November 9 as I saw it back then.

OK, I began making a big fuss about starting this blog on November 9, 2009. Why? In case you haven't noticed, today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of Berlin's Wall. As it happens, this event shattered my intellectual life in many ways that will become apparent as I post more. There's no way I will cover all the round in one post. Today I'll just ruminate on the anniversary and take it from there.

I'm 40 (almost 41). This means I was in my early 20s back then. In my late teens I had become a convinced Marxist (though I never belonged to any organization) of a relatively hard line but was taking some intellectual distances and was already convinced that the regimes of "really existing socialism" were unjustifiably authoritarian. When Gorbachev was elevated to the leadership of the Soviet Union I was among the many convinced that he would be able to steer the leaky boat of the Communist bloc to the safe haven of democratic socialism. Eastern Europe would democratize, Western Europe would maintain, and over time deepen, its commitment to the welfare state, the "House of Europe" would become the beacon of socialism for mankind. What was not to like? 

The events of 1989 laid waste on this scenario. I spent 1989 (and 1990, and 1991) making incremental forecasts of how quickly things would  unravel just to realize that the events were moving faster than anything I could imagine. The Communist bloc was much more decrepit than I had imagined in my more skeptical moments. The economies were poorer than I thought, the population was much more desperate than I thought, the leadership was much more cynical than I thought, and so it went. 

This had several consequences for me. The most obvious one is that I learned never, ever again to make political forecasts. OK, I exaggerate, sometimes I do make them. But ever since I feel very leery and don't put much stock on them.