The Milton Friedmans explained then how all would be well so long as this emerging world shook an invisible hand. Two decades later, many people feel slapped by the back of the hand as we are a year into a ...
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What Is to Be Learned?
Thinking about 1989
When
the Berlin Wall cracked on November 9, 1989, the clock struck thirteen in the Soviet bloc, and its hands halted. History went on. Rotting dictatorships in eastern and central Europe, long sustained by and for Moscow, had been crumpling for some time. Western-style democratic structures (some sturdy, some less so) would supplant them. Europe’s politics and that of the world were recast in a largely unforeseen but exhilarating year of liberation from police states. In its aftermath, a newly unified Germany integrated both into Europe and the Western alliance, while a hobbling Soviet Union dissolved after a failed coup against Communist Party Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev in summer 1991. Then Boris Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” enfeebled further its Russian successor.
The Milton Friedmans explained then how all would be well so long as this emerging world shook an invisible hand. Two decades later, many people feel slapped by the back of the hand as we are a year into a ...
The Milton Friedmans explained then how all would be well so long as this emerging world shook an invisible hand. Two decades later, many people feel slapped by the back of the hand as we are a year into a ...
FOOTNOTES:
- [1] Other factors range from the impact of authoritarian political cultures to the specificities of Russian and German history.
