(Bloomberg News) Rampaging natural catastrophes, global financial calamities, the deaths of despots and desperados, the passing of America's greatest modern technical innovator and roiling protests that shook the Arab world and occupied Wall Street -- they made 2011 a year that will be remembered for its almost unrelenting turmoil.
While earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, tornadoes, wildfires, flood and hurricanes roared from the natural world, a tidal wave of sovereign debt threatened to fracture the economic one, shaking the foundations of the 18-year-old European Union and its common currency and whipsawing U.S. equity markets in the process. Uprisings known collectively as the Arab Spring spread from Tunisia in January to rock Egypt, liberate Libya and threaten the Assad regime in Syria.
It was a bad year to be a dictator or terrorist. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is on trial in the country he once ran, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was hunted down and killed by rebels and Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was shot to death by U.S. Navy Seals in a raid on his Pakistan compound. A missile fired by a U.S. drone in Yemen killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Muslim cleric accused of helping to plot attacks on Americans.
This month, the U.S. ended the war in Iraq after almost nine years, with the last combat troops rolling out on Dec. 18. That, and bin Laden's death, were among the "notable" positive developments in a year few will be sorry to see go, said Lee Clarke, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
'Uncertainty Everywhere'
"What seems most compelling about so many of the events of 2011 is their uncanny similarity to the narrative that began to unspool in 1932, when the full shock of the Great Depression's impact began to be fully absorbed," said David M. Kennedy, the Pulitzer-prize winning historian and McLachlan Professor of History emeritus at Stanford University. "The implosion of over-stressed established regimes, the demonstrated obsolescence of vested ways of thinking, the emergence of new leaders, new ideas, new institutions, new ways of life -- the 'new normal' in realm after realm around the world."
It suggests that "the age of American global hegemony is almost certainly winding down," Kennedy said, and that 2011 "might mark the definitive end of the post-World War II and post-Cold War eras, and prove the portal to a future in which there are many more powerful and ambitious players on the world stage, more bitter political contestation at home, and more uncertainty everywhere than at any time since the 1930s."
'Scary Year'
Still, James E. Mueller, a historian at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism in Denton, said he thinks perspective is in order.
"My take on 2011, and most years, is that we've seen it all before," said Mueller, who is writing a book on the events leading to the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, where George Custer and his 7th Calvary Regiment were routed by Indian tribes. The country was in deep recession, Native American uprisings threatened to uproot settlers from much of the West and former Confederate army units were fighting an insurgency throughout the South, with omens of rekindling the Civil War.
"That was a scary year," Mueller said. "Life is always tough, the news is always sensational, but we seem to always muddle through somehow."
The U.S. wasn't immune from protest in 2011, though it came in gentler form than it did for Egypt or Libya. In September, members of the Occupy Wall Street movement began camping in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. Organizers said they wanted to bring attention to U.S. income equality and what they consider to be the corrosive role of Wall Street in the economic crisis.
Nuclear Meltdown