We won the Cold War – and then lost our way

It would have been easy enough to imagine the 25th anniversary of the Eastern European revolutions being marked with a conference on liberty held in honour of Lady Thatcher — a conference which was held this week. But that is just about the only thing which could possibly have been foreseen from the vantage point of a quarter of a century ago. Who could have predicted then that the stream of Eastern European migrants flooding westwards in the hope of a better life, so welcomed then in their Trabants, would come to be seen so negatively that the desire to keep them out caused the rise of a fourth party in British politics?

Even harder to foresee from the month of Tiananmen Square was the economic rise of China. In 1989 the rules of politics and economics seemed simple: freedom equalled economic success and dictatorship stagnation. No one imagined that a still-communist China — albeit a less malign one than 25 years ago — could so quickly become the world’s second largest economy, while a post-communist Russia would remain in the doldrums, a hotbed of corruption.