The anniversaries of major transformational events like the fall of the Berlin Wall afford societies opportunities to collectively reassess how far they have come (and how much further they have to go). Often, we celebrate moving forward; pat ourselves on the back for embracing new liberties and for finally being able to stitch together the kind of societies we want to live in. Other times, however, lessons from the past are forgotten, which harms progress.

The result regresses us to our worst excesses, where the once abhorrent becomes palatable as societies seek to escape stagnation and intransigence. At best, a moment of reckoning (like mass protests) rights the ship. Thus, while we celebrate the positives, it is important to acknowledge the failures or lapses that have forced citizens out onto the streets in Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Algeria, Russia, Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan and Hong Kong — if only to prevent their repetition.

We have no excuse not to know or learn of other nations’ struggles to maintain stability, given our deeply interconnected world and its sources of information. Granted, the flurry of protests on different continents may get overwhelming, and understanding their underlying grievances is a daunting task.

Yet there is precedent for what is happening right now. This palpable tension everywhere one looks is typical of an imminent generational transition as Millennials prepare to hand over the reins to Generation Z, already laser-focused on forcing governments to take up climate action, pushed into urgency by massive wildfires, mass extinction and a climate gone awry.

It is very much like how Generation X, whose legacy is centered on the fall of the Soviet Union, passed the baton on to Millennials who grew with the internet — the first digital natives seeking to expand newer, innovative technologies to fix some of society’s most intractable problems.

Before them were the Baby Boomers who laid the foundations of the post-1945 world’s complex multilateralism to dodge the issues that plagued the Silent Generation that preceded them, like the Great Depression and the rise of militant nationalism in Germany, Italy and Japan.

The “Greatest Generation” before that buried imperialism and unleashed major cultural transformations, like the radio and film, rejecting the Lost Generation’s fascination with imperialism and insularity, which exacerbated tensions in Europe, eventually leading to the outbreak of the First World War.

This self-evident cycle can trace its foundations back to birth of modern democracy between 1776 and 1799, when average citizens came to know of the inalienable rights that afforded powers once unknown. It unleashed a deluge of movements and expressions of collective will that sought to interpret what these freedoms meant for the average citizen, the foreigner, the woman, the colonized, the enslaved, the minority and more.

We have no excuse not to know or learn of other nations’ struggles to maintain stability, given our deeply interconnected world and its sources of information.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

In other words, at one point or another, each of us can identify with the hopeful idealism, which sought to rid the societies we were born into of their limitations. It does not matter whether it was in defense of the homeland, part of an independence struggle, labor union strikes, civil society dissent, school walk-outs or the toppling of a brutal dictator. All of it is part of a cycle in which we are all trying to adapt our societies to the reality faced by incoming generations.

For the Arab world, the sweeping protests of the 2011 Arab Spring are part of that cycle as the youth attempted to dislodge leadership from a generation that fought for and/or gained independence from former colonialists.

The differing perspectives will undoubtedly cultivate passionate opposition and fervent criticism. After all, in the eyes of the older generations, the Arab world has come a long way from the Cold War, colonialism and undue foreign influence. However, in the eyes of the youth, societies have not gone far enough to address unemployment and other social ills that have only dimmed their future prospects.

Generally speaking, it is a futile exercise to expect, for instance, those born in the 1960s to understand, let alone absorb, the hatred for communism after World War II. After all, if all nationalities had a right to self-determination (a UN protected right), why was there a belief in the West’s near manifest destiny to stop its spread beyond the Iron Curtain in Europe or the Bamboo Curtain in Asia?

Thus, while one generation welcomed wars on the Korean Peninsula and in Vietnam, the next one fervently protested them. For those trapped in communist regimes, older generations may have believed in the glories of unbridled socialism as the answer to wayward western hegemonies. Yet, while the West advanced and developed, Eastern Europe, Asia, Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism seemed stuck in decades long past, unable to answer the evident growing wealth and progress of the capitalist West. It was the same as expecting Great Depression-era youth to forego multilateralism in global cooperation, trade and finance in subservience to the previous generation’s obsession with insularity.

These differing perspectives, and the divisions they create are present everywhere, from sub-Saharan Africa to Asia to the Americas and Europe. Unfortunately, the only lasting solution has been to wait for older generations to age out of leadership. Yet, right on the heels of that transition, a younger generation will already be at the gates, clamoring for change as the previous one ascends into leadership, seeking to right the wrongs that were familiar to them.

It is not a simple issue to exorcise from any leadership since it is human nature to fixate on what is familiar to us. Worse yet, any new developments are examined through the lens of what is familiar to us, rather than assessing issues raised by today’s youth on their own merits in order craft proper policies to address them.

Ultimately, it is these nuances that eventually cripple decision-making and the resulting frustrations lead to streets flooded with protesters seeking change. Or, a generation of disaffected people who become easy prey to the kind of populism that births authoritarians that do more harm than good. It only erases the hard-won progress gifted by generations past, which regresses societies and robs them of their potential as conjured by each generation's youthful idealism.

  • Hafed Al-Ghwell is a non-resident senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He is also senior adviser at the international economic consultancy Maxwell Stamp and at the geopolitical risk advisory firm Oxford Analytica. Twitter: @HafedAlGhwell