Geopolitics

It is the conceit of almost every generation to think that it isliving in extraordinary times. For my parents' generation, it wasthe trauma of the Second World War and the miracle ofpost-war reconstruction. For my older siblings, it was theprotest movements of the late 1960s and the triumph of civilrights and women's equality. In the autumn of 1989, it was difficult not to believe thatsomething monumental was occurring on the global landscape.
The stirrings in Eastern Europe were not isolated accidents, butseemed part of a larger process - whose trajectory was stilluncertain. As graduate students at the University of Oxfordplenty had stood witnesses to these historic events, and whenthe images of East Germans chipping away at the Berlin Wallflashed across the television screen on November 9, everyonejumped aboard a flight to Berlin with some a few of theirclassmates to witness, first hand, the deconstruction of anempire. When everyone arrived the next day, the party atmospherealong the Wall had exploded.
Lufthansa flight attendants withtrays were handing out canapes to those gathered, and U. S.television anchormen, fresh from their overseas journey, werehoisted on makeshift platforms to report "live from the scene."The most astute Western observer of those heady days, Britishjournalist and writer Timothy Garton Ash, described that periodin November as the "greatest street party in the history of theworld".
And so it was. It was estimated that close to two million East Germanscrossed over into West Berlin the weekend after the Wall fell -most of them to spend the welcome gift of 100 Deutschmarksthey received from the West German government. Theobservers came home with their own piece of the Wall, paintedwith graffiti, as well as a euphoric sense of being at the centreof history. The collapse of communist regimes was so rapidthat scholars and journalists scrambled to keep up. The revolutions that had begun in Poland and Hungary, andspread to Germany, sparked upheaval in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria.
The wave eventually spilled over intothe Soviet Union itself, where suppressed nationalism in theBaltic region - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - and in republicssuch as Armenia and Georgia, exploded into calls forindependence. The deteriorating Soviet economy only heightenedthese nationalist sentiments and led successive constituentrepublics of the Soviet Union to create their own economic andlegal systems. Though the genie was already out of the bottle, communisthard-liners in the Kremlin tried to reverse the changes bystaging a coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev in thesummer of 1991.
The effort was thwarted by the president ofthe 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 SovietUnion was officially disbanded on December 26, 1991, endingits reign as the world's largest and most influential communiststate. As a consequence of liberal democracy's victory, and diffusion, he predicted, we would see the waning of traditional powerpolitics and large-scale conflict, and the path toward a morepeaceful world.