While New Year’s resolutions are still resolute, and the faint taste of mince pies still lingers on our lips, Cherwell takes a final look back at 2011, a year in which revolutions swept the Arab world, the English rioted, the EU tottered ever closer to breaking point, and the British press was forced to take a long, hard look at itself.

When Mohammed Bouazzi, a young Tunisian fruit seller, set himself on fire in December 2010 in protest at harassment by the authorities, the Arab Spring ignited, spreading across the region in a wave of protests. Within a month, the 24 year reign of Tunisian dictator President Ben Ali had come to an end. Tens of thousands of Egyptians filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square, leading President Mubarak to step down after 30 years in power. The grizzliest dictator of them all, Colonel Gaddafi, managed no less than 42 years, before being killed by rebels in October at the end of the 6 month war in Libya.

Meanwhile, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh finally caved in to popular pressure after 9 months of protests while, over 5,000 lives later, Bashar Assad is still clinging to power in Syria (though some hope the arrival of Arab League observers will stop the spiral into civil war). Islamist parties have had significant electoral successes in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, leading some in the west to talk of an ‘Arab Winter’.

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After four years of cult-building as Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin surprised no one by announcing that he would be swapping jobs with Dmitry Medvedev, and running again for President in 2012. When Putin’s party then swept the board in parliamentary elections tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg in the freezing December weather, to protest against the results, which they believed were rigged. Putin has since made vague noises about engaging in political ‘dialogue’.

TIME magazine declared ‘the protester’ to be their person of the year, with ordinary people making their voices heard across the globe in and beyond the Arab world and Russia.  Women (and men) bared their bodies in SlutWalks, in response to Toronto policeman Michael Sanguinetti’s comment that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’. The Occupy Wall Street movement declared ‘We are the 99%’ when it pitched camp in New York. Anti-capitalism camps then sprang up in cities across the world, including outside St Paul’s in London.

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As austerity measures began to bite across Europe, Greeks were the most violent in venting their anger, while Britain saw its biggest public sector strikes for a generation. Meanwhile, the Eurozone lurched from crisis to near catastrophe, increasingly drunk with the weight of its sovereign debt and bailouts amounting to hundreds of billions of Euros. The governments of Ireland, Portugal, Greece, and Spain tumbled one after the other, and it was these economic woes, rather than facing trials for corruption and having sex with an underage prostitute, that finally felled Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio ‘bunga bunga’ Berlusconi. While Cameron exercising Britain’s veto to “protect” the City had some arguing that we are now on the sidelines in Europe, the Eurozone leaders have yet to get a grip on the crisis.

England’s cities went up in flames in August, as peaceful protests following the mistaken killing of Mark Duggan by a policeman in Tottenham turned to riots, which spread across London and the rest of the country for four days. Looters made off with trolley-loads of TVs, trainers, clothes and food, while historic buildings burnt, and the police stood by, helpless to prevent the anarchy. Thousands have so far been arrested and charged over the violence, and many Brits said they would support the army being used to quell riots.

The UK rejected changing the electoral system from First Past The Post to the Alternative Vote by a staggering margin of 67.9% to 32.1% in a referendum in May. While mud was slung on both sides of the campaign, the most controversial advert was a poster of an ill baby with the slogan “She needs a new cardiac facility NOT an alternative voting system”, used by the No campaign to claim that changing the voting system would have cost £250m. 

Warring Democrats and Republicans brought the US economy to the brink over raising the debt ceiling, and the US then lost the prized triple A rating on its debt.  Republican presidential hopefuls have sharpened their swords, and then fallen on them in an increasingly bizarre series of faux-pas. Rick Perry couldn’t remember which government agencies he wanted to close, Michele Bachmann suggested that the earthquake and hurricane on the East Coast was a message from God, and Herman Cain’s campaign folded after accusations of sexual harassment. Mormon millionaire Mitt Romney is currently leading the polls for Tuesday’s crucial caucus in Iowa.

Almost ten years after the 9/11 attacks, the world’s most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden, was shot by US special forces in a gated compound in the quiet Pakistani town of Abbottabad in May. US-Pakistani relations subsequently soured, with the Pakistani government suspected of complicity in enabling the Al-Qaeda mastermind to live in relative comfort, and not in a cave as believed. Relations took a further turn for the worse when the Americans accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in an airstrike, and the overland route through the country, to supply the 10 year old war in Afghanistan, was then shut off.

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Americans commemorated the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. This in the same year that they withdrew their remaining forces from Iraq, and announced an official end to the war that came as a direct response to the attack on the Twin Towers.

Hillary Clinton went to Myanmar, in the first visit to the country by an American Secretary of State in 56 years.  The national junta made gestures towards softening its repressive regime, allowing greater freedom to Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the democracy movement, whom they released in 2010 after 15 years of house arrest.

