Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1183404
THIRTY 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 wall, which had stood as a symbol of the Cold War and had physically divided Berlin since 1961, could no longer hold back the forces of change that had been spreading across the Eastern Bloc and the wider world in the 1980s. The politi- cal demands of the hundreds of thousands of East Germans who had been demonstrat- ing for weeks across the GDR were now met by an under- pressure Schabowski. At a press conference, he declared: "We have decided today to implement a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Repub- lic to leave East Germany through any of the border crossings." He announced that this new rule would begin immedi- ately, although officially the order stipulated that it would start at 4am the next day. As the news spread, thousands headed to checkpoints to test the new regulation. By the end of the night, some East Berlin- ers were in the western half of the city, crowds were dancing on the Berlin Wall and com- munism in Eastern Europe took another step closer to its demise. The GDR was following Hungary's lead after it had opened its borders with Aus- tria in June, and Poland, which had elected its first non-com- munist prime minister since 1946 that August. After the wall opened, the Velvet Revo- lution in Czechoslovakia saw playwright and human rights campaigner Václav Havel be- come president, Bulgaria and Romania join the democratic wave, and Lech Wałęsa be- come the first democratically elected president of Poland. The end of history All of this seemed to con- firm the thoughts of political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who, in an article in The Na- tional Interest in the summer of 1989, had pronounced that history had ended. He wrote that the "flow of events over the past decade or so" had made it difficult to "avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history". This was: "Not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evo- lution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." 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 alterna- tives to Western liberalism" and there would now be "the ineluctable spread of consum- erist Western culture" across the globe. Fukuyama's argument had a certain relevance at the time. Organised labour was in retreat in countries such as Britain after the miners' strike, socialism was being rejected by half of Europe and demo- cratic socialist parties were undergoing great changes as they embraced the free market in various ways. And the particular forces of history that pushed the wall over confirmed their strength when globalisation arrived in Moscow with the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in January 1990. Later that year, the GDR ceased to exist when Germany was reunified, and Mikhail Gorbachev brought the Soviet Union to a quiet end in December 1991. Even some of the West's Cold War friends embraced the new era and moved to- wards liberal democracy. Chile removed dictator Augusto Pinochet from power in 1988 and a year later Patricio Ayl- win of the Concert of Parties for Democracy was elected president. And in South Af- rica, Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, apartheid ended and he became presi- dent in 1994. 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. Yet despite the triumphal- ism of Fukuyama's argument, there was to be no "golden age" of liberal democracy. Faltering steps But the 1990s certainly had a liberal democratic mood. Communism had given way to consumerism and East Euro- pean countries voted in demo- cratic elections for the first time in decades. In the West, 24 OPINION maltatoday | SUNDAY • 10 NOVEMBER 2019 Jonathan Davis History didn't end with the fall of the Berlin Wall Jonathan Davis is senior lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin University TheConversation.com