Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Published 7 Jan 2020

That Trump himself did not offer anything remotely like a reasoned alternative made his elevation to the presidency all the more remarkable. He was a protest candidate elected by a protest vote. In that regard, the 2016 presidential election marked a historical turning point comparable in significance to the fall of the Berlin Wall a quarter century earlier. The Age of Illusions seeks to understand what occurred between those two milestones. The quotation from the writer James Baldwin that introduces this book aptly expresses its overarching theme: promises made, but not kept; expectations raised, but unfulfilled; outraged citizens left with no place to stand. 1 AL, FRED, AND HOMER’S AMERICA—AND MINE Donald Trump was born in June 1946, the son of a wealthy New York real estate developer.

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he wondered.9 Back in New York, ABC’s Sam Donaldson announced that the Wall itself had “all but vanished” and, as a result, “freedom’s light is shining.”10 Connie Chung of CBS affirmed the Wall’s sudden transformation from an ugly symbol of repression into “a monument to the abiding dream of people to be free.”11 Print commentary duly echoed such sentiments. According to New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, the fall of the Berlin Wall signified a “glorious victory for the West and the burial of Communism.”12 Reporting from the scene, Times correspondent Serge Schmemann wrote that events there seemed “to sweep away much of the common wisdom and presumptions of the postwar world.” Whatever might happen next, the one sure thing was that “something essential had changed [and] that things would not be the same again.”13 According to the New Republic, “excitement bordering on ecstasy” constituted the only allowable response to the breaching of the Berlin Wall.

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“As dominoes are falling across Eastern Europe,” the United States was “sitting on its hands, trying to slow down the pace of change.”17 The situation called for yet more and faster change, with an American president’s hand on the wheel and foot on the accelerator. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory likewise chastised the president for his evident lack of excitement. “Why did the leader of the western world look as though he had lost his last friend the day they brought him the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall?” she wondered. Bush’s “stricken expression and lame words about an event that had the rest of mankind quickly singing hosannas were an awful letdown at a high moment in history.” She was mystified by the president’s inability to utter “a simple, fervent, ‘Let freedom ring.’”*18 McGrory’s dig, like those of other critics, implied the existence of some essential agreement regarding exactly what freedom signified.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety
by Gideon Rachman
Published 1 Feb 2011

The most dramatic chapter of the Age of Transformation was about to be written. 6 EUROPE, 1989 THE YEAR OF REVOLUTIONS The single most dramatic event of the Age of Transformation was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The wall had divided Europe. It had separated the communist world from the capitalist world, and the Soviet bloc from the democratic world. The sight of thousands of East Germans streaming through the wall and into West Berlin on that November night was the sign that the cold war was over. A single global economic and political system was being formed—a “new world order,” as President George H. W. Bush called it. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a victory for the Western powers and for individual freedom.

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Americans, in particular, have tended to regard the defining moments of recent history as the end of the cold war and the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. One of the best recent histories of U.S. foreign policy is subtitled “From 11/9 to 9/11”—the two dates in question marking the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attack on the United States.12 But the collapse of the Soviet system and 9/11 were part of an even bigger story—the creation of a globalized world economic and political system. The two key events framing that story were the opening of China in 1978 and the 2008 crash. I have divided this thirty-year epoch into two distinct periods.

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In Latin America, economic reformers were often at pains to distinguish their modest market-based measures from the “neo-liberalism” of Reagan and Thatcher,25 neither of whom were particularly popular figures south of the Rio Grande after the Falklands War and Reagan’s support of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. By contrast, Reagan and Thatcher were popular heroes in much of Central and Eastern Europe, a fact that caused a certain amount of pain and confusion to their left-wing and liberal opponents back home. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union took place after Reagan left office. Yet these events cast a retrospective glow of vindication over his presidency. Reagan was able to argue with some justice in his memoirs, published in 1990, that the previous decade had witnessed a “stunning renaissance of democracy and economic freedom”26 around the world.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

The institute had sent me its invitation several months earlier and I had promptly forgotten about it. On 9 November, the morning after the US presidential election, as I tried to make sense of the dawning new reality I recalled that invitation. By eerie coincidence, it was twenty-seven years to the day since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The worm had turned. America had just elected a president who was a big fan of walls and a big admirer of Vladimir Putin. While Putin was surveying his wrecked world in 1989, and we were racing down the Autobahn, Donald Trump was launching a board game. It was called Trump: The Game. With its fake paper money and property-based rules, it bore an uncanny resemblance to Monopoly – except that the number six on the dice was replaced with the letter T.

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With its fake paper money and property-based rules, it bore an uncanny resemblance to Monopoly – except that the number six on the dice was replaced with the letter T. Unsurprisingly, it was a flop. There is no record that Trump said anything positive or negative about the fall of the Berlin Wall. At any rate, all that seemed a long time ago. America had just elected a man who admired the way politics was done in Russia. His campaign had even profited from Moscow’s assistance. Would the Russians kindly agree to my belated acceptance? They would indeed. What followed was a crash course in how to see the world very differently.

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GDP numbers insist we are doing well, at a time when half the country is suffering from personal recessions. The world’s most informative graph is the Elephant Chart.* Devised by Branko Milanovic, a former World Bank staffer, this statistical pachyderm has many virtues. It is intuitively simple and tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the era of high globalisation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It shows the distribution of more than two decades of growth between different percentiles of the global economy. The global median – the emerging middle classes of China, Vietnam, India and so on – enjoyed income growth of more than 80 per cent in those years. Even the bottom deciles, in Africa and South Asia, saw growth of up to 50 per cent.

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990
by Katja Hoyer
Published 5 Apr 2023

Just as individual East Germans are asked to minimize traces of their pre-1990 past, the nation as a whole seems supremely uncomfortable with the GDR as a chapter of its history. In many ways, the process of writing the GDR out of the national narrative began even before its final demise. In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt famously declared, ‘Now what belongs together will grow together.’ For many Germans, East and West, the division of their country, which had seemed a fact of life during the Cold War, now looked like an unnatural state of affairs, a product of the Second World War and perhaps a punishment for it.

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There was only one way to express discontent with the set list: crossing out the names of all the candidates. Votes were then simply counted as a percentage of those who had given their consent to the set list. The result of this farcical procedure was that all of the elections before the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to show near-complete agreement with the composition of the Volkskammer. The 1950 election, for example, produced a result of 99.7 per cent approval for the list on offer. Pressure to attend elections was nonetheless enormous. The turnout in 1950 was recorded as 98 per cent. This process was ridiculed by many GDR citizens who dubbed it ‘paper folding’.

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Ewald himself defended his actions in his 1994 autobiography I Was Sport: Truths and Legends from the Wonderland of Victors in which he claimed that sport had done more good than evil for East Germany and that doping had been more widespread than his leadership at the top had been aware of. Margitta herself, who appears in the doping records as number 1/86, continued on a steep trajectory on the back of her victories. She retired from her Olympic career in 1972, had a family and completed a doctorate in 1977. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she continued to sit on the reunified National Olympics Committee until the documents were leaked that showed her doping records. Those who were given steroids at a younger age and sometimes without their knowledge had to live with the physical side-effects for the rest of their lives. When administered to teenage girls, Turinabol and similar substances cause irreversible changes such as a deeper voice, hair growth, suppressed development of breasts and other ways of making the body more masculine.

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall
by Michael Meyer
Published 7 Sep 2009

Also by Michael Meyer The Alexander Complex THE YEAR THAT CHANGED THE WORLD The Untold Story behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall MICHAEL MEYER SCRIBNER A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2009 by Michael Meyer All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Scribner hardcover edition September 2009 SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

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“We will confront threats… confront new adversaries… confront new enemies… and never back down, never give in, never accept anything less than complete victory.” Again, the Reagan echo with a nod to Winston Churchill. Be resolute, and the enemy will blink. Goodness and light will triumph. The fall of the Berlin Wall serves as proof and inspiration. There’s only one problem—that of disjuncture, a confusion of cause and effect. What if it didn’t happen quite that way? Let us return to that fateful moment. It was the night of November 9, 1989. The place: Checkpoint Charlie, the famous border crossing in the heart of Cold War Berlin.

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Then he paused and, with a ghost of a smile, added a telling caveat: “At least, not as long as I am sitting in this chair.” This no was of immense importance to Nemeth. “It meant we could go ahead. It opened the way for everything that would follow,” he said, from the creation of a democratic Hungary to, ultimately, the fall of the Berlin Wall. This brief encounter with Gorbachev, coming with the first breath of spring after a long winter, would prove to be a hidden but decisive turning point in the end of the Cold War. Yet Nemeth was not finished. Having accomplished his chief mission, he dropped a second bomb, in some ways even bigger than the first.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

The story of how that happened is the story of how the period after that high-water mark of freedom failed to reconcile the wounds of the past or offer people a sense of purpose for the future. It’s a story that shaped the lives of Hungarians like Viktor Orban and Sandor Lederer in very different ways. * * * — At the time, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to end the historical epoch that had begun with the rise of fascism and Communism. The carnage of World War II had morphed into the competition between capitalist democracy and Communist autocracy, and now that battle was over. As an American, I believed we had all emerged into a new consensus, the benevolent cocoon of American-led globalization.

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At the same time, Orban began to expropriate themes from the Republican Party’s culture wars within American society: fidelity to Christian values, opposition to abortion and LGBT rights, antipathy to crass popular culture, and resentment of the political correctness of elites. To many Hungarians, the first two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall had been disorienting and disappointing. The nation was wealthier, but that wealth was still far behind that of its Western European neighbors, and it was concentrated more in the hands of faceless corporations and a small elite than in those of individual Hungarians. The nation was a member of clubs like NATO and the European Union, but it lacked the clout to have a voice on foolish American projects like the invasion of Iraq.

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I walked closer to the Danube to find a statue of Nagy. It was smaller, less impressive, and tucked away between a busy road and some characterless structures. Nagy had been a martyr, but he was also a Communist. I thought about what Sandor had said about Budapest’s transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall: As a child, you see the visuals. Visuals in terms of statues that you see on the streets. In a country where politics has an underlayment of “red or brown,” these decisions about history indicated which side was responsible for Hungary’s defeats and which side had won. It wasn’t just statues.

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990
by Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds
Published 24 Aug 2016

See also ‘Ambassador Winston Lord’, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, 28 April 1998, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Lord,%20Winston.pdf. 32. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 608; Chen Jian, ‘Tiananmen and the Fall of the Berlin Wall: China’s Path toward 1989 and Beyond’, in Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (New York, 2009), 111–12. 33. Liang Zhang et al., eds, The Tiananmen Papers (New York, 2002), 143. 34. Mikhail Gorbachev, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 15 (Moscow, 2010), 261. 35. Zhang Ganghua and Li Peng, Li Peng liu si ri ji zhen xiang: Fu lu Li Peng liu si ri ji yuan wen (Hong Kong, 2010). 36.

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-China Talks during the Cold War, 1949–1972 (Bloomington, IN, 2006) Xu, Dashen, ed., Zhonghua renmin gongheguo shilu (A Factual Record of the People’s Republic of China) (Changchun, 1994) Xu, Jingli, Jiemi Zhongguo Waijiao Dangan (Declassifying Chinese Diplomatic Files) (Beijing, 2005) Xue, Mouhong, ed., Dangdai Zhongguo waijiao (Contemporary Chinese Diplomacy) (Beijing, 1988) Yang, Mingwei, and Chen Yangyong, Zhou Enlai waijiao fengyun (Diplomatic Winds and Clouds of Zhou Enlai) (Beijing, 1995) Zaloga, Steven J., The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945–2000 (London, 2002) Zelikow, Philip, and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA, 1997) Zhang, Ganghua, and Li Peng, Li Peng liu si ri ji zhen xiang: Fu lu Li Peng liu si ri ji yuan wen (Hong Kong, 2010) Zhang, Liang, et al., eds, The Tiananmen Papers (New York, 2002) Zhang, Ying, Sui Zhang Wenjin chushi Meiguo: Dashi furen jishi (Serving in the United States with Zhang Wenjin: Account of An Ambassador’s Wife) (Beijing, 1996) Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi (Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Document Research Office), ed., Mao Zedong nianpu, 1949–1976 (Chronology of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976) (Beijing, 2013) Zubok, Vladislav M., A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007) Zwahr, Hartmut, Die erfrorenen Flügel der Schwalbe: DDR und ‘Prager Frühling’: Tagebuch einer Krise 1968–1970 (Bonn, 2007) Articles and Chapters Alexandroff, Alan S., and Donald Brean, ‘Global Summitry: Its Meaning and Scope’, Global Summitry 1, no. 1 (2015), 1–26 Bange, Oliver, ‘The GDR in the Era of Détente: Conflicting Perceptions and Strategies’, in Poul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad, eds, Perforating the Iron Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965–1985 (Copenhagen, 2010), 57–78 Bange, Oliver, ‘The Stasi Confronts Western Strategies for Transformation 1966–1975’, in Jonathan Haslam and Karina Urbach, eds, Secret Intelligence in the European States System, 1918–1989 (Stanford, CA, 2013), 170–208 Bock, Siegfried, and Karl Seidel, ‘Die Außenbeziehungen der DDR in der Periode der Konsolidierung (1955–1972/73)’, in Siegfried Bock, Ingrid Muth, and Hermann Schwiesau, eds, DDR-Außenpolitik im Rückspiegel: Diplomaten im Gespräch (Münster, 2004), 53–68 Bozo, Frédéric, ‘Détente versus Alliance: France, the United States and the Politics of the Harmel Report (1964–1968)’, Contemporary European History 7, no. 3 (1998), 343–60 Brown, Archie, ‘The Gorbachev Revolution and the End of the Cold War’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. III: Endings (Cambridge, 2010), 244–66 Chen, Jian, ‘Tiananmen and the Fall of the Berlin Wall: China’s Path toward 1989 and Beyond’, in Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (New York, 2009), 96–131 Chen, Jian, ‘China, the Third World and the End of the Cold War’, in Artemy Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, eds, The End of the Cold War and the Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict (London, 2011), 101–21 Colley, Linda, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (1992), 309–29 Costigliola, Frank, ‘An “Arm Around the Shoulder”: The United States, NATO and German Reunification, 1989–90’, Contemporary European History 3, no. 1 (March 1994), 87–110 Cox, Michael, and Steven Hurst, ‘“His Finest Hour?”

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Having paused to take stock of relations with Moscow in the first half of 1989, Bush in turn reoriented his foreign policy towards Europe and engaged seriously with Gorbachev in Malta in December. Their remarks, noted at the start of this introduction, demonstrate a shared eagerness to end the Cold War era, with its spiralling arms race and intense ideological struggle, and even to overcome the division of Europe itself. That meant, above all, addressing the German question. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November put German unification at the top of the political agenda. Over the next few months, as East Germany began to disintegrate, Chancellor Kohl in Bonn moved decisively to absorb the former GDR territories within the Federal Republic. But the prospect of a united Germany at the heart of Europe challenged the foundations of the postwar international order, around which the Cold War had been stabilized in the early 1970s.

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 20 Nov 2018

Because free markets discriminate against those who bear children, Lagadinova believed that only state intervention could support women in their dual roles as workers and mothers. Courtesy of Elena Lagadinova. AUTHOR’S NOTE For the last twenty years, I have studied the social impacts of the political and economic transition from state socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe. Although I first traveled through the region just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, my professional interest began in 1997, when I started conducting research on the impacts of the collapse of communist ideology on ordinary people. First as a PhD student and later as a university professor, I lived for more than three years in Bulgaria and nineteen months in both eastern and western Germany.

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Many women suffered under a double burden of mandatory formal employment and domestic work, as so well captured in Natalya Baranskaya’s brilliant novella, A Week Like Any Other. Finally, in no country were women’s rights promoted as a project to support women’s individualism or self-actualization. Instead, the state supported women as workers and mothers so they could participate more fully in the collective life of the nation.9 After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, new democratic governments rapidly privatized state assets and dismantled social safety nets. Men under these newly emerging capitalist economies regained their “natural” roles as family patriarchs, and women were expected to return home as mothers and wives supported by their husbands.

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Despite their shortcomings, as we’ve seen, the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain did implement a wide range of policies to promote women’s economic independence (albeit with much variation across the region), which would have caused the price of sex to fall, according to sexual economics theory. Is there evidence that women and men began to view female sexuality as something to be shared rather than exchanged for resources? Were intimate relations experienced differently in capitalist versus socialist countries? And what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Did the sexual marketplaces described by Baumeister and Vohs return with the privatization and marketization of the postsocialist economy? All studies of what is called “subjective well-being”—or people’s own self-reported feelings of happiness or sexual satisfaction—share the problem that people’s emotional states are difficult to research in an objective fashion.

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall
by Peter Millar
Published 1 Oct 2009

And finally I must acknowledge a huge debt of gratitude to my late mother who throughout that hectic period never failed to cut out her son’s clippings from whichever newspaper I was working for at the time, and to preserve them in a scrapbook for me. Her efforts have made the burden on my memory so much lighter. Foreword One thing needs saying before anything else, at least for those unfamiliar with the autobiographical works of Spike Milligan: I make no claim whatsoever to having been instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall any more than any other of the millions of people who experienced life behind it and the tremendous exhilaration of seeing its ugly scar removed from the face of a much-loved city. And a tumour excised from the heart of Europe. From 1981 until 1989 – and beyond – I was an eyewitness, albeit a highly involved one, to the events that shook the communist Soviet empire to its foundations, eventually toppling it, bringing down the Iron Curtain and leaving the way open for a fresh start in a new century.

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Least of all the intelligence agencies of the West, caught napping on the eve of their greatest ‘victory’, as they would be again on September 11th, 2001, their greatest embarrassment. Not even the men who gave the orders in East Berlin knew it would happen. Not even as they gave them. They had intended something else. Something else entirely. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the triumphant vindication of the ‘cock-up’ theory of history, of what happens when those seemingly immovable objects of political inertia and the status quo get swept away by two irresistible forces: accident and emotion. I had been a hundred miles away on East Germany’s Baltic coast when the first checkpoint on the Wall that for a generation had severed one half of Berlin from the other was suddenly, unexpectedly thrown open.

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And for them it really was a family reunion: Kerstin Falkner and her husband Andreas had only weeks before fled their home in East Berlin, via the West German Embassy in Poland, thinking it would be years before they saw the rest of their family again, if ever. Now she was standing arm in arm with her brother Horst and his wife Sylvia, who had only hours before walked through a gap in the Wall they thought would keep them apart forever. If for the world at large the fall of the Berlin Wall was theatre on a grand stage, for me it was as first-hand as a family wedding. Eight years earlier my wife and I had made a decrepit flat in a run-down corner of East Berlin our first family home. I had passed my driving test there. We had made friendships that would last a lifetime, lived alongside the natives in a world of grimy buildings pockmarked by bullet holes, of grey cobbled streets and the tiny Trabant cars with fibreglass bodies in fluorescent orange and apple green that rattled over them.

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity
by Stephen D. King
Published 14 Jun 2010

Under the influence of self-determination, sponsored by an increasingly powerful US hostile to colonial influence, the empires of the nineteenth century collapsed in the wars and economic crises that followed. The biggest casualty, most obviously, was the British Empire. The Ottoman Empire went the same way and, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, so did the Soviet Union’s twentieth-century empire. The result was a huge proliferation of nation states. According to Freedom House, there were only fifty-five sovereign countries in 1900, alongside thirteen empires. That compares with the 192 states which, in 2009, were members of the United Nations.

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The dreams of central planners had turned into nightmares of bureaucracy and corruption, leaving East German consumers with products that wouldn’t survive in a world dominated by free market choice. While the West Germans could whiz around in their Audis, the East Germans had to make do with Trabants. Although the cars are treated with nostalgic affection today, Trabant production lasted only a couple of years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Given the choice, East Germans preferred to scrap their heavily polluting and remarkably slow Trabants (0–60mph in 21 seconds) and replace them with second-hand cars from Western Europe. The Trabant was dumped onto the scrapheap of Soviet communism. Those employed making Trabants and other relics of the Soviet era ended up without jobs, and were supported instead by handouts from the wealthy citizens of former West Germany.3 Not all Soviet-era car companies went the same way.

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It went on to produce a number of innovative designs in the 1960s and 1970s but could make only limited headway in Western markets, where advances in motor technology and marketing were far greater. Indeed, by the 1980s, the Škoda brand had become something of a joke. In the UK, Škoda gags became very popular.4 (Q: ‘How do you double the value of a Škoda?’ A: ‘Fill its tank with gas’.) With the fall of the Berlin Wall it became clear that Škoda, like the manufacturers of the Trabant, would not be able to survive as an independent company. In 1991, it became part of the Volkswagen Group, alongside Audi and Seat. Since then, its fortunes have been transformed and the jokes have been long forgotten. In 2008, Škoda managed 674,530 sales, the largest number in its long and sometimes turbulent history.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy
by Mervyn King
Published 3 Mar 2016

As applied to economics, a disequilibrium is a position that is unsustainable, meaning that at some point a large change in the pattern of spending and production will take place as the economy moves to a new equilibrium. The word accurately describes the evolution of the world economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I discuss in Chapter 1. Radical uncertainty refers to uncertainty so profound that it is impossible to represent the future in terms of a knowable and exhaustive list of outcomes to which we can attach probabilities. Economists conventionally assume that ‘rational’ people can construct such probabilities.

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The story of the crisis By the start of the twenty-first century it seemed that economic prosperity and democracy went hand in hand. Modern capitalism spawned growing prosperity based on growing trade, free markets and competition, and global banks. In 2008 the system collapsed. To understand why the crisis was so big, and came as such a surprise, we should start at the key turning point – the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At the time it was thought to represent the end of communism, indeed the end of the appeal of socialism and central planning. For some it was the end of history.16 For most, it represented a victory for free market economics. Contrary to the prediction of Marx, capitalism had displaced communism.

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And the savings glut pushed down long-term real interest rates to unprecedentedly low levels.21 In the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, real rates were positive and moved within a range of 3 to 5 per cent. My estimate is that the average ten-year world real interest rate fell steadily from 4 per cent or so around the fall of the Berlin Wall to 1.5 per cent when the crisis hit, and has since fallen further to around zero.22 As the Asian economies grew and grew, the volume of saving placed in the world capital market by their savers, including the Chinese government, rose and rose. So not only did those countries add millions of people to the pool of labour producing goods to be sold around the world, depressing real wages in other countries, they added billions of dollars to the pool of saving seeking an outlet, depressing real rates of interest in the global capital market.

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze
by Bridget Kendall
Published 14 May 2017

Contents Cover About the Book About the Author Title Page Introduction ‘Then all hell broke loose’ The Greek Civil War (1944–9) ‘The Iron Curtain was in place’ The Communist Coup in Czechoslovakia (1948) ‘There were no weapons, only arguments, ideas’ The Italian Election of 1948 ‘We were suddenly shut off’ The Berlin Blockade (1948–9) ‘Then fear replaced pride’ The Fall of Shanghai (1949) ‘The trap shut’ The Korean War (1950–3) ‘The world became a hostile place’ McCarthyism (1950–4) ‘When I saw the light, I had no idea what was happening’ The H-Bomb (1950s) ‘Now it was going to be different’ The East German Uprising (1953) ‘Democracy and freedom became a memory only’ The Iranian Coup (1953) ‘It was the beginning of freedom’ Khrushchev’s Secret Speech (1956) ‘We are not your comrades’ The Hungarian Revolution (1956) ‘They were leaving with only their suitcases, they lost everything’ The Congo Crisis (1960–1) ‘If one went, one couldn’t return’ The Berlin Wall (1961) ‘The world was going to end any time now’ The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) ‘There was no future’ The Fall of Khrushchev and the Rise of Brezhnev (1964–82) ‘They could accuse you of anything’ The Outbreak of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–7) ‘They didn’t want to live in the dark any more’ The Prague Spring (1968) ‘I can’t wash that stain away’ America’s Vietnam War (1965–73) ‘Everything that you thought is not true any more’ The Coup in Chile (1973) ‘These were just ordinary men marching in the street’ The Fall of Saigon and the Aftermath of the Vietnam War (1975–9) ‘We fell into each other’s arms’ The Cold Peace and Ostpolitik (1969–79) ‘The country was left with no protection at all’ The Angolan Civil War (1975–2002) ‘The newcomer holding a weapon is the enemy’ The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan (1979–89) ‘We came out victorious’ The Birth of Solidarity in Poland (1980) ‘A threat to our mutual humanity’ The Nuclear Arms Race and CND (1981–7) ‘Everyone wanted change’ Gorbachev’s Perestroika (1985–91) ‘They are not so different from us’ The Fall of the Berlin Wall and German Reunification (1989–90) ‘The greatest value of mankind is their freedom’ The Baltic Republics Leave the Soviet Union (1988–91) ‘The last nail in the coffin’ The Collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) Contributor Biographies Picture Section Further Reading: Contributors’ Publications Further Reading Index of Contributors Index Acknowledgements Picture Credits Copyright About the Book Accompanying a landmark BBC Radio 4 series, The Cold War is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how the tensions of the last century have shaped the modern world, and what it was like to live through them.

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For eight more years, disaffected East Germans still had an escape route via West Berlin, until the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 to stop them. Meanwhile, the East German police state tightened its grip. The people would not risk rising up once more against their Communist masters for another 36 years – not until the mass demonstrations of 1989 that began in Leipzig and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. As part of his National Service, George Flint was dispatched to Berlin to be a driver for BRIXMIS – the British Mission in the Soviet Zone. This gave him, at just 19, an extraordinary close-up view of the troubles of East Germany that led to the uprising. The Soviet zone was very downtrodden.

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Those who remained in Czechoslovakia battened down the hatches. Most of them gave up political activity, resigning themselves to a dreary and restrictive life under an oppressive Communist government, which annulled almost all the Prague Spring reforms and kept a firm grip on power for the next 20 years, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Despite her family’s poverty, Prague-born Zdena Tomin was a true believer in Communism from a very young age. This changed during her teens. By the time I was 14, 15, Hungary happened, 1956, and I woke up and realised what it was that I had been ecstatic about.

The Passenger: Berlin
by The Passenger
Published 8 Jun 2021

The GDR supplied the countries with technology, materials and training, and in Vietnam it also built massive infrastructure – housing, hospitals, stores, even a hydroelectric-power plant – for thousands of people who were relocated to the central highlands to tend new Robusta coffee plantations. In exchange the GDR would receive around half of both countries’ annual coffee harvests starting in the mid-1980s. Unfortunately the GDR was unable to reap much reward for its efforts, thanks to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. However, its significant investments helped Vietnam to become the world’s second largest coffee producer, and today Germany is the second biggest importer, after the USA, of Vietnamese green coffee beans. German-Vietnamese couple Sascha Wölck and Hang Hoang with their children May and Kim.

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Described by The New York Times as ‘an impressive and inimitable voice among contemporary writers’, his work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has garnered numerous literary awards, being compared with Borges, Calvino and Nabokov. Born in The Hague, his first novel, Philip and the Others, was published in 1954 when he was only twenty-one, and he went on to achieve international success with novels such as Rituals (1980) and The Following Story (1991). He experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall first hand, recounting it in his Berlin diaries (published in English as Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany, MacLehose Press, 2012), from which this essay is extracted. The final photograph in Part I of my book Roads to Berlin (MacLehose, 2012) shows the Belvedere in the gardens of Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam, and the last sentence of that section ended with the words: ‘and, when I return, everything will be different, yet still the same, and changed forever’.

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It quickly became necessary to provide a structure several square metres in area to shelter the military personnel in charge of passport control, and from there the sentry-box evolved over the years, being renovated and improved, modified and rebuilt, becoming larger and, as the Cold War intensified, more high security. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall the building was transported to the Allied Museum on Clayallee in the borough of Zehlendorf, well outside the city centre. In 2000, to please the crowds of tourists who travelled to the original spot and found nothing, it was decided to ‘rebuild’ Checkpoint Charlie as it had been in the early 1960s – without exactly broadcasting the fact that the structure that stands on the site is only a copy of an original that disappeared long before the fall of the Wall.

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

Victorians would be shocked to find that their beloved British Empire – which provided the essential foundations for nineteenth-century globalization – had more or less disappeared by the late 1940s, by which time the UK itself was on the brink of bankruptcy. Those many fans of the Soviet economic system during the 1930s Depression years would doubtless be astonished to discover that the entire edifice began to crumble following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. SOUTHERN SPAIN Even when patterns of globalization endure for many centuries, they can break down remarkably quickly, leading to dramatic changes in fortune. Consider, for example, the history of Andalucía in southern Spain, a story that veered from one seemingly permanent political structure (Islam) to another (Christianity) within just a handful of years.

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London and Paris eventually established a tougher ‘Dual Control’ system – which understandably provoked a nationalist backlash and an army revolt.13 To be fair, it has not all been reverse gear in Europe. For many years, former Soviet satellites appeared to have found a home in the European Union’s welcoming democratic arms. Poland, for example, went from strength to strength economically following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Between 1990 and 2015, Polish per capita incomes more than doubled, thanks in large part to major institutional reforms associated with Poland’s efforts to join the EU, a feat it eventually accomplished in 2004. The contrast with Ukraine – stuck in a no man’s land between the European Union and Russia – is striking.

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This process, however, is not just about efficiency gains: cross-border movement of both labour and capital is also, in part, a process that reduces inequalities of income and opportunity by levelling a previously very steeply inclined playing field. The failures of Soviet-style communism prevented Eastern European countries from making significant economic progress in the decades following the Second World War: their living standards slowly fell behind those in the West. While there has been some renewed convergence since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a large gap in living standards remains: in 2014, per capita incomes in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were less than half those in the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK. Merging these labour markets should ultimately mean higher levels of output and more investment, in theory making everyone better off.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

Though jeered at by professional planners of her day—one dismissed her work as “bitter coffee-house ramblings”—Jacobs has certainly had the last laugh, with The Death and Life of Great American Cities utterly upending town planning for more than fifty years through its articulation of precisely what makes a neighborhood worth inhabiting. We will spend at least another generation working out how Jacob’s fine-grained mixtures should function within digital environments, but mining her work for insights into the culture machine does not stop there. Just after the fall of the Berlin wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, Jacobs wrote Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, in which she identifies two complementary and opposing moral syndromes: one based on taking (also known as the guardian syndrome), and the other based on trading (or the commercial syndrome).

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It must be contextualized within a much wider and less metaphoric series of battles worldwide, stretching back decades. A key feature of these conflicts has been the oscillation between irrational exuberance and untethered terror. To delineate the period we are living through, I combine the hopefulness that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall with the fear and rage that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. This period I call 89/11 (pronounced “eightynine eleven”), and this section of the book will both define that era’s characteristics and move past the stasis it engendered via the creation of what I term “bespoke futures.”1 What looked like it would be a facile history in 1989—the victory of one sort of built system over another, the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, capitalism over a command economy—turned out to be vastly more complex.

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This period I call 89/11 (pronounced “eightynine eleven”), and this section of the book will both define that era’s characteristics and move past the stasis it engendered via the creation of what I term “bespoke futures.”1 What looked like it would be a facile history in 1989—the victory of one sort of built system over another, the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, capitalism over a command economy—turned out to be vastly more complex. The post-1989 period contained a multitude of features, but one unifying construct was the belief that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the Soviet Union itself, not just Communism, but all the countervailing forces against market capitalism were vanquished, and not just for the moment but literally for all time. The Market with a capital M was the grail at the end of Francis Fukayama’s treatise The End of History.2 The Market was the solution for all questions, the Market would bring peace and prosperity, and would free itself from the tyranny of the business cycle, evolving into an entirely invisible, frictionless, perpetual motion machine that would take the name of the New Economy (again with capital letters).3 This immediate post-1989 period coincided with the most utopian phase of the culture machine: the euphoria of the World Wide Web’s first Wild, Wild West phase.

On Nature and Language
by Noam Chomsky
Published 16 Apr 2007

Although this course is misleading for the reasons mentioned, I will nevertheless illustrate the general pattern with a few current examples. Given the consistency, contemporary examples are rarely hard to find. We are meeting in November 1999, a month that happens to be the tenth anniversary of several important events. One was the fall of the Berlin Wall, which effectively brought the Soviet system to an end. A second was the final large-scale massacre in El Salvador, carried out by US terrorist forces called “the army of El Salvador” – organized, armed, and trained by the reigning superpower, which has long controlled the region in essentially this manner.

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There is also much more to say about the performance of the secular priesthood throughout these awful years and until today. The record has been reviewed in some detail in print, with the usual fate of “unpopular ideas.” There is perhaps little point in reviewing it again, and time is short, so let me turn to the second anniversary: the fall of the Berlin Wall. This too is a rich topic, one that has received a great deal of attention on the tenth anniversary, unlike the destruction of Central America by US terror. Let us consider some of the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet dungeon that largely escaped attention – in the West, not among the traditional victims.

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The openness does not matter much: the press, and intellectuals generally, commonly adhere to the 172 The secular priesthood and the perils of democracy “general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention” what they reveal. But the information is there, for those who choose to know. I will mention a few recent examples to give the flavor. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, US global strategy shifted in an instructive way. It is called “deterrence strategy,” because the US only “deters” others, and never attacks. This is an instance of another historical universal, or close to it: in a military conflict, each side is fighting in self-defense, and it is an important task of the secular priesthood, on all sides, to uphold that banner vigorously.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg
Published 3 Feb 1997

This requires that the taxes imposed upon the most productive citizens of the currently rich countries be priced at supermonopoly rates, hundreds or even thousands of times higher than the actual cost of the services that governments provide in return. 92 THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE NATIONSTATE The fall of the Berlin Wall was not just a visible symbol of the death of Communism. It was a defeat for the entire world system of nationstates and a triumph of efficiency and markets. The fulcrum of power underlying history has shifted. We believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 culminates the era of the nationstate, a peculiar two-hundred-year phase in history that began with the French Revolution. States have existed for six thousand years.

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Yet the following seven years brought the most sweeping disarmament since the close of World War I. • At a time when experts in North America and Europe were pointing to Japan for support of the view that governments can successfully rig markets, we said otherwise. We forecast that the Japanese financial assets boom would end in a bust. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Japanese stock market crashed, losing almost half its value. We continue to believe that its ultimate low could match or exceed the 89 percent loss that Wall Street suffered at the bottom after 1929. • At a point when almost everyone, from the middle-class family to the world's largest real estate investors, appeared to believe that property markets could only rise and not fall, we warned that a real estate bust was in the offing.

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A phase transition of world-historic dimensions has already begun. Indeed, the future Gibbon who chronicles the decline and fall of the once-Modern Age in the next millennium may declare that it had already ended by the time you read this book. Looking back, he may say, as we do, that it ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Or with the death of the Soviet Union in 1991. Either date could come to stand as a defining event in the evolution of civilization, the end of what we now know as the Modern Age. The fourth stage of human development is coming, and perhaps its least predictable feature is the new name under which it will be known.

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
by Alex von Tunzelmann
Published 7 Jul 2021

‘You think about seminal moments in a nation’s history,’ said Bill Hemmer on CNN, ‘indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.’ According to the New York Daily News, ‘a scene reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall began to unspool – and the Iraqis, like the East Germans before them, found some courage.’ US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld agreed: ‘Watching them [pulling down the statue], one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall’. In the Mirror, Anton Antonowicz wrote an impassioned piece: ‘For an oppressed people this final act in the fading daylight, the wrenching down of this ghastly symbol of the regime, is their Berlin Wall moment.’

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In the Mirror, Anton Antonowicz wrote an impassioned piece: ‘For an oppressed people this final act in the fading daylight, the wrenching down of this ghastly symbol of the regime, is their Berlin Wall moment.’ Even two years later, President George W. Bush would tell troops: ‘The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad will be recorded, alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one of the great moments in the history of liberty.’15 It would not, though, because this was not a moment of liberty: it was a simulation of a moment of liberty. Caught in a hyperreality of his own creation, President Bush could no longer tell the difference. Clearly, though, as two hours of non-stop coverage of Firdos Square was beamed around the world that night, the news networks desperately wanted it to have a meaning.

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall
by Mary Elise Sarotte
Published 6 Oct 2014

Praise for The Collapse “The fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the landmark events of the twentieth century, but this great change involved accidental and non-violent causes. In wonderfully readable prose, Mary Elise Sarotte tells a compelling story of how history works its surprises.” —Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Future of Power “In The Collapse, Mary Elise Sarotte provides a needed (and highly readable) reminder that the peaceful culmination to 1989’s dramatic developments was in no way inevitable.” —General Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor “Meticulously researched, judiciously argued, and exceptionally well written, The Collapse describes the fall of the Berlin Wall from an unprecedented perspective.

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—General Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor “Meticulously researched, judiciously argued, and exceptionally well written, The Collapse describes the fall of the Berlin Wall from an unprecedented perspective. Mary Elise Sarotte weaves together numerous German, American, and Soviet accounts, allowing the reader to crisscross the Berlin Wall on the eve and in the course of its collapse. It will come as a surprise to many that this climactic event in Cold War history resulted not from agreements reached in Washington, Berlin, Moscow, or Bonn, but from the uncoordinated actions of people on both sides of the Berlin divide.

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It will come as a surprise to many that this climactic event in Cold War history resulted not from agreements reached in Washington, Berlin, Moscow, or Bonn, but from the uncoordinated actions of people on both sides of the Berlin divide. The Collapse makes it possible for those who made history in 1989 to speak in their own voices.” —Serhii Plokhy, author of The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union “From a remove of 25 years, the fall of the Berlin Wall seems foreordained. In fact, as Mary Elise Sarotte shows, this historic moment was an improbable concatenation of events and decisions triggering in perfect if accidental sequence. Catastrophe at times was just seconds away. As someone who was in Leipzig and Berlin as the crucial events unfolded, I can say that Sarotte gets it exactly right, capturing the fear, confusion, courage, and growing excitement as hitherto ordinary people peacefully toppled the deadly barrier that symbolized the Cold War.”

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
by Branko Milanovic
Published 10 Apr 2016

“Wages, Capital and Top Incomes: The Factor Income Composition of Top Incomes in the USA, 1960–2005.” Unpublished ms., November version. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2013. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper, no. 6719, December. Available at http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/pdf/10.1596/1813-9450-6719. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2015. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank Economic Review, Advance Access published August 12, 2015, doi: 10.1093/wber/lhv039. Landes, David. 1961. “Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism.”

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Reading about global inequality is nothing less than reading about the economic history of the world. This book opens with the description and analysis of the most significant changes in income distributions that have occurred globally since 1988, using data from household surveys. The year 1988 is a convenient starting point because it coincides almost exactly with the fall of the Berlin Wall and reintegration of the then-communist economies into the world economic system. This event was preceded, just a few years earlier, by a similar reintegration of China. These two political changes are not unrelated to the increased availability of household surveys, which are the key source from which we can glean information about changes in global inequality.

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(People are ranked by after-tax household per capita income expressed in dollars of equal purchasing power; for details of how income comparisons between countries are made, see Excursus 1.1.)1 The vertical axis shows the cumulative growth in real income (income adjusted for inflation and differences in price levels between the countries) between 1988 and 2008. This twenty-year period coincides almost exactly with the years from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the global financial crisis. It covers the period that may be called “high globalization,” an era that has brought into the ambit of the interdependent world economy first China, with a population of more than one billion people, and then the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with about half a billion people.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics
by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce
Published 5 Jun 2018

The idea lived on in the early twentieth century through debates in high politics about tariff reform versus free trade and came alive again both in arguments over the future of the British Empire between the world wars and in the soul-searching about Britain's place in the world that accompanied decolonisation, the rise of the ‘New Commonwealth’, and Britain's entry to the European Economic Community (EEC). Then, as the ‘short twentieth century’1 came to an end after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Anglosphere was reinvented once more, becoming a potent way of imagining Britain's future as a global, deregulated and privatised economy outside the EU. In this guise it forms an important part of the story of how Britain came to take the historic decision, in the summer of 2016, to leave the EU.

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In her address to the English-Speaking Union in 1999 she unequivocally endorsed Conquest's thinking, remarking that ‘such an international alliance … would redefine the political landscape’ and, in the long term, transform ‘politically backward areas [by] creating the conditions for a genuine world community’.44 Like him, she drew a sharp contrast between the dynamism and cultural community associated with the Anglosphere, on the one hand, and the EU, on the other, which lacked the deeper set of shared values that had for so long sustained the Anglo-American and Anglosphere ideals. With tongue slightly in cheek, she reminded her audience that ‘God separated Britain from mainland Europe, and it was for a purpose.’45 She also revisited the vision developed by Churchill of Anglo-America as bedrock for the Western order in the post-war world. But now, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Cold War – both victories that she unequivocally claimed for the English-speaking peoples – Thatcher offered considerable encouragement to those pursuing the Anglosphere as a geo-political and economic alternative to European integration. Thatcher's public commitment to these ideas represented a notable shift in her own outlook and was prompted by her sharp turn against the EU.

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Bennett, ‘The emerging Anglosphere’, Orbis, 46/1 (2002). 50  John O'Sullivan, ‘A British-led Anglosphere in world politics’, The Telegraph, 29 December 2007. 51  Hannan, How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters. 6 The Eurosceptic Anglosphere Emerges In the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, proponents of the Anglosphere were required to reorientate their ambitions in the wake of some profound shifts in the global economy and the political environments in which they were operating. In the 1990s, American capitalist democracy was indisputably dominant, ideologically and economically.

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 30 Jun 2004

They grew fainter, more confused, in the music of the 1970s and 1980s, when enlargement from six to twelve member states made the European orchestra more polyphonous, and détente softened the conflict between communist East and anticommunist West; but they were still there in the minds of the men and women who shaped the European project. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and that year of wonders, 1989, which saw the threat of Soviet communism softly and suddenly vanish away. What an opportunity—and what a crisis! Fifteen years later, the European Union comprises twenty-five enormously diverse European states, including, incredibly, three Baltic republics which in 1989 were still part of the Soviet Union.

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In 1988 Delors published a book entitled La France par l’Europe—the very title is eloquent. It contained this sentence: “Creating Europe is a way of regaining the degree of liberty necessary for a ‘certain idea of France.’ “29 A “certain idea of France” was, of course, de Gaulle’s signature phrase. The fall of the Berlin Wall plunged this strategy into crisis. With the enlargement of the European Union to include the new democracies of central and eastern Europe, Germany, not France, would be at its center. Germany, soon united and fully sovereign, would no longer be prepared to play the horse to France’s rider—a simile that de Gaulle himself is alleged to have used.

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At one point during the summit, feeling that he had already talked too much, he indicated to the chairman that he would “pass” on a particular topic. “But Mr. President,” the chairman expostulated, “you are the most powerful man on earth.” As President Bush reflects on this, he comments wryly, “It takes a little time to grow into this job.”1 That could also be said of the whole country, in its new job. After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 (9/11, European style), America gradually woke up to the realization that it was no longer just one of two competing superpowers. Hyperpower, superduper-power, American empire, new Rome, unipolar world—all these terms attempt to capture the new reality of a global predominance with no precedent in the history of the world.

Unfinished Business
by Tamim Bayoumi

The Maastricht Treaty that laid out the road to monetary union was a finely honed compromise that papered over these tensions rather than resolving them. This reflected several dynamics. First, the Treaty was a rushed job that reflected the political imperatives coming from the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1989 reunification of Germany. The single currency was created as a defensive reaction to German reunification rather than as a positive affirmation of European integration. Reflecting this speed, the final treaty closely followed the plan created by the earlier Delors Committee that had been dominated by European central bankers.

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As one historian of the process has put it, “the outcome looked more like an extension of the principle of international monetary cooperation and coordination—which is exactly what it was”.32 * * * The Maastricht Treaty It was the unanticipated collapse of Soviet control in Eastern Europe later in 1989 that triggered a rapid push for monetary union that embraced the only plan readily available, the one in the Delors Report. On November 28, 1989, just three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chancellor Kohl presented a ten-point plan for German unity to the Bundestag without consulting his allies. Two days later, President Mitterrand told German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher that Germany was now a “brake” on European integration and that unless Germany agreed to serious negotiations on a single currency by the end of 1990 it risked a revival of the pre-1913 “triple alliance” between France, Britain, and the Soviet Union.33 Faced with the prospect to diplomatic isolation, Chancellor Kohl agreed to initiate an intergovernmental conference on monetary union at the Strasbourg summit of European leaders on December 8, 1990, just before Mitterrand’s deadline expired.

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In the end, supported by a range of special measures and generous statistical interpretations, all of the potential entrants were admitted into monetary union starting on January 1, 1999. * * * The Flawed Single Currency The drive to create a single European currency unexpectedly succeeded largely due to a dose of sheer luck and two underlying dynamics. The good luck was the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall that created a need to bind a unified Germany more fully to the rest of the European Union, an imperative used to create the single currency. One dynamic was the understanding between Mitterrand and Kohl on the need for progress on greater European monetary integration that allowed crucial decisions to be made without the process getting bogged down in bureaucratic niceties.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Fifty years also have passed since the first World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. For much of its history, the so-called Davos Manifesto participants approved in 1973 was the main inspiration for meeting. In the Manifesto, business leaders promised to look after all their stakeholders, not just shareholders. And 20 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. We then believed we would soon achieve prosperity for all in all nations. But as we saw in previous chapters, income inequality in many countries has reached levels not seen in recent history,12 our growth model is broken, and the environment is degrading further every day, leading to devastation as well as conflicts.

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Many leading economists believed in these dogmas, and they increasingly influenced government and central banks. Some business leaders did sign up for stakeholder capitalism, looking after all those who matter to their businesses, but most adhered to shareholder capitalism, maximizing profits over other priorities. And especially in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, many political leaders became more and more indistinguishable on the economic front, believing that there was only one right set of economic policies, one which favored top-line GDP growth over inclusive development. The rest of this book explores the causes of this fundamental error so we can find a way forward.

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In the Soviet Union, there was a similar increase in trade, albeit through centralized planning rather than the free market. The effect was profound. Worldwide, trade once again rose to 1914 levels. By 1989, export once again counted for 14 percent of global GDP. This was paired with a steep rise in middle-class incomes in the West. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, globalization became an all-conquering force. The newly created World Trade Organization (WTO) encouraged nations all over the world to enter free trade agreements, and most of them did,16 including many newly independent ones. As we saw in Chapter 2, even China, which for the better part of the 20th century had been a closed, agrarian economy, in 2001 became a member of the WTO and started to manufacture for the world.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Fifty years also have passed since the first World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. For much of its history, the so-called Davos Manifesto participants approved in 1973 was the main inspiration for meeting. In the Manifesto, business leaders promised to look after all their stakeholders, not just shareholders. And 20 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. We then believed we would soon achieve prosperity for all in all nations. But as we saw in previous chapters, income inequality in many countries has reached levels not seen in recent history,12 our growth model is broken, and the environment is degrading further every day, leading to devastation as well as conflicts.

…

Many leading economists believed in these dogmas, and they increasingly influenced government and central banks. Some business leaders did sign up for stakeholder capitalism, looking after all those who matter to their businesses, but most adhered to shareholder capitalism, maximizing profits over other priorities. And especially in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, many political leaders became more and more indistinguishable on the economic front, believing that there was only one right set of economic policies, one which favored top-line GDP growth over inclusive development. The rest of this book explores the causes of this fundamental error so we can find a way forward.

…

In the Soviet Union, there was a similar increase in trade, albeit through centralized planning rather than the free market. The effect was profound. Worldwide, trade once again rose to 1914 levels. By 1989, export once again counted for 14 percent of global GDP. This was paired with a steep rise in middle-class incomes in the West. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, globalization became an all-conquering force. The newly created World Trade Organization (WTO) encouraged nations all over the world to enter free trade agreements, and most of them did,16 including many newly independent ones. As we saw in Chapter 2, even China, which for the better part of the 20th century had been a closed, agrarian economy, in 2001 became a member of the WTO and started to manufacture for the world.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

And what of a far more sinister alternative: that, just as World War I exceeded in duration and savagery anything in Shackleton’s imagination (and that an even more destructive war followed two decades later), today’s most nightmarish scenarios about the future may prove to be not only true, but exceeded. Fooled by Optimism The unbridled optimism of the Victorians died a slow death in the fields of Flanders and the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and any lingering spirit dissipated at a time when the specter of nuclear holocaust haunted mankind instead. But it made a comeback after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the swift implosion of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc over the next two years. Nothing exemplified the supreme victory of Western ideals in almost all spheres of life better than US political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s seminal 1989 essay “The End of History”, best known for its bold forecast about the future of humanity: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.5 It is certainly true that doomsday predictions like Malthusian overpopulation and Y2K have a terrible track record.

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His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant”.11 Only by achieving the political aim of liberalism can its philosophical project of promoting individual liberty be realized. The need to strike the right balance between democracy and liberalism is problematic and in practice only very few countries have gotten it right. The triumph of democracy over communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall resulted in the emergence of dozens of newly democratic regimes that were decidedly illiberal in nature, given their weak protection of property rights, discretional application of the rule of law, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, and flaunting of constitutional protections on executive power.

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When public participation in politics is increased, for example through the enfranchisement of women, it is seen as more democratic. … But to go beyond this minimalist definition and label a country democratic only if it guarantees a comprehensive catalog of social, political, economic, and religious rights turns the word democracy into a badge of honor rather than a descriptive category.12 Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become painfully obvious that there is no guarantee that the transition from autocracy to electoral democracy is enough to nurture the forces of liberalism, even in the longer run. Democracy, after all, suffers from the political version of Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, which has it that tolerating the intolerant can lead to the latter imposing their intolerance13: autocrats can use democracy to gain power and impose autocracy, even if slightly disguised from outright dictatorship.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
by John Lanchester
Published 14 Dec 2009

How did we get from an economy in which banks and credit function the way they are supposed to, to this place we’re in now, the Reykjavíkization of the world economy? The crisis was based on a problem, a mistake, a failure, and a culture; but before it was any of those things, it arose from a climate—and the climate was that which followed the capitalist world’s victory over communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was especially apparent to me because I grew up in Hong Kong at the time when it was the most unbridled free-market economy in the world. Hong Kong was the economic Wild West. There were no rules, no income taxes (well, eventually there was a top tax of 15 percent), no welfare state, no guarantee of health care or schooling.

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The biggest boom in seventy years turned straight into the biggest bust. The rest of this book tells the story of how that happened, but there was one essential precursor to all the subsequent events, without which the explosion and implosion would not have occurred in the form they did: and that was the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. Explicit arguments about the conflict between the West and the Communist bloc were never especially profitable. The camps were too entrenched; the larger philosophical issues tended to be boiled off until nothing but the residue of party politics remained.

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David Kynaston points out that under communism, children from primary school upward were taught the principles and practice of the system and were thoroughly drilled in how it was supposed to work. There is nothing comparable to that in the capitalist world. The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little. This climate of thinking informed all subsequent events. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism began a victory party that ran for almost two decades. Capitalism is not inherently fair: it does not, in and of itself, distribute the rewards of economic growth equitably. Instead it runs on the bases of winner take all and to them that hath shall be given. For several decades after the Second World War, the Western liberal democracies devoted themselves to the question of how to harness capitalism’s potential for economic growth to the political imperative to provide better lives for ordinary people.

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World
by William Drozdiak
Published 27 Apr 2020

The rocky relations between Paris and Berlin in recent years, however, had left Europe adrift, struggling to cope with the repercussions of the global financial crisis and the resurgence of big-power competition. “I knew this was the key question of our times,” Macron said, describing the state of the world he faced after his election in May 2017. “Nearly thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I realized we were at a new inflection point with the rise of China, the return of an aggressive Russia, and the retreat of America from global leadership. So where is Europe? Rather than trapped between these superpowers, as a zone to be fought over by others, I believe Europe needs its own renaissance to leap beyond its past and become an autonomous power equal to others.

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But the postwar vision of building a United States of Europe transformed the destiny of two embattled neighbors. Over the past seventy years, France has provided the political leadership and Germany the economic dynamism that have driven Europe’s remarkable resurrection. Since Germany’s unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall three decades ago, however, that delicate balance of power has shifted. As wartime memories have faded, Germany’s prosperity has made its people more conscious of their own mercantile interests and less willing to make economic sacrifices for their partners. France’s failure to adapt to the rigors of globalized markets has caused its political stature to diminish relative to Germany, whose power has been magnified by an expanded population from formerly communist East Germany.