The South of what was then Sudan voted to secede from the country, and the UN welcomed the new nation of South Sudan as its 193^rd member. Meanwhile, the Palestinians launched their own bid to become the 194^th full member of the United Nations, with the US promising to veto the motion if it reached the Security Council.

Violence erupted in Norway as Anders Behring Breivik embarked on a 69-person killing spree at a Labour Party-run camp, after exploding a car bomb in Oslo that left eight people dead. He defended his actions as atrocious but necessary for the protection of Europe against a Muslim invasion. Psychiatrists concluded he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

Tragedy also struck Japan, when an earthquake and tsunami killed 18,000 in March, leaving parts of the country looking like a post-Hiroshima wasteland, and causing a meltdown at the Fukishima nuclear plant. The fallout from radiation is, as yet, unknown. Earthquakes in New Zealand and Turkey claimed up to 1,000 lives.

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Extreme weather linked to climate change flooded much of Bangkok in the autumn, but the deal brokered in Durban was seen by many as no more than a plan to construct an actual deal in several years time. Famine also struck the Horn of Africa, with up to 10m people affected.

2011 saw the deaths of important figures across the globe. Kim Jong-Il was replaced by his son Kim Jong-Un as Supreme Leader of North Korea, after the former’s death on 17^th December. Apple’s innovative number one, Steve Jobs, lost a prolonged fight against pancreatic cancer at the age of 56, while Christopher Hitchens, formerly of Balliol College, died of pneumonia as a result of complications from esophageal cancer. Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27, while football mourned the death of Gary Speed. 

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF and onetime darling of the French Left, suffered a tumultuous fall from grace after he was arrested in New York on charges of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Despite the claimant’s case falling apart after she was revealed to have lied when giving evidence, the episode prompted French novelist Tristane Banon to accuse DSK of sexual assault eight years previously. Conspiracy theories of political collusion to disgrace Strauss-Kahn, tipped for the Presidential candidacy of the Socialist party, abounded.

Meanwhile, the indiscretions of the well-known and well-heeled in the UK became of increasing interest to the public, as consternation about super-injunctions came to a head.  So averse to Britain’s liberal values were these press-gagging court orders felt to be, that the Prime Minister himself waded in to share his misgivings on the matter. But sympathy for the press lasted only for so long. The News of the World, a tabloid paper owned by News International, the British newspaper division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, was forced to close after a story broke revealing the endemic use of phone hacking by its journalists. The scandal, which resurfaced in July after previous instances involving celebrities whose phones had been hacked, provoked general opprobrium as new victims, including a murdered 13-year old, 7/7 victims, and relatives of deceased British soldiers, were revealed to have been targeted.

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All was not doom and gloom this year though, as 26 million Brits tuned in to see the marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton in April, while a further 23 million Americans and 41 million Indians watched the Royal wedding.

On the 31^st October the UN selected several babies, born on that day, to mark the date that the earth’s population was estimated to have reached 7 billion.

When I was in secondary school, the few of us who were barely numerate were made, each year, to take the ‘maths challenge’.  In a bid to add levity to the experience, question one would usually involve the number of that year. In life as in maths challenge, I didn’t have high hopes for 2011. But in life as in maths challenge, I underestimated it a tad. 2011 seems like one of those awkward prime numbers. Actually, it’s a ‘sexy prime’. And the year 2011 has thrown up one or two juicy bits of its own.

January – A big cheer went up from South Sudan as people voted for a wiggly line across a map. This was followed by an even bigger cheer from international atlas-printing companies.

February – My birthday. Also an Egyptian dictator steps down after thirty years in power, but you have to prioritise these things. Charlie Sheen coins the word “bi-winning”. I still don’t know what it means.

March – Bad things going down in Japan and Libya so we try and forget about it by having a nice big Census. Love a good form.

April – Facebook polluted with fashionable cynics declaring their refusal to watch the Royal Wedding, then ‘Liking’ sixty pages related to Pippa Middleton.

May – bin Laden settles down to enjoy the May Bank holiday. He should have taken out a privacy injunction, but was told by Ryan Giggs that they’re a bit shite.

June – There’s some stuff going on with these Greek guys trying to borrow a few quid.

July – Harry Potter film franchise ends, adding to already horrific youth unemployment figures. Amy Winehouse decides on the ‘go while you’re young and on a high’ option – probably in both senses. I finally stop receiving creepy answerphone messages from Rupert Murdoch.

August – It took about six years, but Kaiser Chiefs’ prediction came true. Five-year-olds singing ‘London’s Burning’ are not told to shut up by their parents. Accessorize plundered on a scale not seen since AD 865.

September – We are the 99%! And have been for far too long! Like the effing battery charge indicator on my laptop.

October – Steve Jobs and Muammar Gaddafi depart from this world, leaving people to debate their favourite former All-Powerful Overlord Of An Empire That Produces Valuable Commodities. The Other Place replaces their university chancellor, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, with the guy who runs Sainsbury’s. Tabs: always plumping for the discount option.

