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.
But hardest of all to foresee was the domination in world affairs of fundamentalist Islam. By 1989, admittedly, the Iranian revolution was a decade old. The day of Tiananmen Square also saw the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of that revolution. It seemed probable then that his passing would mark the beginning of the end of this reversion to theocracy, which ran so against the triumph of liberal democracy in the West: a triumph which seemed so absolute that, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a political scientist at Harvard, Francis Fukuyama, was inspired to write that we had arrived at the end of history.
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