The world economy continued to show healthy signs of growth in 2010 putting the previous year’s recession, which came about due to a global financial crisis, in the past.
However, just when things were looking up, huge deficit and debt figures in Greece and Ireland plunged the eurozone into its worst crisis since the birth of the European single currency.
The International Monetary Fund and the European Union consequently pledged billions of euros to bail out the Greek and Irish economies. The EU later set up a permanent mechanism to bail out any member state whose debt problems threaten the 16-nation eurozone.
Tackling the eurozone crisis very much dominated the EU’s work during the year, under both the Spanish and Belgian presidencies. In a defining moment for the EU, the Lisbon Treaty came into force in January, giving the bloc its first ever permanent President, Herman Van Rompuy, and a strenghened foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton.
Van Rompuy seems to have adopted the role of a behind the scenes consensus builder, while Lady Asthon still seems to be finding her feet and has come up with no major foreign policy initiatives.
In Britain, a very interesting election saw Labour ousted from office in a hung Parliament. The Conservatives got a relative majority of seats and agreed to join the Liberal Democrats in Britain’s first post-war coalition government.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg became Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister respectively. Although the coalition worked well for most of the year, cracks have now emerged mainly due to Liberal Democrat unease over spending cuts and rises in university fees.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition suffered a huge defeat in the key state election of North Rhine-Westphalia, robbing her government of a majority in the upper house of Parliament.
The election was the first litmus test for Merkel’s six-month-old CDU-FDP government. Despite impressive economic growth figures in Germany, Merkel has been criticised at home for her handling of the eurozone crisis, with her opponents accusing her of being indecisive.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy also suffered badly in regional elections earlier this year, mainly due to high unemployment figures and overall lack of progress on the reform front.
However, Sarkozy did manage to get his controversial pension reform bill approved by Parliament, despite nation-wide protests and strikes. The President also recently reshuffled his Cabinet giving it a more right-wing look.
It has not been a good year for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who faced corruption charges and serious allegations about his private life.
Berlusconi lost his parliamentary majority last August after his one time ally Gianfranco Fini and 34 other rebel MPs deserted the Prime Minister and formed a new party. In September, Fini and his backers voted with Berlusconi in a confidence vote but earlier this month all but four of the rebel MPs voted against the government. Berlusconi still survived, however, due to a number of abstentions and the four opposition MPs who backed him.
An election in Holland saw two centre-right parties, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats, form a government with the parliamentary support of the far-right Freedom Party.
In Sweden the ruling centre-right coalition was re-elected and made history – it marked the first time a non-socialist government was elected to a second term in the country’s political history.
The rigged presidential election in Belarus, and the brutal clampdown on the protests that followed, confirmed once again that Alyaksandr Lukashenka is Europe’s last dictator. It is a pity that Europe has no coherent strategy to rid Belarus of this man.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last September insisted he had not made up his mind about whether he would stand again for President in 2012, fuelling speculation that he will return as head of state.
At the Nato-Russia summit last month, the two sides agreed to cooperate on missile defence and are in discussions on how to link their separate systems to provide a joint shield aimed at protecting Europe against incoming missiles from rogue nations.
In a referendum, Turkish voters approved imported constitutional amendments which reformed the judiciary and limited the powers of the military, something which was welcomed by both the European Union and the United States.
In the US, President Barack Obama managed to get a number of important bills passed by Congress such as healthcare reform and the Wall Street reform.
Obama also signed a major nuclear arms agreement with Russia which the US Senate has just approved. The new Start Treaty requires the US and Russia to cut their deployed nuclear warheads by some 30 per cent to 1,550 by 2017.
During the year, the American economy continued along the path of modest economic growth but the recovery has been slow and unemployment figures remain high.
Consequently American voters punished Obama in November’s congressional elections and handed back control of the House of Representatives to the Republican Party and severely reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate.
Obama has already shifted policy somewhat to the centre and recently came to an agreement with the Republicans to extent Bush era tax cuts.
In foreign policy, Obama had to fire General Stanley McChrystal as commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan over remarks reported in Rolling Stone magazine.
The US war in Iraq officially came to an end on September 1 with the departure of all US combat troops, and US brokered direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority collapsed after Israel refused to extend a settlement freeze.
The sudden death of Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, was a huge blow to both US diplomacy and to peace efforts in the region.
North Korea continued to behave irresponsibly and defy the international community. In March Pyongyang sank a South Korean naval vessel killing 46 sailors and last month it announced the existence of an extensive uranium enrichment plant which can produce both nuclear fuel and fissile material for a nuclear bomb.
North Korea shelled the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong in a move most analysts believe is linked to Kim Jong-Il’s succession plan for his son and recently appointed heir Kim Jong-Un.
The disclosure by Wikileaks of 250,000 US diplomatic cables, following the earlier release of thousands of confidential military files about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, certainly made the headlines in 2010.
The most astonishing revelation is that Saudi King Abdullah had repeatedly urged the US to bomb Iran and destroy its nuclear programme. Also newsworthy is the fact that China would accept a future Korean peninsula unified under South Korean rule.
Throughout the year, the United States, United Nations and the European Union all announced additional sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme.
Perhaps because of these sanctions, Teheran agreed to hold talks with P5+1 countries (UN permanent Security Council members plus Germany). Another round of talks will be held in January.
At Cancun, UN delegates reached a deal to curb climate change, including a fund to help developing countries. The agreement says deeper cuts in carbon emissions are needed, but does not establish a legal mechanism for achieving the pledges countries made. However, most analysts believe the deal was a step in the right direction.
China, which this year surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy, continued to be put under pressure over human rights and its lack of political reform.
In October, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 peace prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo who was jailed for 11 years last year for calling for free speech and multi-party elections. Not surprisingly, China protested loudly at the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice.
Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to dominate the headlines with the Taleban and al-Qaeda carrying on with their bombing campaigns in both countries.
Nato set out its gradual withdrawal plan from Afghanistan, with responsibility for security to be handed over to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
The Nato-led coalition forces registered some progress in Afghanistan but continued to emphasise the importance of a political solution.
The security situation in nuclear-armed Pakistan got worse, raising many eyebrows in the West, and classified US documents (leaked by Wikileaks) reveal that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, has been arming, funding and training the Taleban for years.
Pope Benedict XVI made an important u-turn on the use of condoms saying they can be used in special circumstances such as that of male prostitutes seeking to protect themselves or others from HIV infection. The Pope earlier in the year made a historic, and successful, visit to Britain.
Other important events in 2010 were the election of Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine’s presidential election (in an apparent reversal of the Orange Revolution); the stalemate in Ivory Coast after Laurent Gbagbo refused to quit the presidency even though the international community said he lost the election; a new strategic concept for Nato adopted at the Lisbon summit; the tragic plane crash in Russia in which Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 95 members of Poland’s elite died; the formation of a new government in Iraq after nine months of deadlock and the signing of a joint nuclear testing treaty by France and the UK.
Both India and Brazil witnessed impressive economic growth during 2010, putting them on course to become future global economic powers.
Throughout the year, there were also quite a few natural and man-made disasters such as the massive earthquake in Haiti, the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud, huge floods in Pakistan, the worst in 80 years, and the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.