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Revisiting the End of the Cold War

Podcasts Nov 5, 2019 John Lewis Gaddis and Elmira Bayrasli

Thirty years ago this week, the world watched in awe as thousands brought down the Berlin Wall, marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Today, however, democracy is in crisis, and authoritarianism is once again on the rise – including in countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain.

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John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale and the author of several books, including, The Cold War: A New History.

Elmira Bayrasli

Writing for PS since 2016
3 Commentaries

Elmira Bayrasli is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the author of From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

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Aaron Johnson Apr 10, 2020

Interesting discussion. I would add that Professor Gaddis seems to not to understand the resiliency and diversity of authoritarian regimes and their ability to govern well in many respects. It would be great if you interviewed scholars who study such regimes, particularly those who focus on Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia) and demonstrate how they have increasingly relied on technocratic-style management of key ministries to keep many content.
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j. von Hettlingen Nov 8, 2019

In his interview with Elmira Bayrasli John Lewis Gaddis recalls the extraordinary events of November 9, 1989, when the first hundreds of jubilant East Berliners poured into West Berlin on their first visits ever. It prompted East Germany to open the Berlin Wall and its border, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West. Calling time on the Cold War and the communist era in Eastern Europe was hailed as a definitive triump of liberal democracy, ending the East-West division of the Continent.
Gaddis is right about democracy being under attack in recent decade – the rise of populist parties across Europe and disruptive forces, like Brexit and Trump’s election in 2016. Yet he is also bullish about the resilience of Western democracy, which is more capable of weathering a storm than an authoritarian regime. Dictators are bad at coping with unexpected situations and hidden crises. Lacking experience in managing them, their regimes most often collapse amid turmoil, as it was the case with the Soviet Union in 1991.
Illiberal regimes like China and Russia gloat over the paralysis in the UK mired in Brexit, and the chaos in Trump’s White House. They seek to impose their own narrative that Western democracy is in disarray and that their form of governance were a better alternative, hoping to overturn the existing strategic order dominated by the US and its Western allies.
Hungary and Poland have won re-elections and tightened their grip on power. While their anti-democratic leaders lash out at the EU and violate rules and norms, in an effort to undermine the European project, they have also exploited the bloc’s generous subsidy programmes, that enrich their families and cronies. Now a new generation of citizens in Central and Eastern Europe is standing up to their right-wing, nationalist, autocratic, kleptocratic regimes.
In retrospect we realise the mistake we made. We believed that the direction citizens in Central and Eastern Europe were heading would be the new normal, and that liberal democracy would bring prosperity. However, 15 years since the EU eastern enlargement in 2004, the region is seeing a democratic backsliding, because the fledgling democratically elected governments were ill-prepared to handle the 2008 global financial crisis that stoked widespread resentments against capitalism.
Despair was widespread as there had also been talks about the decline of democracy in mature democracies in the UK and the US.
Gaddis points out that the triumph of anti-liberal authoritarianism is no more inevitable, with forces of liberal democracy are pushing back against the ravaging nationalist populism. While it is useful to ask the question: “what has gone wrong then,” many have not lost sight of their goals.
The post-Wall generation in central Europe fights for the liberties it has grown up with, and the EU is getting its act together. There is more reason to believe that the 40th anniversary in 2029 could be a more joyous occasion.
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j. von Hettlingen Nov 8, 2019

the focus of most writing about this 30th anniversary, including my own, has been on the question: “what has gone wrong?” But if the post-Wall generation in central Europe fights for the liberties it has grown up with, and the EU starts standing up for democracy in its own member states, there is every reason to believe that the 40th anniversary, in 2029, will again give us cause for celebration.
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