Might the stars tell us what’s going on around the world

Looking back on 2016 and wondering what 2017 had in store, I thought that had I been an astrologer I would have been hard put right now trying to figure out what the stars are up to up there.

Radical changes in attitude happening in different parts of the world are so similar that it seems they are being wrought by some single universal force, be it celestial or otherwise.

It is as if entire nations are getting herded back from the kind of new global society to which we Earthlings were so gingerly feeling our way these past many years. It is what the pundits refer to as a return to aggressive nationalism. Others call it populism. It seems the same thing.

We’ve seen the change in the shape of the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, taking it out of the European Union. Before that, we even saw it in the form of the Scottish coming close to shattering the UK’s own unity by just falling short of voting themselves out of the British isles’ centuries-old union.

We’ve seen it in the lurch to the right in just about every one of the European Union’s mainland states. It has reached the point where there are now fears for that union itself which, inspired by the new-world idealism, got put together so painstakingly over the past many years.

It is seen in both the tone and outcome of the US election. Whichever way you look at it, it reflects a kind of desire to get back to a perceived era when, as the one super power that was ultimately left standing, America was able to assert itself and stamp its authority on all the rest.

By the same token, the Russian bear too has been stirring. From all reports, Vladimir Putin’s desire to make that immense country great again is meeting with enthusiastic approval by the broad populace. The effects have been decidedly visible in the Ukraine and Syria.

Those worrying about these trends often draw comparisons with the 1920s and ‘30s when aggressive nationalism evolved into cruel fascism. It is a disturbing comparison as the resultant brutalities visited upon humanity in the shape of the run-up to and the engagement of World War II as well as its prolonged and ugly aftermath are a fact of history.

The rest of the world has not been without sectarian troubles either.

Tragedy and brutality keep reigning in much of the Middle East and further afield, such as Afghanistan. In the East and Far East nationalistic fervor keeps flaring up, not least on the back of territorial disputes such as between China and Japan.

Then there is that darkest of all forces, named religious fanaticism, which is being most starkly personified in our time by Islamic State and the terror it is visiting upon society in many parts of the world.

All this flies in the face of hopes there once were about the onset of a new world order in which nations would draw closer together and join in tackling climate change, poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease and in the process also help put a brake on humankind’s self-destructive population growth.

The new optimism was evident from the signing in 2000 of the Millennium Goals by 189 governments and the climate-change agreement 195 nations finally came to in Paris a year ago.

That excessive idealism sprung from what must count as one of human history’s greatest coincidences as happened when the Cold War ended at the same time as the internet arrived in our offices and homes.

It ended an era of unreason and of fear of a nuclear calamity blowing us all to bits, and it opened an era in which ordinary folk could talk to each other across national frontiers and geographical divides as if being next-door neighbours. Never before was there better occasion to appreciate our common humanity.

The old stand-off between East and West had many ramifications and visited the worst possible cruelties on societies across the globe. One of its manifestations that remains ingrained in my mind’s eye happened when I in the 1980s stood on a viewing platform on the West side of the infamous Berlin Wall.

There on the East side I saw two German soldiers in a watchtower, guns at the ready to shoot to kill fellow Germans wanting to scale the wall to get to fellow Germans on the other side.

So it is that the ending of that era’s madness remains most clearly marked by the fall of that most brutal of human boundaries.