News
1989 / The year that changed the world
If you think you are sometimes spoiled for choice, consider the fate of an editor on the first weekend of June 1989. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 3, the state of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's Supreme Leader, began to deteriorate rapidly. Just before midnight, Khomeini, 86, died, his death announced on the radio a few hours later. Tehran is 31 and a half hours behind Beijing, so just as crowds in Iran were taking to the streets in extraordinary expressions of grief, residents of Beijing, no less in shock, were coming to terms with what had happened in the early hours of this Sunday morning. People's Liberation Army troops cleared out the remnants of the student protests in Tiananmen Square, firing into the crowds.
But that's not all. As grief and horror gripped Tehran and Beijing respectively, Poles awoke to a day of hope. In the spring, Poland's ruling Communist Party was forced to open roundtables with the opposition, including representatives of Solidarity, the civic and labor group that survived the imposition of martial law in 1981. In Hungary in 1956, and again in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet tanks crushed popular reform movements. By 1989, however, the winds of change in Eastern Europe had reached gale force. In the Soviet Union itself, the general secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, was throwing away old habits like a teenager throwing away last year's fashions. Soviet leaders no longer had the heart of stone or the iron fist to impose their domination by force of arms. So, on June 4, Poland was to hold elections, although the position of the Communist Party was protected. When the two rounds of voting were counted, Solidarnosc had won virtually all the seats in the Sejm, the Polish parliament, that it could contest. The division that had marked Europe since the end of the Second World War was coming to an end. The rivets of the Iron Curtain were beginning to burst.
All historians changed, by resuming what happened before, by revising the
Past judgments will tell you that our understanding of the past is never definitive. What were thought to be world-changing events fade into the subjects of an obscure doctoral dissertation; What seemed like small stories turn out to be the ones that shaped the future. All is relative.
However, 1989 was truly one of those years when the world turned upside down. Some things have changed, and changed completely; We still live with their consequences. Some things have also ended – not just communism as a state practice, for example, but also the idea that the international system is guided solely by state action. In ways that were only dimly perceived 20 years ago, things like multinational corporations, technological innovation, and personal faith now shape our world just as states do.
However significant the events after 1989, the year itself is one for the ages. It was understood at the time. In the most famous contemporary analysis of current events, Francis Fukuyama, a brilliant American academic who was then on the policy planning staff of the US State Department, published an essay in the journal The National Interest entitled "The End of History.” His central thesis statement was unequivocal: "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 final point of the ideological evolution of humanity and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. (Fukuyama turned the article into a book and, over the years, in a spirit of generous intellectual openness, defended and refined her thesis in light of the many attacks she suffered.)
In the hourglass of history, 20 years is just a drop of sand. It is still too early to know whether Fukuyama's claims will be fully confirmed. As I write this, the world is reeling from events in Iran, a state that received little mention in Fukuyama's original article. But one aspect of Fukuyama's thesis proved correct. Despite the fact that the global economy is in the midst of the most severe contraction since the 1930s, there has truly been “an unapologetic victory of economic liberalism” over a competing economic system – that of a global economy.