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If Europe was ever going to achieve an enduring strategic partnership with Russia, there would have to be a greater level of cooperation and understanding with Moscow about the uses and abuses of advanced technologies in the future. As one of the West’s youngest and most consequential leaders, Macron felt comfortable thinking in terms of the next three decades, unlike most of his peers. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Macron believes that the world is poised at a new inflection point, one where artificial intelligence and advanced technologies may transform the power relationship between Russia and the West. Under Putin, Moscow has refined hybrid methods of undermining key institutions in the West and managed to achieve high-impact results at very little cost by using Western commercial digital platforms that are readily available to the public.

9-11
by Noam Chomsky
Published 29 Aug 2011

Graham Allison, “How to Stop Nuclear Terror,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004. 31. Robertson, Daily Beast, 2011. 9-11 1. Not Since the War of 1812 Based on an interview with Il Manifesto (Italy), September 19, 2001. Q: The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t claim any victims, but it did profoundly change the geopolitical scene. Do you think that the attacks of 9-11 could have a similar effect? CHOMSKY: The fall of the Berlin Wall was an event of great importance and did change the geopolitical scene, but not in the ways usually assumed, in my opinion. I’ve tried to explain my reasons elsewhere and won’t go into it now. The horrifying atrocities of September 11 are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

The postwar liberalization of trade helped open up new low-cost sources of supply; coupled with the development of new financial institutions and products (made possible in part by silicon-based technologies), it facilitated the forward thrust toward global market capitalism even during the years of the cold war. In the following quarter century, the embrace of free-market capitalism helped bring inflation to quiescence and interest rates to single digits globally. The defining moment for the world's economies was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, revealing a state of economic ruin behind the iron curtain far beyond the expectations of the most knowledgeable Western economists. Central planning was exposed as an unredeemable failure; coupled with and supported by the growing disillusionment over the interventionist economic policies of the Western democracies, market capitalism began quietly to displace those policies in much of the world.

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Normally such differences would get aired and resolved behind the scenes. I'd been looking toward building the same collaborative relationship with the White House that I'd seen during the Ford administration and that I knew had existed at times between Reagan and Paul Volcker. It was not to be. Great things happened on George Bush's watch: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war, a clear victory in the Persian Gulf, and the negotiation of the NAFTA agreement to free North American trade. But the economy was his Achilles' heel, and as a result we ended up with a terrible relationship. 113 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. 

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Over the past thirty-five years, as many countries have labored to liberalize their economies and improve the quality of their policies, global per capita income has risen steadily. This has especially been the case in countries that previously were fully or partially centrally planned and that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, have embraced some form of market capitalism. I recognize that poverty rates are notoriously hard to quantify, but according to the World Bank, the number of people living on less than $1 per day, a commonly used extreme-poverty threshold, has fallen dramatically from 1,247 million in 1990 to 986 million in 2004.

Hopes and Prospects
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 2009

Human affairs proceed in their intricate, endlessly varied, and unpredictable paths, but occasionally events occur that are taken to be sharp turning points in history. There have been several in recent years. It is a near platitude in the West that after September 11, 2001, nothing will be the same. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 was another event accorded this high status. There is a great deal to say about these two cases, both the myth and the reality. But in referring to the 514th year I of course have something different in mind: the year 1492, which did, undoubtedly, direct world history on a radically new course, with awesome and lasting consequences.

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That remarkable year “changed everything,” thanks primarily to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms within Russia and his “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force…a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history,” leading to the partially open Russian elections of March 1989 and culminating in the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, which opened the way to liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny. The general mood was captured well by barrister Matthew Ryder, speaking for the “niners,” the generation that is now providing global leadership, with Barack Obama in the lead, their conception of history having been “shaped by a world changed without guns” in 1989, events that gave them confidence in the power of dedication to nonviolence and justice.1 The accolades for November 9 are deserved, and the events are indeed memorable.

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He ruefully concludes that all U.S. leaders have been “schizophrenic,” supporting democracy if and only if it conforms to strategic and economic objectives: hence in Soviet satellites but not U.S. client states.4 These judgments were once again confirmed by the events that reached their culmination in November 1989, and again on the twentieth anniversary. The fall of the Berlin wall was rightly celebrated in November 2009, but there was virtually no notice of what had happened one week later in El Salvador, on November 16, 1989: the brutal assassination of six prominent Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper Julia Elba and her daughter Celina, by the elite Atlacatl battalion, armed and trained by Washington.

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud
by Jack Ewing
Published 22 May 2017

A native of the Sudetenland, which had been part of Austria before World War I and became part of Czechoslovakia afterward, Porsche was already prominent in the fledgling auto industry. He had built a battery-powered car around the turn of the century and during World War I oversaw motorization of Austrian artillery at the Skoda automobile works in what is now the Czech Republic. (Many years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Volkswagen would acquire Skoda.) Between the wars, working mostly as an independent contractor, Porsche designed and built a series of innovative race cars for companies including Daimler-Benz and Auto-Union, which would later become part of Audi. Though he had never earned a university degree and was largely self-taught, Porsche’s reputation as an engineer was such that Josef Stalin tried to lure him to the Soviet Union to oversee vehicle construction there.

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The improved motor still had a bit of a growl, but it was no longer prone to blowing clouds of black exhaust like the diesels of old. Volkswagen called the result TDI, or turbocharged direct injection. It took eleven years to perfect. Audi unveiled its first TDI model, an Audi 100 sedan, at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1989, a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Piëch was proud of the innovation, which used an onboard computer to manage the engine, then a novelty. The five-cylinder engine in the Audi 100 used two liters less fuel per 100 kilometers of driving than the competition, he bragged. At the same time, the car accelerated more quickly and ran more cleanly.

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As is so often the case with makers of desirable, expensive sports cars, Porsche was not always profitable. Sports cars are luxury goods rather than necessities, and sales can plunge steeply during economic downturns or stock market crashes when potential buyers decide to cancel or postpone purchases. That was especially true before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Until the 1990s, when markets in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China began to open up, Porsche was dependent on Europe and the United States. When both suffered recessions in the early 1990s, Porsche sales plunged so precipitously that the company suffered three money-losing years in a row and was close to bankruptcy.

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin
by Lonely Planet and Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 31 Aug 2012

(Read more about it on Click here.) The appointment of Erich Honecker in 1971 opened the way for rapprochement with the west. Honecker fell in line with Soviet politics but his economic approach did improve the East German economy, eventually leading to the collapse of the regime and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. 5 Berliner Dom Church Offline map Google map Pompous yet majestic, the former royal court church (1905) does triple duty as house of worship, museum and concert hall. The 7269-pipe Sauer organ and the elaborate sarcophagi made for various royals are top draws. Climb the 267 steps to the gallery for glorious city views.

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The volatile, increasingly polarised political climate led to clashes between communists and the emerging NSDAP, led by Adolf Hitler. Soon jackboots, Brownshirts, oppression and fear would dominate daily life in Germany. 4 Story of Berlin Museum Offline map Google map This multimedia museum breaks down 800 years of Berlin history into bite-sized chunks, from the city’s founding in 1237 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. A highlight is a tour of a fully functional Cold War–era atomic bunker beneath the building. Enter through the shopping mall. (www.story-of-berlin.de; Kurfürstendamm 207-208; adult/concession €10/8; 10am-8pm, last admission & bunker tour 6pm; U-Bahn Uhlandstrasse) 5 Zoo Berlin Zoo Offline map Google map Germany’s oldest animal park opened in 1844 with furry and feathered critters from the royal family’s private reserve.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

We have the technology, the power, and the competitive threat to prompt a new beginning. But it won’t be easy. Since the 1960s, government in the West has tried a variety of cures—from a genuine attempt at revolution under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the quack cures of the modern populists. It has had moments of Trajan-like triumph—especially the fall of the Berlin Wall. But even when it was lecturing the rest of the world about the inevitability of globalization in the 1990s, the Western state never regained the confidence at home it had in the 1960s. The public sector has lagged ever further behind the private sector. And gradually the East has begun to catch up.

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The number of employee days lost to strikes fell from 29.5 million in 1979 to under 2 million in 1986. The top rate of tax fell from 98 percent in 1979 to 40 percent.8 And in a wave of “privatisations” she set free forty-six state-owned companies, including British Gas and British Telecom, as well as selling council houses to their occupants.9 The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 created a mood of euphoria across the West. The Anglo-American hymn of deregulation, globalization, and privatization rang out across the world. Bill Clinton declared the age of big government to be over, and Tony Blair ditched “Clause Four,” which had committed the Labor Party to nationalization.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning
by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
Published 31 Oct 2019

Girard’s insight into the persistent tendency of imitation to breed resentment, while based almost exclusively on the analysis of literary texts, is nevertheless highly pertinent to understanding why a contagious uprising against liberal democracy began in the post-communist world.32 By drawing attention to the inherently conflictual nature of imitation, he helps us to see democratization after communism in an entirely new light. His theory suggests that the problems we face today arise less from a natural relapse into bad habits of the past than from a backlash against a perceived Imitation Imperative promulgated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While Fukuyama was confident that the Age of Imitation would be endlessly boring, Girard was more prescient, foretelling its potential for incubating the kind of existential shame that can fuel explosive upheaval. THE FLOWERS OF RESENTMENT The origins of today’s worldwide anti-liberal revolt lie in three parallel, interconnected and resentment-fuelled reactions to the presumptively canonical status of Western political models after 1989.

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And he did so before a historically conscious audience gathered in the heartland of Europe’s bloodiest twentieth-century tragedies. The provocation coded in Putin’s choice of venue for delivering his message of defiance magnified its galvanic effect on his audience. ‘Munich’, evoking the West’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938, is one of the most overused tropes in Western foreign policy discourse after the fall of the Berlin Wall. NATO cited its commitment not to allow another ‘Munich’ to justify its military intervention in the former Yugoslavia. And this was also how the United States rationalized its war in Iraq. The salience of this historical analogy increased the impact of Putin’s Munich speech. It was in this city that Putin informed his Western counterparts that Russia was determined to destroy the post-Cold War liberal order.

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This is one reason for the deep unpopularity of the ‘democratic reformers’, already registered in the parliamentary elections of 1993 and 1995, elections which otherwise revealed little about how Russians wished to be governed. Though we are used to thinking of the Cold War as an economic and political contest without direct military confrontation, the fall of the Berlin Wall revealed that when economic systems and expectations collapse people die just as inexorably as they do in a shooting war. Russia’s social and economic indicators from the final decade of the last century resemble those of a country that had just lost a war. In the early 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the communist collapse, life expectancy in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe fell precipitously.

The Skripal Files
by Mark Urban

How had this poor patient, in many ways so typical of Russians of his generation, an everyman almost, come to be in this mortal struggle and at the centre of a major international crisis? His story is in many ways an allegory. Certainly it guides us through decades of distrust and espionage between Russia and its Western rivals. It was a battle that never stopped after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, simply paused for a year or two, then resumed, growing more intense and merciless with the passage of time. For Skripal, that conflict had produced a personal reckoning twenty-two years before the poisoning, in an altogether happier time and place. PART ONE AGENT 1 THE PITCH It is high summer in Madrid, 1996.

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At home, in many of the USSR’s republics, from the Baltic coast to the Caucasus mountains, the Kremlin’s liberal policies allowed an upsurge of nationalism and protest. To the officers at GRU headquarters it was all very worrying. This Gorbachev was loved in the West precisely, they felt, because he was giving everything away. The whole socialist bloc was crumbling. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, matters just seemed to accelerate. Friendly governments collapsed across Eastern Europe and in London or Washington the intelligence analysts began to pick up rumblings in the military and party of a possible coup. That confrontation between Gorbachev and those who took it upon themselves to protect the achievements of socialism eventually came to a head in August 1991.

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Jim noted that there was a 50 per cent drop in the number of SVR officers operating in the UK. Facing budget cuts the SVR had come to a deal with the Foreign Ministry, reducing the number of spooks, and with it the potential for embarrassment with the Western countries that befriended Boris Yeltsin’s democratic government. The fall of the Berlin Wall had led to some obvious possibilities for economies in the spy business. Western agencies no longer had to track the activities of the KGB’s fraternal Eastern Bloc services, from East Germany to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. They had become democracies, most dissolving the spying agencies that had become hated symbols of the old system of power.

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Published 15 Jul 2015

Postmodern Paradise had a fatal weakness: it wasn’t prepared to fight for itself or its values. Indeed, its post-modern condition rested on the belief that it had no absolute values that were not open to negotiation. With conflict unimaginable, the leaders of Paradise felt no need to waste money on preparing for war. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, they cashed in on the peace dividend and reduced military spending from 3 to 2 per cent of gross domestic product while the US kept it at 3 per cent. A difference of 1 per cent doesn’t sound a vast gap. But Paradise’s welfare state was becoming ever more expensive as its inhabitants lived longer and had fewer children.

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More important than the money was the European mentality. With children rare, their parents weren’t prepared to risk the lives of the young in battle. They reassured themselves that the lesson of recent history was that fighting got you nowhere. The EU had brought peace to Western Europe for fifty years, while the fall of the Berlin Wall had been a miracle. A terrible ideological conflict between opponents equipped with nuclear weapons that had threatened to destroy the planet had ended with barely a shot fired. Unarmed citizens took to the streets of Prague, Berlin and Dresden and – poof – communism was gone. The residents of Paradise didn’t like to think that pressure from the American arms build-up had played a part in finishing the Soviet Union.

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On the one hand, they bellowed the last hurrah of the Marxists of the twentieth century. Milosevic said he was a socialist, and they took him at his word, and insisted that capitalists were using crimes manufactured by the media to justify the break-up of Yugoslavia because it was the last corner of Europe holding out against market economics after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their conspiracy theory didn’t make the slightest sense. The published diaries of Milosevic lieutenants show that they, not the ‘capitalist’ West, planned the break-up of Yugoslavia. The idea that Serb nationalists were the last socialists in Europe fighting a desperate rearguard action against the forces of the ‘hegemonic’ market was dished by the fact that the Conservative administration of John Major and the equally right-wing Republican administration of George Bush senior refused to stop their ethnic cleansing.

The Extreme Centre: A Warning
by Tariq Ali
Published 22 Jan 2015

And yet it is worth noting that throughout the Cold War years, from 1949 to 1990, NATO never fought a single battle. It was neither tried nor tested. Instead, it was a military propaganda organization, designed to control allies rather than punish enemies. Yet things changed following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Where once the purpose was a defensive show of strength, it now became an offensive test of strength, giving rise to operational shifts and corresponding changes in its command structure. This was on public record at the Welsh summit in 2014. There have been two and a half phases in NATO’s development since 1949.

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To think that the military-political leadership of the United States is preparing to go back home after organizing a soft dismantling of its overseas empire is eminently comforting and wholly untrue. The economic situation in the US and Europe is serious, but not terminal. The economic, political and military components of the present crisis are the direct result of the capitalist triumphalism that gripped the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The strategic and economic policies prescribed by the United States and accepted without question by their global allies – the Washington Consensus – were not hasty improvisations. The gleeful governors of the new world order, initially surprised by the speed of the collapse in the Soviet Union, moved rapidly to take full advantage of circumstances.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration
by Kent E. Calder
Published 28 Apr 2019

Classification: LCC HF1583 .C36 2019 | DDC 337.5 — dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038995 Cover design: George Kirkpatrick Typeset by Newgen in 10.5/13.5 Contents List of Figures, Maps, and Tables Preface Introduction vii ix xiii 1 Eurasian Reconnection and Renaissance 1 2 The Silk Road Syndrome 22 3 Eurasia in the Making 49 4 The Logic of Integration 70 5 Quiet Revolution in China 100 6 Southeast Asia: The First Experiment 122 7 Russia: An Unbalanced Entente 140 8 The New Europe: Deepening Synergies 160 9 Shadows and Critical Uncertainties 185 10 Toward a New World Order 206 11 Prospects and Policy Implications 232 Notes Bibliography Index 253 307 313 This page intentionally left blank Figures, Maps, and Tables figures 1.1 The fall (and rise) of Eurasia (1–2015 AD) 3 5.1 China’s rising share among major Eurasian economies 102 5.2 From exports to a domestic driver— changing demand structure in the Chinese economy (2000 –2017) 103 5.3 China’s steel overcapacity 109 5.4 The reorientation of Eurasian trade: from the US toward China 118 7.1 China’s rising economic scale relative to Russia (1992 –2017) 149 8.1 Rising EU reliance on the Chinese market (1990 –2017) 168 8.2 Rising Chinese investment in Europe 169 maps 1.1 Land vs. sea routes 6 1.2 “Continental Drift” brings Europe and Asia closer in the post–Cold War world 14 2.1 The classic Silk Road 27 2.2 China’s Belt and Road Initiative 45 4.1 China dominates continental overland routes to the West 73 viii Figures, Maps, and Tables 4.2 Sino-Russian maritime access dilemmas 75 4.3 India’s tortured overland options 76 4.4 Contrasting energy supply options for Europe and East Asia 79 4.5 Deepening East-West railway routes across Eurasia 90 6.1 The prospective Kunming-Singapore railway network 131 7.1 China’s multiple pipeline options 144 7.2 The new Eurasian Arctic shipping frontier 146 8.1 Expansion of the European Union (1957–2013) 166 8.2 Germany, the Visegrad Four, and the shadow of Cold War divisions 174 8.3 The Orient/East-Mediterranean corridor 176 8.4 The 16+1 Cooperation Framework Nations 180 tables 1.1 Eurasia’s formidable scale in global context 7 1.2 Top ten most populous countries (2017) 8 1.3 The looming challenge of rising energy consumption in developing Eurasia 8 1.4 Systems of international order 18 3.1 Expanding Central Asian trade with Russia, China, and Turkey 58 4.1 Oil reserves, production, and exports (2017) 80 4.2 Natural gas reserves, production, and exports (2017) 80 6.1 The varied patterns of overseas Chinese presence in Southeast Asia (2011) 125 9.1 WMD prominence across Eurasia 196 Preface The expanses of Eurasia have fascinated me ever since I was a boy. As I was growing up, it was terra incognita— exotic, foreign territory, and much of it off-limits to American citizens. As I began my academic career, the continent was in volatile transition, a world of fragile regimes whose demise opened up intriguing new worlds, epitomized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the shah’s regime in Teheran. Today, Eurasia is being reconfigured once again. Its western and eastern poles are moving into an ever-deeper embrace, with global political-economic implications. Those fateful developments, unfolding before our eyes, configure the story presented in the pages to follow.

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New Linkages and Deepened Ties In the more advanced western regions of the former USSR, the major shortterm impact of the USSR’s collapse and the sudden new market orientation was to deepen interdependence between Russia and noncommunist Europe, especially Germany. In the first two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, six former members of the Warsaw Pact and three former republics of the USSR itself joined the EU. This post–Cold War expansion of the EU—the direct consequence of Soviet collapse—had major implications for the nature of Europe itself as well as for Europe’s ties to the broader world. It shifted the geographical center of the EU close to a thousand miles east— from France deep into Germany.

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Thus, individual states that benefit from deepened interdependence with China, such as poorer states of Eastern and Southern Europe, like Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Greece, are in a position to block efforts to constrain a forceful response to China in many areas, even when core Western members may consider it justified.26 The Security Dimension of Europe’s Transformation The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has a provenance even longer than that of the European economic integration process. Formed in response to the Czech coup and Berlin blockade of 1948, it was constituted nearly a decade before the EC was established in 1957. Like the EC, NATO expanded thereafter in several waves, especially following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in the 1990s. During the 2000s, it grew still further to include even three former republics of the Soviet Union—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It includes a few nations, such as Albania, Montenegro, and Turkey, that are not members of the EU, and excludes some neutral countries, like Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden, that are conversely part of the EU.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

This is the state in which we find ourselves after the financial crisis and the migration crisis, with growing geopolitical tensions, where political liberation after the Arab Spring is no longer associated with stability and democratization, but with chaos and bloodshed. When the iconic image of our time is no longer the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. And that is without mentioning potential looming disaster from climate change. In the past, the great efflorescences in history – those major episodes of openness and progress – petered out because of what has been called Cardwell’s Law, after the technology historian Donald S.

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If we are more judgmental when we answer questions in a messy room where researchers have prepared a used plastic cup on the table and rigged the rubbish bin with greasy pizza boxes and dirty tissues, what happens to our values when the whole world feels a bit untidy? 9/11 vs 11/9 I grew up in an era where the defining event was the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Watching old videos of East and West Germans joyfully smashing and hacking the hated wall to pieces, and hugging old friends and strangers, still moves me to tears every time. It summarized all the hopes of that time, the idea that we are all fellow humans, with the same yearning for love and freedom, only separated by walls that will be torn down.

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Large majorities of all generations of Americans think 9/11 is the event that had the biggest effect on their country during their lifetime, even those who experienced World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights revolution and the moon landing.14 This affects our worldview just like the fall of the Berlin Wall did, but in the opposite direction. Uncertainty and fear make us more suspicious about the world and outgroups. You would expect uncertainty to result in openness to different perspectives on a problem, but combined with a threat it actually makes us more rigid in our thinking and less tolerant of political opponents.

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett
Published 15 Feb 2000

Even before the USSR collapsed East German scientists got sobering glimpses of the price they were going to pay for decades of isolation from their more advanced West German peers. In 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain weakened enough to allow some 400,000 Germans from the East to visit the West, and 1 percent of her scientists relocated westward. Those scientists who went west told colleagues back home that they found their skills woefully backward. In particular, the almost complete lack of computer skills and knowledge of computer-driven research tools put the Easterners twenty years behind.155 And after the fall of the Berlin Wall the West German scientists were shocked to see how completely the Communist Party controlled Eastern science, allowing dogma to carry greater weight than such seemingly irrefutable foundations as the law of physics.156 Czechoslovakia awoke from its 1990 Velvet Revolution to the realization that most of its fifteen thousand scientists had been cowed or jailed after the Soviet invasion of 1968.

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Noril’sk was at the extreme end of a Soviet ecological legacy that could be felt from East Berlin all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In Bohemia, the Czech Republic, fifty years of strip mining and coal smelting had devastated what once was the preferred vacation site of the Hapsburgs and aristocracy all over Central Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave West Germans a shocking look at the industrial filth and putrid air of their eastern countrymen. The Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were suffering from an insane irrigation scheme begun by Lenin, draining the vast, landlocked Aral Sea to provide water for cotton fields, resulting in elevated throat cancer due to environmental dust.64 The visual and physical filth was pervasive.

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“Sometimes local people are involved, but the business is run by foreigners. And they don’t provide health care to their prostitutes. They’re all over the Czech Republic, all over Eastern Europe, in fact, and when one [prostitute] gets ill they just replace her. That’s it.” Since the 1989 Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia, the 1990 fall of the Berlin Wall, and then the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union prostitution had transformed in the vast region from a tightly controlled cottage industry into a multibillion-dollar, multinational enterprise controlled by sophisticated organized crime rackets that transported tens of thousands of women—and in all too many cases girls and boys—from the poorest formerly Communist countries to pockets of plenty along the borders of wealthy Western Europe and the Middle East.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

By the late 1970s the Soviet and American stand-off was nearing its final phase, occasionally referred to as the ‘second Cold War’. Now the Anglo-American hegemony-often hotly disputed by anti-American liberals – was wholly underpinned by rampant capitalism, represented by Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in Britain and Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency in the United States. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 this new global culture would morph into the worldwide cultural revolution that would become Globish. The eerie decade that preceded the crisis of 2001 was the first in a century in which the world was no longer in the shadow of war. Francis Fukuyama declared ‘the End of History’.

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The French theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine went further. EuroDisney, she announced, would be ‘a cultural Chernobyl’. These declarations were partly the expressions of a traditional French reflex, but also an indication of a wider European dismay at the unipolar world that took shape after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The logical culmination of the American century, the 1990s seemed to presage the death throes of a distinctive European culture. So this final decade began with increasingly vehement outbursts of anti-Americanism. In July 1992, with the wounds inflicted by EuroDisney still raw, some 250 French personalities and intellectuals, including novelists and poets, signed a petition demanding that Mitterrand’s government enact a law announcing the mandatory use of French in all meetings, seminars and conferences, in all French-sponsored films-indeed, in all transactions conducted on French soil.

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London, Boston, San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore: in the new knowledge economy, all these cities could be linked simultaneously, offering a new challenge as much for a modernising India as for a globalising America. ‘My God,’ exclaimed Friedman, ‘he’s telling me the world is flat.’ Armed with this insight, Friedman mobilised himself to explore the many economic aspects of globalisation, from Wal-Mart to Yahoo!, that were contributing to this flattening process. For Friedman, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the PC, Netscape, outsourcing, and ‘off – shoring’ – his ‘flattening’ forces – combined to enhance a new global awareness. Millions of people [he writes] on different continents suddenly started to feel that something was new. They couldn’t always quite describe what was happening, but by 2000 they sensed that they were in touch with people they’d never been in touch with before, were being challenged by people who had never challenged them before, were competing with people they had never competed with before … In the new millennium ‘what they were feeling’, he concluded, was the ‘flattening of the world’.

Rogue States
by Noam Chomsky
Published 9 Jul 2015

Rather, the threats were “radical nationalism,” meaning intolerable independence. With the clouds lifted, the sun shone through briefly, but has been ignored. With Russian support for Cuba ending, the US stepped up its economic warfare, hoping to move in for the kill. Meanwhile within US domains, matters continued routinely. A week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War, six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, were murdered by an elite Salvadoran battalion, armed and trained by the US, and fresh from renewed US training, acting on direct orders of the High Command. There was little notice, in accord with the Orwellian principle.

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In October 1989, a month before, the Bush administration had released a secret national security directive, now public, in which it called for support for our great friend Saddam Hussein and other comparable figures in the Middle East in defense against the Russians. That was October 1989. In March 1990—that’s four months after the fall of the Berlin Wall—the White House had to make its annual presentation to Congress calling for a huge military budget, which was the same as in all earlier years, except for the pretexts. Now it wasn’t because the Russians are coming, because obviously the Russians aren’t coming, it was because of what they called the “technological sophistication” of Third World powers.

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In March, it was: our intervention forces have to be aimed at the Middle East as before, where the threat to our interests “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door,” contrary to the lies of the last 40 years. Case by case, the pretext changed, the policies remained—but were now without restraints. That was immediately obvious in Latin America. A month after the fall of the Berlin Wall the US invaded Panama, killing a couple of hundred or maybe a couple of thousand people, destroying poor neighborhoods, reinstating a regime of bankers and narcotraffickers—drug peddling and money laundering shot way up, as congressional research bureaus soon advised—and so on. That’s normal, a footnote to history, but there were two differences: one difference is that the pretexts were different.

Powers and Prospects
by Noam Chomsky
Published 16 Sep 2015

Nor are they likely to be subjected to the results of a 1994 Gallup poll, considered to be the first independent and scientific survey, published in the Miami Spanish-language press but apparently not elsewhere: that 88 per cent said they were ‘proud of being Cuban’ and 58 per cent that ‘the revolution’s successes outstrip its failures’, 69 per cent identified themselves as ‘revolutionaries’ (but only 21 per cent as ‘Communist’ or ‘socialist’), 76 per cent said they were ‘satisfied with their personal life’, and 3 per cent said that ‘political problems’ were the key problems facing the country. If such Communist atrocities were to be known, it might be aecessary to nuke Havana instead of simply trying to kill as many people as possible from starvation and disease to bring ‘democracy’. That became the new pretext for strangling Cuba after the fall of the Berlin wall, the ideological institutions not missing a beat as they shifted gears. No longer was Cuba an agent of the Kremlin, bent on taking over Latin America and conquering the United States, trembling in terror. The lies of 30 years can be quietly shelved: terror and economic warfare have always been an attempt to bring democracy, in the revised standard version.

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Many times, in fact, though the US has sometimes been able to mobilise El Salvador, Romania, and a few others to the cause of justice and freedom; and in the Security Council, Britain is fairly reliable, taking second place in vetoes (France a distant third) since the 1960s, when Moscow’s dominance became intolerable to true democrats.4 As Kennedy’s ‘monolithic and ruthless conspiracy’ engaged in world conquest faded from the scene in the 1980s, the search was on for new aggressors threatening our borders and our lives. Libya, disliked and defenceless, served as a particularly useful punching bag for courageous Reaganites. Other candidates include crazed Arabs generally, international terrorists, or whoever else can be conjured up. When George Bush celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by invading Panama, it was not in defence against Communism; rather, the demon Noriega, captured, tried, and condemned for his crimes, almost all committed while he was on the CIA payroll. At this moment, half of US military aid goes to Colombia, the hemisphere’s leading human rights violator, with a shocking record of atrocities.

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Well into 1989, the US was defending itself against global Communist aggression. By the year’s end that was not what it was (or even had been) doing. In March 1990, the White House made its regular presentation to Congress to explain why the Pentagon budget must be kept at its colossal level, the first presentation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The conclusion was the usual one, but the reasons were now different: the threat was not the Kremlin, but the ‘growing technological sophistication’ of the Third World. In particular, the US must maintain its intervention forces aimed at the Middle East because of ‘the free world’s reliance on energy supplies from this pivotal region’, where the ‘threats to our interests could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door’ in recent years.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan
Published 20 Feb 2020

The Russians saw Russian history in the Arab Spring, with Medvedev fearing that, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, these demonstrations would prove destabilising for Russia.13 Meanwhile, President Obama likened it to the Boston Tea Party and the beginning of America’s war for independence, drawing analogies too with the civil rights protest of Rosa Parks.14 Everyone saw themselves in these events. So they felt confident they knew where they would lead and how they would end. The reliance on analogies implied inevitability: just like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Boston Tea Party, the demonstrations would usher in a new era of democratic freedoms.

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Countries are different, personalities are different and everyone operating in the present is different to those from the past, so make decisions with information that their predecessors did not possess. But when the Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010, analogies popped up like daisies. Just the term ‘Arab Spring’ evoked comparisons with the European revolutions of 1848 and the Prague Spring anti-Communist rising of 1968. Even more common were references to the fall of the Berlin Wall, another event that had defied prediction. In August 2011, one NGO commentator wrote: ‘The Arab Spring is truly historic. People are standing up in a region where customs have required deference to the wise and elder. This is nothing short of a socio-cultural quake. Today’s mostly youth-led revolt is new for the Middle East but not for the world.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

Fierce Dancing filled in the blanks, it told the stories of the alternative cultures – pagans, new age travellers, punks and drop-outs – that had coalesced around this scene and contributed to its vibrancy. It told tales of women who gardened vegetable plots in no knickers, tepee valleys in the depths of Wales, and how to make poppy tea. It was, in that most adolescent sense, a revelation. And to an adolescent growing up in the consumerist nineties, seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seventeen years into the rule of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party where alternative ideas about how to live seemed only to exist to sell ice cream and health drinks, it was also an escape. I’d often wondered what had happened to all the hippies. My favourite film at that time was Easy Rider.

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Watching over us, across the snowy moonscape of eastern Berlin, is the Alexanderplatz television tower. A flying saucer spiked on a giant needle, it is the perfect vision of Soviet futurism. Twenty yards from the door at which it looks like my journey will end prematurely, a flock of municipal exhibition stands have come to rest on Alexanderplatz, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Black and white photos of GDR rebels – crouched over printing presses pumping out samizdat, or else in small groups, smoking – look nonchalantly into the lens of posterity. Who took these photos? Which of their fellow freedom fighters knew we would want to look back on this congregation of young minds which changed the course of history?

Gorbachev: His Life and Times
by William Taubman

CHAPTER 12 1989: TRIUMPH AND TROUBLE AT HOME NINETEEN EIGHTY-NINE WAS a pivotal year in the history of Communism and of the whole twentieth century. The liberation of Eastern Europe—a “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia, remarkably smooth transitions in Poland and Hungary, bloody in Romania—and the fall of the Berlin Wall led with startling swiftness to the unification of Germany and its accession to NATO the next year. By then, if not before, most observers would agree, the cold war was really over. But the epochal events of 1989 abroad would not have occurred without the domestic developments that preceded and accompanied them in the Soviet Union.

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That’s all I have to say.”83 After this public confession, Yeltsin fell ill for two weeks and canceled several public appearances, while aides informed him that his popularity rating had dropped sharply.84 Well might Gorbachev have felt, as the end of the year approached, that at least the Yeltsin threat had receded. But not for long. CHAPTER 13 1989: TRIUMPH AND TROUBLE ABROAD IN THE LONG RUN, THE FALL of the Berlin Wall was inevitable. How could Germans remain forever separated when they were so attached (occasionally too attached) to their shared nationhood? But when and how the wall fell was not predictable. It did not fall because in the summer of 1987 President Reagan declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

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Chernyaev added tellingly in his diary, “The recognition and understanding he gets ‘over there’ reinforces and reassures him—in contrast to the worthless treatment he gets from his own people.”83 And now the GDR had a new leader! Under whom the GDR could proceed to establish its own version of reformed socialism! On November 1 in Moscow, Gorbachev gave Krenz a warm welcome and urged him to undertake “radical reform and not just a cosmetic repair job.”84 THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL eventually changed almost everything. Until then, Gorbachev was the prime initiator of change, launching reforms in his own country, delighted when they spilled into Eastern Europe, pushing Western leaders toward a new world order. Afterward, he had to react to changes initiated by others—by masses of people on the ground in the GDR, by East European politicians moving beyond Communism, by West European and American leaders ignoring or challenging Gorbachev’s vision.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 26 Jan 2017

Meanwhile, selfie-seeking young murderers everywhere confound the leaden stalkers of ‘extremist ideology’, retaliating to bombs from the air with choreographed slaughter on the ground. How did we get trapped in this danse macabre? Many readers of this book will remember the hopeful period that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the collapse of Soviet Communism, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured. Free markets and human rights appeared to be the right formula for the billions trying to overcome degrading poverty and political oppression; the words ‘globalization’ and ‘internet’ inspired, in that age of innocence, more hope than anxiety as they entered common speech.

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In a massive and under-appreciated shift worldwide, people understand themselves in public life primarily as individuals with rights, desires and interests, even if they don’t go as far as Margaret Thatcher in thinking that ‘there is no such thing as society’. In most of the world since 1945, planned and protected economic growth within sovereign nation states had been the chosen means to broad uplift and such specific goals as gender equality. In the age of globalization that dawned after the fall of the Berlin Wall, political life became steadily clamorous with unlimited demands for individual freedoms and satisfactions. Beginning in the 1990s, a democratic revolution of aspiration – of the kind Tocqueville witnessed with many forebodings in early nineteenth-century America – swept across the world, sparking longings for wealth, status and power, in addition to ordinary desires for stability and contentment, in the most unpromising circumstances.

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An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism. * * * Our perplexity, as simultaneously globalized and over-socialized individuals, is greater since no statutory warning came with the promises of world improvement in the hopeful period after the fall of the Berlin Wall: that societies organized for the interplay of individual self-interest can collapse into manic tribalism, if not nihilistic violence. It was simply assumed by the powerful and the influential among us that with socialism dead and buried, buoyant entrepreneurs in free markets would guarantee swift economic growth and worldwide prosperity, and that Asian, Latin American and African societies would become, like Europe and America, more secular and rational as economic growth accelerated.

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment
by Noam Chomsky
Published 15 Mar 2010

The Legacy of 1989 in Two Hemispheres December 1, 2009 November [2009] marked the anniversary of major events in 1989: “the biggest year in world history since 1945,” as British historian Timothy Garton Ash describes it. That year “changed everything,” Garton Ash writes. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms within Russia and his “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force” led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9—and to the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny. The accolades are deserved; the events, memorable. But alternative perspectives may be revealing. German chancellor Angela Merkel provided such a perspective—unintentionally—when she called on all of us to “use this invaluable gift of freedom . . . to overcome the walls of our time.”

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After reviewing the record, Carothers concludes that all U.S. leaders have been “schizophrenic”—supporting democracy if it conforms to U.S. strategic and economic objectives, thus in Soviet satellites but not in U.S. client states. This perspective is dramatically confirmed by the recent commemoration of the events of November 1989. The fall of the Berlin wall was rightly celebrated, but there was little notice of what happened one week later: on November 16, in El Salvador, the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, by the elite, U.S.-armed Atlacatl battalion, fresh from renewed training at the JFK Special Warfare School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The Globalization of Inequality
by François Bourguignon
Published 1 Aug 2012

The acceleration then takes place in the 2000s rather than the mid-­ 1990s.16 Since this represents a more recent phenomenon, maybe it has not registered for everyone yet. See table 2 in the appendix to this chapter. Using a different database, Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic (“Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6719, Washington, DC, 2013) found the same drop in inequality in the 2000s, although less pronounced than in table 2. Two recent draft papers reach the same conclusion. The first one, by Miguel Niño-­Zarazay, Laurence Roopez, and Finn Tarp, “Global Interpersonal Inequality: Trends and Measurement” (WIDER Working Paper 2014/004) based on GDP per capita normalized data finds that the drop in global inequality may have started around 1980.

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The defining institutional change in the last quarter of the twentieth century was undoubtedly the deregulation of markets and the process of economic liberalization, launched at the end of the 1970s in the United States by the Reagan administration and in the United Kingdom by the Thatcher government. This would later spread to the rest of the world, with a significant acceleration after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These reforms sought to relax what were seen as the overly strict regulations that states had placed on markets in the aftermath of the finan- 92 Chapter 3 cial crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War, and to liberate individual initiative from what were seen as stifling levels of taxation and regulation.

The Global Citizen: A Guide to Creating an International Life and Career
by Elizabeth Kruempelmann
Published 14 Jul 2002

To help you work through and reflect on your life abroad, it can be rewarding to share your experiences, pictures, and memories with other global citizens who also have exciting C U LT U R E P R E P : A M I N I - C O U R S E FOR THE C U LT U R A L L Y C H A L L E N G E D 55 Reverse Culture Shock by Elizabeth Kruempelmann (ekruempe@hotmail.com) I experienced reverse culture shock when I returned to the States after a year studying abroad in Denmark and Germany. My senses were overloaded the whole time I was abroad. In addition to my business studies and field trips, I traveled to fifteen countries, experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, learned two languages, and lived with a Danish family, Danish students, and a German family. My senses were stimulated almost every minute. When I returned home, there was simply nothing that stimulated my senses anymore. My mind had been programmed to speak foreign languages every day. Suddenly I had no outlet for all the words I was used to using regularly.

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My Danish professors occasionally joined the students after class at the local pub, and one professor even invited the entire class to his house for tea. Being able to chat with the professors in a casual manner about topics both related and unrelated to our course was so educational. We discussed a variety of topics affecting Europe at the time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the economic and political issues facing the European Union. The learning opportunities that exist outside the classroom can sometimes be even more rewarding than those in the classroom. A P P R E C I AT E D I F F E R E N T C U LT U R E S During a learning-abroad program you will interact on a daily basis with your host family, other students, teachers, and a local community that may deal with daily matters much differently than you.

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If you are staying with a host family, bring a picture book of your own country to show them where you are from, or some local food and drink. And depending on where your travels take you, barter goods might come in handy. When my studyabroad class from Copenhagen visited Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we brought cigarettes to pay for taxi cabs, candy for the kids, and items we knew the locals would want to trade for, like Levi jeans and perfume. In return, we received handpainted babushka dolls, Russian soldier uniforms, big furry hats, and worthless rubles. Having things to trade made it easy to strike up conversations with locals.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

Many events that first appear to be sudden and external – what mainstream economists often describe as ‘exogenous shocks’ – are far better understood as arising from endogenous change. In the words of the political economist Orit Gal, ‘complexity theory teaches us that major events are the manifestation of maturing and converging underlying trends: they reflect change that has already occurred within the system’.11 From this perspective, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the imminent collapse of the Greenland ice sheet have much in common. All three are reported in the news as sudden events but are actually visible tipping points that result from slowly accumulated pressure in the system – be it the gradual build-up of political protest in Eastern Europe, the build-up of sub-prime mortgages in a bank’s asset portfolio, or the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

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Pearce, J. (2015) ‘Quantifying the value of open source hardware development’, Modern Economy, 6, pp. 1–11. 84. Bauwens, M. (2012) Blueprint for P2P Society: The Partner State and Ethical Society, http://www.shareable.net/blog/blueprint-for-p2p-society-the-partner-state-ethical-economy 85. Lakner, C. and Milanovic, B. (2015) ‘Global income distribution: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, The World Bank Economic Review, pp. 1–30. 86. OECD (2014) Detailed Final 2013 Aid Figures Released by OECD/DAC. http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/final2013oda.htm 87. OECD (2015) ‘Non-ODA flows to developing countries: remittances’, available at: http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/beyond-oda-remittances.htm 88.

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Kuznets, S. (1955) ‘Economic growth and income inequality’, American Economic Review, 45: 1, pp. 1–28. Lacy, P. and Rutqvist, J. (2015) Waste to Wealth: the circular economy advantage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lakner, C. and Milanovic, B. (2015) ‘Global income distribution: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, World Bank Economic Review, 1–30. Lakoff, G. (2014) The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leach, M., Raworth, K. and Rockström, J. (2013) Between Social and Planetary Boundaries: Navigating Pathways in the Safe and Just Space for Humanity, World Social Science Report.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

The recent experience of economic growth is that it has destroyed opportunities, either for particular social groups or for future generations. Can it be reshaped in order to continue without incurring such untenable costs? One possible conclusion would be that this point marks the end of the triumphant free market capitalism that has ruled economic policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of communism. The financial crisis and subsequent recession have certainly made the role of government more prominent, but mainly as a result of crisis management. Many commentators have argued that the state should reenter economic management in a more deliberate way, given the staggering demonstrations of market failure we’ve experienced.2 I will indeed go on in this part of the book to discuss the many ways in which markets fail, and the policy conclusions to which pervasive market failures point.

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However, the circumstances are changing. The changing structure of the economy is affecting the way markets should be organized. HOW MARKETS FAIL Two decades after the crisis of communism, capitalism seems to be in crisis. Or so it is widely believed. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—and around the first anniversary of the onset of the massive financial crisis—the BBC’s World Service commissioned a survey about capitalism covering more than twenty-nine thousand people in twenty-seven countries. Only in two countries—the United States and Pakistan—did more than a fifth of respondents agree that capitalism is working well.

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The last chapter discussed the need for better information to guide policy, and this chapter has discussed the need for clarity about values if social welfare is to be well served by policymakers. The third leg of the Economy of Enough is a set of institutions that ensure that society is governed well, and this is the subject of the next chapter. How might we respond to a general crisis of governance? EIGHT Institutions The recent anniversary of the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall brought back emotional memories for Europeans of my generation. Like many children growing up in the Cold War 1960s, I had nuclear nightmares: grey landscapes of ash and devastation with no one else left alive, and the ticking of Geiger counters counting out the rest of eternity. The postwar division of Europe dominated the cultural landscape too.

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
by Vincent Bevins
Published 18 May 2020

Using numbers compiled by the US-funded Freedom House organization, historian John Coatsworth concluded that from 1960 to 1990, the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America “vastly exceeded” the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time.60 The Fall The violence in Central America raged on until the fall of the Berlin wall, and then kept going. From 1989 to 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart spectacularly, along with all the states that Moscow directly established in the wake of World War II. The Second World was no more, and its residents experienced this as the literal collapse of their governments. For the rest of the planet, most of which had somehow been affected by the Cold War, some things changed, and some things did not.

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For the two biggest anticommunist governments ever set up in the former Third World, the end of the Cold War had an indirect effect. Both Indonesia and Brazil transitioned from authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy. They did so at different times—Brazil started the process well before the fall of the Berlin wall, and Suharto left power almost a decade after it fell. Crucially, however, they both did it the same way. In Brazil and Indonesia, the transition from military dictatorship was carried out in a controlled manner. Negotiated transfers of power both maintained the fundamental social structure the dictatorships were set up to protect and provided impunity for the rulers, who remained wealthy and influential.

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Did the triumph of global capitalism mean victory for them too? Were they rewarded with prosperity and democracy? Economist Branko Milanovic, one of the world’s foremost experts on global inequality, born and raised in communist Yugoslavia, asked those questions on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. We can probably guess that no, they didn’t all get that. But it was certainly the idea back in 1991, and in many ways it was the promise that was made to the suffering peoples of the communist world, including to Milanovic himself. What happened instead was a devastating Great Depression.4 Milanovic, in a short essay titled “For Whom the Wall Fell?

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

The notions of economic equality and communal effort were among the reasons Russia turned to Marx. Their communist revolution in 1917 led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, which vied with the capitalist United States as the economic model du jour during the Cold War which lasted from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Marx’s most notable success is communist China. The world’s second largest economy and its most populous nation adopted communism after its 1949 revolution and has remained governed by the Chinese Communist Party ever since. But starting in 1979, when economic stagnation led its leader Deng Xiaoping to adopt reforms, China has moved away from a planned economy towards a more market-based one.

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The protesters called for financial reform, a fairer distribution of income and wealth and a rejection of austerity. The Occupy movement reflected the modern version of a struggle that had been ongoing since the previous century. The twentieth century had witnessed an ideological battle between socialism and welfare state capitalism, culminating in the triumph of the latter with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of the Iron Curtain in 1989, which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Economics Nobel laureate Milton Friedman had observed: There is no figure who had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.1 In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the future of capitalism was once again up for debate.

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With a knowledge of prices, people can choose to produce certain goods or work in certain industries. The economy as a whole operates efficiently even though no one has coordinated their efforts. The book was seven years in the making, and not well received. It marked the end of his professional career. A year later, it was tremendously fitting that Hayek would witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union that followed it. He lived long enough to see the victory of capitalism over communism, but only just. In 1992 he died at the age of ninety-two. Hayek and the global financial crisis At the time of his passing, Hayek had seen the dominance of capitalism over communism at the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

The notions of economic equality and communal effort were among the reasons Russia turned to Marx. Their communist revolution in 1917 led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, which vied with the capitalist United States as the economic model du jour during the Cold War which lasted from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Marx’s most notable success is communist China. The world’s second largest economy and its most populous nation adopted communism after its 1949 revolution and has remained governed by the Chinese Communist Party ever since. But starting in 1979, when economic stagnation led its leader Deng Xiaoping to adopt reforms, China has moved away from a planned economy towards a more market-based one.

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The protesters called for financial reform, a fairer distribution of income and wealth and a rejection of austerity. The Occupy movement reflected the modern version of a struggle that had been ongoing since the previous century. The twentieth century had witnessed an ideological battle between socialism and welfare state capitalism, culminating in the triumph of the latter with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of the Iron Curtain in 1989, which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Economics Nobel laureate Milton Friedman had observed: There is no figure who had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.1 In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the future of capitalism was once again up for debate.

…

With a knowledge of prices, people can choose to produce certain goods or work in certain industries. The economy as a whole operates efficiently even though no one has coordinated their efforts. The book was seven years in the making, and not well received. It marked the end of his professional career. A year later, it was tremendously fitting that Hayek would witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union that followed it. He lived long enough to see the victory of capitalism over communism, but only just. In 1992 he died at the age of ninety-two. Hayek and the global financial crisis At the time of his passing, Hayek had seen the dominance of capitalism over communism at the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of
by Mick Hume
Published 23 Feb 2017

In the UK and Europe, a Left that was losing touch with the working class and turning on its popular base would help pioneer the displacement of politics into the undemocratic world of Euro courts and commissions. Some forty-five years after the Second World War, Western capitalist democracy arguably reached its highest point of historical supremacy with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the rival Soviet bloc. Yet even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was little evidence of any renewed faith in democracy among the rulers of the Western world. In 1989 American author Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis was hailed as a statement of the historic triumph of liberal democratic capitalism. Yet there was little real triumphalism in Fukuyama’s argument.

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What happened in the forty years between to explain this change? The shorthand version of what happened is that the Left in the UK and across Europe lost the political war at home, and so sought refuge in the EU. The defeat of the powerful trade union movement in the 1980s, most notably in the 1984–5 miners’ strike, was followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That not only destroyed Stalinism, but also dealt a heavy blow to all those on the Left whose politics rested on a paler version of Soviet-style state socialism. Finding it harder to win an argument or connect with a working-class constituency in the UK, the Left seized upon the peaceful pastures of Europe’s courts and commissions as a more fruitful field to work in.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

The health of our democracy demands that we consider treating Facebook, Google, and Amazon with the same firm hand that led government to wage war on AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft—even dismembering them into smaller companies if circumstances (and the law) demand a forceful response. While it has been several generations since we wielded antitrust laws with such vigor, we should remember that these cases created the conditions that nurtured the invention of an open, gloriously innovative Internet in the first place. Nearly thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after a terrible recession, and decades of growing inequality, regulation hasn’t regained its reputation. In some ways, its stature has receded even further. Large swaths of the left now share the right’s distaste for the regulatory state, a broad sense of indignation over corporations capturing the apparatus of the state.

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But our automobiles are safer, our environment is cleaner, our food doesn’t poison us, our financial system is fairer and less prone to catastrophic collapse, even though those protective provisions have imposed meaningful costs on the private sector. In the libertarian fervor that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, we lost sight of this moral vision. The Internet is amazing, but we shouldn’t treat it as if it exists outside history or is exempt from our moral structures, especially when the stakes are nothing less than the fate of individuality and the fitness of democracy. Ten THE ORGANIC MIND WE KNOW FROM THE RECENT past that Silicon Valley is not destiny.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
by Ian Bremmer
Published 12 May 2010

Before Margaret Thatcher privatized a long list of large companies, British Airways, British Gas, British Steel, British Telecom, and British Petroleum, as well as large shipbuilders, regional water and electricity companies, airport operators, parts of the nuclear and coal industries, and even Rolls-Royce were all publicly owned. Even Thatcher would not privatize Britain’s National Health Service, however, which remains Europe’s largest employer with more than 1.5 million names on the payroll. Mercantilism Had the fall of the Berlin Wall truly marked the final triumph of free-market democracy, the term state capitalism might have quietly passed from the scene. But these words have now taken on a distinctly new meaning, one that will become enormously important for international politics and the global economy over the next ten years.

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Africa and Latin America had not yet shed the shackles of colonialism. America set aside an isolationist past to take on global leadership and to preach the gospel of free-market capitalism. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, America appeared to have no credible rival. But the fall of the Berlin Wall did not signal the end of authoritarian government, and those who rely on tight political control still need an economic system they can use to ensure that they don’t join the Bolsheviks atop the ash heap of history. Successive U.S. presidential administrations have used the power that Washington wields within international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to condition much-needed aid packages on the willingness of recipient governments to swallow America’s medicine and to emulate its economic model.

The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going
by George Friedman
Published 25 Jan 2011

Certainly the Americans and the British had supported these NGOs, and the consultants who were now managing the campaigns of some of the pro-Western candidates in Ukraine had formerly managed elections in the United States. Western money from multiple sources clearly was going into the country, but from the American point of view, there was nothing covert or menacing in any of this. The United States was simply doing what it had done since the fall of the Berlin Wall: working with democratic groups to build democracies. This is where the United States and Russia profoundly parted company. Ukraine was divided between pro-Russian and anti-Russian factions, but the Americans merely saw themselves as supporting democrats. That the factions seen as democratic by the Americans were also the ones that were anti-Russian was, for the Americans, incidental.

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Its antecedents reach back to the early 1950s and the European Steel and Coal Community, a narrowly focused entity whose leaders spoke of it even then as the foundation for a European federation. It is coincidental but extremely important that while the EU idea originated during the Cold War, it emerged as a response to the Cold War’s end. In the west, the overwhelming presence of NATO and its controls over defense and foreign policy loosened dramatically. In the east, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union found sovereign nations coming out of the shadows. It was at this point that Europe regained the sovereignty it had lost but that it is now struggling to define. The EU was envisioned to serve two purposes. The first was the integration of western Europe into a limited federation, solving the problem of Germany by binding it together with France, thereby limiting the threat of war.

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One
by Meghnad Desai
Published 15 Feb 2015

Could it be that what we had for three-quarters of a century – guaranteed prosperity and rising living standards – are about to disappear and become the experience of these countries who have been stuck in misery for the same long period? As they emerge, are we submerging? Is this the consequence of what is called globalization? Globalization became a buzzword in the 1990s sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It opened up an era of freer capital movements and freer trade across the world. It is hard to remember now that between 1992 and 2007 the developed and emerging economies enjoyed an unprecedentedly long period of growth with low inflation. These good things were attributed to globalization just as much as it is being blamed for the present slump.

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They rely on a combination of longer run forces such as demographic trends and cycles, or bursts of innovation, such as the discovery of gold and silver (relevant for the Gold Standard during the nineteenth century) or innovations in credit creation, as happened in the late twentieth century, or oil/shale discoveries, and also political events which may change the geography of the markets, as the fall of the Berlin Wall did. Kondratieff did, however, cover data going back to the Industrial Revolution. The first Kondratieff cycle has an upswing from the 1780s to 1810/17 and a downward phase from 1810/17 to 1844/51.The next long cycle peaked somewhere between 1870 and 1875 and then entered a downward phase which ended in the 1890s.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

Following the landmark 1978 Chinese reforms that started the ‘household responsibility system’ in the countryside, giving some farmers ownership of their products for the first time, the first ‘special economic zone’ was formed in Shenzhen in 1980. This concept allowed for the introduction and experimentation of more flexible market policies. Although the reforms were slow and not without controversy, by 1984 it became permissible to form individual enterprises with fewer than eight people and, by 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first stock markets were opened in Shenzhen and Shanghai. The broadening reach of market capitalism seemed assured. The changes of the times brought with them many investment opportunities and a more interconnected world, sparking an optimism that infected stock markets. In 1985, during my first year at work, the Dow Jones stock index in the US rallied by just over 27%, the strongest single year since 1975 (the year of recovery from the crash that followed the oil crisis and deep recession of 1973/1974).

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Companies in public ownership in the UK accounted for 12% of GDP in 1979 but only about 2% by 1997.6 By the mid-1990s the trend for privatisation had spread to the rest of Europe, even reaching Socialist-led governments such as that of Lionel Jospin in France, which launched a $7.1 billion initial offering of France Telecom in 1997 and made a $10.4 billion secondary offering a year later (as the fervor for telecom companies accelerated around the expanding technology bubble). The secular trend was punctuated temporarily by a (sharp but short-lived) crash in 1987 before lower interest rates and a continuation of economic growth pushed equities to all-time highs. The continuation of the re-rating of equities was spurred by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and, soon after, the unravelling of the Soviet Bloc. The Dax, the main German stock market index, surged by 30% between October 1989 and July 1990. As a consequence, a more integrated global economy emerged in the 1990s. Throughout this period, equity markets enjoyed a decline in the discount rate; not only did interest rates stay low as a result of the purging of global high inflation but also the end of the Cold War helped push the equity risk premium down further (the required hurdle rate for investing in risky assets compared with low-risk bonds).

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags
by Tim Marshall
Published 21 Sep 2016

The relatively new concept of European identity finds itself battling with national identities and symbols that have been forged over centuries. Flags, and the importance nation states and peoples attach to them, give the lie to the famous theory of the American thinker Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. Dr Fukuyama argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall was not ‘just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. This damaging idea continues to influence generations of foreign-policy thinkers who appear oblivious to the patterns of history and the political direction of Russia, the Middle East, China, swathes of Central Asia and elsewhere.

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Happily, it was settled with the compromise that the joint team would march under the black, red and gold but with the Olympic rings on the red, which is what happened in 1960 and 1964. In 1968 separate teams were entered but each complied with the compromise agreed earlier, and after that each used their national flag. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification the following year, the problem was solved. Many East Germans made their feelings plain in the heady days when the Wall came down by cutting out the coat of arms from the flag. They drew inspiration from the Hungarians, who in 1956 had done the same during their uprising against Soviet occupation.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

Excessive optimism and empty McKinsey-speak aside, it was Clinton’s creative use of recent history that really stood out. Clinton drew a parallel between the challenges of promoting Internet freedom and the experiences of supporting dissidents during the Cold War. Speaking of her recent visit to Germany to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Clinton mentioned “the courageous men and women” who “made the case against oppression by circulating small pamphlets called samizdat,” which “helped pierce the concrete and concertina wire of the Iron Curtain.” (Newseum was a very appropriate venue to give in to Cold War nostalgia. It happens to house the largest display of sections of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany).

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Featuring half a dozen political bloggers from countries like Syria, Cuba, Colombia, and Iran, the conference was one of the first major public events organized by the newly inaugurated George W. Bush Institute. The pomposity of its lineup, with panels like “Freedom Stories from the Front Lines” and “Global Lessons in eFreedom,” suggested that even two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, its veterans are still fluent in Manichean rhetoric. But the Texas conference was not just a gathering of disgruntled and unemployed neoconservatives; respected Internet experts, like Ethan Zuckerman and Hal Roberts of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, were in attendance as well.

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Much of the early scholarship on the subject greatly underestimated the need for entertainment and overestimated the need for information, especially of the political variety. Whatever external pressures, most people eventually find a way to accustom themselves to the most brutal political realities, whether by means of television, art, or sex. Furthermore, the fact that the media did such a superb job at covering the fall of the Berlin Wall may have influenced many observers to believe that it played a similarly benevolent role throughout the entire history of the Cold War. But this was just a utopian dream: Whatever noble roles media take on during extraordinary crisis situations should not be generalized, for their everyday functions are strikingly different and are much more likely to be geared toward entertainment (if only because it sells better).

Year 501
by Noam Chomsky
Published 19 Jan 2016

In a 1988 end-of-year analysis of the Cold War in the New York Times, Dimitri Simes wrote that the impending disappearance of the Soviet enemy offers the US three advantages: first, we can shift NATO costs to European competitors; second, we can end “the manipulation of America by third world nations,” “resist unwarranted third world demands for assistance,” and strike a harder bargain with “defiant third world debtors”; and third, military power can be used more freely “as a United States foreign policy instrument...against those who contemplate challenging important American interests,” with no fear of “triggering counterintervention,” the deterrent having been removed. In brief, the US can regain some power within the rich men’s club, tighten the screws on the Third World, and resort more freely to violence against defenseless victims. The senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was right on target.30 The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 can be taken as the symbolic end of the Cold War. After that, it took real dedication to conjure up the Soviet threat, though habits die slowly. Thus, in early 1990, much excitement was generated by a document published anonymously by University of California Sovietologist Martin Malia, railing about how Brezhnev had “intervened at will throughout the Third World” and “Russia bestrode the world” while “the liberal-to-radical mainstream of Anglo-American Sovietology” regarded Stalinism as having “a democratic cast,” indulging in “blatant fantasies...about democratic Stalinism” and “puerile fetishization of Lenin,” along with a host of similar insights apparently picked up in some Paris café.

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It would not be easy to invent a clearer demonstration of the fraudulence of the Cold War pretext; being doctrinally unacceptable, the conclusions remain invisible (see chapter 6). US opposition to Haitian independence for two centuries also continued, quite independently of the Cold War. Events of the 1980s, notably after the fall of the Berlin wall, also illustrate with much clarity traditional US distaste for democracy and indifference to human rights. We return to details (chapter 8). Another instructive example is Saddam Hussein, a favored friend and trading partner of the West right through his worst atrocities. As the Berlin wall was tottering in October 1989, the White House intervened directly, in a highly secret meeting, to ensure that Iraq would receive another $1 billion in loan guarantees, overcoming Treasury and Commerce department objections that Iraq was not creditworthy.

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The principled US opposition to the use of force in international affairs was revealed again through the 1980s; for example, by Washington’s decisive support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the accompanying slaughter, the government-media reaction to the World Court judgment in 1986 ordering the US to desist from its “unlawful use of force” against Nicaragua, Bush’s invasion of Panama to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War, and much else.28 According to the USG-Times version, Washington “refused to normalize relations as long as a Vietnamese-backed Government in Cambodia resisted a negotiated settlement to its civil war” (Steven Greenhouse); that is, the conflict with the Khmer Rouge, supplied by China and Thailand (and, indirectly, the US and its allies), and attacking Cambodian rural areas from their Thai sanctuaries.29 The reality is a bit different.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
by Michael Lewis
Published 30 Mar 2014

Morgan, Barclays, UBS, Citi, Deutsche Bank. †† Stampfli has not been charged with any wrongdoing. CHAPTER FIVE PUTTING A FACE ON HFT Sergey Aleynikov wasn’t the world’s most eager immigrant to America, or, for that matter, to Wall Street. He’d left Russia in 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but more in sadness than in hope. “When I was nineteen I haven’t imagined leaving it,” he says. “I was very patriotic about Russia. I cried when Brezhnev died. And I always hated English. I thought I was completely incapable of learning languages.” His problem with Russia was that its government wouldn’t allow him to study what he wanted to study.

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The more you cultivate a class of people who know how to work around the system, the more people you will have who know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who are skilled at working around the system.” The population was thus well suited to exploit megatrends in both computers and the United States financial markets. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a lot of Russians fled to the United States without a lot of English; one way to make a living without having to converse with the locals was to program their computers. “I know people who never programmed computers but when they get here they say they are computer programmers,” said Constantine.

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity
by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne
Published 4 Feb 2013

This has brought about unmatched attainment of wealth, facilitated through competitive markets and driven by a competitive financial system, which, in turn, has spurred on even greater striving for more innovation, ingenuity, and originality. This is the underpinning of the great American dream, which has been triumphantly exported to the rest of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and rise of the Iron Curtain. Today, for instance, China, India, Brazil, and Poland, with their meteoric growth and the rise of their own meritocracies, are prime examples. That dream, however, has turned into a nightmare. We now have scientific proof that the monoculture of a single type of currency is a root cause of the repeated monetary and financial instabilities that have manifested throughout modern history.

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Minorities were used as scapegoats by ethnic leaders to redirect anger away from themselves and toward a common enemy, providing the sociopolitical context for extreme nationalist leaders to gain power in the process. Within days of the 1998 monetary crisis in Indonesia, mobs were incited to violence against Chinese and other minorities. Similarly, in Russia, discrimination against minorities was aggravated by the financial collapse of the 1990s. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, it could be argued that the identified archenemy of the United States has now been supplanted with a new foe, immigrants and the poor. Today in the United States, there are some 1,018 identified hate groups compared to only 602 in 2000.18 Another important lesson, and an expensive one in terms of human misery with regard to cooperative currencies, is revealed by the more recent economic crisis in Argentina.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

And they are the same kind of mills that will be radically “disintermediated” in the makers’ 3.0 economy. Victor Falber had a nephew named Reuben Falber. I always knew him as Uncle Reuben, but the world remembers him quite differently. Reuben Falber was the longtime assistant secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who was exposed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union as the official responsible for laundering large amounts of Soviet cash into Britain to finance the communist revolution.70 But my own memories of Reuben Falber were of a scholarly man who would use quotes from Marx to explain to me why the collapse of capitalism was inevitable.

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We shape our architecture; and thereafter it shapes us. CHAPTER EIGHT EPIC FAIL FailCon Big Brother might be dead, but one department of the old totalitarian state remains in robust health. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth—in fact, of course, the Ministry of Propaganda—was supposed to have gone out of business in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But, like other failed twentieth-century institutions, the ministry has relocated its operations to the west coast of America. It has moved to the epicenter of twenty-first-century innovation—to Silicon Valley, a place so radically disruptive that it is even reinventing failure as the new model of success.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

Whoever is blamed, the idea of usurpation is central to this message, which fringe political figures have been promoting for decades (and indeed regularly throughout the West’s modern history). But it took an elephant to make the usurpation story go mainstream. FIGURE 2.1. Income growth, 1988–2008, for each 5 per cent global income group and top 1 per cent. Source: Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Economic Review 30, no. 2 (July 2016): 203–232, https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1093/wber/lhv039. This elephant first appeared a few years after the global financial crisis, in a statistical graphic developed by economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic (Figure 2.1).

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—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH William Wordsworth’s admiring verses about the 1789 French Revolution still reverberated exactly two hundred years after he wrote them, during another world-historical event. For those—like me—who came of age around 1989, those lines could just as well have been written about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism, and the return to the West of the half of Europe that had been locked up behind the Iron Curtain for forty years. At the time it was possible to dream of a new world, where the three pillars of the Western liberal order would be adopted by all countries and borders between nations would gradually fade away.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

Today we know that from the 1990s, the UK was sleepwalking into a debt crisis — one that would end in a much bigger crash than that of 1989.45 But at the time, the country was blissfully unaware of the problems that were being stored up for the future. To many people, the avalanche of cheap credit seemed like a gift from the heavens. This boom coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and a new era of globalisation, during which cheap consumer goods from all over the world would become more readily available than ever before in history. Working people were able to afford plasma screen TVs, mobile phones, and video game consoles. But peoples’ experiences of the long boom differed depending upon their class position.

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In its place, new narratives have emerged among new political communities — whether white supremacists on the internet, or climate strikers in their schools. All around the world, people are turning to one another and saying the same thing: “things cannot go on as they are”. The gravity of this moment is hard to grasp for those who lived through the period of stability following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But perhaps the most important lesson to have emerged from the events of the last decades is that no capitalist system can remain stable for long. The global economy does not operate according to the predictable laws of neoclassical economics, thrown off course only by external shocks. Instead, capitalism engenders complexity, meaning that even the best organised capitalist economies inevitably tend towards chaos.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
by Matthew Syed
Published 19 Apr 2010

I look from the face of the man in the shop to the face of the woman in the photo and the truth is strange but unmistakable: they are one and the same person. It took many years for Andreas Krieger—the name Heidi chose following her sex-change operation in 1997—to discover what had been perpetrated at the Berlin Dynamo Club. Top-secret documents relating to the sporting system in East Germany were uncovered only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it took almost a decade to excavate the full, mind-bending story. At the heart of the infamy were those bright blue pills. Krieger discovered that they were not vitamin tablets but anabolic steroids called Oral-Turinabol: powerful prescription drugs that built muscle and induced male characteristics.

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One way to eliminate drug cheating, of course, would be to legalize drug taking (without rules to break, cheating would cease to exist by definition), but this would surely be an intolerable solution. Success would be determined not by ability and hard work but by a willingness to trade future life expectancy for present glory. The dangers of excessive doping were comprehensively demonstrated during the doping trials after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as we have seen. The question, therefore, is whether there is a middle road between prohibition and full-scale legalization. According to Julian Savulescu, professor of practical ethics at Oxford University, there is. In a radical new approach, he argues that we should not legalize all performance-enhancing drugs; rather we should legalize safe enhancers.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
by Jason Cowley
Published 15 Nov 2018

In Koba the Dread, his 2002 book about Stalin and the British left’s historic reluctance to condemn the crimes of the Soviet Union and its satellites, Amis suggests that his old friend began to mature as a writer, his prose gaining in ‘burnish and authority’, only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as if before then he had been aesthetically restrained and compromised by a self-imposed demand to hold a fixed ideological line, even at the expense of truth-telling. My view is different. I think Hitchens was liberated as a political writer long before the fall of the Berlin Wall – through moving, in his early thirties, first to New York and then to Washington, DC. There, after some early struggles, he found his voice and signature style, contributing to Harper’s and the Nation and, later, as a well-paid deluxe contrarian, to Vanity Fair and the Atlantic.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

You need to have a high degree of leverage by the holders of those assets. In 2008, both elements were present in abundance, just as they were in 1929. THE ROOTS OF THE CRISIS The origins of the crisis can be traced back to the exuberance that followed the end of the cold war. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 exposed the grotesque incompetence of the Soviet system of central planning for all but the blind to see. Not only had millions died to build the Soviet regime, the Soviet paradise turned out to be a squalid hell. In the closest thing we’ve seen to a controlled experiment in economic regimes, Communist East Germany—the jewel in the Soviet crown—had achieved only a third of the level of productivity of capitalist West Germany.

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In the closest thing we’ve seen to a controlled experiment in economic regimes, Communist East Germany—the jewel in the Soviet crown—had achieved only a third of the level of productivity of capitalist West Germany. The Soviet Union was even further behind the West. All but a handful of fanatics realized that they had been mistaken about central planning and government control. “Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,” a senior Indian mandarin recalled, “I felt as though I were awakening from a thirty-five-year dream. Everything I have believed about economic systems and had tried to implement was wrong.”4 Governments across the world embraced competitive markets as the only alternative.

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The result was an explosion of economic growth that sent shock waves through the global economy: real GDP growth in the developing world was more than double real GDP growth in the developed world from 2000 to 2007, as global multinationals opened facilities in the emerging world and emerging-market companies sprang from nowhere. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the world added about 500 million workers to the export-oriented economy between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 2005. In addition, hundreds of millions were brought under the sway of competitive forces, especially in the former Soviet Union. Consumption in the developing world did not keep pace with the surge in income. Most emerging countries had a long tradition of saving, driven by fear of illness and destitution, and systems of consumer finance were rudimentary.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

Unlike that earlier crisis, it has not put the survival of the capitalist system in doubt. Indeed, the Great Recession that began shortly before the Lehman debacle was the first modern crisis in which no systemic alternative to capitalism was on offer. No one, after all, is looking to North Korea for an alternative vision of the future. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the only question has been about the extent of the market orientation of capitalism. What the crisis did do was provoke intense soul searching about the merits and defects of an entrenched capitalist system. The merits are clear enough. Capitalism, by which I mean a market-based system where private ownership of industry and commerce is supported by property rights, has lifted millions out of poverty.

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The Austrian-born economist worried that capitalism’s tendency to monopolistic gigantism, inequality and the encouragement of envy would, with the connivance of an anti-capitalist intellectual elite, drive the world to state socialism. What has changed since Schumpeter’s time is that while those tendencies still exist, there is no longer any systemic alternative to capitalism. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, comprehensive public ownership of the means of production is discredited. To the extent that systemic choices are available, they lie on a spectrum that runs from the market-driven model of capitalism in the US, via the social democratic models of Europe, to the heavily statist, authoritarian form of capitalism that prevails in China and much of the rest of the developing world – a model nonetheless characterised by extensive exposure to the global trading system.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence
by Stephen D. King
Published 17 Jun 2013

Social security systems designed to prevent a repeat of the terrible impoverishment of the 1930s became increasingly widespread, reducing the need for households to stuff cash under the mattress for unforeseen emergencies: they could thus spend more freely. With the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, countries that had been trapped in the economic equivalent of a deep-freeze were able to come in from the cold, creating new opportunities for trade and investment: trade between China and the US, for example, expanded massively. Women, sorely underrepresented in the workforce through lack of opportunity and lack of pay, suddenly found themselves in gainful employment thanks to sex discrimination legislation.

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De Tocqueville's view thus allows for the role of expectations and the impact on the political system if those expectations are not met. De Tocqueville's view of expectations and their impact on political stability captures many of the upheavals seen in the non-democratic world since the end of the 1980s, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire and the Arab Spring. But de Tocqueville also has something useful to say about the problems now facing Western economies. Economic stagnation need not make anyone worse off but it certainly has left expectations unmet. Reductions in public spending plans, rises in education costs, increased retirement age, bigger pension contributions and lower stock-market returns are all part of the same story: stagnation prevents us from delivering on the promises we have made to ourselves.

Inside British Intelligence
by Gordon Thomas

Scarlett saw how the grimly effective simplicity of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had struck with numbing abruptness within the U.S. intelligence community. He wrote that what clearly emerged from the disaster was “a devastating pointer to U.S. intelligence failure.” Yet the signs had been there: the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the First Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the collapse of Soviet Communism, the slide into anarchy in the Balkans, the emergence of al-Qaeda, the revolt of militants against the regimes in power across the Muslim world, and the rise of religious ideology into a powerful cohesive force that was daily expanding not only among the urban poor but to middle-class professionals.

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The NSA covers east of the mountains, including Japan and China, as well as North and South America and the Caribbean. Australia and New Zealand monitor the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. This global-eavesdropping network ensures there are no gaps in coverage. On their workstation screens at Fort Meade, people had watched the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and listened to President Mikhail Gorbachev say that Russia still had “its proper place as a superpower.” For his listeners it was sufficient reason for them to continue spying on an old enemy. At GCHQ the annual budget was increased to £600 million, making it by far the largest slice of the British intelligence funding, and it also received money to work on NSA black projects from funds hidden inside the costs of other U.S. defense projects.

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At GCHQ the annual budget was increased to £600 million, making it by far the largest slice of the British intelligence funding, and it also received money to work on NSA black projects from funds hidden inside the costs of other U.S. defense projects. WITH HIS MUTED TEXAS accent and his “sexual orientation” listed as “straight” in his naval records, Studeman had taken over the NSA weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His background as a hard-nosed intelligence officer had preceded him. He had served as operations intelligence chief with the Seventh Fleet during the Vietnam War before becoming commander at the Naval Operational Intelligence Center in Washington. His reputation was of a man who made good judgments quickly.

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
by William Blum
Published 31 Mar 2002

And if the people of any foreign land were benighted enough to not realize that they needed to be saved, if they failed to appreciate the underlying nobility of American motives, they were warned that they would burn in Communist Hell. Or a CIA facsimile thereof. And they would be saved nonetheless. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still saving countries and peoples from one danger or another. The scorecard reads as follows: From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes.

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When the Fiji coup took place, Rabuka and his supporters pointed to the Libyan "threat" as justifying the coup.51 There are more of such "coincidences" in this drama, including appearances in Fiji before the coup of the National Endowment for Democracy (q.v.) and its funding, some of the CIAs labor mafia, and units of the US military in the Pacific.52 The day after the coup, a Pentagon source, while denying US involvement, declared: "We're kinda delighted.. .All of a sudden our ships couldn't go to Fiji, and now all of a sudden they can."53 Panama, 1989 Less than two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States showed its joy that a new era of world peace was now possible by invading Panama, as Washington's mad bombers struck again. On December 20, 1989, a large tenement barrio in Panama City was wiped out; 15,000 people were left homeless. Counting several days of ground fighting between US and Panamanian forces, 500-something natives dead was the official body count—i.e., what the United States and the new US-installed Panamanian government admitted to.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

A study by psychologists at New York University found that the right-left happiness gap increases with deepening income inequality. This suggests people on the right are better at rationalizing inequality as a normal feature of life and feel less guilty about it. But improve people’s economic outlook and chances are you will make them happier. More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, former East Germans remained unhappier than their fellow citizens from the western side. They would have been even less satisfied were it not for the income boost following unification. East Germans’ satisfaction with life rose about 20 percent between 1991 and 2001. Much of that jump was due to the freedoms gained with the demise of their police state.

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In the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe, four decades of government control over all production and distribution instilled a worldview that is quite different from opinions common in the West. East Germans are more likely to say that success is the product of external social circumstances, while West Germans attribute it to individual effort. In 1997, nearly a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Ossies” were much more likely than “Wessies” to say government should provide for people’s financial security. But views are changing along with economic realities. Researchers suggest that the differences in preferences between East and West are likely to disappear entirely within the next twenty years.

Who Rules the World?
by Noam Chomsky

Small wonder that the Great Communicator is worshipped by Hoover Institution scholars as a colossus whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.”15 The Latin American case is revealing. Those who called for freedom and justice in Latin America are not admitted to the pantheon of honored dissidents. For example, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, had their heads blown off on the direct orders of the Salvadoran high command. The perpetrators were from an elite battalion armed and trained by Washington that had already left a gruesome trail of blood and terror. The murdered priests are not commemorated as honored dissidents, nor are others like them throughout the hemisphere.

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Contrary to fifty years of deceit, it was quietly conceded that the main concern in this region was not the Russians, but rather what is called “radical nationalism,” meaning independent nationalism not under U.S. control.3 All of this has evident bearing on the received standard version, but it passed unnoticed—or, perhaps, therefore it passed unnoticed. Other important events took place immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War. One was in El Salvador, the leading recipient of U.S. military aid—apart from Israel and Egypt, a separate category—and with one of the worst human rights records anywhere. That is a familiar and very close correlation. The Salvadoran high command ordered the Atlacatl Battalion to invade the Jesuit university and murder six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, including the rector, Fr.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
Published 9 Sep 2020

Air Force Academy, he said that ISIL terrorists would never be “strong enough to destroy Americans or our way of life,” in part “because we’re on the right side of history.” 57 But Clinton and Obama also used this triumphalist rhetoric in other contexts. This reflected their confidence, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, that history was moving ineluctably toward the spread of liberal democracy and free markets. In 1994, Clinton expressed optimism for the prospects of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, saying, “He believes in democracy. He’s on the right side of history.”

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But the same providential faith that inspires hope among the powerless can prompt hubris among the powerful. This can be seen in the changing sensibility of liberalism in recent decades, as the moral urgency of the civil rights era gave way to a complacent triumphalism in the aftermath of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall led many in the West to assume that history had vindicated their model of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. Empowered by this assumption, they promoted a neoliberal version of globalization that included free-trade agreements, the deregulation of finance, and other measures to ease the flow of goods, capital, and people across national boundaries.

Social Capital and Civil Society
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Mar 2000

His publications include T h e End of History and the Last M a n ( 1 9 9 2 ), which received the Premio Capri and the Book Critics Award (from the Los Angeles T i m e s ) , and Trust : T h e Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), which was named “business book of the year” by European. LECTURE I. THE GREAT DISRUPTION Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been an extraordinary amount of attention paid to the interrelated issues of social capital, civil society, trust, and social norms as central issues for contemporary democracies. The propensity for civil society was said to be an essential condition for the transition to stable democracy in Eastern Europe, and the decline in social capital in the United States is said to be a major problem for American democracy today.

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again)
by Nick Clegg
Published 11 Oct 2017

For Spain (which found its initial attempt to join the EEC rejected, because of objections to Franco’s authoritarian rule), EEC membership, when it finally came in 1986, was a symbol of democracy’s victory over fascism. And for the many central and eastern European nations that began the process of applying for membership after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, becoming part of the EU was a demonstration of their new-found freedom from the grip of Soviet-era communism. In all these cases, formally agreeing to work with European neighbours, to build partnerships and to strengthen institutional and economic ties was both a symbolic and a practical step towards a brighter and better future.

After Europe
by Ivan Krastev
Published 7 May 2017

Official statistics tell us that 2.1 million Bulgarians were living outside the country in 2011. The figure is exceptionally high for a country with just slightly more than seven million persons. The opening of the borders was both the best and the worst thing to happen to Bulgarian society after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I can only love what I am free to leave,” wrote East German dissident Wolf Biermann in the 1970s.29 For half a century, Bulgarians were asked to love a country they were not free to leave, so opening the borders was understandably a welcome development. An opinion poll twenty-five years after the fall of the Wall showed Bulgarians consider the opening of the borders the greatest achievement of the postcommunist period.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

Milanović has combined the two inequality trends of the past thirty years—declining inequality worldwide, increasing inequality within rich countries—into a single graph which pleasingly takes the shape of an elephant (figure 9-5). This “growth incidence curve” sorts the world’s population into twenty numerical bins or quantiles, from poorest to richest, and plots how much each bin gained or lost in real income per capita between 1988 (just before the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 2008 (just before the Great Recession). Figure 9-5: Income gains, 1988–2008 Source: Milanović 2016, fig. 1.3. The cliché about globalization is that it creates winners and losers, and the elephant curve displays them as peaks and valleys. It reveals that the winners include most of humanity.

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Sure enough, trade as a proportion of GDP shot up in the postwar era, and quantitative analyses have confirmed that trading countries are less likely to go to war, holding all else constant.21 Another brainchild of the Enlightenment is the theory that democratic government serves as a brake on glory-drunk leaders who would drag their countries into pointless wars. Starting in the 1970s, and accelerating after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more countries gave democracy a chance (chapter 14). While the categorical statement that no two democracies have ever gone to war is dubious, the data support a graded version of the Democratic Peace theory, in which pairs of countries that are more democratic are less likely to confront each other in militarized disputes.22 The Long Peace was also helped along by some realpolitik.

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Scores are summed over sovereign states with a population greater than 500,000, and range from –10 for a complete autocracy to 10 for a perfect democracy. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 5–23 of Pinker 2011. The graph shows that the third wave of democratization is far from over, let alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the world had 52 democracies (defined by the Polity Project as countries with a score of 6 or higher on their scale), up from 31 in 1971. After swelling in the 1990s, this third wave spilled into the 21st century in a rainbow of “color revolutions” including Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), bringing the total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 to 87.14 Belying the image of a rollback or meltdown under his watch, the number continued to grow.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
by Jonathan Crary
Published 3 Jun 2013

“Beyond a legacy of old books and old buildings . . . there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry.”8 At the time, Debord and Deleuze were writing against the grain. The “short twentieth century” was coming to an abrupt end, between 1989 and 1991, with what to many seemed like hopeful developments, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of a bipolar, Cold War world. Along with the triumphalist narratives of globalization and the facile declarations of the historical end of competing world-systems were the widely promoted “paradigms” for a post-political and post-ideological era. Twenty years later, it is difficult to recall the seriousness with which these fatuous claims were made on behalf of a West that seemed poised to effortlessly occupy and refashion the entire planet.

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
by Gabriel Zucman , Teresa Lavender Fagan and Thomas Piketty
Published 21 Sep 2015

Henry, “The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for ‘Missing’ Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes,” Tax Justice Network, July 2012, http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf. 16. Ruth Judson, “Crisis and Calm: Demand for U.S. Currency at Home and Abroad from the Fall of the Berlin Wall to 2011,” IFDP working paper of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, November 2012, http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2012/1058/ifdp1058.pdf. 17. Adam, “Impact de l’échange automatique d’informations.” 18. See, for instance, Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report 2013, https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?

Bosnia & Herzegovina--Culture Smart
by Elizabeth Hammond
Published 11 Jan 2011

Without his strong leadership, Bosnia began to deteriorate economically as the decade progressed. Slobodan Milošević gained power among the Serbian Communists during this time, and maintained popularity among Serbs through a strongly nationalist set of policies. He revoked the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina, causing massive protests from those who lived there. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some of the Yugoslav republics, namely Croatia and Slovenia, started pushing for more independence. Croatian nationalism was growing ever more radical in competition with Milošević’s increasingly brazen calls for a Greater Serbia. A turning point occurred in 1989 at Kosovo Polje, a town that held special significance for Serbs as the site of a battle and the death of a Serb hero, Prince Lazar, in 1389.

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
by John Mackey , Rajendra Sisodia and Bill George
Published 7 Jan 2014

By every objective measure, free-enterprise capitalism has won this battle. The United States was far more economically dynamic and socially evolved than the Soviet Union, its chief communist rival. The same held true for West Germany versus East Germany; South Korea versus North Korea; and Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore versus China. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, country after country began to turn toward greater political and economic freedom in the 1990s and 2000s, as the dismal economic and societal results of the various socialistic experiments conducted in the twentieth century became better known. As this transition to greater freedom took root, many countries experienced rapid economic growth, and hundreds of millions of poor people were able to escape grinding poverty.

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Another almost equally historic year occurred more recently in 1989, which marked several epochal changes in society and technology. Consider three momentous events that took place that year. The Fall of the Wall Preceded by the dramatic but failed Chinese uprising in Tiananmen Square in June, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, triggered the collapse of communist regimes all over Europe, something that was unthinkable just a few years before. Without a shot being fired, the defining ideological debate of the twentieth century between competing systems for organizing human society was suddenly over.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 28 Jan 2020

Decisions were often guided by the belief that markets, on their own, would lead to economic efficiency so long as governments kept spending, deficits, debts, and inflation low. It is worth recalling how these decisions were attached to—indeed, contingent upon—a particular moment in history. It was a moment of capitalist triumphalism. Those economic beliefs enjoyed a moment of popularity in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, to say the market economy accounted for the collapse of authoritarian regimes from Warsaw, to Bucharest, to Moscow is to misread history. Instead, it was the failure of a deeply flawed Communist system, pushed to the brink by the American devotion to a high-tech arms race, combined with a human yearning for freedom.

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Europe has maintained a mixed economy—a balance between private enterprise, government (at many different levels), and a mix of other institutional arrangements, including foundations, cooperatives, and not-for-profit organizations. However, the aggressive free-market approach of Margaret Thatcher and the fall of the Berlin Wall resulted in a major change in this balance, based on an excessive confidence in markets. In the clash between two competing systems, Communism and capitalism, the latter seemed to have triumphed absolutely. Some, like Francis Fukuyama, went so far as to proclaim “the end of history,” prophesying that the entire world would eventually appreciate the wisdom of liberalism, capitalism, and democracy.

Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
by Tim Mohr
Published 10 Sep 2018

Police mugshots of East German punks Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic (BStU) Burning Down The Haus Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall By Tim Mohr ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2018 Contents Preface Introduction I: Too Much Future II: Oh Bondage Up Yours! III: Combat Rock IV: Rise Above V: Burning from the Inside VI: Disintegration VII: Lust for Life Acknowledgments Bibliography About the Author Preface When I arrived in the eastern section of Berlin in 1992, I’d never seen any place like it.

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And it was in those clubs, during those years, that I first met East German punks and learned about the secret history of punk rock under the dictatorship. Ostpunks, or Eastern punks, ran or worked at most of the places I hung out; they had set up nearly all the first bars and clubs in the East and established in the process the ethos of the fledgling new society being built almost from scratch after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This kaleidoscopic world I had fallen in love with was their world, their creation. At the time I had no idea I would eventually become a writer. But to an American reflexively skeptical toward the Reagan mythology surrounding the end of the Cold War, the story of East German punk seemed unbelievably important—perhaps more important than even the participants themselves realized.

The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
by Edward Hollis
Published 10 Nov 2009

Once the final revolution had been enacted and the human condition perfected, history itself would come to an end. Then the architect could rest on his column and gaze upon a world made complete, in which nothing need ever change again. History did come to an end of sorts, but not quite as the Marxists or the modernists had planned. The fall of the Berlin Wall on 10 November 1989 concluded what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “the little twentieth century,” which began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, ran through the horrors of the trenches, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima, through Nuremberg and the Prague Spring, and finished in Berlin.

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THE BERLIN WALL Beevor, Anthony. Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. Penguin, 2002. “The Berlin Wall: The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!!” http://berlin-wall.org/. Bernauerstraße Wall Museum. http://www.berlinermauerdokumentationszentrum.de/eng/index_dokz.html. Buckley, William. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Wiley, 2004. Calvin University German Propaganda Archive. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/wall.htm. City Guide to the Wall. http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/bauen/wanderungen/en/strecke4.shtml. East Side Gallery. http://www.eastsidegallery.com. Funder, Anna. Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

Since the liberal view of history cannot explain the outbreak of the war, it likewise treats the existence of fascism and communism (both, indeed, outcomes of the war) cavalierly, as “mistakes.” Saying that something is a mistake is not a satisfactory historical explanation. Liberal theory thus tends to ignore the entire short twentieth century and to go directly from 1914 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, almost as if nothing had happened in between—1989 brings the world back to the path it was on in 1914, before it slipped in error. This is why liberal explanations for the outbreak of the war are nonexistent, and the explanations proffered are based on politics (Fritz Fischer, Niall Ferguson), the remaining influence of aristocratic societies (Joseph Schumpeter), or, least convincing of all, the idiosyncrasies of individual actors, mistakes, and accidents (A.

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“Wages, Capital and Top Incomes: The Factor Income Composition of Top Incomes in the USA, 1960–2005.” Chap. 2 of “The Determinants of Incomes and Inequality: Evidence from Poor and Rich Countries.” PhD diss., Oxford University. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2016. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank Economic Review 30(2): 203–232. Landes, David. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: Norton. Leijonhufvud, Axel. 1985. “Capitalism and the Factory System.” In Economics as a Process: Essays in the New Institutional Economics, ed.

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron
by John Preston
Published 9 Feb 2021

A long list of Maxwell’s ventures follows: academic journals, newspapers, new and exciting technological ventures such as CD-ROM, along with more traditional forms of publishing: ‘The adult books have an interesting backlist which includes F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.’ But the emphasis is firmly on the future – on businesses like the Berlitz language school. ‘We’ve seen a lot of occurrences over the past year such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of freedom in Eastern Europe that are going to cause a need for Berlitz’s services.’ The world stands on the brink of a new era – an era of greater tolerance and internationalism. Already the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has declared that history as we knew it has ceased to exist.

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After all, the Sunday Times Rich List for 1989–90 had estimated Maxwell’s fortune at between 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion pounds. What’s more, he’d done something that counted just as much as any number of bank statements, accounts or written guarantees. He had given them his word. 23. Crossing the Line In the summer of 1990, eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Maxwell flew to the city in his private jet for a series of meetings. As far as he was concerned, the fall of the Wall had all sorts of implications, personal and professional. More than forty years earlier, post-war Berlin had been the making of him; he’d emerged from the ruins of the city bearing the building blocks of what would become his publishing empire.

The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union
by Serhii Plokhy
Published 12 May 2014

In the forty-seven-page treaty, accompanied by seven hundred pages of protocols, the two presidents would agree not just to curb the arms race but also to begin reversing it.2 The confrontation between the world’s two most powerful countries, which began soon after World War II and had brought the planet to the brink of nuclear Armageddon, was now all but over. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, German reunification under way, and Mikhail Gorbachev adopting the “Sinatra doctrine,” which allowed Moscow’s East European clients to “do it their way” and eventually leave the Kremlin’s embrace, the conflict at the core of the Cold War was resolved. Soviet troops began to leave East Germany and other countries of the region.

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Robert Gates wrote in his memoirs that in the months leading up to the coup the administration was following the approach summarized by Brent Scowcroft at a national security briefing for the president on May 31, 1991: “Our goal is to keep Gorby in power for as long as possible, while doing what we can to help head him in the right direction—and doing what is best for us in foreign policy.” Now that Gorbachev was out of power, the task was not to forfeit what had been achieved during his tenure. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had led to the reunification of the two German states and symbolized the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Could the old walls dividing East and West be rebuilt by the new leaders in the Kremlin? No one knew. On August 19, 1991, the same day George Bush dictated his warm and compassionate virtual letter to Gorbachev, he also dictated the following into his tape recorder: “I think what we must do is see that the progress made under Gorbachev is not turned around.

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Paving the road to Madrid had begun eight months earlier in Paris. European heads of state met there in November 1990 with the leaders of the United States and Canada for what was dubbed the peace conference of the Cold War. They took advantage of recent developments in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disappearance of the Iron Curtain to approve the Charter of Paris for a New Europe—a document that bridged the East-West divide in institutional and ideological terms, laying solid foundations for the establishment of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.2 James Baker believed that it was there and then that the Cold War had indeed come to an end.

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989
by Kristina Spohr
Published 23 Sep 2019

People power was explosive, but not in the military sense – the demonstrators of 1989 demanded democracy and reform, they disarmed governments that had seemed impregnable and, in a human tide of travellers and migrants, they broke open the once-impenetrable Iron Curtain. The symbolic moment that captured the drama of those months was the fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of 9 November. In 1989, everything seemed in flux. Currents of revolutionary change surged up from below, while the wielders of power attempted political reform at the top.[2] The Marxist–Leninist ideology of Soviet communism, once the mental architecture of the Soviet bloc, haemorrhaged credibility and rapidly lost grip.

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It is noteworthy that most of them (Kohl and Mitterrand were exceptions) also lost power in 1990–2, so they were never obliged to confront in a sustained way – as political leaders – with the fallout from their actions. My first three chapters deal with the headline-grabbing upheavals of 1989 – the cutting of Hungary’s Iron Curtain with Austria, the bloodbath in Tiananmen Square, the accidental fall of the Berlin Wall. But the main focus is on what happened in the exhilarating yet alarming era that followed: the era of the post-Wall and the post-Square. The hope that humankind was entering a new age of freedom and sustained peace competed with the dawning recognition that the bipolar stability of the Cold War era was already giving way to something less binary and more dangerous.[11] The core of the book traces the story of how in 1990–1 the world was reshaped by conservative diplomacy – adapting the institutions of the Cold War to a new era.

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The opportunities have to be used. If one does not act, they will pass by.’ Citing the famous phrase of Otto von Bismarck, he told the Soviet leader, ‘you have to grab the mantle of history’. Gorbachev agreed: he too was anxious to seize ‘the great opportunities that had opened up’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall.[3] Bush, Kohl and Gorbachev were just three among a cohort of historical actors who navigated the drama of 1988–92 together, each seeking to influence and shape events. All of these leaders had to make choices. In doing so, they contributed to outcomes that none of them had planned or foreseen, and under domestic constraints whose compass varied from case to case.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

The highly imperfect estimates available to us indicate that private wealth in Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries stood at about four years of national income in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and net public wealth was extremely low, just as in the rich countries. Available estimates for the 1970s and 1980s, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist regimes, are even more imperfect, but all signs are that the distribution was strictly the opposite: private wealth was insignificant (limited to individual plots of land and perhaps some housing in the Communist countries least averse to private property but in all cases less than a year’s national income), and public capital represented the totality of industrial capital and the lion’s share of national capital, amounting, as a first approximation, to between three and four years of national income.

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Since Europe’s GDP accounted for nearly one-quarter of global GDP in 2013, the question is of interest not just to inhabitants of the Eurozone but to the entire world. The usual answer to this question is that the creation of the euro—agreed on in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany and made a reality on January 1, 2002, when automatic teller machines across the Eurozone first began to dispense euro notes—is but one step in a lengthy process. Monetary union is supposed to lead naturally to political, fiscal, and budgetary union, to ever closer cooperation among the member states.

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Economic Transparency and Democratic Control of Capital More generally, it is important, I think, to insist that one of the most important issues in coming years will be the development of new forms of property and democratic control of capital. The dividing line between public capital and private capital is by no means as clear as some have believed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As noted, there are already many areas, such as education, health, culture, and the media, in which the dominant forms of organization and ownership have little to do with the polar paradigms of purely private capital (modeled on the joint-stock company entirely owned by its shareholders) and purely public capital (based on a similar top-down logic in which the sovereign government decides on all investments).

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts
by Ashoka Mody
Published 7 May 2018

Merkel grew up in a decaying, Communist East Germany, but there she led a reasonably privileged life, kept her head down, excelled at Russian and the sciences in school, and went on to receive a doctorate in quantum chemistry. She started her career as a research scientist, writing technical papers with other East German researchers. In December 1989, a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she wandered into the neighborhood offices of a political group called Democratic Awakening and volunteered to help. From that first step onward, it was an astonishing rise. In December 1990, she won a seat as a CDU member of the Bundestag. She then became a resentful cabinet member under an overbearing Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

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Together with other leaders of the European institutions, he presented a number of proposals for centralized euro-​area governance, such as eurobonds and a common fiscal capacity, both as president of the Eurogroup and later as president of the European Commission. Helmut Kohl (1930–​ 2017). German politician (Christian Democratic Union). Minister-​ president of Rhineland-​ Palatinate (1969–​ 1976), chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, before (1982–​1990) and after (1990–​1998) reunification. After the unanticipated fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Kohl used the historic moment to reunify East and West Germany. Although he was aware of the economic disadvantages of a single currency, as the chancellor of a unified Germany, Kohl ensured the creation of the euro. Christine Lagarde (1956–​). French lawyer and politician (Union for a Popular Movement).

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University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig (2008) is harsher. He concluded that East Germany had settled into a steady state of low labor productivity, high unemployment, and high emigration. With its young and best qualified leaving, he described the East as a dying region turning into a wasteland. By 2014, a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, migration out of the former East Germany finally stopped but possibly only “because everybody who wanted to go west has gone” (Wagstyl 2014). Unemployment rates remained about twice as high, and productivity was still only about three-​quarters that of the West. 79. Allen-​Mills 1990. 80.

Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Jan 2009

Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight. Men just look away in shame. And so the American father now finds himself in roughly the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain. The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH…YOU…POOR…BASTARD. But I digress.

Mongolia - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
by Alan Sanders
Published 1 Feb 2016

Tsedenbal’s successor, Batmönkh, tried to follow Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, but senior MPRP members expressed concern about “extreme nationalism.” There was renewed interest in Genghis Khan and Mongolian history, and popular demands to reevaluate Mongol–Soviet relations. After the fall of the Berlin wall Mongolian students called on the MPRP leaders to resign. Having tried to calm demonstrators in Ulan Bator by ordering the removal of Stalin’s statue from outside the State Library, the Politburo finally resigned in March 1990. The Great Khural deleted the “guiding force” from the constitution, political parties were legalized, and the Ministry of Public Security abolished.

Pocket Berlin
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 15 Mar 2023

Marvel at cunningly low-tech spying devices (hidden in watering cans, rocks, even neckties), a prisoner transport van and the preserved offices of Stasi chief Erich Mielke. The Stasimuseum is the centre of the still-evolving Campus for Democracy. An outdoor exhibit chronicles milestones of the Peaceful Revolution that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Another exhibit, ‘Access to Secrecy’, takes you inside the Stasi records archives to reveal the byzantine process of information gathering, processing and storage. Stasi Prison Victims of Stasi persecution often ended up in this grim remand prison, now a memorial site called the Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen (www.stiftung-hsh.de).

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

Zweig wrote about growing up in a place and time when the miracles of science—the conquest of diseases, “the transmission of the human word in a second around the globe”—made progress seem inevitable, and even dire problems like poverty “no longer seemed insurmountable.” An optimism (which may remind some readers of the hopes that surged through the Western world after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) informed his father’s generation, Zweig recalled: “They honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity and that peace and security, the highest of treasures, would be shared by all mankind.” When he was young, Zweig and his friends spent hours hanging out at coffeehouses, talking about art and personal concerns: “We had a passion to be the first to discover the latest, the newest, the most extravagant, the unusual.”

Cyclopedia
by William Fotheringham
Published 22 Sep 2011

If, after reading it, you want to try something new, go to a race, or buy a book or DVD that you might not have known about, it will have served its purpose. Enjoy the ride. William Fotheringham, July 2010 A ABDUZHAPAROV, Djamolidin (b. Uzbekistan, 1964) Squat, tree-trunk thighed sprinter from Uzbekistan who was one of the biggest stars to emerge from the Eastern bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Abdu’ first came to prominence in the British MILK RACE, winning three stages in 1986, but it was in the 1991 TOUR DE FRANCE where his unique style grabbed world headlines: he put his head down low over the front wheel—a style later adopted to great effect by MARK CAVENDISH—and zigzagged up the finish straight, terrifying opponents and onlookers.

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The next 30 years were stable, almost backward: professional road racing was largely dominated by riders from the European heartland, sponsors were mainly interested in their own domestic markets, the calendar changed little, and a small number of major stars raced most of the big events taking their teams with them. That all began to change in the 1980s, as first the English-speaking nations arrived led by the FOREIGN LEGION, followed after the fall of the Berlin Wall by waves of former “amateurs” from EASTERN EUROPE. At the same time, the Tour de France began to dominate the calendar thanks to a massive expansion in television rights and coverage. Sponsors with world interests such as T-Mobile and Panasonic appeared, and the last constructors’ teams, RALEIGH and PEUGEOT, went under.

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy
by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale
Published 23 May 2011

It may therefore be only a matter of time before some combination of greater debt and higher inflation precipitates a crash in the JGB and yen markets. 8 JAPAN: THE INTERREGNUM GOES ON Richard B. Katz No Political Stability without Economic Prosperity; No Prosperity without Structural Reform The long political interregnum that began in 1989—with the peak of the 1980s financial bubble and the fall of the Berlin Wall—seems destined to continue for at least several more years. In 2009, hopes were raised that the smashing victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the Lower House elections would usher in at least a few years of political stability and some substantial progress on economic reform.

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All of this begs the question, If one-party democracy is maladaptive for modern economies, how did the LDP and its precursor parties manage to rule in all but two of the sixty-five years following the end of World War II? The answer is that, for a long time, the LDP served Japan very well. For one thing, it kept Japan in the Western camp during the Cold War. Recall that until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the primary opposition parties were the Socialists and Communists who, unlike the pro-Western Social Democrats of Western Europe, oriented toward Moscow, Beijing, and even Pyongyang. As long as the Socialists and Communists remained the voice of the opposition, the LDP was safe.

How the World Works
by Noam Chomsky , Arthur Naiman and David Barsamian
Published 13 Sep 2011

Washington imposed economic sanctions that virtually destroyed the economy, the main burden falling on the poor nonwhite majority. They too came to hate Noriega, not least because he was responsible for the economic warfare (which was illegal, if anyone cares) that was causing their children to starve. Next, a military coup was tried, but failed. Then, in December 1989, the US celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War by invading Panama outright, killing hundreds or perhaps thousands of civilians (no one knows, and few north of the Rio Grande care enough to inquire). This restored power to the rich white elite that had been displaced by the Torrijos coup—just in time to ensure a compliant government for the administrative changeover of the Canal on January 1, 1990 (as noted by the right-wing European press).

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But while this particular phase has ended, North-South conflicts continue. One side may have called off the game, but the US is proceeding as before—more freely, in fact, with Soviet deterrence a thing of the past. It should have surprised no one that [the first] President Bush celebrated the symbolic end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, by immediately invading Panama and announcing loud and clear that the US would subvert Nicaragua’s election by maintaining its economic stranglehold and military attack unless “our side” won. Nor did it take great insight for Elliott Abrams to observe that the US invasion of Panama was unusual because it could be conducted without fear of a Soviet reaction anywhere, or for numerous commentators during the Gulf crisis to add that the US and Britain were now free to use unlimited force against its Third World enemy, since they were no longer inhibited by the Soviet deterrent.

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 20 Mar 2007

“These mandarin . . . strands of power had become tightly intertwined in a network that has been dubbed ‘France Inc.,’” wrote Ignatius. “The ruling clans needed each other—and they protected each other.”14 Normally Bidermann’s case would have been quietly dropped. But Joly was an outsider, and French politics was in flux after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The French left and right, as well as the foreign and domestic secret services, were engaged in giant, tentacular struggles, which were generating press leaks and anonymous tip-offs for the magistrates. Elf was being privatized then, too, and the new head of the company lodged a formal complaint with the magistrates against his predecessor, hoping to mark a clean break with Elf ’s dirty past.15 French president Jacques Chirac, who took power in 1995, also wanted to tarnish the image of his predecessor, François Mitterrand, and his people were adding to the leaks.

…

Though nearly 70, he was handsome and sprightly, and wore a collarless brown suit and a thick, loose, chain bracelet. After the pleasantries, he began his story, a Shakespearean tragedy with many human actors, and one huge, shadowy non-human lurking offstage, influencing everyone. “Oil? Yes,” he said. “It is behind all these problems.” His tale began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “Marxism was a pretext—a religion,” he said. “They ruled Congo with it, but not always in the people’s interests. It failed in the Soviet Union, and failed here, too.” By 1990 political pressure was rising from the streets like heat haze, and president Dénis Sassou Nguesso, a Freemason who had been in power since 1979, was forced to accept big changes.

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War
by Ken Adelman
Published 5 May 2014

The session was nearly universally condemned, even by those as astute in foreign policy as Richard Nixon, who declared, “No summit since Yalta has threatened Western interests so much as the two days at Reykjavik.” The following year, 1987, Reykjavik received some acclaim when agreements reached over that weekend were signed in the White House as part of a sweeping arms control treaty. Since then—despite the earth-shattering events of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and end of the Cold War—Reykjavik has mostly been relegated to a footnote in history, something akin to the Glassboro summit of 1967 between U.S. president Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin. Specialists have debated the summit’s significance, particularly at four conferences held on its anniversaries, but their debates have largely remained there—among specialists at conferences.

…

Taking the cue, the East German people did it their way. They summarily ousted Honecker, who was replaced by Egon Krenz, who summarily ousted his entire cabinet. However, none of this was enough for the protestors. For the Wall was still there. 9/11 AND 11/9 WERE seminal dates in modern history. The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 was one of the biggest events between President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination and the 2001 terrorist attacks of 9/11. Like many Americans, I can remember where I was on each of these days. On 11/9/89, I was heading for Budapest to attend a conference on nuclear disarmament. By then, Hungary had become a new country.

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
by David Enrich
Published 18 Feb 2020

He became a confidant of Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, he dined with Mikhail Gorbachev, and he was a guest in the Connecticut home of Henry Kissinger. Perched on the thirtieth floor of one of Deutsche’s skyscrapers, the fifty-nine-year-old Herrhausen looked down on the rest of the German financial capital. In November 1989, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall appeared to vindicate much of Herrhausen’s liberal free-market ideology, a leading German newspaper, Der Spiegel, gushed: “Hardly ever before has one person ruled the economic scene the way Deutsche Bank chief executive Alfred Herrhausen does at the present time. The banker is all-powerful.”

…

The impact threw the car several yards into the air, smashing its windows, and blasting off its doors, trunk, and hood. The copper projectile severed Herrhausen’s legs. Before fire trucks or ambulances arrived, he bled to death in the backseat. The assassination shocked Germany, which had been in a celebratory mood following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chancellor Kohl, visiting a Düsseldorf trade fair, cried. “It is a threat to our democracy,” the future finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble told the German parliament. Some 10,000 business and government leaders from around the world showed up for Herrhausen’s funeral. The site of the bombing became a shrine of flowers and burning candles.

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation
by Brendan Simms
Published 27 Apr 2016

She feared the loss of British sovereignty and the prospect of German domination either directly or by European proxy. For this reason, Thatcher signalled that she not merely did not wish to participate in further integration herself but that she opposed it for the rest of the Community as well. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the collapse of communism across Europe and the prospect of German unification brought matters to a head. First, there was the German Question, now back on the agenda in the most dramatic possible way. With reunification on the cards, Margaret Thatcher feared that Germany ‘would, once again, dominate the whole of Europe’.77 She summoned a special conference of experts to the prime minister’s country residence of Chequers to brief her on whether a united Germany could be ‘trusted’.

…

In the Middle Ages, the main enemy was France; in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries, it was Spain; from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, it was France again; in the mid- to late nineteenth century, it was Tsarist Russia; in the early and mid-twentieth century, it was first the Kaiser and then Hitler’s Germany; and then Russia again – with a brief interruption after the fall of the Berlin Wall – from the end of the Second World War down to the present day. Very often, the danger was also ideological, from continental heresy in the Middle Ages, through Counter-Reformation Catholicism (which also became a synonym for absolutism and continental tyranny) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jacobinism in the late eighteenth century, continental autocracy in the nineteenth century, right- and left-wing totalitarianism in the twentieth century, to Islamist terrorists arriving from Europe as migrants.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response
by Tony Connelly
Published 4 Oct 2017

He reached for the totems of Easter 1916, the ‘struggle for independence’, the quest for economic prosperity. But every patriotic reference point was couched in terms of Ireland’s European destiny. ‘The 1916 Proclamation,’ he said, ‘recognized that Ireland’s place in the world will always be defined by our relationship with Europe, as well as with the United States and with Britain.’ The fall of the Berlin Wall meant that the most divisive border left in Europe was that ‘between Dundalk and Derry’. Theresa May’s name was not invoked once. ‘Brexit,’ he declared, ‘is a British policy, not an Irish policy or an EU policy. I continue to believe it is bad for Britain, for Ireland and for Europe.’ Avoiding a hard border was ‘a political matter, not a legal or technical matter’.

…

The issue then disappeared. But the German parallel was kept within the ether. A senior Irish official confirmed to the author the following December that it was still being looked at, but that the government didn’t necessarily want to draw attention to it. ‘The model is Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall,’ he said. ‘The principle is that nothing is disturbed [in the event of Irish unity]. No one is contesting this. But there’s no need to put it up in lights.’ But it was being discussed at the highest level. A confidential memo, dated 26 October 2016, was circulated among senior officials in the Departments of the Taoiseach and Foreign Affairs, spelling out the German parallel and the key role Ireland had played in 1990.

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age
by Robert D. Kaplan
Published 11 Apr 2022

And yet he revels in complications: observing Roman limes near Ingolstadt, he mentions that imperial pretensions to universalism have been “a mask for dominion” that predates modernity with all of its nightmares.[18] The shadow of the Holocaust stains the baroque and Gothic splendor of Danubia, providing this travelogue with its moral power. Magris writes about a Central Europe that is whole even though the fall of the Berlin Wall still lies in the future—Danube was published three years before that event, and had been in progress for many years. It is the lifework of an area expert on the verge of being an encyclopedist. Imagining the post Cold War between the lines of the text, the book nonetheless reflects the now-lost nuances of the Communist 1970s and early 1980s that I knew as a reporter: how the Slovaks suffered a lesser fate than the Czechs following the Soviet repression of the 1968 Prague Spring; how Hungary’s internal political detente in the final decades of the Cold War allowed for a relatively freer climate there, in which even the regime wanted to forget politics; and how in Yugoslavia “Marshal Tito ended by resembling Francis Joseph more and more, and certainly not because he had fought beneath his banners in the First World War, but rather because of his awareness of inheriting a supra-national, Danubian legacy.”[19] The odyssey continues.

…

And as the modern age took hold, with its subtle and not-so-subtle reformulations of communal identities, Serb and Croat tensions grew, to culminate in the fascist Ustashe regime in Croatia committing mass murder against Serbs and others during World War II. Yugoslavia was reborn only under Tito’s Communist dictatorship, and in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall it disintegrated into civil war between Serbs and Croats in the 1990s. Yet, as postmodernism with its eclectic identities—similar in some respects to those of the early modern age—takes hold, might the South Slavs find some way towards reconciliation, all living under the umbrella of a NATO and European Union that might still—however much they struggle—manage to exist?

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

The influx of immigrants from the Global South is likely to have profound consequences not just for contemporary European societies but also for the future, because the aging white populations have much lower fertility rates than the immigrant families from developing societies.23 By contrast, immigration was slower in Mediterranean Europe, while Eastern Europe saw a steady loss of migrants for two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, until the numbers stabilized at a lower level. Migration can be driven by many factors, including (1) opportunities to work, study, and live in other countries, and (2) to flee civil wars, economic crises, and the breakdown of political order in countries like Somalia, Libya, Sudan, 42 The Cultural Backlash Theory Eritrea, or Nigeria.

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These cohorts reflect major historical watersheds common across many Western societies, making them suitable for pooled analysis. There are also other major events that could be turning points in specific societies, such as the fall of dictators and subsequent periods of democratization during the 1970s in Spain and Portugal, the era of the military junta in Greece, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification in Germany, the Thatcherite years in the UK, and the impact of 9/11 in the United States. The transition from Communist party rule during the 1990s had a decisive impact on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe, with divergent pathways of regime change in countries such as Ukraine, Slovakia, Latvia, and Bulgaria.

…

This movement of people from the global South to Europe will have profound consequences not only for contemporary European societies but also for the future, because the aging white populations have much lower fertility rates than the younger immigrant families from developing societies.14 Eastern Europe saw a steady loss of migrants for two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, until the numbers stabilized at a lower level. Migration is driven by many factors, including opportunities to work and study in other countries, and to flee civil wars, economic crises, and the breakdown of political order. Refugees, asylum seekers, and stateless persons are at greatest risk, and 6.2 million of them live in Europe.15 Israel United Kingdom Ukraine Turkey Switzerland Sweden Slovenia Luxembourg Finland Note: Net migration is defined as the total number of people moving into a country (immigrants) minus the total number of people leaving a country (emigrants), including citizens and non-­citizens, for the five-­year period.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett
Published 31 Oct 1994

Table of Contents Title Page Preface Introduction 1 - Machupo 2 - Health Transition I II 3 - Monkey Kidneys and the Ebbing Tides I II III 4 - Into the Woods 5 - Yambuku I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X 6 - The American Bicentennial I II III IV V VI 7 - N’zara 8 - Revolution 9 - Microbe Magnets I II III 10 - Distant Thunder I II III 11 - Hatari: Vinidogodogo (Danger: A Very Little Thing) PRELUDE I II III IV 12 - Feminine Hygiene (As Debated, Mostly, by Men) 13 - The Revenge of the Germs, or Just Keep Inventing New Drugs I II III IV 14 - Thirdworldization I II III 15 - All in Good Haste 16 - Nature and Homo sapiens 17 - Searching for Solutions Afterword Notes Acknowledgments Index Notes Copyright Page Preface We always want to believe that history happened only to “them,” “in the past,” and that somehow we are outside history, rather than enmeshed within it. Many aspects of history are unanticipated and unforeseen, predictable only in retrospect: the fall of the Berlin Wall is a single recent example. Yet in one vital area, the emergence and spread of new infectious diseases, we can already predict the future—and it is threatening and dangerous to us all. The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases (most recently, hantavirus in the American West); epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas (for example, cholera in Latin America); diseases which become important through human technologies (as certain menstrual tampons favored toxic shock syndrome and water cooling towers provided an opportunity for Legionnaires’ Disease); and diseases which spring from insects and animals to humans, through manmade disruptions in local habitats.

…

And he adopted the rhetoric of critical environmentalists, saying, “Those who have a vested interest in the status quo will probably continue to stifle any meaningful change until enough citizens who are concerned about the ecological system are willing to speak out and urge their leaders to bring the earth back into balance.”5 At the macro level, then, a sense of global interconnectedness was developing over such issues as economic justice and development, environmental preservation, and, in a few instances, regulation. Though there were differences in perspective and semantics, the globalization of views on some issues was already emerging across ideological lines well before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since then it has sped up, although there is now considerable anxiety expressed outside the United States about American domination of the ideas, cultural views, technologies, and economics of globalization of such areas as environmentalism, communication, and development. It wasn’t until the emergence of the human immunodeficiency virus, however, that the limits of, and imperatives for, globalization of health became obvious in a context larger than mass vaccination and diarrhea control programs.

…

At the characters’ feet lay dead bodies. In a blame-counterblame campaign, the U.S. State Department widely distributed a detailed denial in 1987, charging the KGB had concocted the entire campaign in order to discredit American government credibility in developing countries.207 Years later, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet National Academy of Sciences would formally apologize for the accusation, acknowledging that it had been KGB-inspired. Another theory of deliberate recombination came from Los Angeles anti-vivisectionist Dr. Robert Strecker, who gained a large following in 1987 by again claiming, on the basis of a supposed BLV connection, that the CIA made the AIDS virus.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Meg Patrick

“Stationary Ordinal Utility and Impatience.” Econometrica, 1960, 28, 287309. Kydland, Finn E. and Prescott, Edward C., “Rules Rather Than Discretion: the Inconsistency of Optimal Plans”. Journal of Political Economy, June 1977, 85, 3, 473-492. Lakner, Christoph and Milanovic Branko. “Global income distribution: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” Vox CEPR’s Policy Portal, 27 May 2014. Lane, Robert E. 1998. “The Joyless Market Economy.” In Avner Ben-Ner and Louis Putterman (eds.), Economics, Values, and Organization, 461-490. New York: Cambridge University Press. 123 Lang, Gerald, “Consequentialism, Cluelessness, and Indifference,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2008, 42, 477-485.

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 7 Apr 2004

Weak or failing states commit human rights abuses, provoke humanitarian disasters, drive 92 weak states and international legitimacy 93 massive waves of immigration, and attack their neighbors. Since September 11, it also has been clear that they shelter international terrorists who can do significant damage to the United States and other developed countries. During the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to September 11, 2001, the vast majority of international crises centered around weak or failing states. These included Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, and East Timor. The international community in various guises stepped into each of these conflicts—often too late and with too few resources—and in several cases ended up literally taking over the governance function from local actors.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle
by Jeff Flake
Published 31 Jul 2017

Even as our own government was documenting a concerted attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck. It was then that I was compelled back to Senator Goldwater’s book, to a chapter entitled “The Soviet Menace.” Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this part of Goldwater’s critique had seemed particularly anachronistic. The lesson here is that nothing is gone forever, especially when it comes to the devouring ambition of despotic men. As Goldwater wrote in that chapter: Our forebears knew that “keeping a Republic” meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors; they knew that a people cannot live and work freely, and develop national institutions conducive to freedom, except in peace and with independence.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Tyler Cowen
Published 15 Oct 2018

Econometrica 28: 287–309. Kydland, Finn E., and Edward C. Prescott. 1977. “Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans.” Journal of Political Economy 85, no. 3 (June): 473–492. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2014. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal. Accessed 27 May. Lane, Robert E. 1998. “The Joyless Market Economy.” In Economics, Values, and Organization, edited by Avner Ben-Ner and Louis Putterman, 461–490. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lang, Gerald. 2008. “Consequentialism, Cluelessness, and Indifference.”

City Parks
by Catie Marron

I have since described it as “the mother of all airports.” But entering, I recall a sinking feeling. Its echoing halls seemed saturated with historical associations, inevitably evoking its fascist roots. Years later, visiting the Reichstag for the first time conjured a similar range of emotions. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and German reunification, marked the final phase in the history of the Reichstag and the Tiergarten. An international competition was launched in April 1992 to transform the Reichstag building into a parliament for a unified Germany, moving the seat of government from Bonn to Berlin.

The End of Wall Street
by Roger Lowenstein
Published 15 Jan 2010

Home foreclosures broke every record; two of America’s three automobile manufacturers filed for bankruptcy, and banks themselves failed by the score. Confidence in America’s market system, thought to have attained the pinnacle of laissez-faire perfection, was shattered. The crisis prompted government interventions that only recently would have been considered unthinkable. Less than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when prevailing orthodoxy held that the free market could govern itself, and when financial regulation seemed destined for near irrelevancy, the United States was compelled to socialize lending and mortgage risk, and even the ownership of banks, on a scale that would have made Lenin smile.

…

Its banks had failed. Its investors had failed abysmally. Also, the model of international markets—the idea that investors would regulate world economies, appropriately apportioning capital and limiting risk—had failed. The United States had been lustily pushing this model on the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had been deregulating at home since the 1980s. The disaster raised an unavoidable question: If America had taken a wrong turn, how far back should the clock be set? International opinion was already shifting, sharply, toward the view that free markets had been too free. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, a onetime advocate of American-style capitalism, was espousing government protection of essential industry.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

In the wake of the Cold War, no global vision has emerged that gives people hope about how we can collectively improve the world. We spent much of the twentieth century in great intellectual battles and real wars over which systems—capitalism or socialism, communism or democracy, totalitarianism or anarchy—would be better for all people. Ten years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and still we define current thinking in terms of what it Is not: "Post-Cold War." We still don't have any agreed-upon term to call the current era, yet our era is not derivative of any other. We need a new vision to fit these very different times. This year at the World Economic Forum in Davos—a gathering of many of the world's most powerful business and political leaders—President Bill Clinton was asked after his keynote address what he thought was the most important thing the world needs today.

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They must adopt the rigorous new economy policies and then build on that framework while finding ways to mitigate the social damage that powerful economic change will inevitably bring. They must stay centered all the time. Contribution 2: From a historical point of view, Europeans also have been involved in a process of economic, financial, and perhaps political integration that will have long-term repercussions for the rest of the world. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe has been going through a massive east-west reintegration. The European Union, now numbering fifteen nations, is well on its way to expanding the economic community by as many as ten eastern and central European nations by 2003. Certainly half of them, including the key nations of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, will be accepted by that time.

Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2006

However, despite such judicious mediation, the United States maintained a distant relationship with Mexico, skillfully depicted in a book by journalist Alan Riding entitled, precisely, Distant Neighbors.15 Despite being united by geography, migratory flows, and significant trade, the two neighbors lived at a distance from one another, separated by an immense development gap and an even greater divide of a mutual lack of understanding. Although, in the 1980s, Mexico suddenly and timidly began to change its economic policies, reducing its tariffs and partially opening up to international trade, signs of real change did not arrive until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was this historical opportunity that both countries were able to read: Mexico and the United States could, for mutual benefit, become closer trading partners. The Mexican administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988– 1994) demonstrated courage and audacity by proposing to Mexican society a pact with the United States.

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Of course, there were very high peaks in the period dominated by the military effort required by World War II (from 1941 to 1945, defense spending absorbed 76.2 percent of GDP), but as of the 1971–1975 period, still in the midst of the Cold War, social welfare spending clearly overtook defense spending. And that is not all: in the years subsequent to the fall of the Berlin Wall and up until 2004, in the United States more was spent on health care than on defense. One should highlight these aspects in a republic whose military expansion, with no rival in the world, is clear. Nonetheless, outlays on defense are not the largest category. Just as the Argentina of “social justice” was more inclined to set its pace in spending on the economy and defense, the militarist republic of the United States is more geared to social welfare and health.48 Furthermore, if we analyze the separation of fiscal powers according to how it ties into the supply of public goods, one must bear in mind that Why Institutions Matter 251 table 9.6 United States: Federal and Subnational Public Spending: Outlays by Purpose 1936– 1940 1941– 1945 1946– 1950 1951– 1955 1956– 1960 Consolidated Public Sector Federal government Subnational governments 100% 100% 0 100% 100% 0 100% 81.4% 18.6% 100% 72.9% 27.1% 100% 100% 69.0% 67.3% 31.0% 32.7% General Administration Federal government Subnational governments 8.2% 8.2% 0 4.8% 4.8% 0 14.4% 14.4% 0 5.9% 5.9% 0 6.5% 6.5% 0 Defense and Security Federal government Subnational governments 17.5% 17.5% 0 76.2% 76.2% 0 36.2% 36.2% 0 47.0% 47.0% 0 38.9% 31.9% 38.9% 31.9% 0 0 Health Federal government Subnational governments 0.6% 0.6% 0 0.2% 0.2% 0 0.4% 0.4% 0 0.4% 0.4% 0 0.5% 0.5% 0 0.9% 0.9% 0 Education and Culture Federal government Subnational governments 20.8% 20.8% 0 3.1% 3.1% 0 0.3% 0.3% 0 0.4% 0.4% 0 0.6% 0.6% 0 0.9% 0.9% 0 Economic Development Federal government Subnational governments 24.4% 24.4% 0 8.0% 8.0% 0 4.3% 4.3% 0 4.0% 4.0% 0 4.7% 4.7% 0 5.5% 5.5% 0 Social Welfare Federal government Subnational governments 22.3% 22.3% 0 6.3% 6.3% 0 20.0% 20.0% 0 13.3% 13.3% 0 16.7% 18.6% 16.7% 18.6% 0 0 Public Debt Federal government Subnational governments 9.5% 9.5% 0 3.5% 3.5% 0 9.1% 9.1% 0 5.5% 5.5% 0 4.8% 4.8% 0 4.6% 4.6% 0 -2.2% -3.4% -3.6% -3.6% -3.3% -2.2% 0 -3.4% 0 -3.6% 0 -3.6% 0 -3.3% 0 Undistributed Compensatory -3.3% Resources Federal government -3.3% Subnational governments 0 1961– 1965 8.3% 8.3% 0 Notes: Data are given in percentage of GDP in averages per five-year period. nd: no data.

It's Our Turn to Eat
by Michela Wrong
Published 9 Apr 2009

He was impressed by the young man's earnestness and idealism. ‘He used to tell me: “You should be more ambitious, you can change this world.” We used to joke that one day John Githongo would be president of Kenya.’ For Ali, John was remarkable for his attempt to get to grips intellectually with his stagnating country's predicament. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had ushered in a period of tumultuous change in Africa, in which a generation of post-independence autocrats faced increasingly strident calls for multi-party democracy. It was a drive Moi was doing his best to ignore, banning demonstrations and jailing opponents. ‘Here was someone thinking his way out of a society that was tyrannically stable, a police state.

…

Moi's far leaner economy struggled, in contrast, to sustain the impact of State House's system of authorised looting, which a minister later estimated to have cost the taxpayer a total of 635 billion Kenya shillings (roughly $US10 billion) in the space of twenty-four years.29 Identical practices were viewed in the West with freshly critical eyes. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant support for disreputable African regimes could no longer be justified on traditional ‘He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard’ lines. Many of those bastards were seen to produce failed states, judged – with the menace of the Soviet empire gone – to threaten Western interests. The new head of the World Bank, the Australian James Wolfensohn, gave voice to the new approach when he declared corruption an ‘intolerable cancer’.

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission
by Steve Gibson
Published 2 Mar 2012

Reflections I have said it before, and I say it again; it is the purest delusion to suppose that because an idea has been handed down from time immemorial to succeeding generations, it may not be entirely false. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)1 This additional chapter was written in the summer of 2011, some twenty-two years after the iconic fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. More significantly, it is two decades since the demise of the Soviet Union and the death of Stalinism. This chapter is intended to be a more scholarly examination of life after Brixmis and the broader intelligence function after the Cold War. Equally, it is a reflection upon contemporary times, the intelligence function’s relationship with power, and what now passes for politics in Western societies.

…

When means are misinterpreted as ends, and institutions seem absent of purpose, one might interpret that as evidence of the emergence of an existential crisis of confidence. Indeed, it may very well be – similar to new risks – more in the perception than the reality. In the same way that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is often described as ‘world-changing’, so too is 9/11. Yet, 1989 and 9/11 were culminating events – dénouements – signposts of an already changed context influenced by the historical narrative that preceded them, rather than points of origin for new narratives. It is we that turn them into departure points for new stories rather than recognising them as ends of old ones.

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War
by Benn Steil
Published 13 Feb 2018

There is also the challenge that other nations will consider regional economic, political, or security integration initiated by a power like the United States threatening to their own interests. And when the other nation is as large and powerful as Russia, this likelihood raises the prospect of determined interference. Such interference would create dangerous turmoil as NATO and the EU began expanding eastward in the aftermath of the Cold War. Celebration at the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989. * * * FOURTEEN * * * ECHOES ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 9, 1989, enormous crowds began surging toward official crossings on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Having received orders not to shoot, twenty-five-year veteran border guard Harald Jäger was running out of options.

…

The treaty heaped humiliations on Germany after World War I, with no clear end in sight, and created the economic and political conditions that led to World War II. Having improbably abandoned communism for democracy and capitalism in a near-bloodless revolution, Russians were, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, feeling similarly humiliated and threatened by an unexpected Western military advance toward their borders.45 The European Union, in contrast to NATO, did have the capacity to provide a “Marshall Plan” for the East but was unwilling. The EU’s focus was on deepening economic and political integration within its existing boundaries.

…

Author of The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51. Argued that Europe could have recovered at least as successfully without the Marshall Plan. Mitterrand, François (1916–1996). French statesman. First secretary of the Socialist Party, 1971–1981; president, 1981–1995. Pushed for greater European integration after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Modzelewski, Zygmunt (1900–1954). Polish Communist diplomat. Foreign minister, 1947–1951. Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich (1890–1986). Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet Communist Party, political, and government leader. Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (head of government), 1930–1941; people’s commissar of foreign affairs/foreign minister, 1939–1949, 1953–1956.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History
by Diane Coyle
Published 23 Feb 2014

Almost all the OECD’s member countries were facing stagflation, and for the first time in a generation economists were not confident they had the answers. COMMUNISM Every era is politically divided but it can be hard to recall the character of the division in an earlier time. From this side of November 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the sudden, unexpected, and complete collapse of communism and its system of economic planning, it is easy to assume that those events were inevitable. That is not how it looked beforehand, not even when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan won their respective first election victories in 1979 and 1981, and certainly not in the 1970s.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Published 22 Nov 2013

Design became fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism that emerged during the 1980s, and all other possibilities for design were soon viewed as economically unviable and therefore irrelevant. Walter Pichler, TV Helmet (Portable Living Room), 1967. Photograph by Georg Mladek. Photograph courtesy of Galerie Elisabeth and Klaus Thoman/ Walter Pichler. Second, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War the possibility of other ways of being and alternative models for society collapsed as well. Market-led capitalism had won and reality instantly shrank, becoming one dimensional. There were no longer other social or political possibilities beyond capitalism for design to align itself with.

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell
Published 29 Jul 2019

Eyeballing the crowd, we guessed that more than two-thirds of the attendees were under thirty-five years old. The next-largest demographic was 1960s-era hippies who were now seventy or older. There were very few people like us, who came of age during the 1980s and ’90s, the years of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, their successors George H. W. Bush and John Major, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which socialism seemed pretty thoroughly refuted. All down the hallway, young people were selling T-shirts and other merchandise sporting such asinine slogans as “Solidarity,” “People over Profit,” and “Tax the Rich, A Lot.” There was an occasional “Smash Fascism” or “No More Cops” shirt that we could sympathize with, but for the most part it was crazy stuff like Communist cat calendars, which looked like they’d been printed on someone’s fifteen-year-old inkjet printer.

A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook
Published 18 Feb 2013

At one end of Century Avenue stands the last Soviet building: the Shanghai Oriental Pearl Radio and Broadcasting Tower, which is anchored by a plodding concrete tripod and punctuated by a series of bulbous pink spheres (the “pearls”). Conceived in 1988, a year before the Tiananmen Square protests and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the tower, which opened in 1995, was built to broadcast television and radio programs. Symbolizing the state’s power to control the masses through propaganda, such towers were staples of East Bloc cities, and they dominated Communist-era skylines everywhere from Leningrad to East Berlin.

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As the information age dawned, India levied tariffs on imported computer software that topped 100 percent and employed an army of 250,000 bureaucrats to oversee its mere 2.5 million telephones. Even so, for decades the nation’s economic problems had been partially masked by a favorable barter trade with a friendly Soviet Union that sought to project its influence into South Asia. But with the erstwhile superpower teetering after the fall of the Berlin Wall, India was nearly broke and the bankers who had sustained the country on credit were growing nervous. The Washington-based International Monetary Fund, spawned in the wake of World War II to oversee the financial system of the non-Communist world, agreed to provide a bailout—but only in return for major structural changes to the Indian economy.

1946: The Making of the Modern World
by Victor Sebestyen
Published 30 Sep 2014

Some rare good news in gloom-laden Britain, mid-1946 (© The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images) 30. A postcard to mark the first anniversary of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp (© Interfoto / Friedrich / Mary Evans) Maps Introduction As a journalist, I have covered events ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the former Soviet Union to the cycle of violence and counter-violence in the Middle East over the existence of Israel and Palestine. Throughout, America has dominated as the world’s superpower. During many visits to India I have seen a desperately poor country, stuck in the past, transform itself into a vibrant society, looking to the future.

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But there was a heavy price to pay for this largesse. Nobody knows for certain how many German women were raped by Soviet troops in the immediate euphoria of victory. It was seldom mentioned in Germany until decades afterwards; certainly not in Eastern Germany, where the subject was completely taboo until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the spring of 1946 between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ were born in the Soviet zone, the vast majority of whom were brought up as orphans. Of all children born in Berlin between January and April, it is estimated that one in six were fathered by Russians. The number aborted was far higher – according to some medical opinion, between five and eight times higher.

ZeroZeroZero
by Roberto Saviano
Published 4 Apr 2013

What we experience today, the economy that regulates our lives, is determined more by what Félix Gallardo, El Padrino, and Pablo Escobar, El Magico, decided and did in the eighties than by anything Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev decided or did. Or at least that’s how I see it. Various testimonies relate that in 1989 El Padrino convened all the most powerful Mexican drug lords in a resort in Acapulco. While the world was preparing for the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the past of the cold war, iron curtains, and insuperable borders was being buried, the future of the planet was silently being planned in this city in southwestern Mexico. El Padrino decided to subdivide his activity and assign various segments to traffickers the DEA hadn’t fixed their eyes on yet.

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From an FBI report it appears that one of his lieutenants, who is stationed in Los Angeles, met with two New York Russians linked to the Genovese crime family to develop a plan for shipping toxic American medical waste to Ukraine, to the area of Chernobyl, probably with kickbacks to local decontamination authorities. The Don’s imagination knows no limits. It’s 1997, and Mogilevic has several tons of enriched uranium on hand, apparently one of many gifts from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Warehouses are full of weapons; he just has to figure out how to be the first to claim them. The Brainy Don arranges a meeting at the Karlovy Vary spa; he loves that place. The buyers are seated across the table from him, distinguished Middle Eastern men. Everything seems to be going smoothly, but the Czech authorities blow the deal.

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990
by Mary Fulbrook
Published 14 Oct 1991

Without my husband's unfailing support, and more than equal partnership in parenting, the book could not have been written. Without my children, recounting the fates of those who were born into less fortunate historical circumstances might have been much less meaningful. Page 1 One The Course of German History In those extraordinary months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when discussion of the unification of the two Germanies was for the first time in forty years back on the serious political agenda, many voices were raised giving views on 'the German question'. From a variety of quarters, prejudices were aired which had lain dormant along with the memories, gas masks and other relics of the Second World War over the years when the Cold War and the balance of terror had seemed to ensure a fragile peace in a divided Europe.

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While the official ceremonies took place in the centre of Berlin, at the Brandenburg Gate and Page 344 the Reichstag, demonstrations elsewhere were firmly dealt with by armed police. Less than a year after the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the GDR, the GDR was no more; but the formal unification of the two Germanies was effected in distinctly less euphoric mood than that accompanying the fall of the Berlin Wall only eleven months earlier. Distinctions between 'Wessis' (westerners) and 'Ossis' (from the former GDR) became more vitriolic, as the latter felt they had been downgraded to second-class citizens. Social tensions contributed to a rise in racial tensions. Many Germans felt distinctly uneasy about the new nationalism, the rise in xenophobia and anti-'foreigner' sentiments (thus designated, even when the victims of racial hostility were German citizens).

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

In the following decades, dominated by the Cold War, various other Western European countries joined the EEC. Step by step, restrictions were eased on work, travel, and trade between the expanding list of EEC countries. But it was not until the end of the Cold War that European integration really gained steam. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 showed that the time for much closer, stronger European bonds had grown near. The hopes for a peaceful and prosperous future were higher than ever, among both leaders and citizens. This led to the signing, in 1992, of the Maastricht Treaty, which formally established the European Union and created much of its economic structure and institutions—including setting in motion the process of adopting a common currency, which would come to be known as the euro.

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Then, through heavy investments in education, it grew to the point that by 2007 its per capita income was $42,300, or 93 percent of that of the United States. But then a series of problems befell the country: in the fast-changing world of hi-tech, its leading company, Nokia, lost out to competitors. Finland had close ties with Estonia, which was badly hit by the 2008 crisis. And after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Finland had profited by strong trade with Russia. But sanctions with that country hurt Finland as well as Russia, which also suffered from the decline in oil and gas prices. Finland’s GDP shrank by 8.3 percent in 2009, and in 2015 it was still some 5.5 percent below its 2008 peak. In the absence of the euro, Finland’s exchange rate would have fallen, and the decrease in imports and increase in exports would have stimulated the economy.

Making Globalization Work
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 16 Sep 2006

And even if growth is sustained, most of its people may find themselves worse off. The debate about economic globalization is mixed with debates about economic theory and values. A quarter century ago, three major schools of economic thought competed with each other—free market capitalism, communism, and the managed market economy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, the three were reduced to two, and the argument today is largely between those who push free market ideology and those who see an important role for both government and the private sector. Of course, these positions overlap. Even free market advocates recognize that one of the problems in Africa is the lack of government.

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(China, in spite of its progress toward a market economy, is still treated as a nonmarket economy.) 55 In the case of nonmarket economies, the costs used to calculate whether goods are being dumped are not the actual costs, but what the costs would be in some surrogate country. Those seeking to make a dumping charge stick look for a country where costs will be high, so that high dumping duties can be levied. In one classic case, in the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States levied dumping duties against Polish golf carts, using Canada as the surrogate country. Costs in Canada were so high that Canada did not produce golf carts, so dumping duties were levied on the basis of a calculation of what it would have cost Canada to produce golf carts, if Canada were to have produced them.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
by Karl Polanyi
Published 27 Mar 2001

Fascism and communism were not only alternative economic systems; they represented important departures from liberal political traditions. But as Polanyi notes, “Fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” The heyday of the neoliberal doctrines was probably 1990–97, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the global financial crisis. Some might argue that the end of communism marked the triumph of the market economy, and the belief in the self-regulated market. But that interpretation would, I believe, be wrong. After all, within the developed countries themselves, this period was marked almost everywhere by a rejection of these doctrines, the Reagan-Thatcher free market doctrines, in favor of “New Democrat” or “New Labor” policies.

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A more convincing interpretation is that during the Cold War, the advanced industrialized countries simply could not risk imposing these policies, which risked hurting the poor so much. These countries had a choice; they were being wooed by the West and the East, and demonstrated failures in the West’s prescription risked turning them to the other side. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, these countries had nowhere to go. Risky doctrines could be imposed on them with impunity. But this perspective is not only uncaring; it is also unenlightened: for there are myriad unsavory forms that the rejection of a market economy that does not work at least for the majority, or a large minority, can take.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

The fifty-eight-year-old macroeconomist was an established D.C. insider, easily recognizable in a conference crowd by her sheet of long white blond hair and her habit of wearing chunky silver jewelry. Brainard’s professional life had flowed naturally from an internationalist childhood. Born in Hamburg, Germany, to a Foreign Service officer and a teacher, she had been raised in Cold War Poland and Germany before its reunification following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her upbringing heavily informed her worldview. “I was fascinated by how two countries so close in geography and resources could diverge so sharply simply by being separated by the Iron Curtain,” she had told graduates at a commencement ceremony in 2014.[23] “Germany built a vibrant market democracy oriented to the West while Poland suffocated under a heavy state apparatus oriented to the Soviet Union.

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She had chosen the field because she knew she wanted to work on policy, but she also craved an intellectually disciplined route to answering the world’s big problems. From MIT, Brainard spent what she would later call an “eventful year” at the White House Council of Economic Advisers following the fall of the Berlin Wall, working on Poland’s democratic transition plan. She then returned to academia, earning a reputation as a rising star in the economics world while teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s. But Washington retained a hold on Brainard, and she started as a White House Fellow in the Clinton administration.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
by John Kay
Published 30 Apr 2010

Like the bewildered Russians, they found it self-evident that things would work better if someone was in charge. In the 1960s, as the Whiz Kids rose to power in business and politics, there was genuine fear that Russian technological superiority would overtake the West.2 Only in the 1980s did it become evident how misplaced these fears had been, and only after the fall of the Berlin Wall was it clear just how dismal was the economic performance of the planned economies. Many people who seek to build ever more centralized business organizations, or to institute a global financial architecture, still do not really take the implications of this evidence on board. The economist Friedrich von Hayek gave a prescient explanation of planning’s failures.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Published 25 Feb 2020

Facts aren’t enough to change the mind of a climate denier, so presenting statistics and sources won’t help. If you reach them, it will be because you sincerely listened to them and strove to understand their concerns. By giving care, love, and attention to every individual, we can counter the forces pulling us apart. * * * — For people who came of age between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, today’s world can indeed appear strange. Those days were marked by a general consensus about how humanity should advance. Some may now wish for that simpler time, making us vulnerable to the promises of leaders who would take us back instead of focusing on what lies ahead.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline
by Andreas Malm
Published 4 Jan 2021

Chenoweth and Stephan submit that ‘violent tactics include bombings, shootings, kidnappings, physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure, and other types of physical harm of people and property’, which makes it even more impressive that they can name a single case of nonviolence. The fall of the Berlin Wall? People didn’t caress the cement. But strategic pacifists are right in asserting that in the eyes of the public, in the early twenty-first century and particularly in the global North, property destruction does tend to come off as violent. Likewise, most people would think of a whip of chords as a weapon and the chasing away of money-changers and overturning of their tables as a minor whirlwind of violence.

Pocket Rough Guide Berlin (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 16 Oct 2019

Visiting dignitaries include Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton. 2014 Structural work on new Stadtschloss (City Palace) completed; scheduled to open 2019. 2014 Germany beat Argentina 1–0 in the World Cup Final. 2015–16 Berlin takes in a million refugees. 2016 12 people die during a Christmas market terror attack in Berlin. 2018 Over 200,000 people march and protest against the rise of far-right populism in Berlin 2019 On 9 November, Berlin celebrates 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall < Back to Essentials German Being the cosmopolitan city it is, it’s fairly easy to get around Berlin using English. That said, it’s worth learning some basics in case you find yourself needing to communicate in the native language. Needless to say, any attempt at speaking German often goes a long way.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017
by Ian Kershaw
Published 29 Aug 2018

Globalization provided material advantages that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. There was new economic dynamism. World trade flourished as goods flowed across borders as never before. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century trade was six times higher in volume than it had been at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Europe’s proportion of the world economy had in fact been in long-term decline since the 1920s. That is, Europe’s economy had grown in size, but other parts of the world had grown faster. In 1980 Europe had still accounted for around a third of world trade, but three decades later it was only about 20 per cent.

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The fissure was not healed by the outcome of the Orange Revolution of 2004. It would continue to fester. * * * By 2008 the traumas produced by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, prompted by the devastating terrorist attack on New York seven years earlier, had receded in Europe. And over the almost two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall had symbolized the end of the division of the continent, Europe, east and west, had come closer together. Globalization had brought new levels of convergence, economic and political. The huge economic problems of Central and Eastern European countries during the transition to capitalist economies had significantly diminished.

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The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in discussion with Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, during her visit to Moscow at the end of March 1987. Despite their ideological differences, they got on well and had enjoyed a good working relationship since their first meeting in London in 1984. 24. Hundreds of thousands demonstrate against the East German regime in the rain in Leipzig on 6 November 1989, three days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig had grown massively since they began in early September and exerted increasingly irresistible pressure for radical change on the regime. 25. A man holds a Romanian flag with the Communist symbol cut from its centre on a balcony in Palace Square, Bucharest, in December 1989.

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
by Robert D. Kaplan
Published 1 Jan 1994

Bachman To EDIT BORNSTEIN, AVNER RICHARD GOREN, LOBELL, R I C H A R D AND V A R D A N O W I T Z , AND H A R R Y W A L L B E F O R E T H E N A M E S OF J U S T A N D CAN HAVE PLACE, THERE MUST BE SOME COERCIVE —Thomas Hobbes, UNJUST POWER. LEVIATHAN PREFACE The years that follow an epochal military and political victory such as the fall of the Berlin Wall are lonely times for realists. The victors naturally assume that their struggle carries deep significance, of a kind that cannot fail to redeem the world. In­ deed, the harder and longer the struggle, the greater its mean­ ing in the mind of the winning side, and the greater the benefits it sees for humanity.

Big Capital: Who Is London For?
by Anna Minton
Published 31 May 2017

Western governments wanted to prove to their populations that social democratic capitalist societies could also provide public goods such as hospitals and housing for all, which were available beyond the Iron Curtain alongside authoritarian government and censorship. In Britain and across the West these competing pressures kept capitalism in check. But over the last thirty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, unbridled capitalism in the form of a new neoliberal framework has brought the market into every aspect of public policy, in the NHS, in education and in housing, where privatization, deregulation and property speculation are now the dominant approaches. The result is a system in crisis, rife with the contradictions of two opposing ideologies – socialism and neoliberalism – combined with the unintended consequences of a market-led approach to public goods.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

Foreigners didn’t have to force down our way of life—they ate it up. I don’t just mean our music, movies, food, clothes, sports, manners, and idioms. I mean that our system of political economy, democratic capitalism, which produced our mass culture, was also a universal model, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some yearned for it, some hated it, some tried to adopt it, but no one could be indifferent to it. While Michael Jordan, Titanic, and Microsoft held the world’s attention, Americans never had to think about other countries—thus our notorious ignorance. Why should we know or care that Denmark votes by proportional representation?

Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project
by Hans Kundnani
Published 16 Aug 2023

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the future of the European project, the Maastricht Treaty also committed ten of the twelve member states to create a single currency. “Pro-Europeans” had long dreamed of a single European currency—in particular, as a means of challenging the hegemony of the dollar—but France and West Germany had been unable to overcome their different visions for it. However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with German unification imminent, French President François Mitterrand saw it as a way to constrain a more powerful Germany and pushed Chancellor Helmut Kohl to agree to finally move ahead. In return for his agreement, the new currency was created largely on German terms, with a “hyper-independent” central bank based on the Bundesbank that was committed almost exclusively to preventing inflation, and fiscal rules that set limits on deficits and debts.6 The creation of the single currency on these German terms created a new institutional context for the economic divisions within Europe—in particular, between the richer north and the poorer south.

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
by Eric Hobsbawm
Published 5 Sep 2011

The advance of both during and after the Second World War seemed, at least in Europe, to require from governments and employers alike a counter-policy of full employment and systematic social security. 412 Marx and Labour: the Long Century But the USSR no longer exists, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall capitalism could forget how to be frightened, and therefore lost interest in people unlikely to own shares. In any case, even the spells of mass unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to have lost the old power of radicalising their victims. However, it was not only politics but also the economy that proved to require reformism and especially full employment after 1945 – as both Keynes and the Swedish economists of Scandinavian social democracy had predicted.

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The state and other public authorities remain the only institutions capable of distributing the social product among its people, in human terms, and to meet human needs that cannot be satisfied by the market. Politics therefore has remained and remains a necessary dimension of the struggle for social improvement. Indeed, the great economic crisis that began in 2008 as a sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall brought an immediate realisation that the state was essential to an economy in trouble, as it had been essential to the triumph of neo-liberalism when governments had laid its foundations by systematic privatisation and deregulation. However, the effect of the period 1973–2008 on social democracy was that it abandoned Bernstein.

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism
by Elizabeth Becker
Published 16 Apr 2013

What Frommer had discovered was that tourism was becoming an industry and needed to be reduced to its parts for consumers—book a plane, find a hotel, eat some meals, go on a sightseeing tour—and he was more than happy to act as that go-between with his guidebooks, making a small fortune in the process. The question for the U.N. World Tourism Organization was how to bottle that elixir, measure it and claim it officially as an industry. The answer came in two parts—first from geopolitics, then from the industry itself. It took nothing less than the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Empire to open up minds and horizons. The Berlin Wall was the most famous of the barbed-wire barriers erected by eastern and central European puppet governments to cut off their people from their continental neighbors during the Cold War that had pitted the Communist countries against those in the democratic market system of capitalism.

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With $10 million and the help of two British expatriate airline experts, he put his son Sheikh Mohammed, the current ruler, in charge of starting up Emirates and turning it into the region’s star carrier. That was 1986—an auspicious moment in tourism and all the stars aligned in Dubai’s favor. Just as Emirates was getting off the ground, the world opened up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the 1990s previously closed economies were jumping into the world markets, especially in Asia: China, India, and Southeast Asia. Emirates saw an opening and got landing rights to fly into these newly developing countries, especially the second- and third-tier cities that had only known puddle-jumper airlines, what the industry called “under-served areas,” which became lucrative markets when the middle classes started flying, on Emirates Airlines.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis
by Martin Wolf
Published 24 Nov 2015

On the forces driving inequality and their consequences, see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (Paris: OECD, 2011), Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future (New York and London: Norton, 2012), and Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, and London, England, 2014). 59. See, in particular, a remarkable paper by Christoph Lakner and Branco Milanovic of the World Bank, ‘Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, World Bank Research Working Paper 6719, December 2013, http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2013/12/11/000158349_20131211100152/Rendered/PDF/WPS6719.pdf. 60. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Divided We Stand. 61.

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Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). Laeven, Luc and Fabian Valencia. ‘Systemic Banking Crises: A New Database’, International Monetary Fund WP/08/224, 2008. www.imf.org. Lakner, Christoph and Branco Milanovic. ‘Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, World Bank Research Working Paper No. 6719, December 2013. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2013/12/11/000158349_20131211100152/Rendered/PDF/WPS6719.pdf. Lanman, Scott and Steve Matthews. ‘Greenspan Concedes to “Flaw” in his Market Ideology’, 23 October 2008. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
by Quinn Slobodian
Published 16 Mar 2018

Fine-­tuning of the trade rules of the multilevel system was necessary to allow the signals to move smoothly, thus creating the conditions for the supple and eternal contortion of individual economic actors to the messages of the market. Conclusion A World of P­ eople without a ­People If we ask what men most owe to the moral practices of ­t hose who are called cap­i­tal­ists the answer is: their very lives. —­f riedrich a. hayek, 1989 T wo years a­ fter the fall of the Berlin Wall and one month short of the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, George H. W. Bush granted a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Wilhelm Röpke’s correspondent and the defender of racial segregation in the U.S. South, William F. Buckley. Buckley had “raised the level of po­liti­cal debate in this country,” Bush claimed.

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It was a world where the global economy was safely protected from the demands of redistributive equality and social justice. My narrative has traced a line that leads from the end of the Habsburg Empire to the foundation of the World Trade Organ­ization. In the leading neoliberal journal Ordo, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Röpke’s nephew Hans Willgerodt offered C o n cl u sio n 265 a fine summation of the c­ entury of ordoglobalism. ­After citing Hayek and Robbins’s writings from the 1930s, he wrote that “as witnesses of the international declaration of bankruptcy by communism,” it was time that nation-­states realized they had “made too much use of their sovereignty.”5 He wrote that the nineteenth ­century had achieved “world economic integration” through a “fundamental depoliticization of the economic domain.” 6 Quoting Röpke from 1952, he echoed Röpke’s sentiment that if “the developing countries are granted by the UN a right to expropriate foreign property, this means, when they make use of such a ‘right,’ they not only detach themselves from the world-­economic market . . . ​but [take themselves] out of the international ­legal community of the civilized nations.”7 For the road to world economic integration, Willgerodt looked both ahead and back: “The path to the liberation of the world market from national regulation and trade barriers can be facilitated by institutions like GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade].”8 But he also invoked the old template of Hayek and Mises: Central Eu­ro­pean empire: “The international rule of law with curbed application of sovereignty is doubtless a difficult and unfamiliar idea for the proponents of centralist national states.

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

The underestimation, or even outright ignorance, of the oppositions between Anglo-Saxon liberalism, the French nation-state, and the German and Russian empires ought to have sounded the alarm for the latent conflicts in the international sphere. But the Anglo-Saxon philosophers of the Belle Époque, just like Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were quick to extol the end of history. They believed themselves to be carrying forth universal values, and that it was their mission to introduce them around the world. And what better vehicle for, indeed, this than finance? The pound sterling’s longstanding gold convertibility sanctioned its preponderance as a key currency.

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All those who have reached this point of the argument come up against the same conclusion: Germany and France do not trust each other! But perhaps there are structural reasons why this is the case, which we must understand if we are to know if and how it is possible to surpass this obstacle. The euro was not born under favourable auspices. The upheavals prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall forced a hurried compromise. Chancellor Kohl wanted to get the international community to endorse a rapid unification of Germany. President Mitterrand was frightened by the prospect of future German power, and wanted to use currency as a means of binding Germany to Europe. The compromise reached was that Germany would be given free rein for reunification, but would also have to abandon the Deutsche Mark and accept monetary union.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

We’ve been on the right side of all these issues.’1 Few would disagree with him, certainly not many university-educated people under the age of forty-five on either side of the Atlantic. For them Clooney is obviously on the right side of these issues, and since the fall of Berlin and even more so since the fall of the Berlin Wall liberals have won almost every single social argument there is to be won. While the Left has been defeated in many economic arguments since – although socialist policies remain popular in British opinion polls – the biggest losers in the period have been Right-wingers. Conservatives might whinge that people believe George Clooney’s narrative of history, but why wouldn’t they?

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But that kind of analysis never happened: all that we remember is loads of Tories getting caught shagging or with an orange in their mouth in a stranglewank gone wrong. One of the big problems was that the Tories had been steadily losing what was now called the ‘culture war’, the battle of values. And so, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union two years later, things actually got worse for the Right. 7 ARE WE THE BADDIES? There’s an episode of Peep Show in which Mark, the downtrodden cultural conservative who feels desperately out of touch with the modern world, befriends a new workmate who seems just like him.

The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991
by Robert Service
Published 7 Oct 2015

It produced only a half of its electricity and a fifth of its chemical materials. The Baltic region was unexceptional in its reliance on the other Soviet republics. At the same time he praised Lithuania for its computers, TVs and sound-recording equipment.30 On 9 November 1989, hours before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he reported to the Politburo on his recent meetings with Estonian and Latvian representatives. There had been no meeting of minds. They only wanted to talk about the mechanism for leaving the Soviet Union.31 The Politburo was perplexed about how to handle the situation. Vorotnikov discouraged those who were in favour of an economic blockade.

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Casaroli, Il martirio della pazienza. La Santa Sede e i paesi comunisti (1963–1989) (Turin: Einaudi, 2000) G. Cervetti, Zoloto Moskvy: svidetel’stvo uchastnika finansovykh operatsii KPSS (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1995) Chen Jian, ‘China’s Path Toward 1989’, in J. A. Engel (ed.), The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) A. S. Chernyaev, Beskonechnost’ zhenshchiny (Moscow: GOETAR Meditsiny, 2000) A. S. Chernyaev, Moya zhizn’ i moë vremya (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1995) A.

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Stroilov, Behind the Desert Storm (Chicago: Price World Publishing, 2011) Tajne dokumenty Biura Politicznego i Sekretariatu KS: Ostatni rok wi_ładzy 1988–1989, ed. S. Perzkowski (Warsaw: Aneks, 1994) W. Taubman and S. Savranskaya, ‘If a Wall Fell in Berlin and Moscow Hardly Noticed, Would It Still Make a Noise?’, in J. A. Engel (ed.), The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) E. Teller, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Press, 2001) H. Teltschik, 329 Tagen: Innenansichten der Einigung (Berlin: Goldmann, 1993) M. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993) D.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
by William Thorndike
Published 14 Sep 2012

Fundamentally, Stonecipher, Tillerson, and their fellow outsider CEOs achieved extraordinary relative results by consistently zigging while their peers zagged; and as table 9-1 shows, in their zigging, they followed a virtually identical blueprint: they disdained dividends, made disciplined (occasionally large) acquisitions, used leverage selectively, bought back a lot of stock, minimized taxes, ran decentralized organizations, and focused on cash flow over reported net income. Again, what matters is how you play the hand you’re dealt, and these executives were dealt very different hands. Their circumstances varied widely—those facing Bill Anders after the fall of the Berlin Wall could not have been more different from those facing John Malone when he took over TCI during the cable television boom of the early 1970s. The key is optimizing within given circumstances. An analogy can be made to a high school football coach who every year has to adapt his strategy to the changing mix of players on his team (i.e., with a weak quarterback, he must run the ball), or to the head of a repertory theater company who must choose plays that fit her actors’ unique mix of talents.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates
by John Logie
Published 29 Dec 2006

Most accounts point to the Cold War commencing during a brutal winter in Europe, which ratcheted up a contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over which country could provide more aid to the affected nations (most of which were already reeling from the after-effects of World War II). There is near-universal agreement that the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. While various labels are applied to the intervening periods, there is general agreement that the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a pitched conflict with the very real possibility of nuclear confrontation after reaching a point of schism in the late 1940s. This nuclear threat persisted until the inauguration of a mutually acknowledged period of détente in 1968.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

Long-term legacy Milton Friedman has had a huge influence on the development of economic theory, on the application of monetarism as an economic policy, and on the outlook of many major politicians. He emerged as an economic political thinker at exactly the right time. His writing and theories on economics chimed with a growing disillusionment with the result of the 158 The Great Economists Keynesianism that many governments had tried to follow. Meanwhile the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that his and his wife’s writing on the political aspects of individualism received attention on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He certainly helped himself in this regard. Between 1966 and 1983, Friedman wrote a regular column on current affairs for Newsweek magazine.

Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life
by Scott. Branson
Published 14 Jun 2022

But the current idea of revolution we use relies on a linear view of history, which as Hannah Arendt points out in On Revolution develops from the Christian timeline of the unique event of the coming of Christ. This coming is the beginning point of history—and revolution would be an endpoint (modeled on the apocalyptic Revelation), like the famous end of history claimed by the capitalist nations after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if revolution posits a total change of order, a new world, we might ask how we ensure that the new world is good and lasting. The anarchist response is we don’t and we can’t! Shevek’s experience on Anarres shows us that a liberated social order isn’t a single event (ending time as we know it) but one that demands “lasting vigilance,” something I revise as “perpetual care,” a different orientation of care, framed through trans and disabled experience and marked by refusal, boundaries, and collective processes.

The end of history and the last man
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 28 Feb 2006

Criticism took every conceivable form, some of it based on simple misunderstanding of my original intent, and others penetrating more perceptively to the core of my argument.2 Many people were confused in the first instance by my use of the word “history.” Understanding history in a conventional sense as the occurrence of events, people pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chinese communist crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as evidence that “history was continuing,” and that I was ipso facto proven wrong. And yet what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times.

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And this weakness, so massive and unexpected, suggests that the pessimistic lessons about history that our century supposedly taught us need to be rethought from the beginning. 2 The Weakness of Strong States I The current crisis of authoritarianism did not begin with Gorbachev’s perestroika or the fall of the Berlin Wall. It started over one and a half decades earlier, with the fall of a series of rightwing authoritarian governments in Southern Europe. In 1974 the Caetano regime in Portugal was ousted in an army coup. After a period of instability verging on civil war, the socialist Mario Soares was elected prime minister in April 1976, and the country has seen peaceful democratic rule ever since.

Berlin
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 20 Oct 2010

In other words, it’s the kind of history museum that’ll even entertain kids and teens. Each of the 23 exhibit rooms encapsulates a different epoch in the city’s fascinating history, from its founding in 1237 to its days as the Prussian capital, the Golden Twenties, the dark days of the Third Reich and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Budget at least two hours, not including a tour of a still fully functional atomic bunker beneath the building, which brings the Cold War era creepily to life. The museum entrance is inside the Ku’damm Karree mall. The last admission and bunker tour is at 6pm. GREAT WHEEL BERLIN Map www.greatwheel.com/berlin, in German; Zoologischer Garten Build it and they will come.

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A highlight here is the partial reconstruction of the Spy Tunnel, built in 1953–54 by US and British intelligence services to tap into the central Soviet telephone system. The original recorded half a million calls until a double agent blabbed to the Soviets. Finally there’s a survey of events leading to the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most memorable objects are in the yard: the original 1960s guard cabin from Checkpoint Charlie, a Hastings plane used during the Berlin Airlift, the restaurant car of a French military train, a small section of the Wall and a GDR guard tower. All explanatory panelling is in German, English and French.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 10 Jun 2012

Now our creditability is gone: we are seen to have a political system in which one party tries to disenfranchise the poor, in which money buys politicians and policies that reinforce the inequalities. We should be concerned about the risk of this diminished influence. Even if things had been going better in the United States, the growth of the emerging markets would necessitate a new global order. There was just a short period, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when the United States dominated in virtually every realm. Now the emerging markets are demanding a larger voice in international forums. We moved from the G-8, where the richest industrial countries tried to determine global economic policy, to the G-20, because we had to: the global recession provided the impetus, but one could not deal with global issues, like global warming or global trade, without bringing others in.

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The words we use can convey notions of fairness, legitimacy, positive feelings; or they can convey notions of divisiveness and selfishness and illegitimacy. Words also frame issues in other ways. In American parlance, “socialism” is akin to communism, and communism is the ideology we battled for sixty years, triumphing only in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hence, labeling anything as “socialism” is the kiss of death. America’s health care system for the aged, Medicare, is a single-payer system—the government pays the bill, but the individual gets to choose the provider. Most of the elderly love Medicare. But many are also so convinced that government can’t provide services efficiently that they believe that Medicare must be private.

The Enemy Within
by Seumas Milne
Published 1 Dec 1994

Diverting even a tiny part of the vast reserves of hard currency spent on Warsaw Pact weapons programmes to underwrite industrial struggles, he argued, would be highly effective in terms of its political impact. Using the IMO’s Dublin solidarity trust as a prototype, the British miners’ leader lobbied for the creation of a £30 million fund to help support international trade-union action. Some thought he had lost touch with reality. Others were highly receptive. A year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Scargill discussed the scheme with Erich Honecker, the East German Communist leader, and Harry Tisch, head of the country’s trade unions, who, he claims, agreed in principle to commit £2 million to a wider solidarity fund. He also had talks in Moscow in January 1990 with Gennadi Yanayev – the Soviet vice-president who would later achieve notoriety as the front man in the bizarre ‘coup’ of August 1991 – about the scheme.

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Both Sergei Massalovitch, who complained to the British Fraud Squad about Scargill’s ‘diversion’ of Soviet aid, and Yuri Butchenko, who followed in his footsteps under Miller’s tutelage, were later expelled from the Vorkuta strike committee for misappropriating the organization’s equipment. Butchenko subsequently set up his own ‘information agency’.60 Meanwhile, long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the international trade-union movement carried on fighting the Cold War. Trade unions remained locked into structures which held back the kind of cross-border action that could match the globalization of capital. As the centrist British union leader John Edmonds predicted, the implosion of the WFTU in the wake of the collapse of the East did not reunite the international trade-union movement, but left it more fragmented than ever.

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World
by Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller
Published 3 Feb 2015

The next chapters, then, will be less about the what of nonviolent action and more about the how, the principles without which no movement can survive. To begin this section of the book, let’s go to Belarus. There are few better places I can think of to start in. This lovely country, right next to Russia, somehow missed the fall of the Berlin Wall and is today still living the Soviet dream. Now, let’s go back in time and pretend it’s 2010, on the eve of Belarus’s presidential elections. Since 1994 the country has been under the thumb of a ruthless and corrupt despot named Alexander Lukashenko, who lords over the last dictatorship in Europe.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

And even as the European Union continues to open borders between its member states, it is allocating millions to head off flimsy boats on the Mediterranean Sea. This policy hasn’t made a dent in the flood of would-be immigrants but is helping human traffickers do a brisk business and is claiming the lives of thousands in the process. Here we are, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from Uzbekistan to Thailand, from Israel to Botswana, the world has more barriers than ever.46 Humans didn’t evolve by staying in one place. Wanderlust is in our blood. Go back a few generations and almost everybody has an immigrant in the family tree. And look at modern China, where 20 years ago the biggest migration in world history led to the influx of hundreds of millions of Chinese from the countryside into its cities.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More
by Charles Kenny
Published 31 Jan 2011

And Bill Easterly’s study of seventy different measures of quality of life covering health, education, rights, the environment, and access to infrastructure found that a global pattern was a driving explanatory factor for progress in nearly all of them over the past thirty years.7 Of course, there are exceptions—AIDS and civil war can stall and even temporarily reverse progress on health, and have done so. The fall of the Berlin Wall considerably accelerated progress toward greater respect for civil and political rights. Nonetheless, the transition to a higher quality of life overall follows a similar pattern across measures and countries alike. The apparent importance of processes that are broadly common across countries—whatever their economic performance, policy behavior, or institutional development—suggests conclusions about the role of governments or country circumstances in speeding or retarding progress on quality of life.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
by Paul Verhaeghe
Published 26 Mar 2014

No convincing answer was advanced, and the few instances in which a supposedly scientific ideology was able to achieve its ideal society ended in complete disaster. By the latter half of the 20th century, the debacle of Nazism and communism had caused a serious loss of faith in ideals. Some even saw the fascist concentration camps and the communist gulags as a legacy of the Enlightenment, arguing that it was time to put on the brakes. The fall of the Berlin Wall put the final nail in the coffin of ideology, and so the idea of an engineered society was shelved. Change and perfectibility remained keywords, but the focus now shifted to the individual. The end of the previous century marked the beginning of a radical new take on identity. People became responsible for perfecting themselves, for engineering their own success.

Brave New World of Work
by Ulrich Beck
Published 15 Jan 2000

Putnam, pp. 71f. 90 Ibid., p. 164. 91 Gray, p. 129. 92 Fresh confirmation of this has been provided by the Red-Green victory in the German elections of autumn 1998. 8 Vision of the Future I The Europe of Civil Labour The great opportunity that arose with the collapse of the bipolar world order in 1989 lies in the fact that no one can lock themselves away any more from other cultures, religions and ideas; that all now share a space in which the old territorial identities and cultures, as well as the old frontiers and identities controlled by national states, suddenly encounter one another without protection. This helps us understand the globalization shock that has continued to affect the countries of Central Europe, and especially Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The other side of our living in a more open world is the fact that there is no longer a single model of capitalism or a single model of modernity. There are many capitalisms, many modernities, which do, however, need to be brought into relationship with one another. Multiple modernities and the mirror of one's own future The self-transformation of the Western model, and of its claim to a monopoly on modernity, has made people in the West more open to the history and present situation of divergent modernities in all regions of the world.

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
by Branko Milanovic
Published 15 Dec 2010

It could be that our interpretation is too harsh, or that Rawls, faced with the facts of global inequality that were not widely known or appreciated when he wrote The Law of Peoples, might have reconsidered his position. But his writings do not allow us to make this conclusion. Vignette 3.9 Geopolitics in Light of (or Enlightened by) Economics Between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a rather comfortable intellectual division of the world held sway. There were, as we all knew, three worlds on this planet. There was the first world of rich capitalist economies. Not all of them were at the time democracies, but gradually became so (e.g., with political liberalizations in Greece, Spain, Portugal); not all of them were Western: Japan seemed a permanent big exception.

Rethinking Camelot
by Noam Chomsky
Published 7 Apr 2015

As described by Charles Maechling, who led counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966, that historic decision led to a change from toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” That hideous chapter in the history of Latin American travail for five hundred years—now mercifully coming to an end, in significant measure—was brought to a peak of fury by Reagan’s terrorist wars in Central America. These ended immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, by an elite unit of the US-trained and -armed Salvadoran army, fresh from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy school of counterinsurgency, under the direct orders of the Salvadoran High Command. The twenty-fifth anniversary passed in the usual silence accorded to our own crimes.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy
by Robert A. Sirico
Published 20 May 2012

In the minds of those men, freedom wasn’t about the God-given rights of individuals that must be respected by governments. It was about free scope for the will of the proletariat—for whom they were the only legitimate representatives, of course. This kind of confusion about freedom didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Visit almost any major university in America and you’ll find individuals praising freedom while admiring ruthless totalitarians, usually without the least sense of irony or awareness of the contradiction. And often the totalitarians being praised are the ones who, while busily stamping out freedom, are reassuring everyone that they’re stamping in order to free the people, stamping in pursuit of “national liberty and equality,” stamping for “the pacific co-existence and fraternal collaboration of peoples.”1 Why does all of this matter?

ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet
by Ecovillage 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet-Triarchy Press Ltd (2015)
Published 30 Jun 2015

During this time, there were three points of support. First, the already existing network of community projects in the German speaking arena, and the experience they brought. Secondly, the UN Conference in 1992 in Rio that set goals for social and ecological sustainability. Lastly, the social climate in former East Germany: after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, socialism broke down, but not the longing for community. In 1990, we organised a community festival with 1,000 people. Some people from the East who felt a longing for real community met with existing communities from the West. Our ecovillage initiative had its first public appearance.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

Here is a quick profile of your gifts and gaps: A keen commercial sense: We saw how Ben Weiss capitalized on the intersection of “good for you” and “great tasting” to create the new beverage juggernaut called Bai Brands. It was that same sense that still leads Howard Lerman to leap back into his “pirate ship” to shape the next big idea at Yext. Laurie Spengler was driven by the same force, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as she saw the opportunity to help emerging entrepreneurs fuel their dreams by showing them how to raise investment capital. A creative impulse that enables you to convert customer need to a product or service that fits: Mi Jong Lee, the fashion designer, applies this impulse to serve professional women ages forty to fifty-five.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

What is the thing that is like a piece of paper from a goldsmith in 1690, or a deposit in a bank in 1930, or a money-market fund balance in 2007? When everybody who holds that thing decides to cash it in at once, the world will get very ugly very fast. CHAPTER 14 A Brief History of the Euro (and Why the Dollar Works Better) We remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in a nostalgic haze. It was the beginning of that moment of sweet delusion, between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when the good guys had won and the bad guys had lost and Germany got to be one country again and everything was going to be okay.

The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg: A Fast Paced Portal Adventure
by Eva St. John
Published 23 May 2020

Where was the fun if there was no risk? Shortly after that we'd been reassigned schools to a place more suitable to our skills and attitudes. The Library of Alexandria. ‘So, an egg!’ Paul looked as excited as I felt. The last egg hunt had involved an exploding tanker, and the one before that had taken part during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fun times. ‘Which teams do you reckon they'll pick?’ We were both in with a chance. No one could step within seven days of their last step; it was a simple safety protocol. For the next week none of us could be considered, but on day eight we'd be eligible. So long as we weren't then assigned to another retrieval.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

The pace of change was starting to quicken a bit. My technology platforms were improving faster. After my tour in Jerusalem, I moved to the Washington bureau, where I served as the New York Times diplomatic correspondent, starting in 1989. I had a front-row seat traveling with Secretary of State James A. Baker III for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. On those trips we used Tandy laptops to write and file over long-distance phone lines. We reporters became experts at taking apart telephones in hotel rooms around the world to directly fix the wires to our Tandys. You always had to travel with a small screwdriver, along with your reporter’s notepad.

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“For more than three decades after World War II, all four went up steadily and in almost perfect lockstep,” Brynjolfsson noted in a June 2015 interview with the Harvard Business Review. “Job growth and wage growth, in other words, kept pace with gains in output and productivity. American workers not only created more wealth but also captured a proportional share of the gains.” In hindsight, the period from World War II up to the fall of the Berlin Wall was “an incredible period of economic moderation,” argued James Manyika, one of the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute. And economic moderation drove political moderation and stability. It made inclusion and immigration easier to tolerate. Most countries were also still benefiting from improved health care and decreased child mortality, producing a demographic dividend of bulging youth populations and relatively few older people to take care of.

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989
by Frederick Taylor
Published 26 May 2008

A revolution that has, whatever Gil ScottHeron may have predicted to the contrary fifteen years before, most certainly been televised. It will be followed by the biggest, wildest street party the world has ever seen. And, perhaps inevitably, by one of the biggest hangovers, too. But that is another story. AFTERWORD THE THEFT OF HOPE THE FALL OF THE Berlin Wall, like its construction, took place in a single night. Just as on 13 August 1961, a city and a people awoke to find themselves divided, so on the morning of 10 November 1989 that division was no more. Although how many people actually woke up to this revelation is debatable, since during that night in Berlin many had not slept a wink.

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Online sources cited Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung/Deurschland Radio/Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam, Chronik der Mauer at http://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/ Burkhart Veigel, web-published account of student escape activities at http://www.fluchthilfe.de/ Other books and publications consulted Buckley Jr., William. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Hoboken, 2004. Childs, David. The Fall of the GDR. Harlow, 2001. Dokumentationszentrum Berliner Mauer, Die Berliner Mauer Ausstellungskatalog. Dresden, 2002. Funder, Anna. Stasiland. London, 2003. Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford, 1997. Garthoff, Raymond L.

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping
by Roger Faligot
Published 30 Jun 2019

On 11 November, Defence Minister Heinz Kessler summoned his generals to prepare an offensive: “We must use the Chinese method!” In the shadow of the East Berlin reformers, the politician Hans Modrow and Markus Wolf, head of the secret services, who had plotted Honecker’s fall with the Soviets, realized that they had lost control of the situation. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East German services were paralysed. As Mielke had feared, the demonstrators stormed Stasi headquarters and began seizing archives. The head of the Stasi in Beijing, a military attaché, defected. He refused to offer his services to the Guoanbu. He was expelled, and later returned as a businessmen working for a company headquartered in reunified Germany.

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Furthermore, it was clear that he was joking when, during his visit to Bucharest that August, accompanied by Qiao Shi, he had offered the Romanians the latest system for developing photos—conceived by Kodak and copied by Chinese intelligence—in order to save the Romanians from having to buy the licence.38 In November 1989, after a gruelling year, Qiao Shi met up with his Romanian friends again. The trip went well, with Ceaus sescu calling on the Chinese leadership to promote a new summit of communist countries. The events in Tiananmen and the fall of the Berlin Wall had shaken the Romanian dictator. Chinese analysts continued to believe that the situation in Romania was stable—but hardly had Qiao Shi arrived back in Beijing before the situation began to deteriorate, to such an extent that a Romanian Securitate unit came to Beijing to beg Qiao to help save the Romanian regime and draw up an escape plan for Ceaus sescu and his wife.

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations
by Norman Davies
Published 30 Sep 2009

In June the world outcry against the Tiananmen Square massacre in China lessened the chances of Soviet hardliners regaining control, and the triumph of the Solidarity movement in the partial elections in Poland showed that the monolith was cracking. On 23 August 1989, 2 million people linked hands in the ‘Baltic Chain’, which stretched all the way across the Baltic States from Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. It showed that Estonians were not isolated.77 The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, regarded in the West as a world-historical event, did not make the same impact on Soviet citizens, who had still to break the bars of their cage. In 1990 and 1991 the Estonian national movement adopted the strategy of pursuing its own programme while ignoring whatever Moscow did.

…

Y. 478 Ahern, Bertie 673, 676 Aidan, St 60 Ailamae 718 Aix-en-Provence 118, 217 Aix-les-Bains 415, 417 Alaborg 243 Åland Isles 617 Alans 17, 18, 31 Alaric I 16–17, 31 Alaric II 18, 24–5, 26, 30, 31 Alaric, Montagne d’ 27 Alauna 46, 47 Alba 66, 70–71, 72, 74, 75–6 Alban, St 46 Albania 197, 587, 597, 601, 617 Albert I of Belgium 600 Albert II of Monaco 637 Albert, prince 543–9, 551–9, 573, 637 timetable he prepared for himself, aged fourteen 547, 548 Albert the Bear 344 Albigensian Crusade 125, 179 Albon, counts of 118, 127 Albrecht Friedrich von Hohenzollern 355 Albrecht von Habsburg 478 Albrecht von Hohenzollern 341, 351, 352, 353–4 Alcañiz, fortress 184 Alcluith 39, 64 Alclut 69 Aleksandar, crown prince of Serbia 593, 601, 606, 612 Aleksandar I Obrenović 589–90 Alemanni 24 Alessandria 414 Alexander I, tsar 293, 334, 699 Alexander II, ‘Tsar Liberator’ 294, 297 Alexander VI, Roderic Llançol de Borja 215, 218 Alexander of Teck, 1st earl of Athlone 566, 569 Alexandria, Egypt 401, 435 museum 481 Alexandria, Vale of Leven 37 Alfons de Borja, Pope Callistus III 215 Alfonso I El Batallado 169, 170 Alfonso II of Aragon and I of Barcelona 171 Alfonso II of Naples 214 Alfonso V the Magnanimous, of Aragon 210, 211–12, 213–14 Alfonso VII of Castile 175 Alfonso of Aragon, Infante Alfonso 201–2 Alfonso of Aragon, son of Fernando I 209 Alfred, duke of Edinburgh and of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha 562, 563 Alfred, hereditary prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha 562 Alfred of Wessex, king 68 Alfred the Great 89 Alghero 202 Algierdas 252, 254 Alicante 189 Alice, countess of Athlone 566, 569 Aljaferia Castle 169, 184 Allenstein 342 Allobroges 414 Alt Clud, Kingdom of the Rock 42–83 5th century 49–52 6th century 52–57 7th century 57–62 8th to 9th centuries 62–72 10th century 72–5 11th century 75–7 12th century 77–80 Amadeo, ‘duke of Aosta’ 432–3 Amadeus VI, the Green Count 404 Amadeus VII, the Red Count 404 Amadeus VIII (Felix V) 406 Amalfings 18 Amalric 26 Amanieu de Sescars, il dieu d’amor 172 Ambaciensis (Amboise) 24 Amber Room (Bernsteinzimmer) 383, 386n Amfilohije, Archbishop 614 Amiens, Treaty of 507, 517 Anatolia 196, 319 Ancient Order of Hibernians 644 Ancillon, Charles 365 Andemantunnum (Langres) 95 Andorra 159–60 Andreas von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha 571 Andrew, St 66 Angevins, relations with Aragon 174, 192–3, 195, 197, 211 Angles 53, 56, 57–60, 62, 64 Anglo-Irish Bank 677 Anglo-Irish Treaty 655–7, 661–2, 737 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 66, 73–4 Anglo-Saxons 42, 44, 738 see also Angles Anna of Prussia 355 Annales Cambriae 52 Annecy 118, 407–8, 436 Anselm von Meisser 342–3 Ansip, Andrus 692 Ansky, Semyon 464–5 Antoinette-Marie of Württemberg 547 Antonine Wall 46, 48, 64 Aquitania/Aquitaine 17, 18–20, 24, 27, 30 Arago, François 154 Aragon, empire 161–227, 166, 178, 192, 735 and the Angevins 174, 192–3, 195, 197, 211 Aragonese language 171 and the Balearic Islands 185, 187–9, 197–200, 202–3, 226 and Castile 163, 165, 166, 169, 170–71, 175, 189, 204–5, 207–10, 211, 215–17, 217, 218–19, 220, 223 and the Catalans 166, 171, 174–5, 177, 189, 196, 199, 200, 202, 206–7, 210, 217–18, 222–7, 736 and the Church 169, 181–3, 184 coronation ceremonies 182–3 and Corsica 197, 201, 210 Crown of Aragon 176, 177, 180, 183–4, 190, 195, 206–7, 209–10, 217–18, 221–7, 736 General Privilege 191 and Gozo 196 and Greece 191, 196, 199 House of Ramiro 164–5, 165 and Jaime I 185–6, 187–9, 197 and the Jews 183–4 and Mallorca 187–8, 197–200, 202–3, 226 and Malta 191, 195–6 and Menorca 188–9, 199 and Montpellier 179–81, 184, 202–3 and Naples 184, 193, 197, 210–14, 211–13, 216–18 navy 205 origins of the kingdom 161–4, 165, 166 and Pedro IV 174, 202–7 Privilege of Union 203 and the Pyrenees 156–60 and the Reconquista 164, 166–9, 173, 181, 183, 184 and Rosselló 177–9, 200, 222 and Sardinia 197, 201–2, 206, 220 and Sicily 191–5, 197, 206, 212, 220 and Teruel 190–91 House of Trastámara 207, 208, 210, 216 Union of Liberties 191, 203 union with Barcelona 170–71, 174–6; see also Barcelona and Valencia 176, 189–90 Aragon, river 161 Aranjuez, Treaty of 509 Arborea 201, 206 Arcola, Battle of 501 Arelate (Arles) 20, 109 Argyll 37n, 53, 65, 66 Arianism 16, 20, 30, 93, 98–9 Ariège 157 Aristotle 729 Aristra, Inigo 155 Arius of Alexandria 16n Arles 104, 116, 119, 122 Arelate 20, 109 Kingdom of (Kingdom of the Two Burgundies) 115–19, 116 Armagnacs 131 Armenia 722 Armenian Church 463 Arnau de Grub, St 182 Arnaut Catalan 172 Arpitan 120 Arpitania 121 Art, son of Conn 47 Arthgal, king 69–70 Arthur, duke of Connaught 562 Arthur, king 54 Arthur, prince, of Connaught and Strathearn 562, 563 Arthurian legend 54–55, 56 Arvernis (Clermont) 20 Asad, Muhammad (Leopold Weiss) 478 Ascania, House of 344 Ascendancy, Protestant 650, 660, 667, 679 Asimov, Isaac 632–3 Aster, Operation 714 Asti 407 Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA) 697 Ataulf, the ‘Noble Wolf’ 17–18 ATCA (Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance) 697 Athanasius of Brest, St 277 Athelstan 72, 73, 74 Athens 196 Atholl 65 Atlakvida 94 Attila (Atli) 94, 103 Auberge d’Aragon 220 Auerstadt 521 Augsberger, Franz 713 August II the Strong 283, 364 August III 283, 284 August Wilhelm of Prussia 568 Augustine of Hippo, St 730 Augustodunum (Autun) 95 Augustus Caesar 314 Aukštota 248 Aurausion (Orange) 125 Auschwitz 478, 479 Austerlitz 521 Austria/Austrians and France 451–2, 500–501, 505, 508–9, 516 and Galicia 289, 292, 295, 449–50, 451–3, 455–6, 470, 473–5, 474; see also Galicia Habsburgs see Habsburgs and Italy 425, 500–501 and Montenegro 597–9 and Napoleon I 500–501 and Poland 286 and Serbia 597–9 Vienna see Vienna/Viennese Austria-Hungary 470, 472 Carpatho-Ukraine see Carpatho-Ukraine collapse of Empire 599, 600, 733–4; Treaty of St Germain 625 Austrian Netherlands 141 Avenio (Avignon) 95 Avignon 104, 125, 128, 153, 205 Aouenion 95 Avitus, Eparchius 22 Avitus of Vienne 99 Azerbaijan 233, 722, 731 Azkenazy, Szymon 465 Babylon, Fall of 730 Bacciochi Levoy, Elisa Napoleone 534 Bacciochi Levoy, Maria-Anna (‘Elisa’) Bonaparte 500, 520–21, 523, 524, 527, 529 Bacciochi Levoy, Pasquale/Félix 520–21 Bağiş 313 Bagration, Operation 302 Bakiyev, Kurmanbek Saliyevich 235 Bakunin, Mikhail 730 Bałaban, Meir 465–6 Balearic islands 185, 187–9, 197–200, 202–3, 226 Balkans 214, 314, 383 Balkan Wars 594–5 Montenegro see Montenegro/Tsernagora Balmoral 83 Baltic Appeal (1979) 720 Baltic/Balts 240–42, 244, 245, 618, 702 ‘Baltic Chain’ 723 and the birth of the Grand Duchy of Litva 248–9 deportations under Soviet Great Terror 715 Estonia see Estonia inter-war Baltic States 707 Latvia see Latvia/Latvians Lithuania see Litva/Lithuania and the Mongol Horde 248, 251, 252, 260, 338 Prussia see Prussia/Borussia and the Prussians Soviet 1940 takeover of the Baltic States 301–2, 618, 710–12, 737 and the Teutonic Knights 248, 252, 253, 259 World War II 710 Baltic Tobacco Factory (BTF) 330 Baltiysk 334, 335 Bamburgh Castle 53, 56 Banach, Stefan 477–8 Bandera, Stepan 478 Baou, lords of (Les Baux) 119, 125 Bar, Montenegro 580 Barbarossa, Operation 301–2, 382, 479, 710 Barbarus, Johannes Vares 714, 717 Barbastro 166–7 Barcelona 160, 162, 170, 171, 173, 175, 183, 185–6, 200, 203, 222, 223, 224 Church Council of 181 Disputation of 184 House of 163n union with Aragon 170–71, 174–6 university 184 Usatges de Barcelona 174 Barretinas, Revolt of the 222 Bartians 338 Basle, Council of 215 Batory, Stefan 278–9 Batowski, Henryk 7 The Battle of Brunanburh 73 Battle of the Nations, Leipzig 529 Baussenque Wars 119 Baux, counts/lords of 119, 125 Bavarian Geographer (Geographus Bavarius) 337 Beatrice, princess 558 Beatrice I, countess of Burgundy 122 Béatrice de Provence 174 Beauharnais, Eugéne de 413, 521, 523, 535 Beauharnais, Joséphine de 501 Beaune 137 Beckwith, John 416 Bede 39, 42, 52, 53, 60, 64 Behan, Dominic 666 Beinnie Britt 47 Belarus/Byelorussia 231–9, 232, 249, 291, 301, 302, 303, 703; see also White Ruthenia Byelorussian National Republic (BNR) 233, 301, 738 Lukashenkism 233–5 and the Wikileaks scandal 235 Belfast 653–4 Belfast Agreement 673–5 Belgium 600, 710 Belgrade 590, 600, 602, 604, 605–6 Beli (Bili I) 61 Bellver Castle 199 Benaki Museum, Athens 320 Benedict XIII 209 Benso, Camillo, Count Cavour 417, 420–21, 423, 428, 429 Benveniste de Porta 183 Benvenuti, Pietro 527 Bera, count 171 Berber states 199 Berehaven 663 Berenguela of Barcelona 170–71, 175 Berenguer de Anglesola 182 Berenguer Ramón I El Corbat 163 Berenguer, House of 171, 175 Berlin 367, 370, 375, 379, 382 1918 revolution 599 Congress of 587–8 fall of the Berlin Wall 721, 723 Museum Island 390 Potsdam Conference 387–8 Prussian memory site 389–93 Berlusconi, Silvio 399, 437 Bernard, St 107–8 Bernard de Got 126 Berne 122 Bernhardi, Friedrich von 376–7 Bernicia (Berneich/Bryneich) 49, 53, 56, 60 Bernsteinzimmer (Amber Room) 383, 386n Berthold V, count 121–2 Bertrand, Henri Gatien 531, 533 Besalú 174, 175 Besanz/Besançon 141 Diet of Besanz 123 Vesontio 95, 118 Bevar Bornholmsk 87–8 Bianchi, M. 427 Bismarck, Otto Edward von 369, 376, 377 Black Death 128, 202, 204–5 Black, George Fraser 80 Blair, Tony 673, 680 Bloody Sunday 668 Saville Inquiry 677 Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht von 533 Blue Water, Battle of 252 Blumenthal, J.

…

.: The Waste Land 308 Elizabeth II 570, 665–6, 674, 678 Ełk 343 Emanuele-Filiberto, duke of Savoy 407 Embrun (Eburodunum) 95 Emeland see Varmia/Varmians Eneci see Annecy Engels, Friedrich 731 Enghien, Louis Antoine de Bourbon, duc d’ 517–18 England/the English 6, 42 Hundred Years War 128 occupation of Paris 131 and Sabaudia 406 English Defence League 683 Enrique of Castile, El Impotente 216 Eochaid map Rhun 71 Eogan II (Owain the Blind) 76 Epaon, Council of 99 Epila, Battle of 203 Erasmus of Rotterdam 135 Erbin 52 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 313 Ernst II, duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha 545, 546, 547, 555, 557, 560–61 Ernst III, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, later Duke Ernst I 543, 545, 547, 555, 557 Erwig (Euric/Evaric) 18, 23 Espérey, Franchet d’ 600 Estonia 689–728, 690, 709 1917 declaration of independence 704–5 1988 declaration of sovereignty 723 1991 UN recognition 723 arts 719 Committee of National Salvation 704–5 ‘cyber war’ 697–8 and democracy 707, 708–9 Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic 711–12, 714–23 exiled government in Stockholm 714, 715 expulsion of German Estonians 711 German occupation 712–14 inter-war period 707–9 Jewish extermination 713 language 689–90, 719, 720 Moscow’s 1924 attempted coup 708 national identity 699 national movement 723 and the Nazis 695, 710, 712–14 Nystadt Treaty 699 Tallinn see Tallinn Tartu Treaty 705–6 VAPSI movement 709 War of Independence 705 ‘War of Symbols’ 695–7 World War II 695, 710–15 Estonian Communist Party 714, 717 Estonian Guard Company, 4221st 715 Estonian Heritage Society 722 Estonian Lutheran Church 719 Estonian Peasant Party 709 Estrada Doctrine 617 Etruria, Kingdom of 509–38, 513 creation of 509–10 dissolution of 523–4 Florence see Florence/Florentines and France 509–10, 515, 516, 524–7, 529–33 local politics 515–16 regiments 518 see also Tuscany EU see European Union Eucharistic Congress (1932) 660 Eugène de Beauharnais 413, 521, 523, 535 Eugene of Savoy 409 Eugénie, Empress 428 Euler, Leonhard 332 Euric (Evaric/Erwig) 18, 23 European Economic Union (EEC) 666 European Union (EU) 234–5, 681, 697, 727 Commission 677 and Estonia 689, 695, 697, 725 and Montenegro 581, 582 Everest, mount 1 Evissa (Ibiza) 189 Experius, St, bishop of Toloso 20 External Relations Act (Ireland, 1936) 662, 664 Eyck, Jan van 135 Eymerich, Nicolau 205 Eynard, Jean-Gabriel 518, 535 Farouk, king 401 Fascism 430 Fauchet, Jean-Antoine, baron 524 Faucigny 402, 425, 435 Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 577, 614, 615 Fehrbellin 363 Feldman, Wilhelm 467 Felipe II (Philip II, the Prudent) 220, 221 Felipe III (Philip III, the Pious) 220 Felipe IV (Philip IV, the Great) 220 Felipe V (Philippe de Bourbon) 223 Felix V (Amadeus VIII) 406 Fenians (IRB) 644, 646, 647, 650, 651, 654 Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor 219 Ferdinand I of Austria 450 Ferdinand I, of Leon and Castile, the Great 163–4 Ferdinand II, king of Aragon 210, 215, 216, 218, 219 Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, King ‘Bomba’ 425 Ferdinand IV, king of Naples 506, 508 Ferdinand VII of Spain 522–3 Ferdinando III of Tuscany 503, 504, 507, 508, 516, 534 Ferguson, Samuel 642 Fernando d’Antequera, Fernando I of Aragon 207–9 Fernando I of Naples, Don Ferrante 214, 218 Fernando II of Naples 214 Fernando El Católico 214, 216, 218 Fiachna of Ulster, king 56 Fianna Fáil 639, 660, 661, 677, 678 Field, Michael (Bradley and Cooper, ‘the Mikes’) 499 Filips de Goede (Philippe le Bon) 132 Filips de Stoute see Philip the Bold Fine Gael 639, 678 Finland 693, 702, 704, 710, 712 Finlay, George 317 Finnic tribes 242, 244 fitzAlan-Stewart family 79, 80 Flaochad 103 Flemish School of painting 135 Florence/Florentines 429, 493–9, 494, 512, 513–14, 521, 523, 527, 529 29e Légion de Gendarmerie de Florence 527 British colony of 499 Cosimo I de’ Medici collection 481 Franco-Neapolitan Treaty of 509 and Napoleon Bonaparte 500–510, 519–20 periods 497–8, 499 Pitti Palace 503, 504, 512, 516, 524, 525, 527, 534, 537 ‘Vélites de Florence’ 525 Florschütz, Christopher 546 Fontainebleau decree 523 Forez 118 Forgaill, Dallan 645 Formentera 189 Fortriu 61, 63, 66 Fossombroni, Vittorio, count 518, 535 Foster, Norman 389 Foster, Roy 646, 657 Fourcalquier 119 France 1797 campaigns and new republics 505 and Albania 601 and Austria 451–2, 500–501, 505, 508–9, 516 and Britain 505, 507, 516, 522 Burgundian–Armagnac civil war 131 and Catalonia 179, 199, 222 and Etruria 509–10, 515, 516, 524–7, 529–33 Franco-imperial Habsburg wars 407 Franco-Sardinian Treaty 423–5, 436 French Revolution 288, 412, 423, 642 Hundred Years War 128, 131 and Italy 508, 521; Italian campaign of 1796 500–501 Kingdom of 104, 128, 139, 141, 404–6 modern 141–2 and Napoleon I 500–510; ‘Second Polish War’ 293–4 Nice see Nice and Poland 521 and Sabaudia 404–6, 407, 412, 414, 417, 435, 436; annexation 412, 425–7, 435, 436, 501; Napoleon III 419–22, 423, 425; Nice 409, 410, 412, 421, 423–5, 426; plebiscite 423–8, 435; Treaty of Turin 423–5, 436 and Spain 506–7, 522–3; Franco-Spanish War 222–3; Treaty of Aranjuez 509 and Switzerland 517 Third Republic 435 and Tuscany 509, 525 War of the Sicilian Vespers 193 war with Aragon 210 West Francia’s rebranding as 115 World War I 379 Franche-Comté 128, 141, 142, 147 County-Palatine of Burgundy 124–5, 127–8, 130, 131, 138–41 Francis de Sales, St 407–8 Francis I, duke of Lorraine 504 Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor 450, 503 Franciszka Wiśniowiecka 264 François VI de Beauharnais 520 Fränkel, Moses 479–80 Frankish language 100 Franko, Ivan 467 Franks 24–6, 30, 97, 99, 104 Catalans see Catalonia/Catalans Franko-Burgundian society of Regnum Burgundiae 100–104 Franko-Burgundian wars 99 Franz-Ferdinand of Austria 597 Franz-Joseph I of Austria 450, 468–9, 475, 481, 559 Frauenburg (Frombork) 343 Fredegar/Fredegarius/Pseudo-Fredegarius 102–3 Frederick I, Barbarossa 120, 122, 124 Frederick I of Prussia (Frederick III Elector of Brandenburg) 364–7 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen 123, 126, 192, 339 Frederick II The Great, king of Prussia 286, 350, 369, 370 Frederick III Elector of Brandenburg (Frederick I of Prussia) 364–7 Frederico II of Sicily 195 Frederico IV of Naples 214 Fredro, Alexander 463, 466 Free Trade Zone, French–Swiss border 425, 428, 436 Freemasons 515 Fribourg 121 Friedland 521 Friedrich Josias, prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha 571 Friedrich von Sachsen 351 Friedrich Wilhelm, The Great Elector 358–9, 361, 362, 363, 364 Fuero d’Aragon, ‘Codex of Huesca’ 174 Gaelic language 41, 43–4, 76–7, 78, 80, 637, 638, 660 Gaelic Revival 642–3 Gaels 37n, 42, 43, 46, 53, 62, 71, 81–3 of Argyll 53–54 Picto-Gaelic fusion 37n, 63, 65–6 see also Scots Gaeltacht 38, 75, 82 Galbraith Clan 77 Galicia 289, 292, 295, 734 and the Bolsheviks 475–7 east Galicia/West Ukraine 441–9, 442, 450–51, 477, 478, 480, 481–2; Distrikt Galizien 479 Galician Diet 470–71 Jews 450, 454, 459, 461, 463, 464, 465, 467–8, 470, 472, 473, 477 Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria 449–81; c. 1900 454; c. 1914 in Austria-Hungary 474; afterlife (after 1918) 476–80; creation of 449; economy 457–8; education 465; end of 476; folk culture 464–5; government 469–71; humour 468–9; literature 466–8; and museums 481–9; national anthems 462; population 450, 458; religious culture 462–4; serfdom 455, 456–7, 469–70; society 455–7; suffrage 471; World War I 473–6 landscape 454–5 languages 460–61, 470 migration 458 New Galicia 452 ‘Peasant Rising’/‘Galician Slaughter’ 456 railway from Vienna to Lemberg and beyond 453, 454 and Vienna 452–3, 455–6, 734 west Galicia 450, 474, 476, 477, 480 Gallia Aquitania 17, 18–20, 24 Gallinians 338 Galloway (Galwyddel) 49, 62 Gallura 201 Galwyddel (Galloway) 49, 62 Gandolfo, Ange 524 Garci Ximenez 185 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 420, 425, 428, 429 Gastaustas (Gasztold) 262 Gasztołd, Stanisław 269 Gaul and the Burgundians see Burgundia/Burgundians and the Kingdom of Tolosa 18–31 Roman 17 Gdańsk see Danzig/Gdańsk Gebirtig, Mordechai 467–8 Gediminas 251–2, 253 Gellner, Ernest 632 Geneva (Genava) 95, 97, 104, 408, 505 Conference 604 Génévois 402, 407 Genghis Khan 248 Genoa/Genoese 199, 202, 205, 206, 210, 212, 420, 505, 518, 521 Conference 612–13 Geoffrey of Monmouth 54 Georg Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg 355–6, 358 George, St 169, 221 George IV 82 George V 562, 566–7, 568, 643, 654, 656, 659, 661, 662 GeorgeVI 659, 662–3 George Ballantine & Son Ltd 40 Georgia/Georgians 719, 731, 738 Gereint 52 German Historical Museum (DHM) 390 German Social Democratic Party (SPD) 561 Germany Brandenburg see Brandenburg/Brandenburgers and Britain: Anglo-German Friendship Society 568; ‘Dreadnought race’ 566; royal families 572–3; see also Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Carpatho-Ukraine 626, 627 Coburg see Coburg and Czechoslovakia 626 East Germany 390, 721 fall of the Berlin Wall 721, 723 and Galicia 474–5; Distrikt Galizien 479 Gotha see Gotha and the idea of nation 413 inter-war 567–9 and Ireland 664 Kingdom of 123 and the Mongol Horde 338 Nazis: and Estonia 695, 710, 712–14; Holocaust 302, 479, 480; and Lithuania 301–2; and Prussia 381–8; and Sudetenland 625; World War II 301–2, 382–6, 478–9, 710, 712–14; see also Nazism and Prussia 340, 343–4, 345, 351–3, 364, 367–8, 373, 375–80, 381–8 Rosenau see Rosenau Castle and Russia 377–80, 701–2, 703–4 and Ruthenia 625 Saxony see Saxony and Slovakia 625 and the Soviet Union 301–2, 382–8, 478–9, 710, 712–14, 721; Operation Barbarossa 301–2, 382, 479, 710 Teutonic Knights see Teutonic Knights Thuringia 542 World War I 377–80, 474–5, 701, 703 World War II 301–2, 382–6, 478–9, 710, 712–14; see also Nazism Gévaudan 175 Gévaudan, Gilbert de 175 Gex 407 Ghent 136, 139 Ghibellines 192, 496 Gibbon, Edward 2, 21, 23, 26, 94, 315–17, 419 Gibica 91 Gibraltar, Straits of 205 Gierowski, Józef 7 Gieysztor, Jakub 296 Gilchrist Breatnach 77 Gildas the chronicler 57 Giovanni, duke of Gandia 215 Giric MacRath 71 Girona 153, 173, 181 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry Marie 583 Gladstone, William 587–9, 644 Glas-gau 55 Glasgow 79, 83 Glasgow Celtic 83 glasnost 721, 722 Glycerius, emperor 97 Gobharaidh (Gowrie) 65 Godesigel 97 Gododdin, Land of 49, 53, 59 Godomar/Gundimor 96, 99 Godoy, duke of Alcudia 522 Goerdeler, Carl 381 Golden Bull (1356) 128 Golden Fleece, Order of 134–5 Gołuchowski, Agenor 470 Gonzalo de Cordoba 218 Good Friday Agreement 673–5 Gorbachev, Mikhail 720–21, 722–3, 725, 733 Gorchakov, Admiral 505–6 Göring, Hermann 381 Gotha 541, 542, 560, 561 Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha 545, 557, 559–70; see also Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of 567 Gotha Ursinus G-1 biplane 561 Gothär Waggonfabrik 561 Gothic language 29 Gothic myth 350 Govan 69, 70, 78 Government of Ireland Act (1914) 645 Government of Ireland Act (1920) 653 Goya, Francisco José de 510 Gozo 191, 195, 220 Grandson in the Vaud 138 Grattan, Henry 641, 642 Gray, Thomas 6 Greece, and Aragon 191, 196, 199 Greek Catholic Church 277 Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church 237, 277, 295, 301, 463, 625 Greek Orthodoxy 245 Green Party (Ireland) 640, 678 Gregory IX, pope 340 Gregory of Tours 23, 24, 26, 100–102 Grenoble 417 Griffith, Arthur 652, 654, 655, 656, 680 Grimani Collection, Venice 481 Grodno 291, 293 Gruadenz 342 Grunau, Simon 349 Grunwald, Battle of 346–7 Guallauc 56 Guelphs 192, 496 Guifré El Pilós (Wilfred the Hairy) 175, 184, 224 Guigues d’Albon 118 Guillaume de Poitiers 172 Guillaume VIII 167 Guillem Ramón, Great Seneschal 173 Gül, Abdullah 313 Gulag 706, 714 Gulag 113 695 Gundahar 91, 93–4 Gundahar’s kingdom 91–5, 92 Gundimor/Godomar 96, 99 Gundioc/Gunderic 94–5, 96 Gundobad 96, 97 Guntram 100–102 Guotadin 49 Gusev 335–6 Gustav Adolf of Sweden, prince 569 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden 356, 358, 569 Gvozdenović, Anto 590, 608, 611, 612 Gwynedd 49, 55, 70 gypsies 237 Haakon Sigurdsson 246 Habichtsburg/Habsburg (Hawk’s Castle) 121 Habsburgs 139, 220, 258, 270, 478, 570, 733 Franco-imperial Habsburg wars 407 and Galicia 450, 451–2, 460, 468–9 House of Habsburg-Lorraine 503, 510, 534; Ferdinando III of Habsburg-Lorraine 503, 504, 507, 508, 516, 534 and Nikola I 605 and Tuscany 503, 504, 507, 508, 510, 515, 516, 534 Hacibey (later Odessa) 261 Hadrian’s Wall 48 Hadziacz 282 Hague, Treaty of the 409 Halich 444–9 Halitsky, Danylo Romanovych 449 Hall, Radclyffe 499 Halley’s comet 215 Hamann, J.

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed
by John Peet , Anton La Guardia and The Economist
Published 15 Feb 2014

Maastricht laid the foundations for a new ECB and a single European currency, to be brought in either in 1997 or (at the latest) 1999. It also promised to make progress towards the parallel objective of political union; and it symbolically renamed the European Community the European Union. The new treaty reflected above all the changed political situation in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire. Mitterrand, in particular, was minded to accept German unification after the fall of the wall only if France could secure some control of the Deutschmark, which he feared would otherwise become Europe’s de facto currency. In effect, he had no wish to replace the dominance of the dollar with the dominance of the Deutschmark.

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
by James Bloodworth
Published 1 Mar 2018

Thus there is much less interest in class politics, and this left sits amicably alongside a middle-class liberalism that does as liberalism does – trembles with a slight terror at the prospect of genuine equality between the classes. We live in harsh and uncaring times partly as a consequence of a tide that has swept across the globe in recent decades. One of the paradoxes of the fall of the Berlin Wall is that, while it represented a revolutionary liberation of human beings from under the yoke of totalitarianism, it also resulted in the unshackling of a particularly virulent strain of capitalism. A pessimist might even argue that the social democratic gains of the twentieth century depended to some extent on the existence of a class of semi-slaves toiling away behind an ‘iron curtain’.

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
by Peter Pomerantsev
Published 29 Jul 2019

Srdja, along with many political scientists, sees these movements as part of a greater historical process: successive ‘waves of democratisation’, with democracy defined as a mix of multi-party elections, plural media and independent institutions such as the judiciary. The first wave was the overthrow of authoritarian rule in South America, South Asia and South Africa in the late twentieth century, and the end of Soviet power in Eastern Europe – the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Singing Revolution in the Baltic States, with their unforgettable images of millions pouring peacefully onto the streets in one great sea of anti-Soviet sentiment. The colour revolutions, argues Srdja, were the next wave, the Arab Spring the one after, swelled by the rise of social media.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 14 Jun 2018

Then there is Russia, where a new chapter of relations with the west has opened, despite the continued leadership of President Putin and an inner circle that has led the country for two decades. Military intervention in Ukraine, alleged interference in elections in the US and the UK and accusations of the attempted assassination of a former intelligence officer have led to the worst moment in Russia’s relations with the west since the fall of the Berlin Wall – and, as we shall see, have laid the basis for a reconfiguration of Moscow to the south and to the east. In the heart of the world, the continued problems in Afghanistan, the breakdown of Syria as a result of years of civil war and the tortuous process of rebuilding Iraq fill few with confidence, despite the considerable financial, military and strategic expense that has gone into trying to improve the situation in each one.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

That will require them to evolve. Low-density sprawl, which trades connection for privacy, is one-half of that challenge. The other is the rising inequality – both within and between cities – that has led the rich and the poor to inhabit largely separate worlds. The World is Not Flat The years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the global financial crisis were days of heady excitement over globalization. A wave of trade deals, capped off in 2001 by China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, integrated the world’s major economies. Many poor countries appeared to finally be catching up economically on the back of increased trade and soaring demand for their commodities.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

It’s an optimistic, almost oracular vision, and Heaney goes on to exhort audiences to “hope for a great sea-change / On the far side of revenge. / Believe that a further shore / Is reachable from here.” Heaney wrote these lines in 1990 and said he didn’t think he “would have had the gall” to write such consoling lines “had it not been for the extraordinary events” that had just happened in the world: namely, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of the dissident playwright Václav Havel as president of Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Romanian dictator Ceaușescu, and the release of Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison. If such momentous changes were possible, Heaney reasoned, then why not an end to the thirty years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland?

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom
by Martin Jacques
Published 12 Nov 2009

The first represents the end of a momentous era, the second the beginning of what may prove to be an even more remarkable period. Given the opprobrium attaching to Communism in the West, especially after 1989, it is not surprising that this has greatly coloured Western attitudes towards the Chinese Communist Party, especially as the Tiananmen Square suppression occurred in the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, following the events of 1989, the Western consensus held, quite mistakenly, that the Chinese Communist Party was also doomed to fail. Western attitudes towards China continue to be highly influenced by the fact that it is ruled by a Communist Party; the stain seems likely to persist for a long time to come, if not indefinitely.

…

If the twentieth-century world was shaped by the developed countries, then that of the twenty-first century is likely to be moulded by the developing countries, especially the largest ones. This has significant historical implications. There have been many suggestions as to what constituted the most important event of the twentieth century: three of the most oft-cited candidates are the 1917 October Revolution, 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 1945 and the defeat of fascism. Such choices are always influenced by contemporary circumstances; in the last decade of the last century, 1989 seemed an obvious choice, just as 1917 did in the first half of the century. As we near the end of the first decade of the new century another, rarely mentioned candidate now presents itself in the strongest possible terms.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
by Jeremy Scahill
Published 1 Jan 2007

After Rumsfeld’s third visit, the popular daily newspaper Echo ran the headline “Rumsfeld Is Interested in Oil!”40 Indeed, the flurry of U.S.-military-related activities in Azerbaijan, including the Blackwater deployment, was timed for the launch of one of the most diplomatically controversial Western operations on former Soviet soil since the fall of the Berlin Wall: the massive eleven-hundred-mile oil pipeline that for the first time would transfer oil out of the Caspian on a route that entirely circumvented Russia and Iran—a development both Moscow and Tehran viewed as a serious U.S. incursion into their spheres. The $3.6 billion pipeline project was heavily funded by the World Bank, the U.S.

…

But if it has outside parties that are doing somewhat similar things, it gives people something to benchmark against.” Comparing the military industry to the auto industry, Prince said, “General Motors can only get better if it looks at how Toyota and Honda do. It makes them think out of the box and it gives them a vehicle to perform against.” Prince told a story of how in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, he was driving down the Autobahn in Germany in a rented car. Suddenly, “a Mercedes S500 blew by me at about 140 mph. It was the latest and greatest Mercedes that was available, 300 horsepower, airbags, automatic transmissions, all the bells and whistles.” But after the West German-manufactured Mercedes passed Prince, a slow-moving Tribant—the national car of communist East Germany—changed lanes in front of the Mercedes, almost causing an accident.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

I start from the history of dramatic transformations—technological, commercial, cultural and political—that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century, and with particular intensity since 1989. That year saw no less than four developments that would prove seminal for free speech in the twenty-first century: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the World Wide Web, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie and the strange survival of Communist Party rule in China. History’s horse has not stopped galloping since, and I am always conscious of Walter Raleigh’s injunction that ‘who-so-euer in writing a modern Historie, shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth’.4 Nonetheless, I maintain that the basic character of the challenges we face in this world of neighbours is now clear.

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Or are we thinking (perhaps without fully acknowledging the thought to ourselves) that what worked for offspring of the white Western middle class will not work for people of darker skin colour and different cultural backgrounds? So far as freedom of information is concerned, the legal balancing act is mainly between our right of access to information and secrecy justified in the name of national security. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a massive spread of laws providing for freedom of information. By 2014, more than 5 billion people in nearly 100 countries had some such law on their statute books. However, all these laws spelt out an exception for national security, and many countries also have official secrecy acts.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

His brother Jeb, meanwhile, was elected governor of Florida in 1998 on 61 per cent of the Hispanic vote and his Mexican-American wife was viewed as an asset with Latino voters that would one day help him become president. The Bushes’ string of victories produced an optimistic mindset in which the Republican elite felt they could win Latino votes with a package emphasizing conservative social values and the work ethic. Ideologically, the fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to an optimistic ‘End of History’ spirit among American neoconservatives and interventionist liberals, symbolized by Francis Fukuyama’s iconic book of 1992.40 With communism defeated, liberalism, capitalism and democracy, under American tutelage, could finally become universal. A global framework based on the Pax Americana and the shared values of the ‘Washington Consensus’ would revolutionize humanity.

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If immigrants came from India or China instead of Muslim countries, I believe this would also stimulate these parties, though they wouldn’t reach the level of support they currently enjoy. ISLAM In today’s climate it’s easy to forget that prior to the 1990s Western European publics cared little about Islam. During the Cold War, Islamists were heroes who resisted communism in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. This began to change after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie and demonstrations in support of this by extremist British Muslims in 1989 shocked and angered Britain, but the effects faded. In 1995, the first Islamist terrorist attack on European soil took place in Paris in retaliation for that country’s support of the Algerian government against the Islamists of the FIS.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 1 Jan 2009

It has been shown that this measure of subjective social status is linked to an unhealthy pattern of fat distribution139 and to obesity140 – in other words, obesity was more strongly related to people’s subjective sense of their status than to their actual education or income. If we can observe that changes in societal income inequality are followed by changes in obesity, this would also be supportive evidence for a causal association. An example of a society that has experienced a rapid increase in inequality is post-reunification Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, inequality increased in the former East Germany,141 and there is evidence from studies following people over time that this social disruption led to increases in the body mass index of children, young adults and mothers.142 Health and social policies for obesity treatment and prevention tend to focus on the individual; these policies try to educate people about the risks associated with being overweight, and try to coach them into better habits.

Branded Beauty
by Mark Tungate
Published 11 Feb 2012

MAYBE HE WAS BORN WITH IT The appointment of Owen-Jones as president and CEO in 1988 was a symbol of L’Oréal’s desire to become a global player. He certainly had little truck with the idea – still ingrained in the company’s culture – that L’Oréal was primarily a hair care business. On his watch, it was to become one of the first Western businesses to enter Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It expanded throughout Asia, setting its sights on China well before many of its competitors. Above all, it conquered the United States, taking full control of Cosmair and acquiring iconic American brands, which it then marketed around the world. In the history of L’Oréal, there is definitely a before and after Lindsay Owen-Jones.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Caught between the social responsibility it’s given itself as “the paper of record” and its economic responsibilities as a commercial enterprise, it has struck a cumbersome compromise based on the date of publication. So (at least as I write this), you can read the article announcing the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, online and for free.13 If, however, you want to read E. J. Dionne’s article about the presidential campaign from exactly three years before that, the Times shows you the first paragraph and offers to sell you access to the rest for $3.95.14 If you are looking for an article published between 1923 and 1980—perhaps about the twentieth birthday of the “mental hygiene movement” in 192915—the Times won’t show you even a paragraph, but will sell it to you for $3.95.

Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit
by Loren C. Steffy
Published 5 Nov 2010

He became one of Browne’s trusted inner circle, a turtle. After two years in Russia, Dudley technically left BP to become chief executive of TNK-BP, a joint venture between the company and a Russian concern controlled by a group of wealthy oligarchs. John Browne had been angling for a way to push BP into Russia since soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse 229 2 30 D R O W N I N G I N O I L of the Soviet Union created an opportunity for foreign oil companies, which saw a chance to tap Russia’s huge and underdeveloped oil reserves. The early post-Soviet years, though, were marked by widespread corruption and economic chaos, as a once centrally controlled economy tried to understand the concept of a free market.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

Further to these many theoretical interventions—Foucault, Deleuze, Kittler, Mandel, Castells, Jameson, Hardt and Negri—are many dates that roughly confirm my periodization: the discovery of DNA in 1953; the economic crisis in the West during the 1970s epitomized by President Richard Nixon’s decoupling of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard on August 17, 1971 (and thus the symbolic evaporation of the Bretton Woods agreement); Charles Jencks’s claim that modern architecture ended on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 P.M.; the ARPAnet’s mandatory rollover to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the crashing of AT&T’s long-distance 46. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 330. 47. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 199. 48. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 200. 49. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 138. Introduction 26 Table 1 Periodization Map Period Machine Dates Diagram Manager Sovereign society Simple mechanical machines March 2, 1757 (Foucault) Centralization Hierarchy Disciplinary society Thermodynamic machines May 24, 1844 (telegraph); 1942 (Manhattan Project) Decentralization Bureaucracy Control society Cybernetic machines, February 28, 1953 (Watson and Distribution computers Crick); January 1, 1983 (TCP/IP) Protocol telephone switches on January 15, 1990; the start of the Gulf War on January 17, 1991.50 These dates, plus the many periodization theories mentioned earlier, map together as shown in table 1.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)
by Tim Marshall
Published 10 Oct 2016

In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defense of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the Communist states of Europe—under Russian leadership—formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defense and mutual aid. The pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight, by the early 1980s it was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust. President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the breakup of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as a “major geopolitical disaster of the century.” Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries that Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia in 2004; and Albania in 2009.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
by Richard Haass
Published 10 Jan 2017

This questioning is by no means limited to Great Britain; there are signs of it throughout Europe, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else. All this is a far cry from the optimism and confidence that were just as widespread a quarter of a century before. One source of this mood was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 (11/9 of all days), an event that heralded the peaceful and successful demise of the Cold War, the unprecedented struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that had defined much of international relations for the four decades following the end of the Second World War.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

We don’t have enough large datasets about Arab Spring–like events to run statistical models. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to learn from the real events that happened. In fact, for many in the social sciences, tracing how real events unfolded is the best way to understand political change. The richest explanations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, as sociologist Steve Pfaff crafts them, come from such process tracing.2 We do, however, know enough to make some educated guesses about what will happen next. And, indeed, our experiences during the internet interregnum reveal five premises for how the internet of things will have an impact on global politics.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

None of this is particularly consistent with neoliberal theory except for the emphasis on budgetary restraints and the continued fight against what by the 1990s was an almost non-existent inflation. Of course, there were always considerations of national security which would inevitably upset any attempt to apply neoliberal theory in pure terms. While the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War generated a seismic geopolitical shift in imperial rivalries, they did not end the sometimes deadly dance of geopolitical jockeying for power and influence between major powers on the world stage, particularly in those regions, such as the Middle East, that controlled key resources, or in regions of marked social and political instability (such as the Balkans).

The End of Growth
by Jeff Rubin
Published 2 Sep 2013

If you visited the Black Sea Shipyard in the mid-1990s, you would have come across the rusting remains of the Varyag. When shipbuilders laid down the keel for the Varyag in 1985, the massive steel hulk was to become the Soviet navy’s second Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier. But that was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Construction of the Varyag halted in 1992, after the Soviet navy stopped making payments to the shipyard. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, ownership of the Varyag was transferred to Ukraine. Instead of becoming the pride of the fleet, the Varyag, which was 70 percent complete, was stripped of her engines, electronics and rudder, and left to rust.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
Published 20 Apr 2015

How do market forces influence the price of gold? How will an expectant mother’s diet affect her child? When will a concussion permanently damage the brain? The world was complex in 1948 when Weaver wrote his influential article, and since then it has become significantly more so. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fates of the world’s economies have become more interwoven, with the number of international trade agreements increasing sixfold since 1990. Over the same time, global air traffic has increased nearly threefold, facilitating the mix of people and commerce around the world. Capital has followed trade, and in the past few decades the correlation between countries’ stock markets has more than doubled, while banks’ exposure to debt beyond their home markets has nearly tripled.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes
Published 11 Jun 2012

Are economists who publish papers praising financial deregulation giving us an honest assessment of the facts and trends or courting extremely lucrative consulting fees from banks? In her book about the new global elite, Janine Wedel recalls visiting the newly liberated Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and finding the elites she met there, those at the center of building the new capitalist societies, toting an array of different business cards that represented their various roles: one for their job as a member of parliament, another for the start-up business they were running (which was making its money off government contracts), and yet another for the NGO on the board of which they sat.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

(is a rare event).”3 Around the world, many people first learned of Bin Laden’s death and followed the ensuing story not by watching a network newscast or reading a newspaper front page but by reading posts circulated via Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Consider four other recent world-changing events: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the tragic events of September 11. In each of these previous events, professional journalists working in the mainstream media played a crucial and even iconic role in delivering and distributing the news to a mass audience. In the case of President Kennedy’s assassination, Walter Cronkite’s broadcasts on CBS News came to stand as a shared cultural experience for millions of Americans.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

With the founding of these institutions, the United States joined the rest of the developed world in providing state subsidy to creative endeavors. Direct government support of the arts petered out after the Cold War, during which fear of a Soviet planet prompted a variety of cultural outreach programs at the behest of the State Department, a concerted effort to contrast American dynamism to the drab Eastern Bloc. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the venture capital model has ruled supreme.10 Just as emphatically, technology is regarded as an arena that the government must not touch, the state said to be too ossified and slow to keep up with Silicon Valley’s rapid pace. The Internet, in particular, is presented as territory upon which regulation should not encroach.11 The weaknesses and hypocrisies of this libertarian fallacy aside, it is a philosophical orientation that, by holding up private enterprise and free markets as the primary drivers of innovation and progress, obscures a profound truth: the computer industry and the Internet would not exist without massive and ongoing funding from the federal government of the United States, which invested hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of many years to create it.

Stuffocation
by James Wallman
Published 6 Dec 2013

It became progressively harder for official news agencies to deny that their countries were falling behind. And it became more obvious that the capitalist system, driven by consumerism and underpinned by materialistic values, was not just different. It was better. Eventually, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, many communist, and other, countries started adopting elements of this system too, especially materialistic values, conspicuous consumption and the throwaway culture. Just as it did over here, so it is now giving hundreds of millions over there better lives as well. Again, the way is not entirely clear, but international trade, with materialistic consumerism at its heart, is pulling more out of poverty now than ever before.

Girlfriend in a coma
by Douglas Coupland
Published 19 Feb 1998

Wendy is concerned about swamping Karen with too much information or too much novelty. As a doctor, she can limit certain things. Richard has been coming in with the annual volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia and teaching Karen about the new years leading up to 1997. He is already at 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AIDS quilt - Karen must be so amazed at this. And then there's crack. Cloning. Life on Mars. Velcro. Charles and Diana. MAC cosmetics. Imagine learning so much stuff at once. Karen and Pam have spent some hours sifting through style magazines together; Wendy beamed with pleasure at the sight - so much like the old days.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

By the time communism started unravelling in the 1980s, there was so much cynicism about the system that was increasingly incapable of delivering its promises that the joke was that in the communist countries, ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’. No wonder central planning was abandoned across the board when the ruling communist parties were ousted across the Soviet bloc, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even countries such as China and Vietnam, which ostensibly maintained communism, have gradually abandoned central planning, although their states still hold high degrees of control over the economy. So, we all now live in market economies (well, unless you live in North Korea or Cuba). Planning is gone.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor
Published 22 Mar 2022

For most of the past millennium, the Korean Peninsula largely formed a single social entity, whose inhabitants shared a common language and culture. However, the partition of Korea after World War II into Soviet and American spheres of influence brought about divergent political and economic institutions. North Korea’s poverty and technological underdevelopment – like that of East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall – originates in political and economic institutions that restricted personal and economic freedoms. Insufficient constraints on government power, limited rule of law, insecure property rights, along with inherently inefficient central planning, have hindered entrepreneurship and innovation, while encouraging corruption and fostering stagnation and poverty.

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit
by William Keegan
Published 24 Jan 2019

Instead, these were swamped, and US, German and Japanese banks moved in, with many City figures taking the money and running. I recall that in my early days on the Financial Times, banks were required to maintain strict liquidity and capital ratios. Such ‘fuddy-duddy’ conservative practices went out of fashion under the Thatcher market reforms of the 1980s. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the unleashing of an extreme free market approach, which I like to think I warned about in my book The Spectre of Capitalism. The banking crisis was the apotheosis of this trend. The invasion of the City of London by American investment banks had imported a new culture – harder working, longer hours, bigger risks and absurdly high rewards for what was deemed to be successful trading.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

“The United States has arrived at a new consensus,” wrote Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw in an influential 1998 book on (what they believed to be) the eternal battle between markets and government: in their minds, markets had won a complete victory.17 It wasn’t the microchip that brought us this togetherness, or optical fiber, or the Internet. The economics department of the University of Chicago didn’t win this victory, nor did the fall of the Berlin Wall bring it about. Not even the election of Ronald Reagan was sufficient, on its own, to make the market consensus happen. It required something else—it required the capitulation of the other side. That the triumph of Clinton marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism is not some perverse conviction held by out-of-touch eggheads like me.

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Published 16 Jan 2018

And although European democracies face many problems, from weak economies to EU skepticism to anti-immigrant backlash, there is little evidence in any of them of the kind of fundamental erosion of norms we have seen in the United States. But Trump’s rise may itself pose a challenge to global democracy. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Obama presidency, U.S. governments maintained a broadly prodemocratic foreign policy. There were numerous exceptions: Wherever America’s strategic interests were at stake, as in China, Russia, and the Middle East, democracy disappeared from the agenda. But in much of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, U.S. governments used diplomatic pressure, economic assistance, and other foreign policy tools to oppose authoritarianism and press for democratization during the post–Cold War era.

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You
by Misha Glenny
Published 3 Oct 2011

The challenges posed to the region’s nascent computer engineers were so considerable that they developed an exceptional ingenuity in overcoming glitches and bugs. Furthermore, the software factories that the East Europeans built in the 1980s could not compete with Silicon Valley during the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall – there was no money to invest in research or equipment. But the powerful new organised-crime syndicates that exerted such a huge influence over the economies of the former communist countries saw the factories as a genuine opportunity. First, they acquired these facilities (usually by foul means rather than fair), then they employed those talented engineers to produce counterfeit software on an industrial scale.

The Virtue of Nationalism
by Yoram Hazony
Published 3 Sep 2018

But what cannot be done without obfuscation is to avoid choosing between the two positions: Either you support, in principle, the ideal of an international government or regime that imposes its will on subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary; or you believe that nations should be free to set their own course in the absence of such an international government or regime.3 This debate between nationalism and imperialism became acutely relevant again with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the struggle against Communism ended, and the minds of Western leaders became preoccupied with two great imperialist projects: the European Union, which has progressively relieved member nations of many of the powers usually associated with political independence; and the project of establishing an American “world order,” in which nations that do not abide by international law will be coerced into doing so, principally by means of American military might.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

In the USA meanwhile, the participation rate (share of labour force to population) declined by over 4pp during the same time—had it stayed steady, the unemployment rate would have been higher before the pandemic struck. 1.1.2 …and the Re-integration of Eastern Europe But there was yet another boost to the world’s effective labour supply, arising from the collapse of the USSR, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This brought the whole of Eastern Europe, from the Baltic States, through Poland down to Bulgaria, also into the world’s trading system. The population of working age in Eastern Europe rose from 209.4 million in 2000 to 209.7 million in 2010 and is now projected to be 193.9 million in 2020.

Speed
by Bob Gilliland and Keith Dunnavant

He’s a very nice gentleman who happens to be an aviation legend.” Out of this meeting, the two native southerners who shared something rare developed a friendship. The bond grew stronger still when Lieutenant Colonel Yeilding was chosen for a very special mission. On December 20, 1989, just six weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yeilding, then a Blackbird test pilot, joined RSO Tom Fuhrman to commemorate, two days early, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gilliland’s first flight. The Blackbird descended out of the bright-white haze at Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport as a large crowd of current and former Lockheed employees lined up along Runway 15-33.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything
by Jason Kelly
Published 10 Sep 2012

First, its epicenter was in the neighborhood, giving them a built-in advantage. They’d also managed to link up with former U.S. Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci and signed him up as an adviser, the notion being that he could provide introductions and ideas. BDM was the first case. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the fall of the Berlin Wall reoriented the global landscape. Defense-related companies were cheap, largely because the larger companies who’d earlier swallowed them up didn’t see a bright future for Cold War-geared units. As part of a deal where Loral bought Ford Aerospace, Carlyle bought the BDM subsidiary from Loral.

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes
by Ian Leslie
Published 23 Feb 2021

Rød-Larsen believed that the road to peace led through the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Officially, neither Israel nor the USA dealt with the PLO because they defined it as a terrorist organisation. When a Washington-led peace process opened in 1991, it involved other Palestinian leaders instead. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was optimism for a new world order, but by 1993 the talks were already foundering. The USA was not able to play the role of an even-handed mediator, because of both its alliance with Israel and its sheer military and economic might. The Palestinians mistrusted the Americans, while the Israelis railed against the pressure that the Americans put on them.

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias
by Kevin Cook
Published 30 Jan 2023

By then the standoff was national news, with the Cable News Network at the head of the pack. In an era when cable TV was relatively new, CNN had scored ratings coups with coverage of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger; the rescue of “Baby Jessica” McClure, who fell into a well in Midland, Texas, the following year; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; and other breaking events—coverage the three broadcast networks, with their schedules of afternoon soap operas and prime-time dramas and sitcoms, couldn’t match. That evening, Koresh was on national TV. “They came all locked and loaded,” he told CNN anchor David French in a phone hookup.

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It
by Huib Modderkolk
Published 1 Sep 2021

He heads a team of IT experts at GovCERT, the Dutch government’s Computer Emergency Response Team. Aart Jochem studied computer engineering at The Hague’s technical college in the 1980s, followed by a graduate degree in electrical engineering and computer architecture at Delft University of Technology. Those were the days of the first Macs and the fall of the Berlin Wall. When he joined the team at GovCERT in 2007, it was a rather stuffy organisation tasked with drafting security recommendations for Dutch government ministries. Aart Jochem was a serious, level-headed professional. Colleagues liked his affability, innovative drive and terrific knowledge of information security.

Central Europe Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Charter 77’s group of Prague intellectuals, including the playwright–philosopher Václav Havel, continued their underground opposition throughout the 1980s. By 1989 Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November raised expectations of change. On 17 November an official student march in Prague was smashed by police. Daily demonstrations followed, culminating in a general strike on 27 November. Dissidents led by Havel formed the Anti-Communist Civic Forum and negotiated the resignation of the Communist government on 3 December, less than a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A ‘Government of National Understanding’ was formed, with Havel elected president on 29 December.

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It costs adult/under 26 years/senior €100/20/27). Top of section Czech Republic Includes » Prague Bohemia Terezín Plzeň Český Krumlov Moravian Wine Country Understand Czech Republic Directory A–Z Getting There & Away Getting Around Why Go? More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a host of European cities and countries have been touted as the ‘new Prague’ or the ‘next Czech Republic’. The ‘Where to next?’ focus may have shifted to other destinations, but the original Prague and Czech Republic remain essential stops on any European journey. Prague’s inevitable transition from communist capital to modern metropolis is now complete, as centuries of history and glorious architecture compete with thoroughly 21st-century energy and impetus.

The Pentagon: A History
by Steve Vogel
Published 26 May 2008

Cooke moved forward on a ten-year, $1 billion renovation plan. The timing turned out to be exceedingly poor. As the plans were finalized, the Cold War suddenly and inconveniently ended, and with it much of the raison d’être for an enormous American military establishment. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the threat that the Warsaw Pact posed to Western Europe evaporated. Iraq had been forcibly ejected from Kuwait in February 1991, and the Gulf War was now seen as an aberration, perhaps the last American conventional war. A painful drawdown of the military began, with dozens of bases to close and the size of the force to shrink 25 percent by 1995.

…

His coverage of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was part of a package of Washington Post stories selected as a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Vogel covered the September 11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon and subsequently reported in depth on the victims of the attack and the building’s reconstruction. Based overseas from 1989 through 1994 and reporting for the Post and Army Times, he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War, as well as military operations in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. His reporting has won journalism awards and resulted in many memorable stories, including Washington Post Magazine cover stories on military test pilots, police 911 operators, and emergency workers in a Washington, D.C., hospital.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

In other cases, countries that seemed to be making a transition from authoritarian government got stuck in what the analyst Thomas Carothers has labeled a “gray zone,” where they were neither fully authoritarian nor meaningfully democratic.6 Many successor states to the former Soviet Union, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, found themselves in this situation. There had been a broad assumption in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that virtually all countries were transitioning to democracy and that failures of democratic practice would be overcome with the simple passage of time. Carothers pointed out that this “transition paradigm” was an unwarranted assumption and that many authoritarian elites had no interest in implementing democratic institutions that would dilute their power.

…

The reasons for our disappointments in the failure of democracy to spread do not lie, I would argue, on the level of ideas at the present moment. Ideas are extremely important to political order; it is the perceived legitimacy of the government that binds populations together and makes them willing to accept its authority. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the collapse of one of democracy’s great competitors, communism, and the rapid spread of liberal democracy as the most widely accepted form of government. This is true up to the present, where democracy, in Amartya Sen’s words, remains the “default” political condition: “While democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.”16 Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Vladimir Putin’s petronationalism, or Hugo Chávez’s “twenty-first-century socialism,” or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Islamic Republic.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

‘If he succeeded, “the West” would no longer mean what it has meant for the last 40 years’; while the DDR in East Germany, its economy ‘long the best in the region’, its Politburo (whose members, implicitly, refused to talk to him) most in tune with its leader, Erich Honecker, ‘looks as if it could go on forever’.139 Less than six months off, he never imagined the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even after it crumbled, a sense of disorientation pervaded his articles. Rejecting the idea that history was at an end, as Francis Fukuyama first opined in 1989, Beedham pointed to real threats – from terrorism to Iraq to Russia – but without his trademark enthusiasm. ‘Perhaps history got its timing wrong’, he mused in 1990.

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With so much at stake, the ‘choice is not hard’, a point it drove home, declaring, ‘We would sooner have endorsed Richard Nixon – even had we known how he would later come to grief.’7 (In fact, it did support Nixon.) Chastened by the result, a week later the Economist wondered aloud if it had misunderstood the whole arc of history since the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘The election of Mr Trump is a rebuff to all liberals, including this newspaper.’8 Despite this moment of introspection, however, the shocks continued for the Economist, which was no more far-seeing after Brexit and Trump than before. In Britain, it welcomed the 2017 snap election called by the new prime minister, Theresa May, to ‘strengthen her hand’ as savvy – freeing her to pursue a softer Brexit, and to annihilate Labour, which opinion polls showed her trouncing by over 20 points in April.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends
by Martin Lindstrom
Published 23 Feb 2016

One generation gravitates toward form-fitting jeans and wide neckties, while the next favors looser-fitting pants and skinny ties. One wave of young men will go through their teens and twenties cleanly shaven, and the next gravitates toward stubble or a scruffy beard. Considering Russia’s history since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the issue of imbalance was one I couldn’t help thinking about when I took on a complicated assignment in one of the most remote regions of the world. My trip to the easternmost region of Russia began with a phone call I would describe as cinematic, except that the dialogue could only have been invented by a very bad screenwriter.

Milton Friedman: A Biography
by Lanny Ebenstein
Published 23 Jan 2007

The world as a whole has more or less embraced freedom. Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back. The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others. Socialism today has only come to mean government extraction of income from the haves and giving it to the have-nots. It is about the transfer of income, not ownership. That is still around.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

She oversaw the systematic collection of local market statistics, and applied structured market research to property development, notably at Stockley Park near Heathrow and Canary Wharf in East London. Subsequently she advised Daimler Benz on the redevelopment of the Potsdamer Platz after the fall of the Berlin Wall and played a significant role in the regeneration of Cardiff Bay in Wales. In 1996 Chapman became a Crown Commissioner and in 1997 was appointed CBE for services to the property industry. After the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 and publication of the London World City report in 1990, Chapman turned her attention to London.

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins
by James Angelos
Published 1 Jun 2015

The German foreign secretary sent a letter to the Greek ambassador saying the language of the agreement meant that Greece would in the future make no further claims with regard to questions of Nazi persecution during the occupation. The Greek ambassador disagreed, however, and in his response said that Greece reserved the right to request reparations based on a future “final settlement” mentioned in the London Debt Agreement of the previous decade. The time for that final settlement ostensibly came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Germany’s reunification. In Greece, there were renewed demands for reparations and repayment of the forced loan. During the ’90s, Greek victims’ groups filed class-action lawsuits against Germany for atrocities carried out during the occupation. Greek courts ruled in favor of the claimants, and ordered Germany to pay damages.

Moonwalking With Einstein
by Joshua Foer
Published 3 Mar 2011

EP has lost both types of memory in equal measure, but curiously his forgetfulness extends back only for the last sixty or so years. His memories have faded along a gradient. One of the many mysteries of memory is why an amnesic like EP should be able to remember when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima but not the much more recent fall of the Berlin Wall. For some unknown reason, it’s the most recent memories that blur first in most amnesics, while distant memories retain their clarity. This phenomenon is known as Ribot’s Law, after the nineteenth-century French psychologist who first noted it, and it’s a pattern found also in Alzheimer’s patients.

Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris Hedges
Published 14 May 2010

We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”5 The greatest sin of the liberal class, throughout the twentieth century and into the early part of this century, has been its enthusiastic collusion with the power elite to silence, ban, and blacklist rebels, iconoclasts, communists, socialists, anarchists, radical union leaders, and pacifists who once could have given Ernest Logan Bell, as well as others in the working class, the words and ideas with which to battle back against the abuses of the corporate state. The repeated “anti-Red” purges of the twentieth-century United States, during and after both World Wars, and continuously from the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, were carried out in the name of anticommunism, but in reality proved to be devastating blows to popular social movements. The old communists in the American labor movement spoke in the language of class struggle. They understood that Wall Street, along with corporations such as BP, is the enemy.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

Since then, despite all the unease about various liberalization and marketization plans, the general direction has not changed. As Margaret Thatcher famously put it in the years when she was reviving the British economy, “There is no alternative.” The ideological shift in economics had been building over the 1970s and 1980s even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Conventional economic wisdom, embodied in organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, had become far more critical of the quasi-socialist path of countries like India. Academic experts like Jeffrey Sachs traveled around the world advising governments to liberalize, liberalize, liberalize.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

Far from being disconnected, they’re all parts of the same organic whole. But before we can piece those successive changes together, we first have to break them down. No single phrase or book defined the last quarter century more famously than Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. As the New York Times columnist has long argued, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new global architecture has emerged, more interdependent and interconnected than anything before.11 And the statistics bear that out. Since roughly 1990, the global marketplace has more than doubled in size, growing to encompass roughly two billion people. International trade grew by a factor of two, and then expanded again by a third.12 And the share of American GDP driven by exports has more than doubled.13 But globalization hasn’t been confined to the economic realm: it has also driven the spread of ideas.

Pirates and Emperors, Old and New
by Noam Chomsky
Published 7 Apr 2015

For its victims, the collapse of Soviet tyranny was a remarkable triumph and liberation, though the victory was soon tainted by new horrors. For others, the consequences were more complex. The basic character of the post-Cold War era was revealed very quickly: more of the same, with revised pretexts and tactics. A few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. invaded Panama, killing hundreds or even thousands of people, vetoing two Security Council resolutions, and kidnapping a thug who was jailed in the U.S. for crimes that he had mostly committed while on the CIA payroll before committing the only one that mattered: disobedience. The pattern of events was familiar enough, but there were some differences.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2002

Many socialist regimes abolished private property, weakened the family, and demanded that people be altruistic to mankind in general rather than to a narrower circle of friends and family. But evolution did not shape human beings in this fashion. Individuals in socialist societies resisted the new institutions at every turn, and when socialism collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, older, more familiar patterns of behavior reasserted themselves everywhere. Political institutions cannot abolish either nature or nurture altogether and succeed. The history of the twentieth century was defined by two opposite horrors, the Nazi regime, which said biology was everything, and communism, which maintained that it counted for next to nothing.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy
by Eric O'Neill
Published 1 Mar 2019

You wouldn’t know her hometown. I couldn’t even find it on a map.” “You’d be surprised what I know.” Hanssen sat back. “Does she speak Russian?” “Yes.” I wanted to lie, but how much did he already know? “Interesting,” Hanssen said, leaning back, his stare unmoving. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Allied Forces controlled the west side of Germany and built it into a country of peace, democracy, and prosperity; Russia, however, controlled the east. The machine-gun turrets on the east side of the Berlin Wall had faced inward, toward their own population. Russian socialization began as early as possible, and every child learned Russian as a second language.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

gives voice to their perceptions: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016), Kindle, location 139. The famous Elephant Graph, drawn by economists Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner: Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013), http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/914431468162277879/pdf/WPS6719.pdf. Increase in Real Income, 1988–2008: Ibid. “The people who gained the least were almost entirely from the ‘mature economies’ ”: Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution since 1988,” CEPR Policy Portal, accessed March 25, 2019, https://voxeu.org/article/global-income-distribution-1988.

The Challenge for Africa
by Wangari Maathai
Published 6 Apr 2009

While these policies were, in part, an effort to root out the corruption that by this time riddled many government agencies in Africa and elsewhere, the budgetary austerity forced on poor nations often led to the gutting of essential services like agricultural extension, infrastructure, health, and education. Despite the broad application of structural adjustment, from the perspective of most African citizens, governance did not measurably improve. Nor did the quality of their lives. HOPE RENEWED: THE END OF THE COLD WAR The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed one of the blockages to development in Africa. African leaders no longer had to pledge allegiance to either the Soviet or the American axis—whether they had an ideological commitment or not. These events put African governments on notice that even they could not continue to deny democratic space to their citizens indefinitely.

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein
Published 18 May 2020

By the end of June, the two Germanys had eliminated all barriers to migration, trade, and investment between them. On July 1, the Western deutschmark replaced the East German mark. While wages, pensions, and other contracts would be carried over from before, choosing the exchange rate between the two currencies proved contentious. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the black market exchange rate had been closer to 10:1, although economists believe that this reflected demand for specific Western consumer goods that were heavily taxed in the East more than anything else. The Bundesbank believed that an exchange rate of 2:1 would prevent undue inflation in West Germany and preserve East German industry.

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)
by Chris Grey
Published 22 Jun 2021

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union there had been a brief period when the idea of the ‘end of history’ gained ground. Western capitalism and liberal democracy had ‘won’ and were now the only game in town. That analysis was bound up with the idea of economic globalisation, but it also implied a unipolar geopolitics and a trend to ideological homogeneity. Thirty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, that analysis has turned out to be naïve in almost every respect. The world is not unipolar (nor is it any longer bipolar in the way it arguably was during the Cold War) but multipolar. One aspect of that, in part because of the impact of ‘end of history’ type thinking on reshaping the post-Soviet space, is that Russian nationalism is resurgent and notably hostile to both the UK and the EU.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen
Published 26 Jul 2021

Unfree labour and labour migrations in the nineteenth century. Figures 1. The shifts in labour relations outlined in this book. 2. Modern humans as hunter-gatherers until 10,000 years ago. 3. The evolution of different labour relations, 5000–500 BCE. PREFACE The idea for this book emerged in the 1990s, in that optimistic period after the fall of the Berlin Wall. State socialism had failed, and with it, apparently, the idea that the exploited worker could only find liberation in a totally ‘classless’ society. Instead, a new utopian dream began to emerge. This started in the West but was quickly embraced globally, with the same enthusiasm with which Coca-Cola had been welcomed worldwide.

…

From 1920 to 1935, induced abortion was legal, and then again from 1955 to 1968 – after a hiatus due to the massive losses in population as a result of collectivization, famines and the ‘Great Patriotic War’. The fact that many women resorted to abortion was, of course, also fostered by the want of practically everything that mother and baby needed. The same pattern existed in Eastern Europe in the Russian sphere of influence between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1979, China attempted to limit its population with the one-child policy as one of the main instruments of social engineering. This measure, implemented by means of a contraceptive intrauterine device, surgically inserted after having a first child, and sterilization after having a second child, also significantly increased the productive engagement of women.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
by Virginia Eubanks
Published 1 Feb 2011

Flux, on the other hand, is more like the Hindu god Shiva, a creative force of destruction and genesis. Flux topples the incumbent and creates a platform for more innovation and birth” (10). Thomas L. Friedman makes a similar argument in his 2005 bestseller, The World Is Flat, explaining that digital connectivity produced rapid changes in the last two decades—including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the Netscape Web browser, and employment practices such as outsourcing and off-shoring—that act as flattening and leveling forces, creating broad-based equity across the globe. He writes, “[F]lattening forces are empowering more and more individuals today to reach farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and this is equalizing power—and equalizing opportunity, by giving so many more people the tools and ability to connect, compete, and collaborate” (x).

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 10 Nov 2011

This world is conditioned by the triumph of globalization, the rise of state capitalism and the persistence of terror. Financial warfare is one form of unrestricted warfare, the preferred method of those with inferior weapons but greater cunning. Globalization Globalization has been emerging since the 1960s but did not gain its name and widespread recognition until the 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Multinational corporations had existed for decades, but the new global corporation was different. A multinational corporation had its roots and principal operations in one country but operated extensively abroad through branches and affiliates. It might have a presence in many countries, but it tended to keep the distinct national identity of its home country wherever it operated.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 2003

The median male wage in 2000 was still below the 1979 level after the late-nineties boomlet, though productivity was 45 percent higher, one sign of the sharp shift toward benefits for capital that is being accelerated more radically under Bush II. The potential contributions of Eastern Europe to undermining quality of life for the majority in the West was recognized immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The business press was exultant about the “green shoots in Communism’s ruins,” where “rising unemployment and pauperization of large sections of the industrial working class” meant that people were willing “to work longer hours than their pampered colleagues” in the West, at 40 percent of the wages and with few benefits.

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car
by Tim Harford
Published 15 Mar 2006

As we know, under free trade, both Chinese and American workers can quit work earlier than they could under restricted trade, having produced the same amount as before. The commonsense answer based on practical experience is also no: compare North Korea with South Korea, or Austria with Hungary. To take a very rough guide to how much better it is to have an open, liberal economy than a closed one, simply note that in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin wall, the average Austrian was between two and six times richer than the average Hungarian (depending on how you measure it). The average South Korean is wealthy while the average North Korean is starving. North Korea is so isolated that it’s hard to get any measurement of quite how poor the country is.

The Curse of Cash
by Kenneth S Rogoff
Published 29 Aug 2016

“Hawala: The Hawala Alternative Remittance System and Its Role in Money Laundering.” Prepared by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the United States Department of Treasury in cooperation with INTERPOL/FOPAC. Judson, Ruth. 2012. “Crisis and Calm: Demand for U.S. Currency at Home and Abroad from the Fall of the Berlin Wall to 2011.” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, International Finance Discussion Paper 2012-1058 (November). Washington, DC. Judson, Ruth, and Richard Porter. 2012. “Estimating the Volume of Counterfeit U.S. Currency in Circulation Worldwide: Data and Extrapolation.” Journal of Art Crime 2012 (8): 13–29.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2016, http://www.nber.org/papers/w21906. 28. “Excess Reserves of Depository Institutions,” FRED Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed February 29, 2016, https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXCSRESNS. 29. Christoph Lakner and Milanovic Branko, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank, December 2013, http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Global%20Income%20Distribution%20Lakner%20Milanovic.pdf. Chapter 3: The Myth That Incentives Don’t Matter 1. Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, “The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 4 (2011): 165–90, http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/diamond-saezJEP11opttax.pdf. 2.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by Paul Mason
Published 30 Sep 2013

But as the momentum gathered, from Iran to Santa Cruz, to London, Athens and Cairo, the events carried too much that was new in them to ignore. The media began a frantic search for parallels. Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, told me: ‘It’s a revolutionary wave, like 1848.’ Others found analogies with 1968 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In late January 2011 I sat with veteran reporters in the newsroom of a major TV network and discussed whether this was Egypt’s 1905 or its 1917. As I will argue, there are strong parallels—above all with 1848, and with the wave of discontent that preceded 1914. But there is something in the air that defies historical parallels: something new to do with technology, behaviour and popular culture.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
by Joshua Cooper Ramo
Published 16 May 2016

Had they retired, only to leave the rest of us to pay their future medical bills and ogle their underfunded pensions, to cope with the manipulated political system they’d sued into existence? Or had they left a legacy of tolerance, a firming of American confidence? But anyhow, Generation X? By comparison, irrelevant: a collection of sad, passive slackers. But the great Internet companies were largely built by Generation X. The foundational experience of 1989—the fall of the Berlin Wall—bred optimism. It created, in fact, the possibility of a new exploration. Jon Postel’s idea to “be liberal in what you accept” seemed reasonable. This encouraged new links in trade and finance and friendship. Wi-Fi and TCP/IP and other advances made wiring the world possible, but the context?

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China
by David Eimer
Published 13 Aug 2014

Some may have been motivated by a desire to return to their ancestral homeland. Most, though, left because until the mid-1980s North Korea was a more prosperous place than China. Propped up by China, the old Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe, North Korea had access to both cheap imports and markets for its goods. The fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 and the demise of the USSR in 1991 brought that support to an abrupt end, just as China was opening up to the world. Around the same time, the DPRK started investing huge amounts of money in developing nuclear weapons, a further drain on its dwindling resources. Unable to pay for oil imports, North Korea’s economy collapsed and people started to go hungry.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Parts of this definition have universal appeal today. Today, for example, we take private property for granted in the world. Communism defined itself in opposition to private property. Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Communism collapsed and was widely discredited as a miserable failure. The battle for private property had been won. The harder part of the definition follows: capitalism is “characterized by the freedom of capitalists to operate or manage their property for profit in competitive conditions.”

Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall
by Anna Funder
Published 19 Sep 2011

Praise for Anna Funder and Stasiland “The Stasi were the secret police of the former East Germany, infamous for their obsession with detail and for being, literally, everywhere. Some believe their network of collaborators and informants numbered one in every six people. Anna Funder went back to East Germany seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall to interview those whose lives had been affected by the Stasi. Her portraits are by turns funny, heartbreaking, and stirring. She tells the story of the collapse of a way of life with wit, style, and sympathy.” —Marie Claire “Impressive. . . . Funder’s fully humanized portrait of the Stasi’s tentacles reads like a warning of totalitarian futures to come.”

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
by Jonathan Kaufman
Published 14 Sep 2020

They weren’t Chinese. I knew, in fact, that they were Jewish. The Kadoories had helped fund programs at the synagogue I had gone to in Hong Kong while I lived there as a reporter. I didn’t have a chance to learn more about the Kadoories then. My reporting took me to Berlin, where I covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. I didn’t return to China for almost fifteen years, even as it reemerged and twitched back to life. In 2002, I found myself back in Shanghai to cover China’s rise as a global economic power for The Wall Street Journal. My reporting took me to a neighborhood away from the waterfront and away from the hustle and bustle of the business districts.

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely
by Andrew Craig
Published 6 Sep 2015

However, technological and societal developments have meant that in the last few decades, roughly since the end of the Second World War, people in the developing world have increasingly been able to compete for jobs and capital with those in the West. This has increased the real cost of things. With China’s decision to pursue economic development in the late 1970s, and the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade later, this process has accelerated. This is a key part of the paradigm shift I referred to earlier in the book. Like it or not, those of us in “rich” countries are losing our relative and absolute economic power to billions of hungry, aspirational and hard-working people elsewhere.

At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel
by William C. Rempel
Published 20 Jun 2011

“As you know, I came here to help you, to protect you and your families from Pablo Escobar. And I continue to work for your well-being and that of your families. But I am very concerned. I see pressure building but not much progress with the government. And international pressure is only getting worse. That should be a concern.” Jorge shared his opinion that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union the United States was alone as a world power, that since it had successfully taken down Noriega and pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, it had a lot of military resources with little to do. Jorge said he feared one day American forces might even land in Cali to take the cartel leaders.

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation
by Sophie Pedder
Published 20 Jun 2018

In a book published in 2003 the commentator Nicolas Baverez wrote of the ‘atomisation of French society’, the ‘spread of social nihilism’, and the ‘anaemia’ of French democracy.13 In foreign policy, he argued trenchantly, the French had concealed the deterioration of their military capacity, misread the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and clung to a sense of global importance long diminished. ‘There is effectively something metaphysical in the sentiment of decline which is engulfing the old world in general, and France in particular,’ commented the writer Franz-Olivier Giesbert.14 It was a time of disorientation for much of the West, faced with the rise of China and other emerging powers, the transformations brought by the digital economy and the revival of identity politics.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller
Published 17 Sep 2018

In 1981, she joined the faculty of Stanford University, subsequently serving in the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush, where she had her first real experience in government as part of the foreign policy team that oversaw the start of democratic transitions in Eastern and Central European countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. She was, in other words, like Samuel Huntington before her, just the kind of liberal technocrat that the direct democrats in Occupy Wall Street regarded as complicit in ongoing American war crimes. The cover of Rice’s book features a famous black-and-white photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., at the head of a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965—a high point of the American civil rights movement, which Rice covers in the first chapter of her book.

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism
by Ruth Kinna
Published 31 Jul 2019

u=loughuni&sid=DLBC [last access 17 February 2018]. 2 Muñoz, Anarchists. 3 Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism 1864–1892 (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2009); Pietro Di Paola, The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 4 Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007); ‘Gustave Courbet: A Biography’, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, online at http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/courbet-dossier/biography.html#c19275 [last access 5 March 2018]. 5 Muñoz, Anarchists. 6 George Engel, ‘Autobiography’, online at https://libcom.org/library/engel-george-autobiography [last access 25 February 2018]. 7 Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2006 [1980]). 8 Samuel Fielden, ‘Autobiography’, online at https://libcom.org/library/fielden-samuel-autobiography [last access 25 February 2018]; Blaine McKinley, ‘Samuel Fielden’, in Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont (eds), Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles Kerr & Co., 1986). 9 Adolph Fischer, ‘Autobiography’, online at https://libcom.org/library/fischer-adolphe-autobiography [last access 25 February 2018]. 10 Muñoz, Anarchists. 11 Shulman (ed.), Red Emma Speaks. 12 Louis Patsouras, The Anarchism of Jean Grave: Editor, Journalist and Militant (Montreal: Black Rose, 2003); Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalization (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 13 Martin Henry Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 14 Philip S.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

Rather than adapt and upgrade Communism’s competitiveness vis-à-vis the Western world, these liberalization efforts brought about the country’s unraveling. Openly available information didn’t free the Soviet economy; it crumbled it. Eastern European Communist dictatorships dissolved rapidly in 1989, marked by the epic fall of the Berlin Wall. Less than two years later, on Christmas Day 1991, the Russian flag replaced the Soviet flag atop the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin understood relationships: how to mold them and manipulate them. Not surprisingly, his return to St. Petersburg led to his becoming a behind-the-scenes fixer for a controversial mayor before quickly climbing into Russia’s leadership.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

The ongoing Cold War narrative helped the press use anti-communism as a club to batter heretical thinkers, who as luck would have it were often socialists. They even used it as a club to police people who weren’t socialists (I would see this years later, when Howard Dean was asked a dozen times a day if he was “too left” to be a viable candidate). But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet empire took a little wind out of the anti-communist religion. Chomsky and Herman addressed this in their 2002 update of Manufacturing Consent, in which they wrote: The force of anti-communist ideology has possibly weakened with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the virtual disappearance of socialist movements across the globe, but this is easily offset by the greater ideological force of the belief in the “miracle of the market…” The collapse of the Soviets, and the weakening of anti-communism as an organizing principle, led to other changes in the media.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

Ultimately this claim is rooted in a version of adverse possession and justified by the long passage of time. This is true not just in North Carolina but for virtually every plot of land in the world. The significance of physical possession was one of the most contested issues after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Communist countries reintroduced market economies. Working in the region in the early 1990s, Heller advised many postsocialist governments on how to create the legal framework for private property. Government leaders had to decide between pre-Communist owners (and their heirs) demanding return of confiscated property and current occupants trying to stay in their homes.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

Too much focus on economic freedom leads to the destruction of the social and natural world and to the steady degradation of the institutions that hold the market in balance. Russia’s experience illustrates this dynamic. The Soviet economy under communism grew much more slowly than the Western economies, while also greatly restricting personal and political freedoms. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russia moved aggressively to embrace a completely unconstrained market—Chicago economics in its purest form. For a golden moment it seemed as though Russia would become a developed market economy. But no one stopped to price externalities, build the institutions that would enforce the rule of law, provide decent education and health care, or ensure that firms couldn’t set their own rules.

The City
by Tony Norfield

British worries grew following German reunification in 1990, and they were also shared by France. While the latter had been a long-term ally of Germany in European policy, it had seen its position undermined with the spread of capitalism into what it feared was to be a German-dominated Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. A UK Cabinet Office report of a meeting in January 1990 between the UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and French president François Mitterrand brought the point home sharply. It described the concerns each leader had about a Germany on the verge of reunification: President Mitterrand said that he shared the Prime Minister’s concerns about the Germans’ so-called mission in central Europe.

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers
by Michael Fabey
Published 13 Jun 2022

Even driving in the rain could be interesting. The JFK job jazzed her. She had been a training officer for the carrier Ronald Reagan, one of her two favorite presidents—the other being John F. Kennedy. Reagan reigned as the president of her childhood years of the eighties—years she loved. She recalled the fall of the Berlin Wall as one of the biggest events of her childhood. Reagan inspired her. Her affection for him rivaled that for her grandpa. Kennedy, on the other hand, she recognized as a navy advocate who did a lot for equal rights, something dear to her heart. Both presidents skillfully projected themselves on the screen, but they were quite different, not only as men, but also as carriers.

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis
by Kevin Rodgers
Published 13 Jul 2016

The theory was taught as orthodoxy in every business school and economics faculty despite numerous worrying weaknesses in it: why were stock prices more volatile than you would expect based on the data that the market would use to derive them? How could the US stock market be correct at one price at the start of trading before the crash on 19 October 1987 and still be correct 20 per cent lower at the end of the day, in the absence of any significant new data?4 In a strange way, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of my career reinforced the general faith in markets. One American colleague of mine at Merrill Lynch even went so far as to claim, on the subject of rational markets, that ‘markets must be efficient because without them society fails – just look at Russia’.

Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers
by Paulina Rowinska
Published 5 Jun 2024

In 1951, an international airport was built in this small, remote city. It connected major destinations all over the world, from London, Paris and Amsterdam in Europe to Tokyo and Mumbai in Asia, and New York and São Paulo in the Americas. By the 1980s, this airport was nicknamed the ‘Crossroads of the World’. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the USSR opened its massive airspace for most airlines. This, together with the development of modern, longer-range aeroplanes, diminished the role of Anchorage Airport for commercial flights. The rapid decrease in commercial flights notwithstanding, the importance of Alaska in international aviation has only grown since its heyday.

Tunnel 29
by Helena Merriman
Published 24 Aug 2021

That question was in the back of my mind when I was working as a journalist in Egypt and the police built a ten-foot-wall in front of the Ministry of Interior and protesters pulled it down. It was in my mind when I was living in Jerusalem and spent hours queueing at checkpoints to cross into Gaza or the West Bank. People talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall as the end of an era, and in one way it was: it marked the end of the Cold War. But a new era soon began: the age of walls. Right now, walls are in fashion – over seventy countries (a third of the world) have some kind of barrier or fence. Some run along borders, others separate areas within countries, or even within cities.

The Cold War: A World History
by Odd Arne Westad
Published 4 Sep 2017

THIS BOOK ATTEMPTS to place the Cold War as a global phenomenon within a hundred-year perspective. It begins in the 1890s, with the first global capitalist crisis, the radicalization of the European labor movement, and the expansion of the United States and Russia as transcontinental empires. It ends around 1990, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the United States finally emerging as a true global hegemon. In taking a hundred-year perspective on the Cold War my purpose is not to subsume other seminal events—world wars, colonial collapse, economic and technological change, environmental degradation—into one neat framework.

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Even in the 1980s, many Bulgarians saw Communism as a relatively successful development program, even though they resented the authoritarianism and oppression of the government. Most Bulgarians also felt a distinct kinship with the Russians for cultural and historical reasons. With Gorbachev in power in Moscow, this sense of closeness could lead to unexpected results, though. On 10 November, one day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, younger Communist leaders ousted party head Todor Zhivkov for his failure to instigate Gorbachev-style reforms. Zhivkov had lead the party for more than thirty-five years. He was a father figure for many Bulgarians and not widely hated like a Husak or a Jaruzelski. The new leaders wanted to build on the successes of Bulgarian socialism, while moving closer to the European Community, and position themselves to remain in power after a multiparty system had been introduced.

Culture works: the political economy of culture
by Richard Maxwell
Published 15 Jan 2001

These included the requirement that artists receiving NEA funding sign a written pledge that they would not make anything that could be considered “obscene,” ratification of an antiobscenity law regarding the use of NEA funds, increased congressional oversight of the Endowment’s activities, autocratic power for the presidentially appointed NEA chairman to overrule the recommendations of the peer panels, and the unprecedented application of that power in chairman Frohnmeyer’s repeated refusal to fund artists and projects recommended by those peer panels (including two by well-established artists Karen Finley and Mike Kelly) on the basis that their work was simply “too political.” It could be sheer coincidence that government support for freedom of expression in the arts was withdrawn for the first time in 1989, the year the Cold War was declared to be officially over. Although it would be hard to draw a direct line of causality between the fall of the Berlin Wall and court cases regarding U.S. obscenity laws taking place in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., it certainly seems that the 1989 triumph of liberal democracy over communism raised unforeseen problems for freedom of expression in the 46 Art United States; for without the mandate to pose as an international model of freedom, the most repressive forces of U.S. society—suppressed since the McCarthy era—could once again surface.

Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 22 Dec 2005

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became a major subcontractor, running the United Nations’ two largest and most demanding peacekeeping missions. Both the United Nations and the United States experienced this surge in nation-building demand throughout the 1990s and beyond. During the first 45 years of its existence, from 1945 to 1989, the United Nations mounted a total of 13 peacekeeping operations. In the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, it launched 41 new such missions. During the Cold War, American military interventions had occurred on the average of once per decade, in the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama. During the 1990s, the frequency of such American ventures increased to • 219 • • James Dobbins once every 30 months.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 15 Nov 2016

Once market participants saw war was inevitable, they acted in the same mechanical way as the generals with their mobilization plans and timetables. The period of the classical gold standard immediately preceding the war, 1870–1914, is best seen as a first age of globalization, a simulacrum of the second age of globalization that began in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. New technologies such as the telephone and electricity tied diverse financial centers together in a dense web of credit and counterparty risk. In 1914, global capital markets were no less densely connected than they are today. With the advent of war, French, Italian, and German investors all sold stocks in London and demanded proceeds in gold shipped to them by the fastest available means.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

Palchinsky’s secret execution was unusual – perhaps because, stubborn to the end, he refused to recant. His persecution was not. The Soviet Bloc began to fall apart in the late 1980s, punctuated with famous events such as the victory of the newly legalised Solidarity movement in the Polish elections of June 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that year. In the heart of the iet Union itself, a momentous but less famous revolt was also taking place: the first major strike in Soviet history. In July 1989, a quarter of a million coal miners walked away from their jobs. Part of the protest was about grotesquely dangerous conditions: the death rate for Soviet miners was fifteen to twenty times higher than it was for their American equivalents, with the local pits claiming the lives of over fifty men every month.

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic
by David Wessel
Published 3 Aug 2009

With the help of Washington’s superagent (and lawyer) Robert Barnett, Greenspan landed a reported $8.5 million advance for his memoirs. The book, The Age of Turbulence, hit the bookstores in the fall of 2007, a year and a half after he retired, just as the Great Panic was getting under way. The title was apt for a book that looked back to the 1987 crash, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, two U.S. wars with Iraq, the September 11 attacks, and the emergence of China and India as economic powers. But Greenspan had no idea how much more turbulence lurked just over the horizon, nor how his then sterling reputation would suffer — fairly and unfairly — in the aftermath. WHAT DID HE KNOW?

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

Issues of fiscal probity also seemed to be forgotten. As Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist, remarked: ‘When the banks said they needed hundreds of billions of dollars, all worries about the size of the deficit were shunted aside.’1 Stiglitz even sees the collapse of Lehman Brothers as a moment to rival the fall of the Berlin Wall;2 in this case, it was the free market capitalist model that was undermined. To critics like Stiglitz, the US could no longer claim that its financial system was the best allocator of capital. The rival Chinese approach, with governments controlling the banks and restricting the flow of international capital, looked much more appealing to developing countries.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
by Stephen R. Covey
Published 9 Nov 2004

But you see, as I say in the opening chapter of this new book, the world has profoundly changed since The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was published in 1989. The challenges and complexity we face in our personal lives and relationships, in our families, in our professional lives, and in our organizations are of a different order of magnitude. In fact, many mark 1989--the year we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall--as the beginning of the Information Age, the birth of a new reality, a sea change of incredible significance ... truly a new era. Being highly effective as individuals and organizations is no longer optional in today's world--it's the price of entry to the playing field. But surviving, thriving, innovating, excelling and leading in this new reality will require us to build on and reach beyond effectiveness.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

Instagram users play with filters to “hack” their photos, to make them different and more interesting (and to share them as well). There are even “bio-hackers” who buy machines to copy DNA and attempt to hack them into new life-forms. A major driving force of the new maker culture is demographic. To boomers who grew up during the Cold War, with half the world closed off to them behind the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern Europe and China held so much promise. Globalization was exciting for consumers eager for a taste of the wider world, and for corporations who saw an expanding global marketplace as a strategy for growth. Generation Y, on the other hand, has seen the negative effects of globalization—the uncertainty of throwing in your lot with a big corporation that has no loyalty to you, the way outsourcing has made it harder for them to get jobs and advance careers, the inequality of the haves and have-nots—and they have begun to innovate a different path.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 1 Jan 2009

For readers of the more specialist economics and business press, rejecting proposals on the grounds that they are ‘suboptimal’, ‘time-inconsistent’, or lack ‘incentive-compatibility’, has also become fashionable. And as a last resort there is always the plain but vacuous condemnation ‘uneconomic’. Veto economics serves to protect the economic orthodoxy. In some ways the orthodoxy has served us, in rich economies, quite well. For a brief period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, some even talked of ‘The End of History’. Our economic problems were solved, and something called ‘The New Economy’ had arrived, promising endless prosperity - or at least an endlessly rising stock market. Although these fantasies are now largely forgotten, a more humble but still confidently optimistic orthodoxy prevails.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

The Western Allies had poured Marshall Plan money and development into building a vibrant West Germany, which became a world leader in innovation and growth. But in that same time, East Germany’s postwar fate was dictated by the Soviet Union. And East Germany’s hallmark was stagnation. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East Germany was reunited with West Germany. Instantly, the entire nation was forced to wonder: can you teach an entire people how to compete, when they’ve never competed before? For the previous 40 years, every aspect of Eastern life had been dictated by the Soviet “planned economy.”

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

There were, of course, areas like space and arms technologies where they were leading the world (after all, in 1957 the Soviet Union put the first ever man in space), thanks to the disproportionate amount of resources poured into them. However, when it became evident that it could only offer its citizens second-rate consumer products – as symbolized by Trabant, the East German car with plastic body, which quickly became a museum piece after the fall of the Berlin Wall – the citizens revolted. In the next decade or so, the socialist countries in Eastern Europe made a headlong dash to transform themselves (back) into capitalist ones. Many thought that the ‘transition’ could be made quickly. Surely, it was just a matter of privatizing SOEs and reintroducing the market system, which is after all one of the most ‘natural’ human institutions?

Lonely Planet's Best of USA
by Lonely Planet

Reserve online ($6.25 fee) to ensure admittance. (%202-426-6924; www.fords.org; 511 10th St NW; h9am-4:30pm; mMetro Center) F Newseum Museum Map Google Map This six-story, highly interactive news museum is worth the admission price. You can delve into the major events of recent years (the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, Hurricane Katrina), and spend hours watching moving film footage and perusing Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs. The concourse level displays FBI artifacts from prominent news stories, such as the Unabomber’s cabin and John Dillinger’s death mask. (www.newseum.org; 555 Pennsylvania Ave NW; adult/child $23/14; h9am-5pm; Wc; mArchives, Judiciary Sq) White House Visitor Center Museum Map Google Map Getting inside the White House can be tough, so here is your backup plan.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

It isn’t sudden middle-class impoverishment by unemployment that is really the most important story — though it happens in economic downturns of course — it is the slow impoverishment of middle-class professionals, the constriction of their room for manoeuvre, their status and then their salary too. The political thinker Francis Fukuyama caused a storm of intellectual excitement after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by proclaiming ‘the End of History’. He became, rather reluctantly, part of the intellectual underpinnings of a new kind of deregulated ideal, the one that fell to pieces in the banking crash of 2008. These days, he finds himself in rather different company, and has recently begun a defence of the embattled American middle classes.[23] What he described as ‘happy talk about the wonders of the knowledge economy’, hailing a new economy based exclusively on service and finance, was actually a ‘gauzy veil placed over the hard facts of deindustrialization’.

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
by Kapka Kassabova
Published 4 Sep 2017

There were other perks: medals for ‘exceptional services’, extra leave, and sometimes even holidays in the GDR. One of the last victims of this border was a 19-year-old from Leipzig called Michael who was executed by a 20 year-old guard with a point-blank shot to the cheek, and bled to death a hundred metres from Greek territory. It was in July 1989, four months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. His divorced parents travelled to Sofia to see his body, and his mother spent the rest of her short life trying to indict the guard. Michael had spent his whole adolescence planning his escape from his foretold future. He had taken all his savings with him: 790 marks and a gold coin. WIRE IN THE HEART The house was an ordinary, run-down village affair with a low stone fence, rubber galoshes in the doorway, and cardboard in place of a broken window.

Antonio-s-Gun-and-Delfino-s-Dream-True-Tales-of-Mexican-Migration
by Unknown

He found, however, that Mexican musicians didn’t dare move from the center of the country where they had careers—from Mexico City and Guadalajara—to the musical wasteland of Baja California for an orchestra that didn’t yet exist. No matter. Echevarría had really been looking east all along. The socialist bloc had been in its death throes since the fall of the Berlin Wall in . During the summer of , a coup by Communist hardliners in Moscow attempted to knock Mikhael Gorbachev from power. An uprising of Muscovite citizenry foiled the coup, and with that the Soviet Union stumbled to its final days, leaving Russia in shambles and the world to ponder what the cataclysm meant for the future.

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

These economists and their supporters from outside economics (there are many) point to the founding father of economics, Adam Smith, who built his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations (1776) on the rock of humans as essentially selfish creatures. Modern economics has returned to this classical tradition, they conclude, after the aberration which began with Karl Marx and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the best efforts of John Maynard Keynes to postpone the inevitable. Unfortunately, this version of history goes wrong from the beginning. Adam Smith’s ideas reflected the eighteenth-century intellectual society he lived in and don’t easily translate to our world. The cornerstone of his Enlightenment thinking was the idea of enlightened self-interest, which is not at all the same as selfishness.

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon
by Robert Kurson
Published 2 Apr 2018

In 1989, he left that company to become vice chairman of General Dynamics, a major supplier of aircraft, tanks, and other weapons to the United States Department of Defense. By agreement, he would become the company’s CEO a year later. On paper, the move might have seemed crazy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the coming end of the Cold War, defense contractors began to suffer, their wares no longer in name-your-price demand. General Dynamics seemed even worse off than its competitors; having amassed huge debt, it looked headed for bankruptcy. But Anders saw possibility in darkened clouds.

Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden
Published 16 Sep 2019

The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it. I wanted, I think, to be part of something. Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent about serving because it had seemed pointless, or just boring. Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001. In that span, which coincided with my youth, America lacked for enemies. The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people like me—prosperous and settled. There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online.

The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre of WWII's Greatest Battle
by Iain MacGregor
Published 27 Jul 2022

The Daily Mail 17 proclaimed on its front page: “Stalingrad Army Wiped Out,” while across the Atlantic the New York Times heralded the destruction of “the flower of Adolf Hitler’s army … [with] Axis casualties on the Volga since last Fall to [be] more than 500,000 in dead and captured alone.”18 At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill presented on behalf of King George VI the “Sword of Stalingrad,” inscribed “From a grateful British people” to Joseph Stalin.19 Socialist realism was the official government-approved style of art—in all its forms—that dominated Soviet Russia from the days of Lenin in the 1920s all the way through until nearly the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Writers, artists, sculptors, poets, and filmmakers all came under its sphere of influence in order to perfect the socialist ideal of life in the country. A key element of this doctrine was the embellishment of truth in order to support whatever Party line was taken.

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends
by Uma Anand Segal , Doreen Elliott and Nazneen S. Mayadas
Published 19 Jan 2010

Immigrants from Eastern Europe put into question the ‘‘southern’’ European model developed in Portugal, much more than historical immigrants from Africa or Brazil, and also more than Western European immigrants in search of sun (such as Britons and Germans) or belonging to the same cultural model (such as Spaniards). In sum, the immigration situation in Portugal highlights a serious identity crisis. It is also part of a wider crisis—that of European identity after the fall of the Berlin wall. Notes 1. The Authorization of Stay (Autorização de Permanência, or AP) was created under Law No. 27/2000 of September 8, 2000, and entered into force in 2001. It could be granted for one year (renewable until a maximum of five years) to foreign nationals with or without visas, but with at least a formal offer of employment in Portugal.

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As can be seen from the foregoing section, some EU countries, while often benefiting from their labor, have also felt under heavy pressure from immigrants from poorer neighboring states over the past decade or so. While wars and poverty in African countries have for several decades led to immigration mainly to former colonial countries, two particular events on the European continent itself led to greater movement from the former Eastern Bloc countries, namely, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the break up of Yugoslavia in the early nineties. Thus, by the 1990s the European Union was taking a more active role in the regulation of immigration, and individual countries have since also enacted more restrictive and even repressive legislation. One of the issues facing the EU and member states concerns the conflation of debates and policy formation in relation to immigration with those related to a specific group of immigrants, that is, asylum-seekers.

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future
by Ian Goldin , Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan
Published 20 Dec 2010

PART II PRESENT 4 Leaving Home: Migration Decisions and Processes Having reviewed 60,000 years of human migration in the part I, part II covers the period from the early 1970s to today. This has been a period of unprecedented globalization. Accelerating cross-border movements of goods, services, ideas, and capital are drawing the regions of the world into an interdependent and interconnected community. Political changes associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening up of China, and democratization in much of Africa and Latin America have been both a cause and an effect of this accelerating integration. Rapid technological progress and the development of containerization, fiber optics, and mass computing have facilitated more rapid integration, as the increasing transfer of skills and ideas has prompted further innovation.1 The rise of cross-border flows resembles the “first wave” of early globalization between 1840 and 1914 that was accompanied by mass migrations.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Part I lays out the big, hard facts of the age, and rebuts the loose and often irresponsible rhetoric that pervades today’s public discourse. We step back and make clear the connective and developmental forces that defined the Renaissance of five hundred years ago and which, over the past quarter-century, have completely remade the world we live in now. Columbus’s voyages of discovery, the fall of the Berlin Wall—both events highlighted the breakdown of long-standing barriers of ignorance and myth, and the opening of fresh, planet-wide systems of political and economic exchange. The Gutenberg press, the Internet—both shifted the whole of human communication to a new normal: information abundance, cheap distribution, radical variety and wide participation.

Roads to Berlin
by Cees Nooteboom and Laura Watkinson
Published 2 Jan 1990

He was German Emperor between 1871 and 1888. Wilhelm II (1859–1941)—Grandson of Queen Victoria and German emperor (1888–1918), Wilhelm was forced to abdicate at the end of the First World War. Wolf, Christa (1929–2011)—German writer who lived in the D.D.R. and was known in her country as a “loyal dissident.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall she opposed moves towards reunification, a stance which attracted much criticism. Wolf, Markus (1923–2006)—Co-founder and head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence service. C.D.U. / CHRISTLICH DEMOKRATISCHE UNION—CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS / DEMOCRATIC UNION The C.D.U. was founded in 1945 as a conservative political party guided by the principles of Christian democracy.

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
by Jacqueline Novogratz
Published 15 Feb 2009

When I was considering what to do after business school, my choices were to accept a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation to explore enterprise-development strategies for low-income communities in the United States or to move to Czechoslovakia to work on a fund that would build small enterprises in that newly freed country just one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With my tendency toward wanderlust, I leaned toward working in a new land during a historic moment. John felt I should instead accept the fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation. “It will give you an important vantage point on what philanthropy is, both domestically and internationally,” he said.

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
by Alanna Collen
Published 4 May 2015

A great accumulation of evidence points to the correlation between chronic diseases and affluence, from grand-scale comparisons of the gross national product of entire countries, to contrasts between socio-economic groups living in the same local area. In 1990, the population of Germany provided an elegant natural experiment into the impact of prosperity on allergies. After four decades apart, East and West Germany were reunifying following the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous year. These two states had much in common; they shared a location, a climate, and populations composed of the same racial groups. But whilst those living in West Germany had prospered, eventually catching up and keeping pace with the economic developments of the Western world, East Germans had existed in a state of suspended animation since the Second World War and were significantly poorer than their West German neighbours.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Moises Naim
Published 5 Mar 2013

To explore this possibility, in Figures A.2 and A.3 I show the evolution of democratic regimes (as a percentage of all the regimes) in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the ex-Soviet bloc, North Africa, and the Middle East.* As shown in these two figures, many Latin American and ex-Soviet countries experienced a democratic transition during the period from 1975 to 1995. These transitions occurred mostly in the late 1970s for Latin America and in the early 1990s for the ex-Soviet bloc (following the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989). In 2008, 54 and 48 percent of the Latin American and ex-Soviet countries, respectively, are classified as free (democratic) by Freedom House. There is also a positive trend in democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, although it is less steep than the trend for Latin America. The Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East are remarkably stable, and fewer than 10 percent of them are classified as democracies throughout these years.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

Anyway, I think it’s really important to realize the extent to which peddling political snake oil, whether it’s about the economy, race, the effects of immigration, or whatever, is to an important extent a way to peddle actual snake oil: magic pills that will let you lose weight without ever feeling hungry and restore your youthful manhood. WHY IT CAN HAPPEN HERE August 27, 2018 As I mentioned earlier, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend of mine—an expert on international relations—made a joke: “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path—fascism.” Even at the time, his quip had a real edge. And as of 2018 it hardly seems like a joke at all. What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

He wrote those words in the early part of the twentieth century, at a moment of extreme global upheaval, with the Great Depression giving way to a second world war. One might not have thought that ideas were what mattered most at such a moment. But he was right. The perspectives of economists and the contest of political ideologies served to shape the two world wars, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the financial sector, and a globalizing economy—virtually all of the greatest challenges of the twentieth century. Economists also entered the innermost halls of political decision-making, advising leaders and directly crafting public policy. Prior to World War II, it was lawyers who dominated federal agencies, and courts ignored most economic evidence about the predicted effects of their decisions.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Complexity scientists refer to moments of radical change within a system as a ‘phase transition’.5 When liquid water turns into steam, it is the same chemical, yet its behaviour is radically different. Societies too can undergo phase changes. Some moments feel abrupt, discontinuous, world-changing. Think of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. The rapid reorganisation of our society today is just such a moment. A phase transition has been reached, and we are witnessing our systems transforming before our very eyes. Water is becoming steam. The transformation of society in the early twenty-first century is the focus of this book.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

“I had not read a single book on renewable energy. I just did my own thinking and I wrote a chapter suggesting a new SDI, the Solar Development Initiative,” Scheer replied.21 Unsurprisingly Scheer found little to celebrate in the ending of the Cold War. In A Solar Manifesto, published four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Scheer condemned the leaders of the West for “their self-deceiving euphoria of victory.”22 Even so, Scheer managed to profit from this apparent reverse. Intended as a postreunification boost to small-scale hydro schemes, the 1991 Electricity Feed-In Act had Scheer’s fingerprints all over it.

A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories)
by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf
Published 27 Sep 2006

Finally, after an interim of United Front coalitions (1996–8), the Hindu Nationalist BJP regime (from 1998 to 2004) represented new strategies of managing coalitions based on regional and other interests within, as well as a newly assertive presence, economic, cultural, and military, in the world outside. Democratic India in the nineties 273 i n t e n s i fi c at i o n o f c o n fl i c t, 1 9 8 9 – 1 9 9 2 The year 1989, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, was one of momentous change worldwide. In India too it inaugurated a new era. Though the Congress, battered and bruised, could and did win elections in subsequent years, its defeat in 1989 put an end not only to the direct rule of India by the Nehru family, but as well to the assumption that that party, with its long nationalist history, could appropriately claim to somehow represent India in itself, and so alone possessed a legitimate right to rule the country.

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Nov 2019

There was a time not so long ago when democracy was obvious; a time when it was the clear solution to the world’s ills, to be spread as broadly and as completely as possible. That was the objective of reform across much of the twentieth century. That was its singular achievement. In 1942, there were 9 democratic states across the world. By 1975, there were 34. By the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that number had risen to 63.5 Democracy had become the default. At the “end of history,”6 only rogues would deny rule by the people. Yet if you asked “the people” today anywhere, but especially in America, whether the people rule, most would find the idea somewhat quaint. Everywhere there is the view that society is divided between an elite and “the people.”

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service
by Eric Thompson
Published 18 Apr 2018

When a submarine dives, the ambient radiation level actually drops because the sea shields it from the sun. My Devil’s advocacy held sway for twenty-six years. **** Whilst beavering away at my corporate plan, the world as I had known it turned on its head. The Cold War came to an abrupt end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and within two years, the Soviet Union had dissolved. Our enemy had packed it in. There was now to be a Peace Dividend. Translated, that meant massive cuts to Defence spending, a complete re-think on our Long Term Costing, and a deluge of additional work for Ministry warriors. There would now be redundancies in the Armed Forces.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

In the meantime the Pakistani parents of Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London, moved to the UK, and his father also became a bus driver.5 Among the final arrivals in 1972–73, before the door slammed shut, were South Asian refugees expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin’s brutal dictatorship. They included Rumi Verjee, now a Liberal Democrat lord, who made his fortune by franchising Domino’s Pizza in the UK. Across Europe Migration to Western Europe took off again in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many moved from east to west – including ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and nearly a million refugees from the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Among them were the Bosnian parents of Zlatan Ibrahimović, the star Swedish striker.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment,” Sociology 47, no. 2 (2013), 219–50. 4 Michael Hout, “Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012), 379–400, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102503. 5 Michael Hout, private correspondence. 6 Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Economic Review 30, no. 2 (2016), 203–232. 7 David Bailey, Caroline Chapain, and Alex de Ruyter, “Employment Outcomes and Plant Closures in a Post-Industrial City: An Analysis of the Labour Market Status of MG Rover Workers Three Years On,” Urban Studies 49, no. 7 (2011), 1595–1612. 8 Tara Tiger Brown, “The Death of Shop Class and America’s Skilled Workforce,” Forbes, May 30, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarabrown/2012/05/30/the-death-of-shop-class-and-americas-high-skilled-workforce/#7ba6e3a0541f. 9 Conversation with the author. 10 See, for example, Office for National Statistics, Construction Statistics, Great Britain: 2017. 11 “Self-Employment Jobs by Industry,” Office for National Statistics. 12 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fe-data-library-apprenticeships. 13 https://www.citb.co.uk/documents/research/tns-2016-2017_final%2020-10-17.pdf. 14 “Migrant Labour Force Within the Construction Industry,” Office for National Statistics, June 2018. 15 “Employer Skills Survey 2017: UK Finding,” Department for Education, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employer-skills-survey-2017-uk-report. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Educating for the Modern World, CBI/Pearson, 2018, 16–17. 19 Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The US Is Experiencing a Widespread Worker Shortage.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

Walls and walling performances, as Wendy Brown asserts, “do not simply respond to existing nationalism or racism. Rather, they activate and mobilize them.”16 Walls thus solidify the idea of a homogenous nation-state, emphasizing difference and separation from those deemed undesirable. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, seventy walls now exist in our barbwired and walled world.17 Securitization has also turned the border into a dystopic testing ground, constituting a five-hundred-billion-dollar border security industry18 that flaunts virtual walling through intrusive electronic surveillance technologies, automated decision-making, predictive data analytics, facial recognition software, and biometric systems tested on migrants and refugees by blood-sucking leeches like Amazon, Palantir, Elbit Systems, and European Dynamics.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

Unlike their Soviet predecessors, the East German government committed the resources necessary to make the system work. In 1949, only 17 percent of East German children had access to childcare centers, but by 1989 the government claimed to guarantee a place for 100 percent of parents who wanted a space.49 On the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 80 percent of all infants and toddlers under three were in nurseries and 95 percent of children between three and six attended preschools. In contrast to the miserable conditions of the Soviet children’s homes in the 1920s, the East German kindergartens had professional staff and decent facilities.50 Similar combinations of paid parental leave and subsidized or free universal childcare spread throughout the Eastern Bloc countries and eventually to socialist-leaning countries in the Global South such as Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Namibia, and Nicaragua.

Germany Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Experiencing the country through its food and drink will add a rich layer to your memories (and possibly your belly!). Top of section TOP EXPERIENCES Berlin Wall 1 Few events in history have the power to move the entire world. The Kennedy assassination; landing on the moon; 9/11... And, of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. If you were alive back then and old enough, you will probably remember the crowds of euphoric revellers cheering and dancing at the Brandenburg Gate (Click here). Although little is left of the physical barrier, its legacy lives on in the imagination and in places such as Checkpoint Charlie (Click here), the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Click here) and the East Side Gallery (Click here), with its colourful murals.

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The Treaty of Versailles created fertile ground for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, which took the country into WWII and ultimately to disaster and humiliation. The Cold War once again split Germany, this time into austere communist East and affluent West that underwent the economic miracle of the 1950s and ’60s. This wealth and industrial might, plus peaceful reunification following the fall of the Berlin Wall, have fashioned the powerful country we know today. Tribes & the Romans The early inhabitants of Germany were Celts and, later, the Germanic tribes. In the Iron Age (from around 800 BC), Germanic clans on the North German Plain and in the Central Uplands lived on the fringes of Celtic regions and were influenced by the culture without ever melting into it.

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After the war, Dietrich retreated slowly from the public eye, making occasional appearances in films, but mostly cutting records and performing live. Her final years were spent in Paris, bed-ridden and accepting few visitors, immortal in spirit as mortality caught up with her. Renamed DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the illustrious UFA studios produced East German films until the fall of the Berlin Wall, most notably adaptations of German and Slavic fairy stories. Germany’s cinematic story begins at the Universum Film AG (UFA) studio in Babelsberg (Potsdam), founded in 1911 and now a large multimedia complex. One early UFA classic is Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis (1927), about a subterranean proletarian subclass.

Democracy Incorporated
by Sheldon S. Wolin
Published 7 Apr 2008

Elitism signified a privileged claim to power on the part of those who not only manifested proven intelligence, experience, and sterling character but also, unlike the fantasy-prone masses, were “realists.”70 A whole ideology emerged to legitimate elitism: the “realists” and “neoliberals” such as Niebuhr, George Kennan, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. That war was “cold” only in the sense that the two antagonists did not engage each other in a shooting war. During that era, which lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1987, the United States fought two very hot wars, first in Korea, then in Vietnam. It suffered a stalemate in one and defeat in the other, both by Soviet proxies. If we add the defeat in Iraq, we might be tempted to redefine superpower as an imaginary of power that emerges from defeat unchastened, more imperious than ever.

Moscow, December 25th, 1991
by Conor O'Clery
Published 31 Jul 2011

With a straight face Kaplan, who is Jewish, replied, “To me you will have to say ”Happy Hanukkah.”“Why would I have to say ‘Happy Honecker’?” asked the official, puzzled. The Americans burst out laughing at the official’s assumption that Kaplan is referring to Erich Honecker, who fled to Moscow after the fall of the Berlin Wall two years earlier. The mistake is understandable. The disgraced East German leader is in the news again this morning. The seventy-nine-year-old communist hard-liner was given compassionate asylum in Moscow by Gorbachev, who privately regards him as an “asshole” but who felt he should protect an old comrade.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism
by Harm J. De Blij
Published 15 Nov 2007

Over the long term, therefore, think of our planet's surface as ever changing, of continents moving and the crust shaking, of oceans and seas opening and closing, of land lost by subduction and gained by eruption. And this is only one dimension of the ceaseless transformation of Earth that began 4.6 billion years ago. OCEANS PAST AND FUTURE The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to much introspection—not only political, but also philosophical and scientific—and gave rise to a spate of books signaling the onset of a new era. Their titles were often misleading, such as The End of History by Francis Fukuyama, but none more so than one by John Horgan (1996) called The End of Science, which argued that all the great questions of science had been answered and that what remained, essentially, was a filling of the gaps.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

These simple words outlined the concept of “collective defense,” which created the most successful alliance in history. This “All for one, one for all” approach to sharing risk and response allowed the United States and its allies to stand together, taking them from the start of the Cold War to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond, including their collective response to the 9/11 attacks on the United States and subsequent deployment half a world away to Afghanistan. But in April 2007, NATO and its collective defense ideals faced a twenty-first-century test. A new alliance member, Estonia, was one of Europe’s most wired states.

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff
by Fred Pearce
Published 30 Sep 2009

Soviet scientists were masters at the business of collecting obscure Central Asian crop varieties. But many of their collections have languished since the Russians went home after 1989. And, like your grandfather’s stamp collection, the fate of the plant collections is in doubt because nobody realizes their value. The loss of these plants could prove another casualty of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The future of the apple, for instance, may now hang in the balance. Britain, famously, has more than 2,000 apple varieties, but few are now grown commercially and most of the rest survive only on one site, in the national fruit collection at Brogdale in Kent. But the greatest genetic resource of the apple is far away in the Tien Shen mountains of Kazakhstan, where wild apple woods still grow.

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
by Mark Hertsgaard
Published 15 Jan 2011

Telling the life story of 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper, who had voted for him that day in Atlanta, Obama maintained that "unyielding hope" had triumphed over long odds again and again in the past. When Ms. Cooper was born in 1902, Obama said, someone like her could not vote because of both her sex and her skin color. But she lived to see many supposedly impossible things come to pass: women and African Americans winning the right to vote, a man walking on the moon, the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Yes we can," Obama had said during his campaign, urging Americans to believe in their ability to come together and change their country. Now unyielding hope had made a man of mixed race and humble origins the nation's forty-fourth president, and he hoped it would continue to guide America through the undoubted difficulties ahead.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

Mills saw these entities in rough equipoise in their Cold War setting, each with its own independent base of power (that is, the capacity to force others to do what they would not be inclined to do otherwise). Mills’s division has been more and less relevant over 216 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY the course of the twentieth century; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, the military’s domestic power waned, while 9/11 brought with it the resurgence of a defense/intelligence/ policing complex. But his concept continues to capture attention and interest.96 Some social theorists have adjusted Mills’s typology to take into account the rise of other important actors, such as the media.

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia
by Steve Coll
Published 29 Mar 2009

If these factories and other state enterprises are now to be shut down, essentially on the grounds that they shouldn’t have been built in the first place, then the government had better be prepared to retrain and relocate the victims. Otherwise, the social and political rebound may be nasty indeed. Just ask the Germans what it has been like since the fall of the Berlin Wall, my informants would typically conclude. And the Germans have the money, the developed economy, to give it a try. India does not. For us, the numbers of people who may languish on the wrong side of transition are just too great. And what will happen if we fail, if we divide our society between those who can make it with the Ambanis and those who cannot?

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

In fact, it grew into something of an academic hippie commune, with parties where Ostrom herself led the singing of folksongs.35 And then one day, years later, the call came from Stockholm. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, the first woman ever to win.36 This choice sent a strong message. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the crash of capitalism in 2008, finally the moment had arrived to give the commons – that alternative between the state and the market – the spotlight it deserves. 5 It may not be breaking news, but since then the commons has made a spectacular comeback. If it seems like history’s repeating itself, that’s because it’s not the first time this has happened.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

The fear that the Germany that had so aggressively pursued dominance of Europe in the twentieth century was now reborn and would return to its old ways revived the paranoid suspicion that the EU itself was really a German front. The notion that Germany was in effect reversing by stealth the result of two world wars and achieving by economic means the dominance it had been denied on the battlefield had long been there. But its rise as a potent political myth in England was itself an unintended consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The irony here is that Brexit will help to create the very thing its political proponents feared. When Boris Johnson told voters a month before the referendum in 2016 that the EU was ‘pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate’, he was manipulating English anxieties about the dark Teutonic truth behind the EU’s tediously consensual deal-making.

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
by Douglas Murray
Published 3 May 2017

The difference from their Western European partners could not have been more stark. What was it that made the East and West of the same continent think so differently on such central issues? Chantal Delsol noticed the seeds of this difference in the mid-1990s. Spending time in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she saw that Eastern Europeans ‘increasingly considered us as creatures from another planet, even while at a different level they dreamed of becoming like us. I later became convinced that it was in these eastern European societies that I should seek some answers to our questions … the divergences between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life’.14 That tragic dimension of life had not been erased in the East.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

By the end of the next quarter-century, it was slated to be twice the size of the U.S. economy. But ideologies are often more influential than evidence. Free-market economists seldom looked at the success of the managed-market economies of East Asia. They preferred to talk about the failures of the Soviet Union, which eschewed the use of the market altogether. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, it seemed that free markets had triumphed. Though this was the wrong lesson to be drawn, the United States used its sway as the sole remaining superpower to advance its economic interests—or, more accurately, to advance the interests of its large and powerful corporations.

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink
by Taylor Downing
Published 23 Apr 2018

Putin grew up in Leningrad (St Petersburg) in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1975, after leaving university, he joined the KGB, then under Yuri Andropov. He was a junior officer in counter-intelligence before moving on to the First Chief Directorate under Kryuchkov. At the end of the Cold War he was based in East Germany and helped to burn KGB files after the fall of the Berlin Wall to prevent them falling into the hands of hostile demonstrators. He resigned having reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1991 but retains some of the paranoia and suspicion about foreign influences that he picked up during his formative KGB years. In this sense there is a direct link between the Soviet Union of Andropov and Kryuchkov and the Russia of Vladimir Putin.

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World
by Paul Morland
Published 10 Jan 2019

This was the backdrop to the swell of immigrants trying to get into Germany in 2015, many but far from all fleeing from the Syrian civil war. Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted ‘wir schaffen es’–‘we can cope’, ‘we can get it done’–but the backlash from a large number of her citizens suggests that there is far from a consensus on this matter. In addition to arrivals from the south, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and expansion of the EU there has been a mass movement of people within Europe, from east to west. As in the US, these shifts have not only changed the ethnic composition but have been a major component in fuelling new political forces in reaction, whether UKIP and the Brexit vote in the UK, the Front National in France or Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.

Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor
by Clinton Romesha
Published 2 May 2016

The revolt they kicked off inspired other parts of the country to join the rebellion, which bled the Russians for the better part of a decade until the last Red Army units finally limped back across the northern border in the winter of 1989. Within a few months a series of revolutions in Eastern Europe, triggered in part by the disaster that the Russians had endured in Afghanistan, would culminate in the fall of the Berlin Wall and, soon thereafter, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. If you’re not from this part of the world, you should think very carefully before you decide to fuck with the people of Nuristan. When the US government decided to fling itself into Afghanistan following the attacks of 9/11, it encountered a problem in the eastern part of the country that would have made every Russian commander who had served time in the region back in the 1970s nod in recognition.

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite
by Jake Bernstein
Published 14 Oct 2019

As a student, Owens had participated in the civil society demonstrations against Noriega. He proudly kept the X-rays that show where his wrist was injured by police. For years President Ronald Reagan had countenanced Noriega’s alliances with money launderers and drug traffickers because the dictator was an ally in the fight against the Sandinistas. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Noriega’s usefulness diminished.12 The December 1989 invasion ended years of economic and social turmoil in Panama but left the country’s banking secrecy and tax haven status intact. A brilliant legal tactician, Owens had a quick wit matched by a puppy’s eagerness to please. An Isle of Man newspaper report of an Owens speech promoting Panamanian shell companies noted that alongside his PowerPoint presentations,13 the lawyer “likes to break into a little salsa to liven up the proceedings.”

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
by Casey Michel
Published 23 Nov 2021

They’ve all gotten their pieces of the dirty money pie. And they all exist, quite literally, offshore. But that definition of “offshore” has been a misnomer since the late twentieth century. It fails to account for a turning point toward the end of the Cold War, during a transition that just so happened to coincide with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. All of a sudden, the postcommunist states opened to the West—and the communist apparatchiks were replaced by rapacious oligarchs, all of whom watched their net worth explode, mirroring the elite wealth gathering in other postcolonial regions. And it didn’t take long for officials and industrial leaders in the U.S. to suddenly realize how they could profit from that transition.

Lonely Planet Cyprus
by Lonely Planet , Jessica Lee , Joe Bindloss and Josephine Quintero
Published 1 Feb 2018

The two peoples treated each other with civility and kindness and, more than a decade after the checkpoints’ opening, no major incidents have been reported. Many Turkish Cypriots now cross the line every day on their way to work in the southern part of the island. Serdar Denktaş, the son of Rauf and the man behind the realisation of the Green Line opening, dubbed the events 'a quiet revolution'. Many compared it to the the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, minus the dramatic knocking down of the buffer zone, an event still to take place. Repairing the Damage Many Greek Cypriots quickly regrouped after 1974, putting their energies into rebuilding their shattered nation. Within a few years the economy was on the mend and the Republic of Cyprus was recognised internationally as the only legitimate representative of the island.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

On reflection, I write, the global financial crisis is a sober reminder that the path of history is far from linear. ‘Some may view events as a form of divine retribution, a punishment for a generation of excess characterised by the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us. At the very least, they challenge two assumptions which have held good since the fall of the Berlin Wall: the innate superiority of the western model of market capitalism and the inevitable progress of globalisation.’ 2009 Aftershocks By the turn of 2009, the global financial crisis had moved from survival to recovery. Central banks had ‘saved the system’ by injecting vast amounts of liquidity to support the banks.

Germany
by Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Published 17 Oct 2010

A conservative coalition government is formed in West Germany under Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl. 1985 Boris Becker wins Wimbledon tennis tournament and becomes the youngest player and first German to do so. West Germany receives its biggest confidence boost since its 1954 World Cup victory. 1989 Demonstrations are held in Leipzig and other East German cities. Hungary opens its border with Austria, and East Germans are allowed to travel to the West, prompting the fall of the Berlin Wall. 1990 Berlin becomes the capital of reunified Germany. Helmut Kohl’s conservative coalition promises East–West economic integration, creating unrealistic expectations of a blossoming economic landscape in the east. 1998 After its popularity wanes during the first decade of reunification, Helmut Kohl’s CDU/CSU & FDP coalition is replaced by an SPD and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen government. 2005 Angela Merkel becomes Germany’s first woman chancellor, leading a grand coalition of major parties after the election results in neither the SPD nor the CDU/CSU being able to form its own government. 2006 Germans proudly fly their flag as the country hosts the FIFA World Cup for the first time as a unified nation. 2008 The economic crisis bites deeply into German export industries.

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Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall; 2004) is a chilling account of Hitler’s last 12 days – from his final birthday to his suicide – mostly in his Berlin bunker. Florian von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (Lives of Others; 2006) portrays the Stasi and its network of informants five years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. * * * MARLENE DIETRICH Marlene Dietrich (1901–92), born Marie Magdalene Dietrich into a good middle-class family in Berlin, was the daughter of a Prussian officer. After acting school, she worked in the silent-film industry in the 1920s, stereotyped as a hard-living, libertine flapper.

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More than 3000 figures, assembled in numerous scenes, depict not the actual battle but an allegorical interpretation of the tumultuous transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era. It took artist Werner Tübke and his assistants five years to complete this complex work, which was inaugurated in 1989, just a couple of months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its artistic merit and political context have been hotly debated, but its size and ambitious themes do not fail to impress. The museum is on the Schlachtberg, about 3km north of Bad Frankenhausen. Return to beginning of chapter Sleeping & Eating A Kurtaxe (spa tax) of €1.50 per person is added to every overnight stay.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 May 2011

Just a few years earlier, she had been working as a physical chemist in communist East Germany with no expectations of any career change. But the abrupt German reunification in 1990 had catapulted her into politics and, quite quickly, into the leadership of the Christian Democratic Party. Now, just half a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she was environment minister of unified Germany. In her opening remarks to the Berlin conference, she stressed the importance of the industrialized countries being “the first to prove that we are bearing our responsibility in protecting the global climate.”20 That was the thrust of the outcome.

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They started to organize, but they were too late.” This feed-in tariff was notable not only for what it did for the renewable industry. It was also the very last law of the West German parliament, before unification came into force on January 1, 1991. “And yes,” said Scheer, “it was, indirectly, the result of the fall of the Berlin Wall.”17 The Feed-In Law of 1991 borrowed from America, specifically PURPA. Its model required German utilities to buy electricity from renewable generators at higher fixed rates—or very much higher fixed rates—and then subsidize those rates by spreading them across the system so that the costs blended into the overall price.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Defectors steal in a society that has declared that stealing is wrong, but they also help slaves escape in a society where tolerating slavery is the norm. Defectors change as society changes; defection is in the eye of the beholder. Or, more specifically, it is in the eyes of everyone else. Someone who was a defector under the former East German government was no longer in that group after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But those who followed the societal norms of East Germany, like the Stasi, were—all of a sudden—viewed as defectors within the new united Germany. Figure 1: The Terms Used in the Book, and Their Relationships Criminals are defectors, obviously, but that answer is too facile. Everyone defects at least some of the time.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

The energy world would be substantially affected by two other political events of that year. Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of Great Britain on May 4, 1979. She and Ronald Reagan, who took office as president of the United States in 1981, implemented free-market-friendly economic policies that helped to pave the way for the expansion of globalization after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This increased economic activity the world over, massively increasing the number of people who could afford cars, motor scooters, electric appliances, and international travel. Less noticed but just as important, in 1979, three years after Mao Tse-tung’s death, China’s communist government permitted small farmers to raise their own crops on individual plots and to sell the surplus for their own profit.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

Chapter Four 1 In conversation with the author in November 2003. De Klerk makes the same point less explicitly in his autobiography, The Last Trek. See also the interview in the Financial Times, January 23, 2010, with de Klerk about his decision to lift the ban on the ANC twenty years earlier: “Encouraged by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which took away the root gevaar [red danger] or fear of a communist takeover, de Klerk was emboldened to press ahead.” 2 Interview with the author in November 2003. See “Asia Now Aspires to the Charms of a Bourgeois Life,” The Times, London, January 8, 2004. The “Hindu rate of growth” was the sarcastic description of India’s low growth rate of only 3.5 percent from 1960 to 1990, while other Asian countries were growing by 6 percent or more.

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies
by Judith Stein
Published 30 Apr 2010

Reagan had not effected a Republican realignment.54 The congressional races even demonstrated voter preference for shifting resources from defense to domestic social programs.55 FALTERING RECOVERY During the Bush years foreign policy successes initially overwhelmed a faltering economy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the rapid ending of the Cold War, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 satisfied. The first Gulf war, repelling Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in 1991, demonstrated that high-tech American weapons were potent, but the glow of victory dimmed quickly. A desert triumph could not compete with industrial decline, Japanese competition, rising unemployment, and growing inequality.

The Rough Guide to Prague
by Humphreys, Rob

You can, however, still see the tank at the Vojenské technické museum (Military Technical Museum) in Lešany, 40km or so southeast of Prague. CONTE XTS | History West German embassy in Prague. Honecker, the East German leader, was forced to resign and, by the end of October, nightly mass demonstrations were taking place on the streets of Leipzig and other German cities. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 left Czechoslovakia, Romania and Albania alone on the Eastern European stage still clinging to the old truths. All eyes were now turned upon Czechoslovakia. Reformists within the KSČ began plotting an internal coup to overthrow Jakeš, in anticipation of a Soviet denunciation of the 1968 invasion.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith
Published 19 Jun 2012

On 4 November, 500,000 marched in East Berlin, converging on Alexanderplatz to demand elections. Within five days the barriers on the Berlin Wall had been raised, and East Berliners were free to walk the streets of West Berlin, many of them for the first time in their lives. In Czechoslovakia, people were given hope by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Prague’s Wenceslas Square became the stage for their Velvet Revolution. At the centre of the city, this kilometre-long square was where people gathered every day after they had finished work, gaining confidence as their numbers grew, sharing information and news (the public media were not to be trusted), reading the many colourful posters plastered on walls, and – the final act of each day – singing the national anthem.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
by Jason Stearns
Published 29 Mar 2011

“That was misguided socialism.” Lastly, we have to understand the time warp that Kabila was in. For decades, he had set his compass to the cold war divide, preaching against the neocolonial domination of Africa by the United States. To people who met him in the early days of his presidency, it was as if the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union had passed him by; he gave the impression of a revolutionary fossilized in the 1960s. He had come of age during the anti-western socialist rebellions that swept through Africa just after independence. The writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Mao Tsetung, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon lined his bookshelf; after he took power he continued to call his associates “comrade” (although, apparently none of them was allowed to reciprocate).22 To make matters worse, Kabila was saddled with questions about the massacre of Rwandan refugees.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
by Richard H. Thaler
Published 10 May 2015

. ________________ * It also didn’t hurt that financial markets offer the best opportunities to make money if markets are misbehaving, so a lot of intellectual resources have gone into investigating possible profitable investment strategies. † We have benefited by some “natural” experiments, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, that have allowed us to compare market vs. planned economies. ‡ Even the label given to a tax cut may be relevant. Epley et al. (2006) find that people report a greater propensity to spend from a tax cut that is called a “bonus” rather than a “rebate.” § Of course, not everyone should be encouraged to become an entrepreneur.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

These kids—the young baby boomers—rehearsed hiding under their desks with their arms over their heads to protect themselves from an atomic blast launched by America’s Communist nemesis. The fight against communism would be part of the boomers’ formative experiences: from the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the Vietnam War of the 1960s and ’70s to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even the millions of boomers who opposed the excesses of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War grew up to think, with considerable justification, that capitalist economies created more wealth for their countries than socialist ones. When many socialist countries in the developing world shifted to more market-based systems in the 1990s, many boomers saw it as vindication: boomer historian Francis Fukuyama called this shift “the end of history” and characterized it as a decisive victory for free-market capitalism and liberal democracy.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

A Commentary on Ulrich Beck,” Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2003): 35–48. 14. H. A. Kissinger, “The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck,” Daedalus 97, no. 3 (1968): 888–924. 15. D. H. Chollet and J. Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11; The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror (Public Affairs, 2008), 318. 16. Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference, March 25, 2021; www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/03/25/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-conference/. 17. “Fact Sheet: The American Jobs Plan, March 31, 2021,” www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/31/fact-sheet-the-american-jobs-plan/. 18.

The Fire and the Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945
by Sinclair McKay

In this sense, as a thirty-something KGB officer, Putin had a very much more pleasant life there than practically any of the citizens he passed on the streets. His one moment of serious alarm came in the autumn of 1989 with the breakdown of control across the German Democratic Republic that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Dresden, angry citizens were already turning their attentions to the Stasi main headquarters. Putin correctly divined that they would also be marching on the KGB villa, and it was he who went out alone to face the crowd, imploring them calmly, in German, not to proceed any further because there were snipers in position who would not hesitate to shoot them down.

The Profiteers
by Sally Denton

An outgrowth of the People for Peace movement—and in response to the 1991 Gulf War—LASG grew from an informal association of peace activists, ministers, and political progressives to a formalized organization providing technical consultation to a coalition of over a hundred loosely allied citizen nuclear groups in New Mexico, California, and Washington, DC. “Our idea was that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closure of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility [following a raid by the FBI for environmental crimes], we could have citizen-influenced change in Los Alamos. I felt that the institutional configurations of the Cold War of my entire life could finally become unstuck.”

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

Yet (in its own unparaphrasable words), “as huge as our world of Coca-Cola is today, it is just a tiny sliver of the world we can create.”30 Coke has had global ambitions for a long time.31 But nowadays an ambitious company cannot simply capture global consumer markets by aping their ideologies and accommodating their tastes: it must also be prepared to create global markets by careful planning and control. The new technologies are more powerful than the old, and Coke has now manufactured its own soft-drink ideology that assimilates the ideals of the Olympics, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Rutgers University into a theme-park ideal existence for Coke drinkers. McWorld’s innovative virtual industries generate virtual need factories (advertising agencies, corporate public relations and communications divisions, business foundations) where emotions are identified and manipulated with images that forge new wants.32 Now thirst cannot be manufactured but taste can.

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992
by Rick Houston and J. Milt Heflin
Published 27 Sep 2015

The Apollo moon missions were over. The great space race between the United States and Soviet Union was over, and America had scored a decisive victory. Glynn Lunney saw the Cold War as a forty-four-year contest, divided into quarters and beginning with the end of World War II in 1945 and ending with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The Soviets got out to an early lead with the launch of Sputnik and then stretched it out with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. By halftime, however, the game was over. “In our theater of competition, the space theater, we were surprised and engaged at the beginning of the second quarter,” Lunney said.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

—MARK 3:25; ABRAHAM LINCOLN CHAPTER 1 Introduction That things are not going well in the US and in many other advanced countries is a mild understatement. There is widespread discontent in the land. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, according to the dominant thinking in American economics and political science in the last quarter century. After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History, as democracy and capitalism at last had triumphed. A new era of global prosperity, with faster-than-ever growth, was thought to be at hand, and America was supposed to be in the lead.1 By 2018, those soaring ideas seem finally to have crashed to Earth.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

The result has been deep social anger and frustration at the results of the market economy, so much so as to call into question its very status and legitimacy. And that anger and frustration have come amid times of economic growth and booming markets; think what they might be in a serious recession. To make matters still worse, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 there was remarkable complacency across the political spectrum about the status of capitalism, especially in the UK and USA. History had supposedly ended. Since then, the centre-right has not found it necessary to make the case for the market economy in any serious way, let alone to develop the kind of systematic account of its strengths and weaknesses that might enable it to combat the spread of crony capitalism.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
by Janek Wasserman
Published 23 Sep 2019

Had the Austrian legacies remained only the ones just discussed—an ecumenical school of economic theory based on subjectivism and marginal utility theory, a heterodox economic approach in the United States, a network of foundations for neoliberalism, a group of policy entrepreneurs deploying their expertise behind the scenes in advanced societies—this would have been impressive indeed. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War managed to transform the Austrians into seers too—as the prognosticators of socialism’s demise. Austrians’ predictions about socialism’s impossibility had seemed to come true. Their scientific and philosophical pronouncements appeared to bear the mantle of truth.56 Vienna itself loomed large in this triumphalist, post-1989 narrative, which would have delighted Austrian School members.

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
by Matthew Sweet
Published 13 Feb 2018

He is also the rightful successor to Gandhi, Lincoln, de Gaulle, and Martin Luther King. His writings—The Third Stage of Imperialism, “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” and Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism—are landmarks in the history of ideas. His thinking inspired the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “In only a few decades in the late twentieth century,” said Warren Hamerman, in a speech at a 1990 Labor Committees conference, “the ideas generated by Lyndon LaRouche and our association, enriched by co-thinkers in every conceivable area of human knowledge and activity—from politics and physical economy to philosophy, natural law, the arts and sciences—have swept across the globe like seeds in a strong wind, and blossomed forth afresh from individuals on every continent on Earth.”

The Future Won't Be Long
by Jarett Kobek
Published 15 Aug 2017

JULY 1993 Daddy Was in KGB Gets a Good Review A bright moment occurred when the Bay Guardian featured Daddy Was in KGB as “Demo Tape O’ The Week.” Минерва rushed into the apartment, her pale face flushed with ruddy color. It was the first time in our friendship where she’d displayed unbridled enthusiasm. She seemed positively American. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the evaporation of Communism, it wasn’t a question of “if?” but of “when?” and “where?” I’m happy to report that the when is now and the where is here. Daddy Was in the KGB, a S.F. punk outfit made up of four women who’ve escaped the former Soviet States, offers a headcrunching, genre-bending response to the last few years of realpolitik.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

Bernanke had argued in his 2004 speech that Japan was the exception, not the norm. But was it? In fact, a financial crisis engulfed Norway in the late 1980s and persisted into the early 1990s, when much of the banking system in both Finland and Sweden collapsed, a casualty of the collapse in Russian demand for Scandinavian goods after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, savings and loan associations saw their loans go bad as the real estate bubble popped. Upwards of 1,600 banks eventually went under, and although this banking crisis was not as severe as the recent global financial meltdown, it nonetheless led to a credit crunch, a painful recession in 1990-91, and significant fiscal costs of nearly $200 billion (in 2009 dollars).

Lonely Planet Barcelona
by Isabella Noble and Regis St Louis
Published 15 Nov 2022

TOP EXPERIENCE Attend an Art talk at MACBA An extraordinary all-white, glass-fronted creation by American architect Richard Meier, opened in 1995, the MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) has become the city’s foremost contemporary art centre. The permanent collection features some 3000 pieces centred on three periods: post-WWII; circa 1968; and the years since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, right up to the present day. ARCHITECT: RICHARD MEIER; TONIFLAP/SHUTTERSTOCK© The emphasis is on Spanish and Catalan art from the second half of the 20th century, with works by Antoni Tàpies, Joan Brossa, Miquel Barceló and Joan Rabascall, among others. International artists, such as Paul Klee, Bruce Nauman, Alexander Calder, John Cage and Jean-Michel Basquiat, are also represented.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

Bailouts were provided, but most of the benefit accrued to the foreign banks that had been lending to these governments.166 Meanwhile, extremely harsh austerity programs were imposed and were associated with a dramatic increase in poverty and inequality.167 In South Korea—one of the poster children for structural adjustment—researchers found that businesses gained most from structural adjustment while the labor force had to shoulder most of the costs.168 The unemployment rate rose by a factor of four in Korea, a factor of three in Thailand, and a shocking factor of ten in Indonesia.169 Urban poverty in Korea tripled, while in Indonesia it doubled.170 The fall of the Berlin Wall allowed the international financial institutions to expand into what had previously been known as the “second world.” The results of neoliberal shock therapy there, championed by allegedly progressive economists like Jeffrey Sachs, who later stated that the reforms had been a mistake, are now well known.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
by Bethany Moreton
Published 15 May 2009

“But nowhere in sacred Scripture does it say that America will continue to be a dominant industrial force in the world,” he cautioned. “It will depend on how it is led and how it is managed, and that is where you come in.”128 In 1991, the reorientation became ofÂ�fiÂ�cial: “SIFE Goes Global,” proclaimed a headline in the year-Â�end review. The orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion explicitly linked this move to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and though it mentioned the Mexican and Asian contacts in passing, the focus was on the recent converts from communism. Rogers State College, the article reported, inaugurated the new era by contacting East German colleges to offer their help in the economic transition. The result was a two-Â�week sojourn in Oklahoma by three students of the Technische Hochschule-Â� Zwickau, who “quickly became believers in our free market system.”

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
by Misha Glenny
Published 7 Apr 2008

The appearance of dynamic young economies in Eastern Europe put this problem in a yet starker perspective as Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and others proved willing to put in longer hours for less money as they sought to make up for half a century of consumer misery under Communism. Growth rates in Eastern Europe began shooting up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany was busy outsourcing its industrial base throughout Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, while the European Union accession program meant that huge sums in regional development funds were fighting poverty and assisting in the development of democratic institutions in Eastern Europe.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

On 9 November 1989 a bemused East Berlin press corps were informed that ‘the decision [had been] taken to make it possible for all citizens to leave the country through the official border crossing points … to take effect at once’, news that prompted a flood of East Berliners to the border checkpoints. Unprepared, guards opted not to resist. By midnight all the checkpoints had been forced to open and one of the greatest parties of the century was under way, closely followed by one of its biggest shopping sprees. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War was essentially over, though it was not until the failed Moscow coup of August 1991 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union that the Baltic states, Ukraine and Belarus, along with the three big Caucasian republics and the five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, became independent states.

Barcelona
by Damien Simonis
Published 9 Dec 2010

MUSEU D’ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA Map Macba; 93 412 08 10; www.macba.cat; Plaça dels Àngels 1; adult/concession €7.50/6; 11am-8pm Mon & Wed, 11am-midnight Thu & Fri, 10am-8pm Sat, 10am-3pm Sun & holidays late Jun-late Sep, 11am-7.30pm Mon & Wed-Fri, 10am-8pm Sat, 10am-3pm Sun & holidays late Sep-late Jun; Universitat The ground and 1st floors of this great white bastion of contemporary art are generally given over to exhibitions from the gallery’s own collections (some 3000 pieces centred on three periods: post-WWII; around 1968; and the years since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, right up until the present day). You may see works by Antoni Tàpies, Joan Brossa, Paul Klee, Miquel Barceló and a whole raft of international talent, depending on the theme(s) of the ever-changing exposition. The gallery also presents temporary visiting exhibitions and has an extensive art bookshop.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

Yesteryear it was Peter Wright and his book Spycatcher; we were not allowed to read in this country though it was freely available across the globe. Now it is what our spooks get up to alongside the Americans in the ‘war on terror’. The US has changed. In these days of ‘homeland security’ my enthusiasm for the American way of life is no longer what it was when I lived there. The fall of the Berlin Wall – the greatest world-changing event since 1987 – proved not to be the end of history, but the beginning of a dolorous period of constant war. The enemy, ‘terror’, lurks in the shadows, while hundreds of thousands have died in the post 9/11 environment. Would Mrs Thatcher have ridden shotgun for George Bush as Tony Blair did?

