It was “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in 1992.
The Berlin Wall had been brought down and the Iron Curtain forced open. Germany was reunited while the Soviet Union had disintegrated. The American political scientist knew the plates had shifted for good.
And who could argue? Capitalism had won. Communism was discredited. The final form of human government had been found and (almost) everyone agreed.
In the 10 years that followed, the world came in from the cold.
The European community became a union, leading to a single currency and central bank. The World Trade Organisation was created and the African Union was conceived.
The Oslo Accords gave Israel and Palestine a pathway to co-existence. The Dayton Agreement ended the bitter Bosnian War and the Good Friday Agreement brought peace to Northern Ireland.
Apartheid was overthrown in South Africa and a Rainbow Nation was born in its place. Latin American liberal democracies flourished where military dictatorships had ruled. Even Cuba began accepting US aid.
It was not all rosy, of course; the Rwandan genocide and Kosovo conflict left deep wounds, while the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania hinted at a jihadist menace to come.
But it was chiefly a decade for agreements, accords, unions, and reunifications.
And what now?
Trump may be a successful businessman, but he is short on ideas, never mind an ideology
A world turned in on itself
It seems only bitterness, division, acrimony, and intolerance.
A Great Britain under constitutional threat from Brexit forces. Right-wing parties on the rise across a fractured Europe. The Middle East roadmap in tatters. A failed Arab Spring. Syria at war, and IS on the march. Terrorism everywhere.
At the same time, China is colonising the developing world via economic stealth, while Russia uses covert military and cyber warfare to intimidate neighbours it can annex, and destabilise opponents it cannot.
Even in Bangladesh, houses and temples are being attacked because the people inside follow a different religion. Next door in Myanmar, the Rohingya face a similar strain of persecution.
And now we have Trump.
Pandemic nationalism
They say that if America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. Maybe this time, the pathogen passed the other way.
The bitterness, division, acrimony, and intolerance infecting much of the global political landscape in 2016 has gone viral thanks to a New York real estate tycoon with an ego as grotesque as his bank balance.
Trump built the campaign he prefers to call a “movement” around his social media presence and off-the-cuff, rambling speeches. Both suited his swashbuckling style. Twitter, in particular, provided a turret through which he could fire at will, at any time and at anyone.
That won’t do now.
Trump may be a successful businessman, but he is short on ideas, never mind an ideology. He can still find these, of course, but any resetting of his moral compass in line with his new office may take time the world simply does not have.
His inauguration at the end of January 2017 will be followed by bellwether national elections in the Netherlands, France, and Germany.
However grand the party held at the Manhattan Hilton on Tuesday night, it could not possibly have matched those thrown by Geert Wilders in The Hague, Marine Le Pen in Paris, or the AfD in Berlin.
All three congratulated Trump before he had even congratulated himself.
The struggle for 2017
If this rising tide of hate-filled nationalism is to be stopped, then perhaps only the country which has been fought over, ripped open, and pulled from pillar to post more than most can force back the flood.
The country with two world wars and an unspeakable act of genocide on its collective conscience; the same country which has thrown open its borders and arms to a million Syrian refugees as the rest of Europe has erected fences in 2016.
Helmut Kohl’s Germany led the world out of the Cold War and into a decade of relative reconciliation. Angela Merkel and Europe’s largest electorate can again show a better way when it goes to the polls next September.
If the 1990s saw a spirit of hope borne out of years of struggle and despair, the elections of this year can leave no doubt that the despair has returned, and that the struggle for 2017 has already begun.
Maybe now, as happened then, the hope will follow. In the country with the darkest past, the light will surely be seen.
Phil Humphreys is a British journalist and former Bangladesh development worker now living in Berlin, Germany.
