Well, we had our global financial crisis in 2008, and the recovery has certainly been slow. Average incomes in many Western countries have still not recovered to pre-2008 levels, and the growth of nationalist and racist sentiment is evident in countries like Britain (the Brexit vote), France (the rise of the National Front), and the United States (Donald Trump).
The wave of non-violent democratic revolutions that transformed so many developing countries at the end of the Cold War ended with the failure of the "Arab Spring", leaving a new dictatorship in Egypt and civil wars across the Middle East.
In parts of Asia the process has even gone into reverse (military rule in Thailand, death squads run by populist elected governments in the Philippines and Indonesia).
Authoritarian, ultra-nationalist governments hostile to the European Union have come to power in post-Communist Eastern Europe (Fidesz in Hungary, the Law and Justice government in Poland). And a trade war is brewing between the United States and China no matter who wins the US election in November.
You could add to the list of worries a new ruler in China (Xi Jinping) who is more autocratic and readier to play the nationalist card than any other Chinese leader since Mao, and a Japanese Prime Minister (Shinzo Abe) who promises to remove the anti-war clause from the constitution. Not to mention that addict to high-stakes international brinkmanship, Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Quite a list, but does it really mean that we are back in 1936 (fascists in power in Germany, Italy and Japan, civil war in Spain, the Great Purge in the Soviet Union), with the catastrophe of global war just three years away? Or is it just a grab-bag of local problems, failures and worries of the sort that are bound to exist in a world of almost 200 independent countries? Probably the latter.
Right- and left-wing parties are a legitimate, inevitable part of any democratic society, but they tend to mutate into more extreme, paranoid versions of themselves in times of economic hardship. It is difficult to argue, however, that the times are really that bad at the moment.
Times are hard in most developed countries for the old working class, who have been left behind by globalisation, and that is where most of the support for right-wing extremism comes from. But there aren't enough of them to take over the state: Trump will not win in November, the National Front will not win next year's French election, and the Brexiteers in Britain - well, that remains to be seen.
The Middle East is a disaster area but it is an isolated disaster area, apart from occasional small-scale terrorist outrages in Western countries. To live in fear of a world-wide Islamic caliphate is as delusional as to hope for it.
Democracy is not in retreat in Africa or Latin America, and the pluses and the minuses balance out in Asia (military rule in Thailand and authoritarian elected governments in the Philippines and Indonesia, but more democracy in Burma and Sri Lanka).
Nor should we see the triumph of a couple of ultra-nationalist parties in traditionally nationalist Eastern European countries as a sign of things to come in the rest of Europe.
It is possible that the United States and China might stumble into a military confrontation at some point: that risk is implicit in the kind of power shift that is under way. But we are not on the brink of any great and awful calamity in the world. It is not 1936.
■Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
