Refugees arriving in Greece in 2015 . Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images

Decades, like centuries, never fall as neatly as we might like. The 19th century spilt over into the 20th until the final glorious summer of 1914. The Roaring twenties didn’t last out their own decade before crashing in Manhattan. But the decade we have just been through does have an odd kind of order to it, and although it is a little early to write the history of 2010-2020 anyone tempted to do so would start with a man in a Tunisian market trader setting himself on fire.
The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi appeared to have been provoked by the vegetable and apple-cart trader’s humiliation by officials in Tunis. Though some of the details are disputed, the 26-year-old clearly came up against the sclerotic implacability which dogged the economic opportunities of people like him in Tunisia under its then leader, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
The wounds he suffered at his own hands on 17 December 2010 led to Bouazizi being hospitalised, but he died a fortnight later. By then wider Tunisian society was in revolt. The humiliations which had led Bouazizi to his extreme act were clearly shared by large numbers of his fellow countrymen. As anyone who knows North Africa can attest, such frustrations are almost inevitable in societies where achieving the most basic of things requires a labyrinthine process demanding the patience of a prophet, if not a saint.
As the protests in Tunisia grew so they were replicated across the rest of North Africa and eventually across the Middle East. The Ben Ali government was eventually overthrown, giving huge impetus to the populations of other countries keen to get rid of their own corrupt, inefficient and previously apparently immovable leaders.
Next door in Libya the uprising of a portion of the population against Colonel Gaddafi was met with predictable brutality by the dictator. Expecting a massacre of Gaddafi’s opponents in Benghazi an alliance of outside powers – including the UK and France — were persuaded to intervene. The result was Gaddafi’s rule ending in rather bloodier circumstances than Ben Ali, the sinking of Libya into civil war and the breaking of decades of uncomfortable compromise agreements with the regime; sordid agreements which had largely prevented illegal migration flows from the Libyan coastline across the Mediterranean to the soft underbelly of Europe.
Over in Syria anti-government protests picked up their own momentum. Outspoken opposition to the Assad regime was supressed with a brutality which Gaddafi would have admired, and here the protests soon splintered and the country descended swiftly into civil war. One of the actors that stepped into the resulting vacuum was the Islamist group ISIS, who declared a caliphate across a huge portion of Syria and northern Iraq. Soon people were fleeing the country by the millions, to refugee camps in neighbouring Jordan and Turkey, but also for the more desirable destination of Europe.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe