Despite Bright Hopes of the 1990s, Fall of Berlin Wall Fails To Usher in Global Era of Wider Freedom
In the 1990s, there was reason to hope that Russia was moving toward democracy and that China, despite the Tiananmen Square massacre, would move away from repression and toward convergence with rules-based market economies.
As one who shared the hope, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, that representative government, guaranteed liberties, and global capitalism laced with some measure of welfare state protections would spread across the globe, I naturally look back over the intervening long generation and ask what went wrong.
In the 1990s, it seemed to many that the vision of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” would prevail. Not that bad things would never happen again. Mr. Fukuyama’s more subtle thesis was that after the debacle of communism, there was no intellectually viable alternative to some combination of political democracy and market capitalism as the means to a decent society.
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