The past is prelude: Can we learn anything from history?

By that token, none of us will be privy to the world-historical significance of the events of 2011.

Not surprisingly, analogies have been made with the student revolts of 1968, when events in Paris set off a chain reaction that extended far beyond European borders as far as Mexico and Pakistan; and with the events of 1989, when perestroika-inspired uprisings brought down communist regimes across Eastern Europe, paving the way for the demise of the Soviet Union itself two years later.

Perhaps the most striking analogy, though, is with the European ructions of 1848, which, among other things, prompted a pair of German radicals to pen The Communist Manifesto. “Two years after 1848,” the still lucid nonagenarian Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm declared on the BBC last month, “it looked as if it had all failed. In the long run, it hadn’t failed. A good deal of liberal advances had been made.”

This occurred, mind you, nearly six decades after the French Revolution. It could be argued that history progresses more speedily in the age of the Internet and instantaneous social media. Yet the events of the twelve months just past make it hard, if not impossible, to predict what lies ahead in the year just begun.

After all, the defining feature of 2011 was its unpredictability. Even after the self-immolation of frustrated Tunisian fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi, who could have possibly known that such an occurrence – unusual but hardly unique – would spark an uprising that would not only rock the status quo in the Middle East but, at a stretch, inspire uprisings elsewhere.

As the first domino to crumble in the face of popular unrest, Tunisia established a crucial template that hasn’t exactly been emulated elsewhere. Egypt was the next to implode, but its army, dominant since the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser, has thus far managed to more or less maintain the status quo and, despite elections, it remains to be seen whether democracy will be permitted to take root.

One of the most interesting phenomena of the previous year was the United States’ discomfiture at Hosni Mubarak’s comeuppance. The US was as keen as Saudi Arabia and Israel to facilitate his presidency, but it eventually changed tack once the popular mood in Cairo’s Tahrir Square became obvious.

Crucially, so did the Egyptian army. But the latter had an agenda in mind, and Tahrir Square has lately again been the focus for protests that have been deplorably mishandled by the very army that had decided to stand aside when Mubarak was the focus of popular angst.

Things went even worse in Yemen and Bahrain, where the power structures have remained essentially unchanged, but it is Syria that competes with Libya for the least undesirable outcome.

The latter, uniquely, faced a Nato intervention based on the excuse of an impending massacre in rebellious Benghazi. But the protection of civilians was hardly on the US-European military alliance’s mind when it came to the purported endgame and the targeting of Muammar Gadhafi, whose extrajudicial execution did not appear to upset any of his dictatorial counterparts in the Arab world – largely because none of them had trusted him for four decades.

Libya’s future, though, remains indeterminate – not least on account of the fact that some of the forces the US and its allies were supporting were the very sort it has been combating in Afghanistan, including one luminary who is pursuing charges against the British authorities for “rendering” him to the Americans.

Syria, too, was at the receiving end of “renditioned” suspected terrorists, but it has not escaped Nato retribution on account of that. Its relations with China and Russia, both of which exercise vetoes in the UN Security Council, have probably been more of a consideration, and the Arab League has taken more of a stand in this context.

Last week, however, a League observer team was being advised to pull out of Syria, as its mission had clearly not persuaded the security forces to restrain their murderous impulses as protesters found cause to redouble their efforts in cities such as Homs.

Meanwhile, last month’s American pullout from Iraq, arguably bringing to an end an engagement that blighted the previous decade, has been followed not just by terrorist attacks but by ructions and recriminations within the puppet ruling alliance, and the state’s division along sectarian lines is once more on the agenda.

The other “beneficiary” of an American invasion, still-occupied Afghanistan, has also offered few indications of an ultimately positive outcome, notwithstanding the extra-territorial assassination last May of Osama bin Laden – once purportedly the crux of most problems.

Bin Laden’s demise ostensibly took Pakistan by surprise, and the nation has been embroiled ever since in increasingly fraught relations between civilian and military components in its power structure, as well as between Islamabad and Washington.

How that particular drama plays out will feature among the must-see scenarios of the year just begun, although it may well be overshadowed by developments in Europe, where the burden of the free market has proved too onerous for several key members of the European Union and, in the former Eastern Bloc, even the autocratic Vladimir Putin of Russia has received notice that his next term as president is unlikely to be smooth going.

Following the experience of 2008, when the American electorate voted overwhelmingly for change and obtained not much of it, it would perhaps been unwise to make too much of the discretely bizarre Republican aspirants to Barack Obama’s White House throne.

Yet, for all the disappointments he has spawned, were Obama to be toppled in November, the character who replaces him would inevitably provide even more cause for concern.

Perhaps above all, it remains to be seen whether anything comes of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the clones it has spawned, whose disenchantment with the established capitalist order cannot be ignored.

Yet, whatever may lie ahead, Tunis and Tahrir Square are likelier to survive as symbols of what made 2011 so significant and models for what may lie ahead.