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market
by Daniel Reingold and Jennifer Reingold
Published 1 Jan 2006

We want you to be our global telecom leader, and we want you to be our main U.S. telecom analyst as well.” It seemed as if Merrill was offering me the chance to build my own team, see the world (first class, of course), and participate in the economic restructuring of the post–Cold War era. It had been four years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and capitalism was now the only game in town. As governments from Europe to Asia to Latin America privatized their largest companies, they could raise a huge amount of cash and inject capitalism into a large part of their economies. Telephone companies were perfect for privatization: they sold a necessity, demand was growing steadily in Europe and very rapidly in the developing world, and new services such as cellular were blossoming.

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
by Thomas E. Ricks
Published 14 Oct 2009

It had been flummoxed and humbled by its struggle in the Land Between the Rivers, trying nearly everything in its toolbox of conventional methods, and not finding much that promised a successful outcome. Finally, it was ready to try something new. It had to come a long way. In the feel-good days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11, and even for some time after, when the U.S. military was the armed wing of “the sole superpower,” Pentagon officials liked to talk about “rapid decisive operations.” That was a term for, as one 2003 study done at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies put it, the devastating cumulative effect of “dominant maneuver, precision engagement and information operations.”

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism
by William Baker and Addison Wiggin
Published 2 Nov 2009

The End of Moderation The pressures of integrating vast populations involved on the periphery of the world economy played an important role in the formation of the financial bubble at the turn of the millenia and the subsequent meltdown. World integration, while hardly new, accelerated greatly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Probably within a half century it may be largely over, save for pockets around the globe that may remain backwards due to Islamic fundamentalism, communism, or despotism. Population growth, once a scare akin to global warming today, peaked at 2.4 percent in the 1960s in developing regions.

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her
by Rowland White and Richard Truly
Published 18 Apr 2016

The space station was to be named Freedom, and the Shuttle, as first laid out by Nixon’s 1969 Space Task Group, would be both the means of its construction and its connection with Earth on completion. Ultimately, plans to build Freedom were to falter before eventually evolving into the International Space Station following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Until then, the orbiter itself, the last great achievement of NASA’s Apollo generation, would serve as a means through which we learned to live and work in space. With each new mission, the growing Shuttle fleet—three-strong with the addition of Discovery in the summer of 1984, and joined by Atlantis the following year—grew into the role, expanding the range of jobs they could perform, from, with Spacelab on board, mini space station through satellite launch, repair and retrieval to early on-orbit construction.

Investment: A History
by Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing
Published 19 Feb 2016

By the 1980s, financial freedom of flows was finally at or above the level it had reached almost a century earlier.108 Furthermore, new stock exchanges opened around the world, including New Delhi in 1947, Dhaka and Busan in the 1950s, Lagos and Tunis in the 1960s, Bangkok in 1974, and Kuwait and Istanbul in the 1980s.109 Countries in Eastern Europe that had closed their exchanges in the 1940s began to reopen them after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For example, the stock exchange in Budapest reopened in 1990, and Warsaw’s reopened in 1991. Even Shanghai reopened its stock exchange in 1990.110 Capital markets vary from country to country with respect to form and performance, suggesting that there is no single path to securitization and to the emergence of a public capital market.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

At the Hmawbi Township bottling plant, twenty-five hundred people were immediately employed, with twenty-two thousand more being employed in distribution to over 100,000 vendors across the vast and rugged country. The company’s CEO, Muhtar Kent, compares Coke’s return to Myanmar after sixty years to the fall of the Berlin Wall.*2 A world of competitive connectivity makes a mockery of sanctions only genuinely backed by one power. Recent experience in Iran and North Korea demonstrates how difficult it will be to isolate countries: Even when the American sanctions noose was at its tightest, dozens of countries and companies from oil traders to banks continued to do large business with these so-called rogue states.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 1 Jan 2004

One central pillar of neoliberal policies is privatization, which, when not adopted by states of their own accord is often dictated by supranational economic organizations, such as the IMF. In certain periods of history privatization has become a kind of feeding frenzy, as it did after the long period of the French Revolution, between the reigns of Louis Philippe and Louis Bonaparte; or after the crisis of the welfare state in Europe in the 1970s; or again after the fall of the Berlin wall, when the old state apparatchiks of the Soviet bloc were reborn as capitalist oligarchs. Today, privatization often involves selling state-run businesses and industries to private hands, but it also involves expanding the realm of property itself. We saw earlier how traditional knowledges, seeds, and even genetic material have increasingly become objects of ownership.

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House
by Ben Rhodes
Published 4 Jun 2018

Journalists who moved from one protest to another called me—not to seek comment, but to share stories, as they were experiencing their first glimmer of hopefulness in a war-torn Middle East and wanted to talk about it. Experts sent us papers trying to place the unfolding events in the Arab world in historical context: Was this analogous to the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the nations of Eastern Europe transitioned to democracy like flowers blooming; or was this like Hungary in 1956, or Tiananmen Square in 1989, popular movements that would be trampled by strongmen? I’d lie awake in bed, my mind racing. A few weeks ago, it seemed that helping to pass the New START treaty was the biggest thing I’d be a part of in government; now, every statement we made, every meeting I was in, every decision Obama had to make, felt like the most important thing I’d ever been a part of—and I wanted us to do something, to shape events instead of observing them.

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
by Thomas Rid

Four days later, on October 30, 1987, the main Soviet government newspaper, Izvestia, carried an article by two Soviet scientists who officially distanced the Soviet Academy of Sciences from the accusations that AIDS was U.S.-made, and even protested the appearance of Soviet articles claiming the opposite.45 DENVER was officially over, but the disinformation work continued in secret. As late as September 1989, just weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Department X argued in an internal meeting that the peak of the AIDS disinformation campaign had not yet been achieved.46 The X was right. Jakob Segal continued to spread the AIDS-was-made-in-the-USA theory until his death in 1995—the X and Service A had ceased to exist, but the academic remained a committed conspiracy activist.

The Rough Guide to Brussels 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)
by Dunford, Martin.; Lee, Phil; Summer, Suzy.; Dal Molin, Loik
Published 26 Jul 2010

Métro Botanique or Rogier. Mini-Europe blvd du Centenaire 20 T02 478 05 50, Wwww.minieurope.com. Mini-Europe is pure tack, but children love it. All the historic European sights are reproduced in miniature – there are three hundred in all – and you can even re-enact the eruption of Vesuvius and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fireworks displays are held on Sat at 10.30pm during July and Aug. Adults €12.40, children €9.40; a combination ticket for Mini-Europe and Océade (see p.239) costs €23.50 for adults and €17.50 for children. Open mid-March– June & Sept daily 9.30am–6pm; July & Aug 9am–8pm; mid-July to mid-Aug Sat till midnight; Sept 9.30am–6pm; Oct–early Jan 10am–6pm.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
by Peter Warren Singer
Published 1 Jan 2003

The costs for the refueling contract alone is expected to run more than $15 billion.39 Also in the works is the privatization of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (the British equivalent of the American DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is in charge of the development and assessment of military technology.40 The Blair government has even floated the idea of privatizing future troop donations to UN peacekeeping missions.41 The Former Soviet Union and the Middle East To the east, an explosion of private military activity has accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall. The deterioration of order in post-Soviet Russia provides a dramatic illustration.42 Besides the nearly 150,000 employees of private security firms that operate inside Russia, several new companies have ventured onto the international market to provide military expertise for hire. This has resulted in thousands of ex-Soviet soldiers working in the PMF field.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

In order to save ourselves from both anarchic forms of globalization, such as war and terrorism, and monopolistic forms, such as multinational corporations, we need global democratic bodies that work, bodies capable of addressing the global challenges we confront in an ever more interdependent world. In the centuries of conflict that have defined the world from the Congress of Vienna to the defeat of the Axis Powers and the writing of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the Treaty of Versailles to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of a bipolar world, nation-states have made little progress toward global governance. Too inclined by their nature to rivalry and mutual exclusion, they seem quintessentially indisposed to cooperation and incapable of establishing global common goods. Moreover, democracy is locked in their tight embrace, and there seems little chance either for democratizing globalization or for globalizing democracy as long as its flourishing depends on rival sovereign nations.

Daemon
by Daniel Suarez
Published 1 Dec 2006

“How is it you speak English so well? You sound like you’re from Ohio.” “My father worked with the Russian consulate here in D.C. during the Cold War.” Ross pointed toward the Potomac. “I grew up in Fairfax.” Merritt kept shaking his head—but then, he didn’t know what to believe. Ross grew somber. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were recalled to Russia. My father was murdered by Communist hard-liners in the 1992 coup attempt.” Merritt searched for signs of dissembling—rapid facial movements, fluttering of the eyes. Ross displayed only a wistful calm. A melancholy. In a few moments Ross brightened. “Well, that was a long time ago.”

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” Planck wrote shortly before his death in 1947, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”26 Having witnessed a few different sorts of revolutions during my life—from the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe to the rise of LGBTQ rights in the United States to the strengthening of national gun laws in Australia and New Zealand—I can vouch for these insights. People can change their minds about things. Compassion and common sense can move nations. And yes, the market of ideas has certainly had an impact on the way we vote when it comes to issues such as civil rights, animal rights, the ways we treat the sick and people with special needs, and death with dignity.

From Peoples into Nations
by John Connelly
Published 11 Nov 2019

East Germans without such connections, or without positions permitting them to obtain Western currency, often felt second-class, betrayed by socialism, and unable to keep up. Even the keepers of orthodoxy were not immune to the draw of Western products, though restrictions applied. In keeping with the maxims of the class struggle, the Politburo was chauffeured in Volvos and not Mercedes sedans. Sweden, after all, was neutral. What struck people after the fall of the Berlin Wall was how unostentatiously these leaders lived, in solid but unglamorous two-story family houses, with printed art on the walls, mass-produced china, cutlery, and furniture; washing machines and refrigerators from state socialist production, but color televisions from the West.73 Politburo members had access to fresh fruit and Western toothpaste and never had to wait in line.

…

Guided by the local sense of propriety that had made the negotiated revolution possible, voters swept the party from power, in the March and August 1990 elections, to the parliament and the presidency, respectively.20 A new government was constituted by the Hungarian Democratic Forum, supported by 43 percent of the vote, in league with other center-right parties (Alliance of Free Democrats), who attained 24 percent. Hungary, Poland, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall Without Mikhail Gorbachev’s conviction that socialism needed democracy, there would have been no revolutions in East Central Europe in 1989. But beyond Poland and Hungary, Communist leaders considered his ideas anathema, and therefore without the Hungarian and Polish reformers, perhaps Leninism would live on in Europe to this day.

Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 9 Mar 2000

This fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class. We need to look more concretely at the form of the struggles in which this new proletariat expresses its desires and needs. In the last half-century, and in particular in the two decades that stretched from 1968 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the restructuring and global 54 T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T expansion ofcapitalist production have been accompanied by a transformation ofproletarian struggles. As we said, the figure ofan international cycle ofstruggles based on the communication and translation ofthe common desires oflabor in revolt seems no longer to exist.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Published 20 Mar 2012

Just think of Nogales. What separates the two parts is not climate, geography, or disease environment, but the U.S.-Mexico border. If the geography hypothesis cannot explain differences between the north and south of Nogales, or North and South Korea, or those between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, could it still be a useful theory for explaining differences between North and South America? Between Europe and Africa? Simply, no. History illustrates that there is no simple or enduring connection between climate or geography and economic success. For instance, it is not true that the tropics have always been poorer than temperate latitudes.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

Like the Great Depression, it might have been expected to produce a backlash against those seen as irresponsible profiteers, resulting in more government intervention and a fairer tax system. Joseph Stiglitz, the liberal economist, described the 2008 financial meltdown as the equivalent for free-market advocates to the fall of the Berlin Wall for Communists. Even the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Washington’s free-market wise man nonpareil, admitted that he’d been wrong in thinking Adam Smith’s invisible hand would save business from its own self-destruction. Potentially, the disaster was a “teachable moment” from which the country’s economic conservatives could learn.

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas
by Markus K. Brunnermeier , Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau
Published 3 Aug 2016

After the terrorist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015, Merkel rushed to demonstrate solidarity with France, and Hollande continued to support Merkel over the refugee crisis, even though his stance attracted the opprobrium of the French nationalist right. After the flaring up of the refugee crisis, Hollande and Merkel made a joint appearance before the European Parliament, the first such occasion since Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand had spoken in the dramatic circumstances after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hollande said that “more Europe” was needed. And Merkel explained, “We must not fall prey to an inclination to want to act nationally on these matters. We must, to the contrary, act together.”5 Brexit Referendum There is an additional issue, perhaps an even more fundamental European crisis, that is highlighted by the polarization in French politics but also the Brexit vote in June 2016.

The Future of War
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 9 Oct 2017

The 1985 version spoke of an ‘unceasing introduction of new nuclear and conventional Soviet military capabilities’. The secretary of defense’s preface opened with a quote from a NATO document referring to the Warsaw Pact’s emphasis on ‘the element of surprise and the necessity of rapid offensive operations’.32 The September 1990 edition published after the fall of the Berlin Wall acknowledged the changes underway and the greater openness shown in Moscow when discussing the problems posed by its excessively large military establishment. Yet it still insisted that it would be wrong to conclude, ‘no matter how much we might wish it’, that this was ‘an eviscerated force structure and an evaporating threat’.33 It was hard to accept that the USSR might one day do what ‘other declining powers have been impelled to do in history: that is, retreat from an empire it could neither afford to support nor hope to control over the longer term’.34 A National Intelligence Estimate of May 1988 noted how Gorbachev’s policies had ‘increased the potential for instability in Eastern Europe,’ but offered comparatively mild scenarios as its outliers, certainly compared with what was to come.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
by Annie Jacobsen
Published 14 Sep 2015

“It wasn’t so clear the [Soviet leaders] weren’t going to re-form,” remembers Dr. Craig Fields, DARPA’s director at the time. “There was a lot of anxiety about the fact that they might re-form.” The two nations had been moving toward normalized relations, but for the Pentagon this was a time of great instability. While the world rejoiced over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Defense Department had been coping with a myriad of national security unknowns. Would a unified Germany join NATO? How to handle troop reductions throughout Europe? What about all the nuclear weapons the Soviets possessed? The Soviet Union had spent the past five decades building up its weapons of mass destruction, in a shoulder-to-shoulder arms race with the United States.

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq
by Peter R. Mansoor , Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan
Published 31 Aug 2009

My first two commands—the “Maulers” of M Company, 3rd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment—both had been good units, but neither had faced combat under my command. This experience would be vastly different. After I received the brigade’s colors from Major General Robinson, my speech was short and to the point. I tried to place the brigade in historical perspective. “We live in extraordinary times,” I began. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, American soldiers have overthrown oppressive regimes in Panama, Haiti, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Iraq.” As the 1st Armored Division had served honorably during combat operations in World War II and the Gulf War and more recently during peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, we too would do our duty.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Thus, writes Johnson, “one could use the Internet directly to improve people’s lives, but also learn from the way the Internet had been organized, and apply those principles to help improve the way city governments worked, or school systems taught students.” Not surprisingly, he believes that in their political significance, major developments in Internet history are comparable to, say, the French Revolution or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hence, “the creation of ARPANET and TCP/IP . . . should also be seen as milestones in the history of political philosophy.” To Hobbes and Rawls, now we must add ARPANET and TCP/IP. Why? Well, Johnson believes that sites like Wikipedia and Kickstarter, a popular fund-raising platform for aspiring artists and geeks, work because they embed the decentralizing spirit of “the Internet”—the same spirit that runs through and regulates its physical networks.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

But Germany has also pushed reform in many other ways: It has a core of medium-size industrial companies known as the Mittelstand, whose family owners are known for thinking in the long term, and they have made smart strategic use of the abundant supply of cheap, well-educated labor that opened up to them after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many have invested in new factories in Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as in the United States and China, effectively exporting the German industrial model. 2010 was the first year in which German car companies made more cars abroad than at home, helping to forge what is arguably the leading global industrial power.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

The experts also said that Donald Trump wasn’t going to win and that the British people would not vote for Brexit. My friend Sir Steve Smith, who is the excellent vice-chancellor of Exeter University, whose field is international relations, told me with economists failing to spot the Great Recession there were similarities in that experts in his field failed to spot the fall of the Berlin Wall! The experts did miss the big one though. Why did no one see this coming? They were working on something else. CHAPTER 7 Sniffing the Air and Spotting the Great Recession Today, the economist who wanders into a village to get a deeper sense of what the data reveals is a rare creature.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

Bishop Auckland’s predicament in the 1980s was soon emblematic of hundreds if not thousands of towns across regions of the United States. Left to their own devices, without targeted and sustained state intervention, they simply could not adapt and modernize. They ended up as permanent losers, not winners, in the new economy, and in a state of perpetual decay. Initially in the United States, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and then the collapse of the USSR in 1991, there was no sense that America too was in postindustrial decline. The idea that the West had won the Cold War and capitalism had prevailed over communism deflected attention from the troubles of America’s old manufacturing centers and their displaced workers.

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
by Robin Wright
Published 28 Feb 2008

They are as ready for change and democracy as Eastern Europe was in the 1980s and as Latin America was in the 1970s. History is moving. The moment is ours.” That’s the good news. The so-called “Arab spring” of 2005, which offered greater promise than at any time since most countries gained independence, did not endure. It did not set off the toppling dominoes of regional change, as the fall of the Berlin Wall did in Eastern Europe. For much of the Middle East, the challenge of change is today tougher than anywhere else in the world. The Middle East, concluded a United Nations survey in 2005, faces an “acute deficit of freedom and good governance.” Most Arabs live in a “black hole…in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes.”7 The region has the largest proportion of ruling monarchies (eight) and family political dynasties (four) in the world.* The dangers of change are also already visible.

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World
by Sinclair McKay
Published 22 Aug 2022

By the 1960s he had become Ken Adam, the hugely talented film production designer for the James Bond films, among others. He brought some Weimar architectural inspiration to those fantastical sets: using concrete, glass and fascinating angles, he created a world of heroes and villains that aesthetically would have been recognized in the Bauhaus. Years later, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sir Ken Adam returned to the city; there was, quite recently, a special film-museum exhibition focusing on his work. There had also been a brief period before 1933 when Berlin offered solace to those who had been through trauma. This was the case for the orphaned Eric Hobsbawm, who had to leave Vienna, the city of his birth, with his sister.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

The ability of people from different cultural backgrounds to inspire each other is one of the most attractive features of diverse societies. While genuine injustices motivate the opponents of cultural appropriation, we should proudly defend the joys of mutual cultural influence. Chapter 10 SPEAK FREELY When I first set foot in Sopron, a city in western Hungary that has enjoyed enormous economic growth since the fall of the Berlin Wall, I marveled at the beauty of its round churches and cobblestoned streets. The spruced-up town looked like a shining example of the successful transition from communism to democracy. Then I started approaching passersby to ask what they thought of their government. When they saw the BBC logo on my microphone—I was traveling through four countries in Central Europe for a radio documentary—most refused to talk to me.

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 9 Jun 2010

Presented at the Second Annual Research Conference, International Monetary Fund (Mundell-Fleming Lecture), November 30, 2001, revised January 22, 2002. Given that Dornbusch represented a minority view, Soros was not attacking a straw man. On the other hand, other hedge-fund managers were won over to Soros’s view. As described in chapter seven, Stanley Druckenmiller found Soros’s view of currencies valuable after the fall of the Berlin wall. See Jack D. Schwager, The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 203. 18. Soros also argued that economists tended to exaggerate the extent to which shifts in interest rates would help to drive currencies to equilibrium. If the United States ran a trade deficit, this implied a relatively low demand for investment capital and hence low interest rates; speculators would shift money out of dollars to currencies that yielded more, so weakening the dollar and helping to reduce the trade deficit.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

Not very long ago, the world was divided into three blocs: the First World, the rich democratic nations of Europe, North America, and Japan; the Second World, the Communist nations, including the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, where the government directly controlled most of the economy; and the Third World, a collection of wildly different nations with only one fundamental thing in common—poverty. Despite some small local success stories, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, it looked like the world would forever stay split among the rich; the regimented and poor; and the very poor indeed. The world has changed enormously for the better in the generation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead of a world split eternally between rich and poor, we’ve entered the era of the great global middle. Most of the world today is at least middle class by the standards of the twentieth century. There has been an extraordinary surge of wealth, unparalleled in human history. China, India, and most recently, nations in Africa have been the primary beneficiaries of this incredible economic expansion, but the United States has benefitted as well—not only through cheaper prices, which is the standard economic explanation, but also through new labor markets, increased cultural contact, and the gradual easing of the threat of global war.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

See also investment banks Iania, Leonardo, 126 IBM, 244 Icahn, Carl, 137, 146 Iceland, 279, 345 collapse of banking system, 275 stock market, 84 Ideal Husband, The, 53 IFIL Investments, 222 Ikebe, Yukiko, 40 illiquid markets, 287 Immelt, Jeffrey, 63, 344 imports from China, 85 income, annuities, 70 increase in borrowing levels, 265-268 incubators, 247, 254 independent contracting, 181 indexed gold put options (IGPOs), 216 India, 22 gold in, 27 rupees, 21-22 individual retirement accounts (IRAs), 48 industrialization, 38 inflation, 49, 145 after fall of the Berlin Wall, 101 effect on conglomerates, 60 hyperinflation, 22 in Zimbabwe, 22 information asymmetries in securitization, 271 determining from noise, 125-127 transparency, 283 infrastructure, 124 innovation, 77 innovative debt structures. See debt Inside Job, The, 316, 353 insolvency, 280 Institute of Theoretical Physics (Copenhagen, Denmark), 101 insurance bonds, 176 life, securitization of, 178 prices, 209.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
Published 26 Sep 2006

In 1990, however, when the Cold War had just ended, he found himself on a squad devoted to Middle Eastern terrorism. There was little in his background that prepared him for this new turn—but that was true of the bureau as a whole, which regarded terrorism as a nuisance, not a real threat. It was difficult to believe, in those cloudless days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that America had any real enemies still standing. Then, in August 1996, bin Laden declared war on America from a cave in Afghanistan. The stated cause was the continued presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia five years after the first Gulf War. “Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation,” he stated.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer , Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
Published 19 Sep 2016

In 1963, the NSA station began operating in newly constructed buildings at the top of Teufelsberg, its satellite antennae positioned in prime hilltop spots concealed by the canvas-covered spheres. The station became a key surveillance station for American and British intelligence officers studying the goings-on in East Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the station was abandoned. In 1996 the site was sold to property developers Hartmut Gruhl and Hanfried Schütte, who envisioned a bold transformation involving luxury apartments, a hotel, and a restaurant. Those plans, however, have not materialized. The former NSA station is still at Teufelsberg, and has attracted artists looking to make their mark on its abandoned walls and, eventually, establish an official residency.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

No distinction is made between hegemony and domination as in approaches of Gramscian inspiration.11 The promises of neoliberalism are revealed for what they were: a sham. An ideology that seduced most of the population is broken. The psychic and political consequences are incalculable.12 The fall of Wall Street is to neo-liberalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism.13 This naturalization of market logic (or “values,” to use Massimo de Angelis’s language) was nothing more than a spell. This spell was broken in 2008, a year after The Beginning of History was published. The point of all this: When I argue that we now live in a postneoliberal world, I do not mean that its practices or program have ceased (Ireland, Greece, and Portugal make it loud and clear that it’s alive and kicking), but that the narrative of the market’s universality is no longer unchallenged.

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order
by Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright
Published 23 Aug 2021

THE GLOBAL DEMOCRATIC RECESSION In 1991, the late Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the phrase “the third wave” to describe a surge of political liberalization and democratic governance across the globe that started in the 1970s and 1980s and accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union two years later. According to Huntington, the first wave involved the gradual spread of democracy in the nineteenth century, and the second occurred in the decades after World War II. Each wave was followed by reversals, with some countries slipping back into autocracy.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

But some of its affiliate national networks helped trigger and feed nationwide public debates. One inÂ�terÂ�estÂ�ing case is Germany, where Â�there had been some modest interest in basic-income ideas in the 1980s, in parÂ�ticÂ�uÂ�lar among Â�people close to the incipient green movement. However, the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany (in October 1990) created such a daunting challenge for the German welfare state that the discussion about basic income and related ideas practically disÂ�appeared for many years.136 It was spectacularly revived as a reaction to the so-Â�called “Agenda 2010,” also known as “Hartz IV,” the profound reform of the German welfare state finalized in 2005 by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s coÂ�aliÂ�tion of social democrats and greens.

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth
by Frederick Kempe
Published 30 Apr 2011

*Thurow himself escaped to the West on February 21, 1962. As a deserter he thereafter was hounded by State Security; he evaded one confirmed order to murder him and at least one effort to kidnap him. *Schumann later settled in Bavaria in West Germany, where he met his wife. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he said, “Only since 9 November 1989 [the date of the fall] have I felt truly free.” Still, he continued to suffer tensions with former colleagues and family in Saxony. On June 20, 1998, suffering from depression, he committed suicide, hanging himself in an orchard. *At the request of the former student, this book does not use his real last name.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

Labuda, Damian, Lefebvre, Jean-Francois, Nadeau, Philippe, and Roy-Gagnon, Marie-Hélène. 2010. “Female-to-male breeding ratio in modern humans—an analysis based on historical recombinations.” American Journal of Human Genetics 86: 353–363. Lakner, Christoph, and Milanovic, Branko. 2013. “Global income distribution: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6719. Larrimore, Jeff. 2014. “Accounting for United States household income inequality trends: the changing importance of household structure and male and female labor earnings inequality.” Review of Income and Wealth 60: 683–701.

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation
by Blake J. Harris
Published 12 May 2014

“The entire marketing program,” Nilsen said, “is designed to build awareness for Sonic 2sday, the street date of Sonic 2.” “And on that date,” Schroeder explained, “the game won’t just be available at retail in the U.S., but also in Europe, Japan, Australia, and the rest of the world!” “Yup,” Nilsen confirmed. “We’re working to make Sonic 2sday the biggest international event since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” To someone outside this room, the idea of a coordinated worldwide release might have seemed interesting but irrelevant. But the point of a global launch wasn’t to dazzle with concept; the point was that the concept created connection. Normally, with games released at different stores on different days, customers couldn’t help but feel like these things sort of fell out of thin air.

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017
by Ian Black
Published 2 Nov 2017

It has opened new vistas, new sets of words, new horizons, new realities. It has made it possible to believe that justice may yet be achieved.’ Raja Shehadeh1 GULF OF MISUNDERSTANDING Not for the first time, at the start of the 1990s Palestinians found themselves victims of larger geopolitical developments in the Middle East and far beyond. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions in Eastern Europe, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the US-led coalition to liberate the Gulf state, Yasser Arafat’s embrace of Saddam Hussein and the flurry of diplomacy that followed the war, all influenced the conflict with Israel. The PLO was especially alarmed at the lifting of the last Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration, which provided a powerful reaffirmation of Israel’s Zionist raison d’être and a new stream of immigrants who were welcomed in that spirit.

The Rough Guide to Paris
by Rough Guides
Published 1 May 2023

The west wing In the west wing, the gloomy old refectory and modernized arsenal building have been filled with a staggering array of weaponry and armour, from Bronze Age spearheads and Iron Age helmets to medieval and Renaissance pieces – including the extraordinary mail made for François I, a big man for his time – and some beautifully worked swords from China and Japan. Perhaps the most affecting galleries, however, cover the world wars and their aftermath, beginning with Prussia’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Events are documented through imaginatively displayed memorabilia combined with stirring contemporary newsreels, most of which have an English-language option. The simplest artefacts – a rag doll found on a battlefield, plaster casts of mutilated faces, an overcoat caked in mud from the trenches – tell a stirring human story, while un-narrated footage, from the Somme, Dunkirk and a bomb attack on a small French town, flicker across bare walls in grim silence.

The Rough Guide to Korea
by Rough Guides
Published 24 Sep 2018

Udo by bike There are few more enjoyable activities in all Korea than gunning around this tiny island’s narrow lanes on a scooter. Seogwipo Flanked by waterfalls, Jeju’s second-largest city is a relaxed base for tours of the sunny southern coast. Teddy Bear Museum The moon landings and the fall of the Berlin Wall are just some of the events to be given teddy treatment at this shrine to high kitsch. Yakcheonsa Turn up for the evening service at this remote temple for one of Jeju’s most magical experiences. Hallasan Korea’s highest point at 1950m, this mountain dominates the island and just begs to be climbed.

The Defence of the Realm
by Christopher Andrew
Published 2 Aug 2010

The Thatcher government, however, was not yet ready to follow the example of its intelligence allies.57 Section F After the Cold War 1 The Transformation of the Security Service What made the greatest impression on many, perhaps most, MI5 staff in the final months of 1989 was not the secret intelligence to which they had access but the images on television news of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid, unexpectedly peaceful collapse of the Communist one-party regimes of Eastern and Central Europe. The Security Service, like all Western governments and intelligence agencies, was caught off guard. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union transformed the priorities of the Security Service.

…

By the end of the decade, however, MI5 had come to terms with its new role; the Belfast station was wholly funded and mainly staffed by the Security Service. The IJS was wound up in 1984.27 At the beginning of 1989 Security Service staff had no more idea than the rest of the British people that before the end of the year they would see on their television screens the fall of the Berlin Wall and other unforgettable images of the collapse of Communist rule. The end of the Soviet era (finally concluded with the disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later) was almost as unexpected as its beginning almost three-quarters of a century before. Like the Bolshevik Revolution, it transformed MI5 objectives in ways no one had foreseen.

A Fraction of the Whole
by Steve Toltz
Published 12 Feb 2008

No directions were necessary, though; a real cavalcade of vehicles and bodies was surging through the streets in one direction: police cars, ambulances, fire engines, army Jeeps, media trucks, ice cream vans, spectators, gardeners, rabbis, anyone in Sydney who owned a radio and wanted to take part in a historical event. Everyone wants a ringside seat for history in the making. Who'd turn down the opportunity to watch the back of Kennedy's head explode if given a ticket to Dallas in '63, or the falling of the Berlin Wall? People who were there speak as if their clothes were stained with JFK's cerebrum, as if the Berlin Wall fell from their own persistent nudging. No one wants to have missed anything, like sneezing during a small earthquake and wondering why everyone is screaming. The capture and possible killing of Terry Dean was Australia's biggest earthquake in fifty years, which is why they got to that bowling alley any way they could.

Understanding Power
by Noam Chomsky
Published 26 Jul 2010

Incidentally, one of the nice things about the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union is that top-level American planners are finally becoming a bit more honest about some things. So for example, every year the White House puts out a big glossy document explaining to Congress why we need a huge military establishment—and for a long time it was always the same story: the Russians are coming, this-that-and-the-other-thing. Well, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they had to change the computer disk for the first time. The bottom line had to remain the same: we need a big military, a big so-called “defense” infrastructure (read: support for electronics)—but now the justification had to change. So in 1990, the reason they gave was no longer “the Russians are coming,” it was what they called “the technological sophistication of Third World powers”—especially ones in the Middle East, where they said, our problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.”

Hunger: The Oldest Problem
by Martin Caparros
Published 14 Jan 2020

* * * — In the midst of all these explanations, one—a near clone of an Adam Smith dictum—arose with a lot of strength in the eighties: If there were still hundreds of millions of hungry people, it was due to state interference in the economies of those countries that did not allow the market to do its job, to shower the people with its blessings. The idea was part of the offensive against any regulation of capitalism, which began in those years. In the nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the supposed end of history, there was no longer anything standing in its way. The story is well-known: taking advantage of the debts the poor countries had contracted with the large international banks in the seventies—when the big banks had too much liquidity and convinced the poor countries to accept loans—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank imposed neoliberal policies on them.

Cuba: An American History
by Ada Ferrer
Published 6 Sep 2021

The governor refused, so Maceo pledged to continue the war. The meeting between Maceo and the Spanish governor is well-traveled territory in Cuban history. Known as the Protest of Baraguá, it has come to represent the principle of no surrender. More than a century later, in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, billboards across the island announced that Cuba itself was an “eternal Baraguá.” As Eastern Europe surrendered to capitalism, the signs implied, Cuba would continue the fight. The billboards did not mention that despite his noble and fiery intentions, Maceo had no choice but to lay down his weapons soon after that defiant protest.

Winds of Change
by Peter Hennessy
Published 27 Aug 2019

In December 1962 Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s Secretary of State (and a considerable Anglophile), famously told the young soldiers at West Point, the premier US military academy, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’.128 (‘Always a conceited ass,’ wrote Macmillan in his diary,129 commenting later to a friend that Acheson was ‘a nice man, but a kind of American caricature of an Englishman, and always overstates his case’.130) Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl did the same some forty-seven years later at a conference to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall when, speaking of his old antagonist Margaret Thatcher in the company of Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush Senior, he declared: Thatcher says the European Parliament should have no power because Westminster cannot surrender a single bit of its sovereignty. Her ideas are pre-Churchillian.

Bosnia and Herzegovina
by Tim. Clancy
Published 15 Mar 2022

Through carefully implemented communist methodology and nationalist rhetoric Milošević secured half of the eight votes in the federal government. He controlled Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Vojvodina. In his eyes that left only the challenge of getting Macedonia on board to gain a majority and further implement constitutional change in favour of Serbian dominance. With the fall of the Berlin Wall came the unification of East and West Germany and the almost overnight collapse of the Soviet Union. Faced now with a struggling economy and the shift from a planned to a market economy, there were demands by the republics for more freedom and sovereignty from the federal government. The Serbian government attempted to block any movement towards the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer
Published 1 Jan 2010

In the early 1980s, he made the seemingly absurd forecast that a little-known project called the Arpanet would become a worldwide communications network, linking together humanity in a way previously impossible. Around the same time, he made the equally ridiculous claim that the cold war, which had just heated up with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was going to end in just a few years. The Internet and the fall of the Berlin Wall made Kurzweil look like a clairvoyant. “You’ll often hear people say that the future is inherently unpredictable and then they will put up some stupid prediction that never came to bear. But actually the parameters of it are highly predictable,” says Kurzweil. He isn’t arguing that he can see into the future exactly and his business plan isn’t to pick lottery numbers.

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Published 15 Oct 2009

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once offered to make Sidney Weinberg, Goldman’s legendary leader, ambassador to the Soviet Union. “I don’t speak Russian,” Weinberg replied in turning down the president. “Who the hell could I talk to over there?” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Goldman was among the first Western banks to try to crack its market, and three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Boris Yeltsin’s new government named the firm its banking adviser. Profits proved to be elusive, however, and Goldman pulled out of the country in 1994 but would eventually return. By 1998 it had helped the Russian government sell $1.25 billion in bonds; when, two months later, after the default, the bonds proved to be virtually worthless, the firm again withdrew.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

During the Third Wave itself, as well as during the more recent Arab Spring, ideas clearly propagated rapidly across international borders via radio, television, the Internet, and flows of activists bringing news of political upheavals elsewhere. The wave of democratic transitions occurring in sub-Saharan Africa during the early 1990s was clearly inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dramatic developments taking place in Eastern Europe shortly before. In terms of the framework built around the six dimensions of development laid out in chapter 2, theories focusing on ideas or cultural values would posit a causal relationship looking something like Figure 19. FIGURE 19.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

It’s a challenge, too, to those parts of the left that equated socialism with the authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union and its satellites (though there was always a rich tradition, particularly among anarchists, that considered Stalin’s project an abomination of core social justice principles). Because the fact is that those self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than Canadians and Australians. Which is why one of the only times the developed world has seen a precipitous emissions drop was after the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Mao Zedong, for his part, openly declared that “man must conquer nature,” setting loose a devastating onslaught on the natural world that transitioned seamlessly from clear-cuts under communism to mega-dams under capitalism.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956
by Anne Applebaum
Published 30 Oct 2012

And even when it seems as if they are in full agreement with the most absurd propaganda—even if they are marching in parades, chanting slogans, singing that the party is always right—the spell can suddenly, unexpectedly, dramatically be broken. EPILOGUE And so it was necessary to teach people not to think and make judgments, to compel them to see the nonexistent, and to argue the opposite of what was obvious to everyone … —Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago FOR MORE THAN thirty years, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the communist leaders of Eastern Europe kept asking themselves the same questions they had posed after Stalin’s death. Why did the system produce such poor economic results? Why was the propaganda unconvincing? What was the source of continuing dissent, and what was the best way to quash it?

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
by Steve Coll
Published 29 Mar 2009

Turki has described the matter differently than Clarke, however; he has said that Osama “came to see me with a proposal” to foment rebellion in South Yemen, and that “I advised him at the time that that was not an acceptable idea.”9 Whatever the truth, the geopolitical equation changed during the first six months of 1990 in a way that led Riyadh to renounce support for violent rebellion in Yemen. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to Yemen’s peaceful reunification and the formal end of the South Yemen state. On May 22, 1990, Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of a united Yemen; as part of the bargain, he tried to co-opt and calm Islamist groups that had previously waged jihad. Osama and other radicals, however, did not see the virtue in this deal, or in a national government that incorporated former communists, and they persisted with their preaching and organizing.

Lonely Planet Eastern Europe
by Lonely Planet , Mark Baker , Tamara Sheward , Anita Isalska , Hugh McNaughtan , Lorna Parkes , Greg Bloom , Marc Di Duca , Peter Dragicevich , Tom Masters , Leonid Ragozin , Tim Richards and Simon Richmond
Published 30 Sep 2017

May An excellent time to visit Eastern Europe, May is sunny and warm and full of things to do, but never too hot or crowded. Big destinations feel busy, though hiking areas and villages remain quiet. zInternational Labour Day, Russia Bigger than Christmas back in communist times, International Labour Day (1 May) may have dropped in status since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it's still a national holiday in Russia and several other former Soviet republics. You'll find fireworks, concerts and even military parades. 6Czech Beer Festival, Czech Republic An event most travellers won't want to miss is the Czech Beer Festival (www.ceskypivnifestival.cz), where lots of food, music and – most importantly – over 150 beers from around the country are on offer in Prague from mid- to late May. 3Prague Spring & Fringe, Czech Republic Three-week international music festival Prague Spring is the most prestigious event in the Czech capital's cultural calendar, with concerts held in an array of venues.

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State
by Paul Tucker
Published 21 Apr 2018

Hence, it is not complete fantasy to see our democracies as flirting with a peculiar cocktail of hyper-depoliticized technocracy and hyper-politicized populism, each fueling the other in attempts, respectively, to maintain effective government and to reestablish majoritarian sensibility.4 This conjuncture of politics and economics might conceivably end up challenging the basic structures and values of liberal democracy, the dominant model of collective governance since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That system combines liberalism—broadly, constitutionally constrained government under the rule of law—with representative democracy via some form of free and fair elections. In the years following the demise of the Soviet Empire, there have been growing concerns about illiberal democracies, which elect their governments but pay no more than lip service to minority and individual freedoms.

The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War
by Giles Tremlett
Published 14 Oct 2020

‘The German-speaking units of the International Brigades represented the nucleus of the armed forces of the future GDR,’ the country would eventually certify.48 Considering that there were barely more than a thousand veterans in East Germany, their importance is outstanding.49 Some German Brigaders became notorious oppressors, with veterans providing more than a dozen senior members of the feared Stasi secret police, while a hundred more joined the ranks of various police forces.50 The infamous Stasi, indeed, was founded by Wilhelm Zaisser (aka General Gómez) with the help of Brigader Karl Heinz Hoffmann. The 85,000-strong Stasi ‘People’s Police’ force and its network of 175,000 informers was led by Brigade veterans for all but four years until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By that time it had become East Germany’s most notorious and hated tool of state repression. Erich Mielke, its head for thirty-two years and a veteran of the Brigades’ internal security services, became known as ‘the Master of Fear’. He was the ruthless architect of what one writer called ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’, which held files on millions of citizens.51 When the Berlin Wall finally fell, much of the popular hatred against the communist regime was channelled directly at him.

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick
Published 3 Aug 2020

On the “Kennan Sweepstakes” and the development of “democratic enlargement,” see Douglas Brinkley, “Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine,” Foreign Policy (Spring 1997), 111–27. See also chapter 3 in Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11: The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), especially at 65–71. 2. On grand strategy, see, e.g., Hal Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); idem., American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018); John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy (New York: Penguin Press, 2018); Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy,’” International Security 27 (2018). 3.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
by Graham Farmelo
Published 24 Aug 2009

After railing at Halpern for an entire morning, she would spend the afternoon trying to sweet-talk Florida State officials into giving him a permanent position in the physics department.38 She behaved no more consistently towards her brother Eugene, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease: in public, she adored him but in private she described him witheringly as ‘a third-rate physicist’.39 On the telephone, she argued with him for hours about family matters, haranguing him for his politics and for associating with ‘the Moonies’. On New Year’s Day 1995, she called Leon and Ellen Lederman hours after Wigner’s death, and said to each of them in turn: ‘Thank God the monster is dead.’40 Even in her ninth and tenth decades, Manci kept abreast of the news. In late 1989, she was jubilant when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet-backed Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party abdicated its monopoly power and agreed to free elections. Soon afterwards, during the presidency of George Bush Senior, she considered applying for American citizenship so that she could vote against him if he stood for re-election. Delighted when Bill Clinton first won the presidency, in late 1995 she wrote supportively to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who sent a courteous reply on White House notepaper (‘Dear Ms Dirac […]’).41 No letter ever gave Manci more pleasure.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Published 30 Apr 2012

Its profit performance proved far more consistent and durable than that of other great corporate behemoths of America’s postwar boom, such as General Motors, United States Steel, and I.B.M. In 1959, Exxon ranked as the second-largest American corporation by revenue and profit; four decades later it was third. And more than any of its corporate peers, Exxon’s trajectory now pointed straight up. The corporation’s revenues would grow fourfold during the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its profits would smash all American records. As it expanded, Exxon refined its own foreign, security, and economic policies. In some of the faraway countries where it did business, because of the scale of its investments, Exxon’s sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy.

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War
by Norman Stone
Published 15 Feb 2010

There is a counterpart in economics, where the ‘supplysiders’ of the early eighties had been widely dismissed, with derision, and had then turned out to be right, in so far as economics is about prosperity. In 1991 there was much triumphalism on the Right, the more so as, by a quirk of history, the fall of the Berlin Wall more or less coincided with the fiftieth anniversaries of the Marshall Plan and NATO or, for that matter, of the German Federal Republic itself (celebrants of which could often only mumble a half-remembered and rather soppy version of the old national anthem). It was an Atlantic hour, a triumph of American power, soft, as exemplified by CNN, and hard, as exemplified by the IMF.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

Yet the internet freedom agenda extends beyond furthering commercial opportunities for US tech companies. It has also been a deeply ideological, value-driven political project, designed to promote democracy, freedom, and other Western values as part of a larger US foreign policy agenda in the post–Cold War era. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US’s fear was that the promise of a new era of political freedom could be compromised if the countries around the world started building new “virtual walls” to divide the world by censoring the internet and targeting dissidents online. For example, in 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton drew a comparison to the Berlin Wall and Soviet-style restrictions on press freedom, warning that with growing censorship efforts by authoritarian governments, “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.”52 The US government was determined to prevent that from happening.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety
by Eric Schlosser
Published 16 Sep 2013

Thousands of nuclear warheads still sit atop missiles belonging to the United States and Russia, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice. Hundreds more are possessed by India, China, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Great Britain, and France. As of this writing, a nuclear weapon has not destroyed a city since August 1945. But there is no guarantee that such good luck will last. The fall of the Berlin Wall now feels like ancient history. An entire generation has been raised without experiencing the dread and anxiety of the Cold War, a conflict that lasted almost half a century and threatened to annihilate mankind. This book assumes that most of its readers know little about nuclear weapons, their inner workings, or the strategic thinking that justifies their use.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
by Adam Tooze
Published 31 Jul 2018

By the late 1980s plans were afoot, driven above all by Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission, and his supporters in the French Socialist Party, for another round of negotations over monetary integration. Given the national interests at stake those would most likely have gone nowhere had it not been for the sudden end to the cold war. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s irresistible push for national reunification threatened to make Germany even more dominant. A currency union and irrevocable economic unification seemed to both Kohl and Mitterrand the best way of securing a much larger Germany in a peaceful and stable continent.3 As a price of surrendering the Deutschmark, the Germans exacted the promise that the new European Central Bank would continue the conservative heritage of the Bundesbank.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
by Max Boot
Published 9 Jan 2018

In reality, Prouty was a crank with a febrile imagination—“a complete nut,” in Rufus Phillips’s words.5 He was a “good pilot of prop-driven aircraft,” Lansdale later said, “but had such a heavy dose of paranoia about CIA when he was on my staff that I kicked him back to the Air Force.”6 Prouty would be associated after his retirement from the Air Force in 1964 with the white supremacist Liberty Lobby, the Church of Scientology, and the cult leader Lyndon LaRouche; he grandiosely compared LaRouche’s federal prosecution for conspiracy and mail fraud to the trial of Socrates. He also claimed that the fall of the Berlin Wall was stage-managed by David Rockefeller to profit from “the rubles and the gold,” that he had personally seen a UFO, and that “the Churchill gang” murdered Franklin D. Roosevelt.7 Prouty’s old boss was a favorite target of his bizarre and inventive accusations. He claimed that Lansdale had concocted the entire Huk threat—that so-called Huk attacks were actually carried out by Philippine army special forces in order to elect Ramon Magsaysay president, although he never explained why Washington would want to elect Magsaysay if there was no Huk threat.8 In a similar vein, he claimed that the members of Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission were “a band of superterrorists” who deliberately created the Vietcong by moving a million Vietnamese from the North to the South in 1954–55.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011
by Steve Coll
Published 23 Feb 2004

The CIA was also under pressure from the mujahedin’s champions in Congress because of logistical problems that had crimped the weapons pipeline to Pakistan. In addition, the civil war now raging openly between Hekmatyar and Massoud raised questions about whether the rebels could ever unite to overthrow Najibullah. The mujahedin had not captured a single provincial capital since the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The fall of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989 changed the Afghan war’s geopolitical context, making it plain that whatever danger Najibullah might represent in Kabul, he was not the vanguard of hegemonic global communism anymore. And McWilliams’s arguments about the dangers of Islamic radicalism had resonated in Washington.

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
by Gareth Stedman Jones
Published 24 Aug 2016

Likewise, the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works (MECW), published in Moscow, London and New York between 1975 and 2005 in fifty volumes, was aimed at a lay public. But since these editions were also published under Communist Party editorial control, their reliability is as limited as that of MEGA. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closure of the Institutes of Marxism–Leninism in Berlin and Moscow 1990, the continued publication of the works was entrusted to the newly established Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung in Amsterdam. For some time, the future of the project remained in doubt owing to a lack of sufficient funding.

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Updated Edition) (South End Press Classics Series)
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Apr 1999

“Withdrawal from Gaza” and other territories is understood to exclude Jewish settlements and the resources they control. And even this “permanent settlement” lies well down the road. It is understandable, then, that the Times editors, expressing the prevailing view, should see the “historic deal” as a great opportunity. It is “the Middle East equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall,” chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman proclaimed on the same day. The projected arrangements represent the “triumph of realism over fanaticism and political courage over political cowardice.” “Realists” understand that in this world, you follow U.S. orders. Those who are not convinced of the justice of traditional U.S.

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s
by Alwyn W. Turner
Published 4 Sep 2013

The European Community had once been embraced by Conservatives as a bulwark against both international communism and domestic socialism, but now that the external threat was imploding and the power of the trade unions had been curbed at home, there seemed little further need of anything save the free market, operating on as wide a basis as possible. Everything else about the EU – its aspirations to exert influence in social matters and foreign affairs, for example – was inherently suspect. The fall of the Berlin Wall allowed an instinctive patriotism to reassert itself, while the Manichean rhetoric of the Cold War era survived, to be directed now at the EU; any hint that it might seek to impede the free workings of capitalism was portrayed as socialism in disguise, a return to the bureaucratic statism of Eastern Europe.

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe
by Norman Davies
Published 27 Sep 2011

In June the world outcry against the Tiananmen Square massacre in China lessened the chances of Soviet hardliners regaining control, and the triumph of the Solidarity movement in the partial elections in Poland showed that the monolith was cracking. On 23 August 1989, 2 million people linked hands in the ‘Baltic Chain’, which stretched all the way across the Baltic States from Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. It showed that Estonians were not isolated.77 The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, regarded in the West as a world-historical event, did not make the same impact on Soviet citizens, who had still to break the bars of their cage. In 1990 and 1991 the Estonian national movement adopted the strategy of pursuing its own programme while ignoring whatever Moscow did.

Eastern USA
by Lonely Planet

Corcoran Gallery MUSEUM (www.corcoran.org; cnr 17th St & New York Ave NW; adult/child $10/free; 10am-5pm Wed-Sun, to 9pm Thu) DC’s oldest art museum, the Corcoran Gallery, has had a tough time standing up to the free, federal competition around the block, but this hasn’t stopped it from maintaining one of the most eclectic exhibitions in the country. Newseum MUSEUM (www.newseum.org; 555 Pennsylvania Ave NW; adult/child $22/13) Although you’ll have to pay up, this massive, highly interactive news museum is well worth the admission price. You can delve inside the major events of recent years (the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, Hurricane Katrina), and spend hours watching moving film footage, perusing Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs and reading moving works by journalists killed in the line of duty. WASHINGTON, DC IN… Two Days Start your DC adventure at the Mall’s much-loved Air & Space Museum and National Museum of Natural History.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

When it came to recycling municipal waste, socialist states fell behind in the 1980s; West Germans already collected more paper than their brothers and sisters across the Wall in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the collapse of socialism amounted to a major disruption in existing channels and habits of recycling. Within a couple of years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, only a hundred collection points were left in East Germany. Elsewhere back-purchase systems lost their subsidies and gave way to cheaper, privatized forms of disposal. In the Czech Republic, paper and glass collection all but collapsed. If the 1990s were golden years for recycling in the West, they were a lost decade east of the Elbe.54 Recycling had to start again from scratch.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
by Peter Baker
Published 21 Oct 2013

He was so focused on certain things, and what may be dramatic to you and I may not be dramatic to him because he was already past it. He’s already thinking ahead.” In reality, it was a small moment in Baghdad involving only a few hundred people. But the symbolic parallels to such iconic scenes as the liberation of Paris and the fall of the Berlin Wall dominated the media. CNN replayed the toppling of the statue that day on average every 7.5 minutes and Fox News every 4.4 minutes. Bush’s father sent him an e-mail praising his “conviction and determination.” It would be hard for a president not to feel a sense of satisfaction. Cheney watched in a hotel room in New Orleans, where he had flown to give a speech.

The Rough Guide to France (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Aug 2019

Musée de l’Armée Hôtel des Invalides, 51 bd de la Tour-Maubourg, 7e • Daily: April–Oct 10am–6pm; Nov–March 10am–5pm • €12 ticket also valid for Église du Dôme and Napoleon’s tomb • musee-armee.fr • La Tour-Maubourg/Varenne The vast Musée de l’Armée plots a course through French military history from the Middle Ages to the end of the Cold War. Perhaps the most affecting galleries cover the world wars and their aftermath, beginning with Prussia’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Memorabilia is combined with stirring contemporary newsreels, most of which have an English-language option. The simplest artefacts – a rag doll found on a battlefield, an overcoat caked in mud from the trenches – tell a stirring human story. The Extraordinary Cabinets in the east wing display historical figurines, artillery models and military musical instruments, while the floor above, covering the years from 1643 to 1870, has a number of intriguing Napoleon exhibits – including, somewhat surprisingly, his horse Vizir (now stuffed).

USA Travel Guide
by Lonely, Planet

Corcoran Gallery MUSEUM Offline map Google map (www.corcoran.org; cnr 17th St & New York Ave NW; adult/child $10/free; 10am-5pm Wed-Sun, to 9pm Thu) DC’s oldest art museum, the Corcoran Gallery, has had a tough time standing up to the free, federal competition around the block, but this hasn’t stopped it from maintaining one of the most eclectic exhibitions in the country. Newseum MUSEUM Offline map Google map (www.newseum.org; 555 Pennsylvania Ave NW; adult/child $22/13) Although you’ll have to pay up, this massive, highly interactive news museum is well worth the admission price. You can delve inside the major events of recent years (the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, Hurricane Katrina), and spend hours watching moving film footage, perusing Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs and reading moving works by journalists killed in the line of duty. WASHINGTON, DC IN… Two Days Start your DC adventure at the Mall’s much-loved Air & Space Museum and National Museum of Natural History .