https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/11/after-the-wall-three-decades-of-cultural-despair/The Politburo of the East German Communist Party had made a fatal mistake. It had met in emergency session on the cold evening of November 9, 1989, as the country’s border controls were collapsing and hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets of East Berlin demanding democratic reforms and human rights. Other communist regimes were disintegrating in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, and similar irreversible processes were underway in the Soviet Union itself. The party chiefs knew that there would be no Soviet support for a brutal crackdown, as Mikhail Gorbachev pursued his campaign to modernize communism. Almost casually there emerged a proposal to lift the ban on East Germans leaving the country. Incredibly, the Politburo grasped at it, hoping to relieve the pressure while aligning itself with the liberalization being promoted by Moscow. Just before 7pm the order was given, and by midnight thousands of Ossis were surging through the checkpoints to be greeted by Wessis waiting with flowers and champagne on the other side.
It was the moment of ‘people power’. Soon German folk, delirious with joy, were dancing on top of the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, where eight months later half a million people joined Roger Waters of Pink Floyd in a massive star-studded concert version of The Wall, culminating in a stirring rendition of “The Tide is Turning” that helped embed the idea of ‘people power’ in popular culture. In one hugely symbolic moment the Cold War effectively came to an end. The dismantling of the Soviet bloc and the foundation of democratic states in its stead had still to unfold, but the Wall was down and the Curtain had parted. It seemed that the world had evaded the abyss of a new dark age and could finally move forward into “the broad, sunlit uplands of freedom” that Churchill had so eloquently evoked 50 years before as he galvanized the besieged liberal democracies after France had capitulated to the other great totalitarian force of the 20th Century.
For one intellectual it was a career-defining moment. In an act of astonishing prescience (or incredible good luck), a young academic, Francis Fukuyama, had submitted an article “The End of History” only months before to the National Interest where it was published in its Summer issue of 1989. It seemed to relate directly to the epoch-defining events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Fukuyama argued that the world had reached 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, he believed humanity had reached the end point of its ideological evolution and seen the vindication of Western liberal democracy as the ultimate form of human government. It was an apotheosis: the previously intractable conflicts inherent in global politics had finally been resolved and liberal democracy had emerged victorious over communism and its other opponents in the great war of ideologies. The logic of modern history had led “the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy.”
