A gaggle of students are driving at high speed to Berlin. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven,” wrote Wordsworth about the French Revolution. The year is 1989, not 1789, but the poet’s sentiments capture our mood. Having grown up under the Cold War’s nuclear shadow, the temptation to catch a glimpse of its physical demise was irresistible. The instant we heard East Germany had opened Checkpoint Charlie, uniting Berlin, we were on our way. Within 18 hours we were chipping at that wall alongside tens of thousands of others, young and old, German and foreign. With chisels and pickaxes we made our tiny contributions. Two days later we returned to England, hungover, astonished to have avoided any speeding tickets, each carrying a small chunk of the wall.
We were infected with optimism. As a student of philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, I imagined I possessed insight into the significance of the moment. PPE’s detractors called it a “pretty poor education”. They may have had a point. But in that moment, studying it seemed pertinent. We subscribed to progress, or rather Progress — belief in which is the closest thing the modern west has to a religion. In 1989 its schism was healed. By unifying its booming western wing with the shrivelled post-Stalinist eastern one, a monumental roadblock had been cleared from our future. No longer would nuclear-armed camps face each other across the 20th-century bloodlands of central Europe. That riven continent, from which Britain no longer stood aloof, would unify. Democracies would take the place of the Warsaw Pact, whose regimes were falling like dominoes to peaceful demonstrators. It was not just autocracy that was dying but nationalism. Borders were opening up. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm was to write, the short and genocidal 20th century, which began with the first world war in 1914, was about to come to an end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Humanity had proved it could learn from its mistakes. It was a good time to turn 21.
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