Mick Hartley

Well, someone needs to look on the positive side. Here's Terry Glavin:

This coming weekend marks the 30th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall “fell,” as the epochal event of Nov. 9, 1989, is commonly, if inaccurately, described. In fact, the wall was knocked down when two million people, trapped for four decades on the Communist side of Berlin, flocked to the wall that weekend, with pickaxes and hammers, and went about the work of joyful destruction.

It was the weekend that German reunification was set in motion. It spelled the end of the European polizeistaaten, the police states of the Warsaw Pact. Within two years, the Soviet Union was gone. Communism was chucked into history’s dustbin. The Cold War that had divided the democratic and capitalist West from the Soviet-dominated, communist East, and the dozens of bloody proxy wars that division had set in motion throughout what we used to call the Third World, was over.

The new era allowed a flowering of democracy around the world. Several new and revived independent states took up their places at the United Nations. For all these reasons, Nov. 9, 1989, was a very big deal, but there’s something else to notice about that day that makes it immediately relevant to upheavals underway around the world at the moment, from Baghdad to Santiago and from Hong Kong to Beirut.

Nobody saw it coming.

After a brief period of celebration and joy, characterised by Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”, the optimism soon dissipated in more disasters and more wars. Russia turned into a corrupt kleptocracy under Putin, Iran's theocracy spread terrorism across the region, China's Communist Party under President Xi has more recently reverted to the worst of Maoist thought control, backed this time around by considerable economic power. History reasserted itself.

Last weekend, an extensive YouGov poll commissioned by George Soros’s Open Societies Institute showed that the people of the former Warsaw Pact states are increasingly pessimistic about democracy, the rule of law and freedom of speech. In Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, roughly 60 per cent of the YouGov poll respondents said democracy was under threat in their countries. Nearly eight in 10 respondents said their elections were “not free and fair.”

Still, there is optimism among the young. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 37 were confident in their abilities to mobilize and effect positive change, and around the world, millions of people are marching in the streets in an upheaval unlike anything since 1989. In Hong Kong, Lebanon, Iraq, Chile, Bolivia, Spain, Pakistan — across generations, religious sects and classes — something is happening.

It defies the easy categories of the Cold War days. But something is happening, and like the events of Nov. 9, 1989, nobody saw it coming. There is no “end of history,” and no one knows what comes next.