It is the conceit of almost every generation to think that it is

living in extraordinary times. For my parents' generation, it was

the trauma of the Second World War and the miracle of

post-war reconstruction. For my older siblings, it was the

protest movements of the late 1960s and the triumph of civil

rights and women's equality.

In the autumn of 1989, it was difficult not to believe that

something monumental was occurring on the global landscape.

The stirrings in Eastern Europe were not isolated accidents, but

seemed part of a larger process - whose trajectory was still

uncertain. As graduate students at the University of Oxford

plenty had stood witnesses to these historic events, and when

the images of East Germans chipping away at the Berlin Wall

flashed across the television screen on November 9, everyone

jumped aboard a flight to Berlin with some a few of their

classmates to witness, first hand, the deconstruction of an

empire.

When everyone arrived the next day, the party atmosphere

along the Wall had exploded. Lufthansa flight attendants with

trays were handing out canapes to those gathered, and U.S.

television anchormen, fresh from their overseas journey, were

hoisted on makeshift platforms to report "live from the scene."

The most astute Western observer of those heady days, British

journalist and writer Timothy Garton Ash, described that period

in November as the "greatest street party in the history of the

world". And so it was.

It was estimated that close to two million East Germans

crossed over into West Berlin the weekend after the Wall fell -

most of them to spend the welcome gift of 100 Deutschmarks

they received from the West German government. The

observers came home with their own piece of the Wall, painted

with graffiti, as well as a euphoric sense of being at the centre

of history. The collapse of communist regimes was so rapid

that scholars and journalists scrambled to keep up.

The revolutions that had begun in Poland and Hungary, and

spread to Germany, sparked upheaval in Czechoslovakia,

Romania, and Bulgaria. The wave eventually spilled over into

the Soviet Union itself, where suppressed nationalism in the

Baltic region - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - and in republics

such as Armenia and Georgia, exploded into calls for

independence. The deteriorating Soviet economy only heightened

these nationalist sentiments and led successive constituent

republics of the Soviet Union to create their own economic and

legal systems.

Though the genie was already out of the bottle, communist

hard-liners in the Kremlin tried to reverse the changes by

staging a coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev in the

summer of 1991. The effort was thwarted by the president of

the Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin - with the help of the army

- but the communist regime in Moscow was mortally wounded.

Any remaining authority it had quickly evaporated. The Soviet

Union was officially disbanded on December 26, 1991, ending

its reign as the world's largest and most influential communist

state.

As a consequence of liberal democracy's victory, and diffusion,

he predicted, we would see the waning of traditional power

politics and large-scale conflict, and the path toward a more

peaceful world.