The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Review of the decade
Decades matter. For all that they logically ought not to, because human events do not move in neat 10-year cycles, they do affect the way we think about the past. For all the clichés flung up by them – the ‘Roaring’ Twenties, ‘Swinging’ Sixties and so on – we tend to measure our history (and often our own lives) in decades. So what will people make of the one now ending, even centuries into the future?
The fact that we have not yet decided even what to call this last decade – the Twentytens? The Twentyteens? – implies that our view of it is still malleable. Perhaps the extent to which leaps in technology have dominated means that it could be nicknamed the Digital Decade. Of course, digitisation and mobile devices existed beforehand, but they really came of age between 2010 and 2019, profoundly affecting almost every aspect of global life, for better and for worse.
The previous decade – the 2000s, sometimes tweely called ‘the Noughties’ – was dominated by the 9/11 attacks that took place only nine months into 2001, and the long bloody conflict with fundamentalist Islamicist totalitarian terrorism that resulted. The 2010s confirmed the predictions of those who said at the time of the Twin Towers’ collapse that this would be a generational struggle, rather than just some kind of supercharged police action.
This last decade was neatly bookended by two spectacular American raids against the enemy’s leaders: the one that killed the head of al-qaeda, Osama bin Laden, on 2 May 2011, and the one that despatched the Isil leader, Abu Bakr al-baghdadi, on 26 October 2019. Despite these welcome victories, and the destruction of the Isil empire in the Middle
East, the decade saw a seemingly endless string of monstrous outrages, including the shooting of Malala Yousafzai by the Taliban in October 2012, the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in May 2013, President Assad’s sarin attack that killed around 1,400 people in a Damascus suburb in August 2013, the mass kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram in April 2014, the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015 and the Bataclan massacre that November, and the Manchester Arena suicide bombing in May 2017.
There have been moments in the past decade when it has almost seemed that the Enlightenment itself – the late-18th-century movement that gave us the concepts of reason, progress, liberalism, logic, and ultimately democracy – has been in full retreat. The internet has brought dangerous conspiracy theories that are believed by huge numbers of people; anti-semitism
(which the Enlightenment abhorred) has been embraced by growing numbers in Eastern Europe as well as experiencing a resurgence in Britain.
The decision by President Barack Obama to withdraw US forces from Iraq in October 2011, and then not to punish Assad for overstepping the ‘red line’ over the use of chemical weapons in Syria in August 2013, sent a clear message to President Vladimir Putin of Russia that suddenly, for the first time since Henry Kissinger forced them out of the Middle East in the 1970s, the Russians could flood back into the region. The House of Commons facilitated this in August 2013 by a vote of 285 to 272 against the British government’s antiassad plans for Syria.
In his poem entitled September 1, 1939, WH Auden wrote of the 1930s, ‘As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade/ Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth.’ The West’s retreat in 2013 led directly to the exodus of millions of refugees from Syria and the wider region, which in turn led to populism rearing its head in southern and Eastern Europe as populations attempted to protect their national characteristics and ways of life from the massive influx.
The election of the undeniably oafish
Donald Trump to the White House in November 2016 was another step back from the kind of Enlightenment dreamt of by the 18th-century philosophers, but he has ultimately acted like most Republican presidents have in the past, while sounding like no one who has ever filled that role before.
There were good things about the decade, too. We came closer than ever before to eradicating polio, which will hopefully soon be the first disease to be wiped from the globe since smallpox in 1980. No two first-rank countries went to war with each other; and everyone would far prefer to have lived in 2010-19 than in 1910-19. For all the terrorist atrocities mentioned above, apparently fewer people died violently than in any previous decade in history. Even the seemingly inexorable rise of
China has been managed peacefully so far, unless you are one of the unimaginably brave democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
The House of Windsor started the decade extremely well, with Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton in April 2011 and the Queen’s successful Diamond Jubilee the following February (which was celebrated in June). On 22 July 2013, the Windsor line was secured for another generation by the birth of Prince George of Cambridge. May 2018 saw the family embracing diversity when Prince Harry married Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle.
Yet tragically the decade ends with the humiliating spectacle of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, being forced to resign from public life for failing to show any sympathy with the victims of his former friend, the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, from whom he had also failed to distance himself even after details of his crimes had emerged in court.
At the end of a decade which had seen the emergence of Jimmy Savile’s crimes in late 2012, the rape allegations made against Harvey Weinstein (which he denies), the rise of #Metoo, and any number of male celebrities brought down by sexual-misconduct allegations, it was truly extraordinary that Prince Andrew should have so misjudged his answers in a TV interview with the BBC’S Emily Maitlis. The events of the decade have meant that men can no longer treat women in the way that they have for centuries, so perhaps the gentility envisaged by the Enlightenment might make a welcome comeback.
The decade saw the deaths of political giants – Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 and Nelson Mandela that December, among them – but few leaders seem to have been made from the same mould today. This might prove a danger in the new decade we are entering, for although history does not repeat itself, occasionally it can echo and rhyme. ‘Leadership in War’, by Andrew Roberts, is out now