moving pieces, and at any given time, one of them could break down with catastrophic consequences. A crop failure. A terrorist attack. A natural disaster. A financial collapse. There's a constant undercurrent of chaos flowing through a seemingly calm and orderly facade. So it's natural for people to ignore or downplay the potential for chaos constantly unfolding around them. The people who can't or won't exhaust themselves, mentally and emotionally. (They also irritate everyone around them with their constant "The end is nigh" pronouncements - or so I'm told.) There's a danger in that complacency, though. It leads people to assume that because they survived a past crisis, they will also survive the current one.
We're living in one of those uncertain moments right now. Right-wing authoritarianism is on the rise multiple areas throughout the world. Brazil just elected a far-right politician as president. In Germany, a far-right movement is gaining popularity, and Angela Merkel's retirement signals an uncertain future. There's also a far-right resurgence in other parts of Europe. And America, which has long held the title of "Leader of the Free World," is seeing its democratic institutions being eroded from within. Will this be a temporary uptick, or will it lead to a long-term erosion of democracy? Will the international order that has been responsible for over seventy years of relative peace endure, or will we call these "the inter-war years" someday? We can't know for sure, because we're in the middle of these events. But there's no doubt that the storm clouds are gathering.
Tick-tick-tick. . .
