TWENTY YEARS AGO

En esta nota citó algunos artículos en los que se realiza una evaluación de la esperanza y progreso, la ambigüedad del What if, y el cambio en la geopolítica (el nacimiento de la Asia Moderna) tras la caída del muro de Berlín.

Ian Buruma invita a la promoción de la justicia, la equidad y la libertad en el mundo:

"Still, 1989 was a good time to be alive (except in China, where the democrats were put down). Many of us felt that we were seeing the dawn of a new liberal age, in which freedom and justice would spread, like fresh flowers, across the globe. Twenty years on, we know this was not to be."

"[…] what is needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on how to promote justice, equality and freedom in the world. Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev, assisted in the end of an ideology, which once offered hope, and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision, which will lead to progress, but this time, we hope, without tyranny."

Por otra parte, Meyer nos plantea un escenario What if Evolución vs. Revolución

"[What if] Strictly speaking, the Wall would not have fallen. It would have been opened, not breached. The Communists, not the people, would have done it. Change might have come by evolution, not revolution. Might Krenz (Communist boss of the German Democratic Republic) and the Communist reformers who had seized power just weeks earlier have been able to channel popular unrest, or even defuse it? Instead of a unified Germany today, could there still be two Germanys, East and West?"

Finalmente, Chellaney señala la reconfiguración geopolítica global a partir de la caída del muro y enfatiza el nuevo rol económico de Asia.

"For Asia, the most important consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall was that the collapse of communism produced a shift from the primacy of military power to economic power in shaping the international order. To be sure, rapid economic growth also occurred during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-WWII period. But in the post-Cold War period, economic growth by itself has contributed to altering global power relations."