November – A sprinkling of Real Life in Oxford, as public-sector strikers make it awkward to swagger down Broad Street like a boss. Jeremy Clarkson offends everyone again – a talent he has been nurturing since birth. The EU begins its annual discussion relating to cod. Teenage boys begin their annual procrastination relating to COD.

December – David Cameron decides to be the ‘indie kid’ of European leaders. The Iraq War (what’s that?) officially ends. Madame Tussaud’s pricks its ears as Kim Jong-Il dies.

Thus on to 2012. It promises… well promise. And its share of fun, fees and the bland.  In the meantime, keep calm and carry on – old posters can’t go wrong.

The range of possible events that could arise from the death of Kim Jong-Il runs from a degree of liberalising reform to nuclear war, which is to say that anything could happen, a prospect that would be slightly less terrifying if Western observers could do more than guess at the political machinations playing out around in Pyongyang. North Korea is legendary for its secretive isolation, often enforced at gunpoint; even the few tourists who venture there witness only a revolutionary pantomime of real life, in lieu of actual contact with any human being.  

Yet the decisions of the small cabal of warlords are almost matched for opacity by those of their main (and only) backer – China. The Communist Party’s stance on the various crises to plague the Koreas in the past few years has been confused at best. Hu Jintao begs constantly for more dialogue, more talks, more regional harmony and co-prosperity, and still refuses to even mention the notion that North Korea might be a threat to its neighbours. Despite burgeoning trade with the South, China grows defensive whenever the North launches an attack, kidnaps a Southern film director (I kid you not), or fires missiles off into the sea, retreating instead into bland calls for peace and dialogue, more hippy than authoritarian.

The attachment of China’s leaders to this bizarre, desolate scrap of land would seem to fly in the face of their avowedly pragmatic, ‘scientific’ foreign policy. The troughs of aid that the Chinese have poured into the place have bought little political influence, and have not even persuaded the North Korean army to stop shooting hapless Chinese farmers who stray too near the border. At a time when China’s rulers craves international respect and political influence, propping up a near-medieval backwater seems an odd choice.

The fact is that for all China’s mantric rambling about peaceful, harmonious development, the Communist party still promotes the belief that China is surrounded by racist-capitalist-imperialist-conspiracists led by the United States, waiting to carve the country up as soon as a weak point appears. Riots are blamed on the CIA, and foreign film and music condemned as ‘spiritual pollution’; phrases like “America’s strategy is clearly to mark out a line encircling China and make China suffer for crossing it” appear frequently in Chinese papers (that quote is from the Global Times, a paper that makes even the most jingoistic tabloids of the West seemed naive and oversensitive).

It is easy to dismiss much of this as blustery propaganda, but the ‘America threat’ carries as much weight as does the ‘China threat’ on American talk shows. The Kim dynasty comes into the picture as a handy buffer state that ensures China need not share a border with an American ally. The idea of American troops attempting to conquer part of China via the Korea peninsular might seem outlandish, but the scars left by the Korean war (remembered, to be precise, as the “campaign to resist America and save Korea”, the ‘United Nations’ coalition that actually defended the South always placed in scare-quotes) run far deeper in the People’s Republic than in the States, where the war was largely eclipsed by Vietnam.  

Sadly for the North Koreans, the American right is doing all it can to confirm the Party’s paranoid conspiracy theories; John Huntsman’s claim that an angry, internet-savvy generation of dissidents is rising up to “take China down” is only the most recent quote to be seized upon as evidence of American imperialism by, ironically enough, Chinese internet users. Were the US give Chinese fears even a modicum of attention, with, perhaps, an offer to remove American troops from South Korea if North Korea could be pacified, deadlock might be broken. At the very least, it would be better than simply pretending that such concerns, however unfounded, do not exist.  

Even if China accepted that US policy is not solely directed at bringing it 2500 year old cultural heritage crashing down, there is no grand bargain that could be struck to free Korea, not least because promoting unification, and consequent democratisation, would be politically impossible for an authoritarian government. At best, a clearer understanding of what America and China want from the peninsula, and less cynical paranoia from the Chinese, would help avoid another Korean War in the far from unlikely event that the North dissolves into chaos.  

Sino-American relations will centre on Korea for the next months, perhaps for years if events take a particularly unfortunate turn, but Chinese obstructionism should not be viewed as inevitable or without cause. China does not need the Kims, and indeed that continued support for their barbaric little fiefdom is the principal reason that China’s international ambitions are viewed with suspicion in the first place. North Korea will without doubt be less stable even after Kim Jong-Un’s coronation, but the first potential crisis to emerge in decades, in which both China and the US have a stake, will create a real opportunity for trust to be built. It is worth approaching positively, even if the alternative may be deadly chaos.