The arab awakening is an unfolding story that is barely two months old and which will most likely continue unfolding for years to come. But it is beginning to have consequences, and not just for the dictators and their families and cronies who are being overthrown.  One potentially important consequence can be seen in Saturday's vote by the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on the Gaddafi regime in Libya, to freeze its assets and to refer Colonel Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court. Welcome and appropriate though these gestures are, they are little more than gestures, given that the murderous Gaddafis holed up in Tripoli are not in much of a position to be affected by them. The true significance of the resolution lies in the unity of the Security Council and, in particular, in China's support, albeit reluctant, for the measure.  In effect, China has just voted to refer Colonel Gaddafi to the ICC for having acted against his opponents in pretty much the same way as it did in 1989 when faced with the Tiananmen Square revolt. Chinese troops then may have fired into the crowds from footbridges rather than helicopters or fighter aircraft, but there is little doubt that Deng Xiaoping would have ordered even greater force to be used had it been necessary.  Today's China, much more than that of 1989, is insistent on the importance of multilateral institutions and agreements. Its Government has now laid down an apparent marker in the leading multilateral institution that it considers the use of murderous force in the suppression of an uprising to be a crime for which government leaders can and should be held accountable.  It will be important to remind China of this marker when next Tibetans or the Muslims of Xinjiang go out into the streets. Until then, or a new Tiananmen protest in Beijing, we cannot know how seriously to take it. But it could well represent a kind of coming of age: the point when China's increasing exposure around the world (there are a reported 30,000 Chinese workers in Libya) forces it also to take a more responsible international stance. and perhaps, just perhaps, the time when it would respond to domestic dissent through a massacre has now passed.  The second clear consequence, which affects the West and China equally, can be seen in the rise in the price of oil. Whether oil continues to surge towards $120 a barrel, or even to pass its 2008 peak of $150, will largely depend on whether Libya's unrest really does turn into civil war, and even more on whether unrest spreads to Saudi arabia and the smaller Gulf oil producers.  The bet, surely, should now be that sooner or later it will. The same conditions of fast population growth, high youth unemployment, readier access to information, extreme income inequalities and inflexible, often gerontocratic regimes apply there in spades. So although this will not inevitably result in interrupted oil supplies or a big price shock, governments should be planning now for the possibility that such a shock might happen.  a sharp oil price rise would be like a big tax on all oil consumers, and would bring us clearly into double-dip-recession territory. The tempting response in Britain will be to cut our own fuel taxes to stem the rise in retail petrol prices. The right response, however, if the coalition really does believe in joined-up government, will be to leave fuel taxes alone and instead to cut other taxes - probably VaT or even income tax.  Supposedly, the Government wants greater energy efficiency and fewer greenhouse gas emissions, so it should let higher prices do their work, while compensating people's incomes and supporting the economy through these other means. For George Osborne, an oil shock would be just the sort of force majeure clause that he needs to invoke to bring on a fiscal plan B. The third broad consequence of events in Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya is one that casts us far into the future. It is the consequence for the European Union of the now possible - even likely - spread of a democratic revolution across a wide swath of North africa and the Middle East. We should be patient in assessing how far that revolution will go, just as we were in the first months after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. But also, like then, it will pay to plan ahead.  The evolution of the EU has consisted of a series of ideas that seemed far-fetched when they were first mooted but that later came to seem inevitable. The next such idea is likely to be the expansion of the EU to encompass the southern coast of the Mediterranean. Such a body, born let's say in 2030 or 2040, coul