Volume 46, Number 18 · November 18, 1999
Ten Years After
By Timothy Garton Ash
Ten years after the Central European revolutions of 1989, what more do we know? Above all, we know more about the consequences. We can now say that these events had results that place 1989 beside 1789 as a date in world history. Not only was the peaceful revolution that leapt from Poland to Hungary to Germany to Czechoslovakia the beginning of a swift and fundamental change of system in the countries of Central Europe. 1989 also meant the end of the cold war, which had started in the 1940s over these same countries. As a result it directly affected many other regions of the world, such as Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, whose politics had been deformed by the global competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, cap-italism and communism, 'East' and 'West.' In fact, it is difficult to find a country in the world that was untouched by the end of the cold war.
Feature, 3616 words
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