The riots on the streets of London and other British cities this past week were no doubt a showcase of opportunism by hooligans and bored teenagers. But the antisocial and criminal behavior of these mostly young and usually unemployed people was too widespread and massive to be dismissed as merely the work of puerile gangsters. Something is percolating from an undercurrent that goes beyond England's green and pleasant land.
It's probably no coincidence that there are over one million people in Britain between the ages of 16 and 24 who have been without a job for at least a year -- the highest proportion generationally and the most since the deep recession when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. As in the U.S., the real unemployment (and underemployment) figures are probably much higher, as people simply quit looking for jobs. It's also not a coincidence that this groundswell of anger, alienation, and frustration with the inability of the government to do much more than give them a handout (versus giving them hope) follows on some of the deepest cuts in social spending there since the 1980s.
As with their Atlantic cousins, many fail to grasp that, if properly done, public assistance can be an investment in social stability (averting the huge costs and lost opportunity that social unrest brings) and the maintenance of markets upon which businesses make their money. (After all, employees are also consumers.) No doubt one reason why, for instance, President Obama is seeking an extension of the payroll tax cuts under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act as well as of long-term unemployment benefits. Perhaps he understands what the Germans long have -- that well-managed government benefits dampen the downturn and enable a faster recovery. No coincidence, either, that the German economy is doing well enough to be in a position to bail out much of the rest of Europe.
Obama, however, also seems to grasp that the hard times we're in are not only due to the business cycle, but a structural problem that has less to do with Wall Street than with Main Street -- although the media seems to find it more appropriate to report, to the second, the vicissitudes of the rich rather than on the plight of the poor (that, too, is a business decision). By headlining the stock traders over shelf stockers last week, even The Huffington Post continued to tacitly buy into trickle-down economics.
As development aid and NGO workers, as well as counterinsurgency and counter-terrorist experts know, you have to get to the root of the problem. From London to Libya, Spain to Syria, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Chile, Russia, East Africa, and Philadelphia, the common thread is the widening gap between rich and poor and the disenfranchisement, disconnectedness, and dissent it fosters. The unsurprisingly suppressed "Jasmine revolution" in China was also largely due to this.
Around the world, wealth disparity has grown to endemic levels, according to the United Nations, threatening to de-stabilize numerous "fragile" states and generating the security problems we've come to know well since 9/11. The Generalized Inequality Index (or "Gini coefficient") that has roughly measured national income distribution since the Titanic went down, has been steadily rising since the 1980s, with indicators (ranging from 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest disparity) averaging in the 50's and 60's in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America. It's no coincidence that the greatest international security challenges come from those places, especially when we understand how security in the 21st century has become both globalized and humanized.
Even in the United States, the average has steadily risen since the Reagan era, from the mid-30's to the upper 40's, converging with China (rising) and Mexico (falling).
As Mark Twain would say, history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Last time we witnessed such levels of wealth disparity was in the days of the robber barons, coming to a close, after a great deal of social turbulence and middle class destruction that brought on world war, the Russian Revolution and Hitler, and another world war. In the U.S. and U.K., at least, with the dismantling of many New Deal era reforms in a conservative counterrevolution (in the enduring debate about the pie and its pieces, and the role of government in all this), the more loosely bridled forces of capitalism are once again at play, creating new economies and destroying old ones -- an inherently unstable process. There are ups and downs in all this, depending on how we meet and manage it.
The first thing is understanding that what we're watching in England and elsewhere is not just a passing phase. Former Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen have only got part of the problem right. The greatest long-term threat to national (and international) security is more than the deficit. It's also the ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots and the social inequalities that come with it -- beyond a clash of civilizations, cultures, and class, it's generational.
And it's not just a disparity of wealth; it's a deficit of opportunity. When you look at the world and see hundreds of millions of idle, unemployed, and estranged youth who feel -- as the punks of a previous generation chanted -- they have "no future, no future," some pretty big things are going to happen. This is the real issue. When the youth of America, for example, figures out that one of every four of their near-future tax dollars will be paying for nothing else but debt, in order to protect "entitlements" and low tax rates for richer, older people, and to feed the military industrial complex, to say they will become politically active could turn out to be an understatement.
That is, of course, if there is a political process they can believe in.
And, if they don't, as apparently a good number of their contemporaries overseas already do, then what happened there may be merely the shape of things to come. The culture of impunity that forms one context for the riots in England could eventually find a home here, too.
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To paraphrase Jim Locher of the Project on National Security Reform, it's not your grandparents' national security anymore. And, in one hopeful sign that emerged from England, with the use of the same social media to come out against the rioters, work with police, and the clean up the cities, another lesson looms large -- security, in this new and broadened context, is everybody's business.
It's neither the government nor the private sector that have a corner of the solution market. It's both. Adam Smith or David Ricardo rarely used the term "economy" alone. They used the term "political economy." That implies a role for both, in local communities and in the global community, giving the term "social security" a whole new meaning.
It's not just London that's calling. Are we ready to answer?