Mandela’s spirit is out of step with this era

I’ve been in the US for the past three months, from where I have just watched the 10th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death come and go. The most noticeable thing about the anniversary was how unnoticeable it was.

People certainly remember Mandela; his name recognition remains extremely strong. Occasionally you even pass someone on the street wearing a T-shirt that carries his image. But the media coverage of the anniversary of his death has been scant and bland. It is as if nobody is quite sure what to say about the great man or what his memory might mean.

This declining resonance is not just American; it is global. I think the reason for it is simple. Mandela became the most famous human being on the planet in February 1990. It was one of the most remarkable times in modern history, when it was plausible to imagine that the world was being reborn.

The Cold War was ending. On our television screens three months earlier we had watched the Berlin Wall fall and people walk into West Berlin in their thousands. The Soviet Union would dissolve a year later. In the east, China’s integration into the global economy was just showing its extraordinary face.

The story of Mandela as it unfolded over the following four years embodied the spirit of this broader, global tale, a tale of endless possibility. Apartheid’s conflicts had been considered intractable, the country’s probable future one of endless racial war. In the face of this Mandela forgave his enemy on behalf of his people and negotiated a settlement. And what an extraordinary settlement it was: a constitutional democracy with a robustly independent judiciary, a free press and a pulsating, energetic civil society.

To conjure that from the dying days of apartheid was evidence that magic was possible, that the end of communism was possible, that the integration of China was possible, that no conflict was too intractable to resolve, no structure of oppression too thick to knock down. The myth of Mandela fed off what was happening in the world as a whole; he became the embodiment of its spirit.

Thirty years later, little of this spirit remains. The integration of China and Russia into the global economy did not make humanity one big, happy family. On the contrary, great power conflict is back with a vengeance; it had only taken a reprieve. There is war in Ukraine and the Middle East, a terrible recent war in Ethiopia. And in parts of the world that are soaring, like India, economic success is coupled with a vicious ethnic nationalism.

As for what was once known as the free world, its political institutions are suffering a degree of fragility unimaginable 30 years ago. The working classes are increasingly alienated from politics and voting in large numbers for extreme political programmes that barely existed in the late 20th century.

And the political process itself is increasingly imperilled. Had you predicted in the 1990s that the loser of an American presidential election would storm the Capitol you would have been considered a joke.

Where is there place in a world like ours for Mandela? He seems anachronistic to us now, a figure wedded to a time that is gone and is unlikely to return for a long while. Mandela signals possibility, hope, freedom. He signals the idea that seemingly intractable conflicts are actually solvable, that ancient enmities can melt into kindness, that old enemies can make friends.

We don’t really believe that anymore. We aspire to head off the worst of the coming climate disaster, prevent the globe’s great power conflicts from becoming hot wars, and survive the next pandemic. Aspirations have been radically scaled down. They are about the fundaments of basic security, not the soaring spirit of new freedoms.

All of this makes Mandela an object of nostalgia. We can look back at him and marvel at the spirit of his times, perhaps even briefly relive them. But we cannot make him ours for he is not a part of the world in which we now live.