Dancing on the Wall

"The 1980s had been a decade of social division, nuclear paranoia and endless strife. Now, if you were in the right place at roughly the right time, what seemed to be superseding all that was a profound sense that a new era was opening, and many of the miseries of the previous decade would be over. By the end of 1990, Nelson Mandela was out and Thatcher was out; seven years later, the fact that New Labour was able to seize on a mood of pop-cultural optimism was proof that some of 1989's spirit had lingered on.
"But as the Blair years would prove, the legacy of 1989 would also curdle into hubris. In the summer of 89, the American economist Francis Fukuyama famously declared the final triumph of liberalism and the alleged end of history, a belief enacted in the real world by the application of brutal free-market economics to the newly liberated countries of eastern Europe, which spread a resentment that still runs deep. The fate of the Balkans proved that the euphoria of 1989 was often completely misplaced. And the same arrogance that defined the western powers' economic policies would lead on to the Iraq war–a fatal application of the cursed concept of 'liberal interventionism', which was 1989-era triumphalism all over."

John Harris at The Guardian looks to what was positive about 1989 as an antidote to what is negative about 2019.