How George Floyd’s death reverberates around the world

SOME MIGHT dispute whether America remains the “indispensable nation”, a phrase deployed in 1998 by Madeleine Albright, then the country’s secretary of state. But it is certainly still the nation that cannot be ignored, the one that, in a sense, sets the political weather globally. So when it goes through a trauma as it has since the killing by the police of George Floyd, the impact is felt worldwide. Mr Floyd’s death has provoked popular protests in dozens of countries; it has also been an opportunity for gloating from the governments of America’s foes and rivals, and has been an embarrassment for its friends and allies.

This past weekend saw hundreds of protests not just in America, but around the world. On Saturday in Parliament Square in London, the largest of many demonstrations in Britain, tens of thousands of people braved chilly squalls and the risk of covid-19, which had led government ministers to call for protests to be shunned. They shouted Mr Floyd’s name, chanted “Black Lives Matter” and, every now and then, dropped to one knee with one clenched fist raised skyward. The crowd, overwhelmingly young and racially mixed, mostly wore masks but paid no attention to social-distancing constraints. Many regarded the danger posed by the virus as proof of their commitment to the anti-racist cause. Their parents or grandparents might have been hurt or arrested in the battle outside the American embassy that followed a protest against the Vietnam war in March 1968. But they too, in their own eyes at least, were putting themselves on the line.