Publications

It has been precisely thirty years since Eastern Europe experienced the Velvet Revolution, first in Berlin, then Prague, and finally Bratislava. Throngs of people flocked to the squares and a new spirit of freedom filled the air. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, offering dramatic evidence of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the implosion of the Soviet bloc, and the end of the struggle between the two major ideologies of the second half of the twentieth century. The excitement in the West was so great that Francis Fukuyama attributed Hegelian significance to these events, penning The End of History. The world, including the former Soviet Union and even China, he wrote authoritatively, would now undergo a process of “convergence” and all nations would adopt the principles of liberal democracy. Indeed, consequent to the fall of the Iron Curtain, we witnessed “the third wave of democracy,” as Samuel Huntington called it, with no fewer than sixty nations across the globe joining the democratic club. The rush of optimism about the future reminiscent of the late industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, when social evolutionists—such as Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, and Henri de Saint-Simon—were sure that the change in human history was so dramatic that there would be no more wars.