Ramachandra Guha: Looking back at Europe’s hopes and fears, 35 years later

On February 28, the day the Ukrainian President was humiliated by the American president in the White House, I was reading an old issue of the literary magazine, Granta, which I had picked up in one of Bengaluru’s wonderful second-hand bookstores. Published in Spring 1990, the issue was entitled New Europe! The adjective new and the exclamation mark both nodded to the epochal events of the previous year, which included the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first free elections in Poland for decades, and the collapse of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe more generally.

To assess what these events of 1989 meant for the future of the Continent and the world, the editor of Granta had commissioned essays by 15 writers of European descent, some based in the nations in which they had been born, with others living in exile. Inevitably, several contributors were pleased, even exultant, with the happenings of the past few months.

They included the East German priest Werner Krätschell, who saluted the struggle for “freedom and dignity” that brought down the Wall, as well as the celebrated Czech novelist Ivan Klima, who thought that the dissenters who had helped end authoritarianism had it “in their power to realize the idea of a democratic Europe, a Europe...

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