Via Art Goldhammer, a new paper examining trends in public disorder across europe from 1919 to our own blessed unhappy time. Here’s the chart:
The authors explain their methodology: “We look at five different types of instability – anti-government demonstrations, riots, assassinations, general strikes, and attempted revolutions – in Europe over the period 1919-2009. The data comes from a large-scale international data collection (Banks 1994), and is based on an analysis of reporting in the New York Times. The individual indicators are then aggregated by summing them up for each country and year. This gives the variable called CHAOS. Figure 1 shows how it evolved over time since 1919, presenting the mean and the maximum. The interwar years show a high level of unrest, as does the immediate post-World War II era, and the period from 1970 to the early 1990s.”
Perhaps this is a flawed method. Nevertheless and at the risk of blundering into the realm of confirmation bias, note how quiet and peaceful the last twenty years have been. Unusually so, in fact. In other words the present crises – economic, political, moral – represent a return to some kind of unhappy normalcy. It’s the peace and prosperity of the past two decades that’s unusual, not the fears and problems caused and presented by recessionary times. If we’re unlucky – and we may be! – the post-Cold War dividend will come to be seen as some kind of misleading aberration during which bubble people and governments persuaded themselves that the good times would roll on for good. Naturally, this produced its own moments of hubris and perhaps invites a backlash against both liberalism and just about any kind of established authority even though for a long time many people had rarely had it anything like as good as they have done these past twenty years.
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