Berlin 1989

As the Berlin Wall was being taken apart brick by brick as Germans reclaimed their divided nation twenty years ago, the mood was euphoric (on this side at least).
Europe would remove the shackles of Superpower domination and chart a new path to independence.
What do we have now?
A temporary gorging on free market capitalism and the biggest debt bubble in history.
Latvia is imploding to the East, as Iceland (suddenly ‘European’) did in the West.
Eastern Europe is looking so much like Latin America in the 1980s as it embarked on the Third World Debt Crisis.
Read the right wing financial press, and you will see they are looking at the events of 2000/2001 in Argentina to figure out the future for Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, in parallel, and perhaps because of the social dislocation over the past two decades, some hideous political forces have appeared.
Like a rash over the European body, we see the rise of the Hard Right.
In the West, it hit France some time ago and is now most virulent in Holland.
The UK has now joined that club, after the June elections.
Despite or perhaps perversely because of the worst economic crisis since 1930, the Left is retreating throughout Europe.
This will be confirmed if Die Linke don’t do well in the German general elections in September.
And, the US military is still here and expanding NATO with missiles in Poland……
Anyone still chanting “Change we can believe in”………. Hope springs eternal….

Farid Bakht