The story of 2011 has been of the advance of democracy and the failure of democracies. In the Arab world, tyrants have fallen on the region's political awakening. In rich nations, elected leaders have been frozen in crisis. Welcome to another of the paradoxes of the new global disorder.

I do not recall the advance predictions that the good news this year would come from the Arab street; nor that the bad news would see a Greek debt crisis turn into an existential threat to half a century of European integration. We are in an age that habitually defies the easy assumptions of the old order. The passing of two centuries of western hegemony will be an unpredictable and uncomfortable experience.

The tyranny many assumed to have been the natural state of affairs in the Middle East is crumbling. Successful uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have confounded the self-styled foreign policy realists.

With a little help from demography, the visceral desire for individual freedom and human dignity has upended once impregnable regimes. For all the violence of his resistance, Syria's Bashar al-Assad will probably be next. Autocratic leaders everywhere are now obliged to look anxiously over their shoulders.

Inevitably, real life disappoints those who imagined that the young protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square could build overnight a shiny liberal democracy. Some are already lamenting how quickly spring has turned to winter. The Egyptian military is reluctant to surrender power and, given a chance, voters have preferred Muslim conservatives to twittering liberals.

The road to democracy will be uneven. Americans and Europeans will not like some of the choices made by newly-emancipated citizens. But then the west still clings to its own double standards, cheering the uprisings in the Maghreb while hoping the autocrats cling on in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.