First of all, I'd hardly consider myself a raging leftie, but only as modestly left-leaning. Just because I think young-earth creationists and climate change deniers are lunatics and that George Bush's invasion of Iraq was misguided and at least partially based on lies doesn't make me a member of the socialist alliance. I'd say the road to a fairer world is primarily through electoral success with the odd protest along the way rather than violent revolution. This is evidently the core of most modern leftist movements in developed countries at least. The right is, despite everything, quite similar. Sure they sometimes run a slicker propaganda machine (cough 'Fox News' cough) and the odd Norwegian Christian fundamentalist might go on a rampage, but neither side differs too wildly on their political methods. Overall violence is rare and the public discoure, however vitriolic, is generally decent.
The developing world is sometimes dramatically different. The recent Arab Spring has a definite populist tone. From Tripoli to Damascus people have called for the overthrow of brutal, often decades-old totalitarian regimes. The situation is of course complicated and varies by country, some of those regimes have long been backed by the US (Egypt) or are the result of earlier 'populist' and 'anti-western' revolutions (Libya) but every Arab country that has seen violent protests and civil wars of late has been fuelld by people power. The idea of 'the people' rising up against a dictator to create a newfound democracy is of course brilliant, but often carries a lot of baggage which can take generations of progressive change to eliminate. Even the founding fathers of the United States, who fought against King George III with all the passion of Libya's tribes and Islamists against Muammar Gaddafi, kept the draconian institution of slavery in their newfound country and more than a century would pass before women and ethnic minorities would attain equal rights, such as suffrage, with the rich, white, racist, tax-evading old men who founded America. One must not expect the Arabs to embrace democracy overnight, it took Europe two world wars and half a millenium to get it only kinda right. The Arabs haven't really done too bad a job so far when you think about it.
There was a time when the 'developed' countries of the world went though their own, and often far bloodier, periods of violent revolution. These have occurred from both the left and the right. The English Civil War in the 17th century would have to be one of the earliest examples, when the Parliament won the penultimate battle with the English Monarchy after centuries of power struggles. America and France were among several countries who endured similar revolutions in the late 18th century. By the beginning of the twentieth it looked like democracy was the way of the future. The world's most affluent countries were all relatively democratic and liberal (Britain, France, the US) or getting there (Germany, Italy) while Europe and Asia's old monarchies were in various states of decline (Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Russia, China). However, democracy came too late to save Europe's masses from the meat-grinder that was warfare following the industrial revolution. The sense of superiority European leaders inherited from centuries of colonial conquests was to be their undoing.
The aftermath of WW1 shattered the old imperial order. The Imperial governments of Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary and Turkey collapsed and by 1920 it has been said that if you stood on the French border with Germany and looked east, the next country you'd see that was functioning effectively was Japan. Even in the more liberal west huge changes were brought about, most European Nations as well as the US gave women the vote after the war and talk of 'empire' became taboo where it had not just been excepted, but downright expected, a few years before. Nearly every country in the world took a dramatic turn to the left and nowhere was this shift more dramatic than in the old Russian Empire, which collapsed into five years of brutal fighting between the Communist 'Red Army' and the most conservative and disparate 'White Army' and its western backers, before it would be reformed in the 1920s as the Soviet Union. The trenches of the eastern front had instilled in much of the Russian populist a sincere anti-capitalist fanaticism that makes Fox New's inherent bias look genuinely 'fair and balanced'. In such a climate democracy, the best hope for populist revolutions, never stood a chance against such power-hungry individuals as Joseph Stalin.
Not everywhere was this shift to the left permanent, it was often made fleeting by anti-communist movements that had arisen out of the ashes of the old Imperialist regimes. In Italy Benito Mussolini's fascists soon became that Kingdom's 'saviours' when they, with the backing of Italy's elite, kicked out the Communists in the 1920s despite the latter movement's widespread support. This would later contribute to the Italian military's low morale and abysmal performance during WW2. Spain underwent a similar civil war in the 1930s, and Francisco Franco's wise decision to keep Spain out of WW2 kept his regime alive well into the 1970s. Only in Germany were the old imperialist dreams so successfully reawakened by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. The lessons of the First World War, argued Hitler so passionately, were not that Imperialism was a bad idea but that a lack of Nationalist pride on the part of the German people, especially those 'vile Jews' and other untermenschen, had led to disaster. He rapidly prepared Germany's second bid for superpower status. Japan, also a rising industrial power, had similiar ambitions and a not so dissimilar worldview. Other factors such as the high unemployment and despair of the Great Depression only heightened global tensions further.
Thus, the stage for the Second World War was set. Whereas the first had been basically an imperialist struggle, a markedly right-wing affair declared and waged by rival, affluent power brokers and fought by the poor and working class from many nations, the second was fought along very different ideological lines. Instead of Imperial Germany in 1914 being scarcely different from the somewhat more democratic British Empire or poorer Tsarist Russia, the three countries by 1939 were ruled by radically different regimes whose power extended from fundamentally different ideologies and worldviews. The western world was basically politically centrist, a mix of corporate dominance, popular elections, military-industrial complexes and universal suffrage and education. Fascist regimes such as Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain leaned dramatically to the right, mocking the weaknesses of democracies and openly calling for the extermination, rather than the empowering, of the 'weaker' individuals of society. The Soviet Union, and later its communist acolytes around the world, from China to Cuba, leaned dramatically to the left calling for an end to the old Bourgeois system and a new world order emphasizing cooperation over virtually all forms of competition.
The Fascists had learned nothing from the First World War, and it would take the utter devastation of their homelands in the second to curb the more brutal political aspirations of Nationalism, racism, Imperialism and Colonialism once and, hopefully, for all. The Communists, blinded by the horror of the war to the importance of freedom alongside equality, had initially learned their lessons too well. Their social engineering and even more so their political repression in pursuit of their ideology would devastate the lives of millions over the next half century. Meanwhile the west, for all its flaws and eccentricities, had taken a much wiser course, and usually managed throughout the 20th century to navigate the narrow political path between blatant right-wing nationalism and full-blown left-wing socialism, something largely made possible by their relatively free and fair democratic systems.
The more recent political landscape of the 21st century seems harder to read, perhaps because we currently lack the obvious benefit of hindsight. The western world has in some ways moved further to the left. Increased spending on social programs, from public education to universal healthcare, social security to environmental preservation, indicates a continuing shift to the left. However the growing power of corporate interests and the widening divide between rich and poor evidences a shift back to the right. Only a few years after the collapse of most die-hard, supposedly left-wing governments with the dissolution of the Warsaw pact in 1991, a new generation of political polarisation, with growing extremes on both the left and right, seems to be emerging.
The current global financial crisis has certainly accelerated this process and curbed the growth of democracy over the past few years. Like the great depression in the 1930s, the economic turmoil of the 2010s may be looked back upon as one of the catalysts of major ideological conflicts in subsequent decades. While over the past two years there have been tentative signs of economy recovery, notably the dropping of the US unemployment rate from 10% in October 2009 to 8.3% at the start of 2012, these may turn out to be illusory in the long run. The income gap is still growing, promised reforms of the world's financial system to prevent another 2008-style collapse have not materialized, the cost of living in nearly every country is rising sharply and, perhaps most worryingly in the long run, the global debt crisis has worsened dramatically and no real solution is in sight. The bottom line is that the structural problems in the world economy that caused the crisis have not been solved. It is possible, I daresay even likely, that any apparent 'recovery' in the world economy in the next few years will prove fleeting and that by 2020 a second great depression may hit for real. Could the next step truly be a Third World War?
