Mikhail Gorbachev takes part on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, November 2014. Bernd von Jutrczenka/ Press Agency.All rights reserved.The year 2016 saw a string of shock political events, from the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency to the Brexit vote in Britain. There were also shock election results in many countries and a surge of support for right wing conservative forces in the heartland of the EU and elsewhere. Many interpreted these in terms of the rise of populism, but this begs the question of why populism has become seemingly so strong in the west at this time. One answer may lie in the end of the cold war in 1989/91.
The cold war was a confrontation – political, ideological, military, economic and social – between two camps, the liberal democracies of the west and the communist states of the east. The architecture of this confrontation consisted of a standoff between two armed alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and in Europe two economic communities, the EU and Comecon.
The cold war also shaped the political agenda in the individual countries. In the liberal democracies, it undercut much of the appeal of more radical left-wing forces and greatly complicated the life of the moderate left; it was all too easy to discredit the moderate left by referring to the international enemy. In the communist east, it provided a rationale for regimes to crack down on any signs of domestic reformism, and therefore consolidated those regimes in power.
