The BBC World Service has commissioned Globescan to do an opinion survey in 27 countries worldwide asking an open ended question “In the future, when historians think about the year 2005, what event of global significance do you think will be seen as most important?” Globally the most significant were seen as the Asian tsunami and the Iraq war but the details are quite interesting.
The most accessible results are on the polling company’s site.
The results varied from country to country with some fairly obvious peaks. 48% of Poles for example saw the death of the Pope as highly significant, not surprising in a deeply Catholic country and where John Paull II was born. The most surprising perhaps was the British response to the bombings in London. It was only the fourth largest response at some 7% , as Globescan comments
only 7 percent mentioned the London bombings–only modestly higher than the worldwide average of 4 percent. The London bombings also figured more prominently among Ghanaians (11%) and Australians, South Koreans, and the Spanish (8% each) than among the British. In contrast, Indonesians were more influenced by the bombings in Bali, with 48 percent mentioning them as the most significant event. The French, though, were similar in that only 9 percent mentioned the riots in the French suburbs.
Which raises questions. Have the French and British both “seen it all before” and shrugged off what might have been thought to be traumatic events? Does it prove that terror attacks would actually have very little effect among the British public? Is the hysterical Bush-like angst Blair is trying to ingender to pass draconia legislation backfiring on him?
