1989 was a miraculous year for western liberal democracy. According to the American scholar Francis Fukuyama, the year, with its concatenating regime changes in central and eastern Europe, was definitive proof that liberal democracy was the final stage of history.
Fukuyama’s doctrine put the pestilential manifestations of global capitalism, such as the debt bondage of poor countries and their exclusion from the world market, the infiltration of mafias into economics and politics, unemployment and ethnic wars out of mind. The regime change in central and eastern Europe induced euphoric hallucinations that no western political scientists had probably ever anticipated.
The revolutions of 1989 gave skeptical citizens and politicians from the West the possibility of vicariously experiencing euphoria through people in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and countries in eastern Europe. Central and eastern Europe was a place where a depleted western democracy vindicated its belief in Fukuyama’s claim that liberal democracy was the end of history.
