If, toward the end of 1999, you had wanted a vision of the decade ahead, you would have been advised to visit a place called Jardim Angela, a ramshackle slum of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
A United Nations agency had just declared it the single most violent place on Earth. It seemed to be buffeted by all the trends that the decade was said to promise –rampaging teenaged gangs armed with assault rifles, high rates of AIDS, religious intolerance, battles over scarce fuel and water, an alarmingly fast-growing population, and a near absence of anything resembling government or civil society. 1
“Everything here was falling apart, becoming violent, and there was nothing safe for my sons – no country to help me any more,” Rosa Maria dos Santos Souza, a 63-year-old mother of four, told me.
Ten years ago, many people predicted this sort of place was the future: “The withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war” would be the defining factors in the early 21st century that would “confront our civilization,” the U.S. writer Robert Kaplan predicted in The Coming Anarchy, a highly influential 2000 book about the decade to come. 2
He was far from alone: Entire shelves creaked with volumes anticipating the disaster that would be this decade – the coming bad times.
To go by conventional media vision now appearing in magazine and TV decade-in-review features, it amply lived up to the most grotesque millenarian prophesies. What else do you say about a decade that began in earnest with a huge terrorist attack, followed by two intense wars and more terrorism, ending with a complete financial collapse, undercut with fear of an overheating planet? 3
But there has been another, perhaps more important decade. It is the decade we missed, while we were captivated by dramas in a handful of faraway countries and major financial districts.
Those wars and acts of terrorism have been symbolically significant, but limited: They engaged, directly and indirectly, perhaps 2 per cent of the world’s population, during
a decade when there have been fewer conflicts than at any time in modern history. 4
I visited Jardim Angela twice this year and found it radically changed. Suddenly, there was a strong presence of government there, with schools and a community-based police force. Drugs and AIDS were no longer major problems. People had cellphones and home computers, and there were jobs and schools.
Ms. Souza told me that her sons had become graduates, and the land under her shack had quadrupled in value.
What had happened?
Jardim Angela, and countless places like it, had been missed by most of the horrors that grabbed headlines in the 2000s. But they’d been touched by Earth-transforming forces no one had seen coming in 1999.
Airline passengers wait to be rescued on the wings of a US Airways Airbus 320 jetliner that safely ditched in the frigid waters of the Hudson River in New York in January, 2009.— Steven Day/AP
SO MUCH FOR TRIBES AND CORPORATISM – THE STATE STRIKES BACK
Halfway through the decade, I stood on a bridge at the edge of the Ibar River in the southern Balkans, and watched to see if this would be the place where the world fell apart. Below me I saw bunches of flowers marking the spot where a boy was said to have been chased by a pack of pitbulls to his drowning death.
NATO soldiers were all around me, poised for a deadly war between Orthodox Christians and Muslims, part of a wave in which ever-weaker states were expected to splinter into ethnic factions, in wake of the conflicts that dominated the 1990s.
Five years later, we’re still waiting. The river flows through Kosovo, now a semi-recognized country whose 2008 separation from Serbia, whether it was a good idea or not, at least happened without the anticipated noise and pain. Serbia was too busy building a stronger economy and trying to join the European Union to let its people repeat the slaughter of the previous era.
