Upheaval

* Book: Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change. By Jared Diamond. Allen Lane, 2019

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Description

From the Wikipedia:

"A 2019 nonfiction book by American scientist Jared Diamond. Diamond attempts to analyze devastating crises (political, economic, civil, ecological, etc.) that may destroy whole countries and the multiple reasons causing them. To support his analysis with real-world examples, Diamond investigates past crises that have hit such countries as Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States. Diamond also tries to understand the ways in which individuals learn to cope with personal traumas and how these approaches can be applied to nations. His unexpected conclusion is that individuals do learn from crisis but countries seldom do. He also concludes that the United States is a country in which crises are getting worse."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upheaval_(book))

Review

By Colin Kidd:

"Diamond’s analysis of the ways in which half a dozen modern countries that he knows well – Finland, Chile, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Australia – have coped with crises, is shot through with reflections on the fragility of democracy. It explores the imperatives of taking responsibility (without scapegoating), honest national self-appraisal, a willingness to learn from other nations and a capacity to compromise, sometimes, indeed, to swallow the unpalatable.

Consider the parable he relates about Finland. Throughout the cold war, “Finlandisation” was a term of abuse in the west for complicity with the Soviet Union. Under the long rule of two ultra-cautious presidents, Juho Kusti Paasikivi and Urho Kekkonen, between 1946 and 1981, the Finns did things “unthinkable in any other democracy”, such as engaging in self-censorship, postponing a presidential election and pressuring one unacceptable presidential candidate to withdraw. Why? Because during the second world war the Finns had fought alone against an invasion by the Soviet Union that gobbled up the region of Karelia (including Finland’s second city of Vyborg), and then found themselves on the wrong side at the war’s end. Finlandisation began right away when the Finns – under allied pressure – tried their own wartime leaders for war crimes. Diamond recognises the brute realities of the country’s geographical proximity to Russia and the costs of a war that took the lives of 100,000 Finns. Not a huge figure, it might seem, but amounting to about 5% of the male population. The Finns made massive sacrifices during the war to preserve their autonomy, and continued to make sacrifices of a cringing, craven sort in the postwar era. But what other option did they have? “A country’s independence is not usually absolute,” President Kekkonen reminds us. “There was not a single state in existence that did not have to bow to historical inevitabilities.”

...

Diamond’s checklist of factors that underpin national resilience is, however, of limited utility, as he recognises, when it comes to the problems faced by our small blue planet. We have little previous experience of coping with pan-global challenges, and, whereas nations often draw on external models when searching for solutions, humankind stands alone in the face of global warming, resource depletion and the threat of nuclear catastrophe. Nor do we share a common identity of the sort that allowed the Finns to pull together. Although there have been serious attempts to build global institutions – such as the League of Nations and then United Nations – the results have been patchy. Is humanity ready to engage in honest self-appraisal of the condition in which it finds itself? And are we then prepared for worldwide acceptance of responsibility for our plight?

Diamond has grounds for extreme pessimism, but he also sees some hopeful signs, in the work of international agencies to tackle specific issues, such as the eradication of smallpox, or the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships. He is further impressed by the continent-wide levels of cooperation found in the EU, notwithstanding the inevitable teething problems associated with such a bold departure from the historic norms of statehood. Globalisation brings difficulties in its wake, yet, regardless of our human propensity to self-deception – so evident still in certain redoubts – it also brings a growing awareness of the interdependence of nations.

Diamond’s methods – drawing direct parallels between personal and national trauma, and between the psychology of individuals and character of nations – are not those practised by historians, who tend to emphasise the particularity of circumstance and the intricate unrepeatability of events. Diamond nonetheless plots in counterpoint the various predicaments he discusses, alert, in as non-deterministic a mode as he can manage, to the open textures of historical possibility. The prophet spares us chiselled commandments, but we have been warned."

(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/01/upheaval-by-jared-diamond-review)