INSIGHT: CAN DISASTERS SHAPE HISTORY?
By Bridget Kendall
BBC NEWS
436510.stm
2008/06/05 08:52:53 GMT
In the second instalment of a new monthly column, Bridget Kendall
asks whether natural disasters act as agents for political change.
Perhaps our first instinctive thought is that of course they do.
In the United States, for example, opinion polls suggest public dismay
at the government’s failure to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina
in 2005, has made a deep impact on potential voters’ attitudes in
this election year.
Choosing a president capable of dealing with a national crisis has
been high on the list of electoral priorities – higher even, it seems,
than finding a solution to the Iraq debacle.
Let’s not forget that on a smaller scale, this has always been true in
the US: no American mayor or governor, so the saying goes, is deemed
to have shown his or her true worth until they’ve weathered a bad snow
or rain storm, and shown they can run a city or state in an emergency.
This is the litmus test for re-election.
Philosophical change
Go further back to the great Portuguese earthquake of 1755 and the
consequences were not only political, it’s argued, but profoundly
philosophical.
The apocalyptic scale of the Portuguese quake provoked an intense
battle between church and state
The massive jolts shattered buildings and started numerous fires. The
tidal wave that swept in immersed whole areas of Lisbon. Tens
of thousands of people died. Large parts of one of Europe’s most
important cities were reduced to rubble. Even today you can still
see ruined remains of some buildings.
And since it happened on All Saints’ Day, when many people were in
church, the apocalyptic scale provoked an intense battle between
church and state.
Was this the wrath of God, or was the cause scientific? Should citizens
turn to prayer and repentance for salvation, or clear dead bodies to
avoid disease and set about rebuilding?
In the end, the triumph of pragmatism over religious faith helped
entrench the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Go further back still, and there is even an argument that earthquakes
may have hastened the end of entire civilizations.
The mysterious end of the Bronze Age in 1200BC may be partly
explained by a string of earthquakes and aftershocks in the Eastern
Mediterranean, say some geophysicists.
How else, they argue, can one explain that so many major cities and
palaces in such a relatively small area were all destroyed in the
same 50-year period?
Armenian set-back
But not all earthquakes and natural disasters bring political change
in their wake.
The Armenian earthquake of 1988 was devastating for this small Soviet
republic. The entire city of Spitak was destroyed, along with poorly
constructed schools and hospitals, which meant that the death toll
was more than 50,000.
You might have thought that such a cataclysmic event would act as
a spur to the political rumblings already threatened to crack the
foundations of the weakened Soviet state. But in fact, although the
Soviet Union did, of course, collapse three years later, that was
for other reasons.
The Spitak earthquake, instead of prompting faster change, probably
arrested Armenia’s development, deepening a sense of isolation and
economic deprivation already exacerbated by quarrels with Azerbaijan
and Turkey.
More recently, the earthquake that flattened the Iranian city of Bam
in 2003 looked as though it might lead to a political breakthrough
between Iran and the US.
The US authorities temporarily eased sanctions on Iran and sent in
a disaster and medical team as part of the international relief effort.
But hopes of rapprochement came to nothing. If anything, relations
have hardened as Washington has grown more concerned about the nuclear
intentions of Iran’s increasingly conservative leaders.
"Earthquake" diplomacy
But sometimes there are breakthroughs.
Let us not forget another set of recent earthquakes that did help
create a political bridge between two former rivals: the quakes that
shook Turkey and Greece in the summer of 1999 helped initiate what’s
become known as "earthquake" diplomacy.
The outpouring of sympathy and aid from citizens on either side led
to a new political engagement to end decades of mutual hostility.
So what made the difference here? Why in this case was there a
political turning point?
The answer, surely, lies both in public attitudes and in political
will. The governments in both Greece and Turkey were ready for this
moment and seized the opportunity. Whereas in Iran, the political
momentum was pulling away from pro-Western reformers.
So we need to be careful to distinguish between cause and effect. Some
natural disasters may, indeed, provide a catalyst for change. Others
serve as an opportunity to shine the spotlight on a situation that
is already dynamic.
Perhaps this is what the world is witnessing as it watches China
grappling with its most recent terrible earthquake and apparently
showing a new openness and flexibility.
The impact of the Olympics this summer, the increased prosperity of
many citizens and an evolving political leadership was, it seems,
already encouraging transformation.
It is interesting to compare what is happening now with China’s last
major earthquake of 1976. It is believed to be the largest quake of
the 20th Century measured by the number of casualties, which were
possibly more than 600,000.
China initially refused international aid from the United Nations,
insisting on self reliance. But there were political repercussions;
the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping was able to use the blame game
afterwards to take over power from the Gang of Four and effectively
end the Maoist era in China.
A parallel can be made for the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 –
a man-made disaster, but one of quake-sized catastrophic proportions.
Opening up
Some have argued that it was this emergency that forced the Soviet
Politburo to open its doors to change, leading to an explosion of
political "glasnost" or openness that ended censorship and, with it,
political repression.
But the opposite argument may be even more compelling: the new Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev was already intent on opening his country up,
and seized on the Chernobyl disaster as an opportunity to ram down
the throats of his internal hardline critics reforms which he was
trying to push anyway.
So perhaps the point is that the rubble or flood waters of disasters
may pour through a door that is already ajar, opening it still further.
But what happens when the door remains firmly locked – as in the
Burmese case? Does that pressure piling up behind the door force it
off its hinges and precipitate a full-blown political crisis?
In theory, perhaps. But in practice, I find it hard to think of
an example.
There have been new calls to extend an international obligation to
move in to disasters… when a nation state looks like failing to
meet the needs of its own citizens
But maybe in this increasingly global age, we should no longer be
looking at change at the level of one country, but internationally.
Already we have witnessed a groundswell of political opinion calling
for greater global responsibility to intervene when nation states
fail in their duty to protect their citizens.
Instant global images of distress have encouraged global responses to
the Asian tsunami or the recent Pakistan or Bangladesh disasters. A
new and urgent dismay at leaving people to their fate is what lies
behind the new UN "responsibility to protect" in the case of war
crimes or genocide.
Now there have been new calls to extend an international obligation
to move in to disasters like the one in Burma, when a nation state
looks like failing to meet the needs of its own citizens.
So, perhaps, what is politically significant about the disasters we
have witnessed this year is the way they may move this debate forward,
strengthening the argument for global rather than national responses
to emergencies, in name of global citizenship.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/7