Commentary: History was supposed to end after the Berlin Wall fell – 30 years on, it hasn’t

CAMBRIDGE: 30 years ago, the Berlin Wall was forced open by excited East Berliners taking advantage of a mistaken order given by Socialist Unity Party official Günter Schabowski.

The GDR was following Hungary’s lead after it had opened its borders with Austria in June, and Poland, which had elected its first non-communist prime minister since 1946 that August. Liberalism was victorious “in the realm of ideas” and 1989 saw “the triumph of the West” and “the Western idea”. There had been the “total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism” and there would now be “the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture” across the globe.

All in all, it looked like Fukuyama’s assertion that ideological differences were over. Capitalism had won the century’s economic argument, liberal democracy claimed the political prize and by the end of the 1990s there were nearly as many democratic states as there were non-democracies across the world.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1985, cementing their 'special relationship' AFP/MIKE SARGENT READ: Commentary: The ghost of Tiananmen Square hovers over a 'fragile superpower' even after 30 years From Birmingham in Britain to Seattle in the US, the WTO-vision of the world inspired protest and new thinking. Even though no coherent idea emerged to unite the various groups, the post-1989 environment helped bring people together to discuss shaping the world along different socio-economic and political lines.So rather than taking 1989 as the point when history ended, we can see it as the point when it moved into a new stage.

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