It is the conceit of almost every generation to think that it is
living in extraordinary times. For my parents' generation, it was
the trauma of the Second World War and the miracle of
post-war reconstruction. For my older siblings, it was the
protest movements of the late 1960s and the triumph of civil
rights and women's equality.
 
In the autumn of 1989, it was difficult not to believe that
something monumental was occurring on the global landscape.
The stirrings in Eastern Europe were not isolated accidents, but
seemed part of a larger process - whose trajectory was still
uncertain. As graduate students at the University of Oxford
plenty had stood witnesses to these historic events, and when
the images of East Germans chipping away at the Berlin Wall
flashed across the television screen on November 9, everyone
jumped aboard a flight to Berlin with some a few of their
classmates to witness, first hand, the deconstruction of an
empire.
 
When everyone arrived the next day, the party atmosphere
along the Wall had exploded. Lufthansa flight attendants with
trays were handing out canapes to those gathered, and U.S.
television anchormen, fresh from their overseas journey, were
hoisted on makeshift platforms to report "live from the scene."
The most astute Western observer of those heady days, British
journalist and writer Timothy Garton Ash, described that period
in November as the "greatest street party in the history of the
world". And so it was.
 
It was estimated that close to two million East Germans
crossed over into West Berlin the weekend after the Wall fell -
most of them to spend the welcome gift of 100 Deutschmarks
they received from the West German government. The
observers came home with their own piece of the Wall, painted
with graffiti, as well as a euphoric sense of being at the centre
of history. The collapse of communist regimes was so rapid
that scholars and journalists scrambled to keep up.
 
The revolutions that had begun in Poland and Hungary, and
spread to Germany, sparked upheaval in Czechoslovakia,
Romania, and Bulgaria. The wave eventually spilled over into
the Soviet Union itself, where suppressed nationalism in the
Baltic region - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - and in republics
such as Armenia and Georgia, exploded into calls for
independence. The deteriorating Soviet economy only heightened
these nationalist sentiments and led successive constituent
republics of the Soviet Union to create their own economic and
legal systems.
 
Though the genie was already out of the bottle, communist
hard-liners in the Kremlin tried to reverse the changes by
staging a coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev in the
summer of 1991. The effort was thwarted by the president of
the Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin - with the help of the army
- but the communist regime in Moscow was mortally wounded.
Any remaining authority it had quickly evaporated. The Soviet
Union was officially disbanded on December 26, 1991, ending
its reign as the world's largest and most influential communist
state.
 
As a consequence of liberal democracy's victory, and diffusion,
he predicted, we would see the waning of traditional power
politics and large-scale conflict, and the path toward a more
peaceful world.