Invasion of Ukraine jolted West out of complacency

WHEN I was sent by the BBC from my job at Radio Devon in Exeter to be its reporter in Berlin at the beginning of 1989 few people, I least of all, predicted the momentous events of that year – described three years later by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama as “the end of history”.

Yes, the reforming Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been gradually opening up the rigid Communist system that had prevailed since the Russian revolution and led to the post-Second World War division of Europe and the Cold War. There had been limited moves in some of the Communist countries to liberalise – most notably Hungary, which had given its citizens a few more freedoms, including the limited freedom to travel to the West – but the bulk of central and eastern Europe remained locked in poor, stultified systems, behind an impenetrable “iron curtain”, the most obvious symbol of which was the Berlin Wall. When the Berlin Wall fell in the autumn of 1989 and, one by one, the authoritarian governments of central and eastern Europe were toppled it felt like the final and permanent victory of liberal democracy.

After 1989 there was great optimism, not just in the onward march of liberal democracy but also in the development of a rules-based global order, one that would deter or prevent dictators from terrorising their own people or invading their neighbours. The successful Western intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was a military expression of this new, optimistic doctrine that if you launched a genocidal war the international community would not stand idly by. But now, in 2022, 33 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, history has come back to bite us. This has not happened suddenly. It’s been happening for years, but we haven’t been paying attention.

“The End of History” was always a bit of a misnomer, as Fukuyama has since recognised. Many people across the world still laboured under authoritarian or dictatorial regimes, but for several decades after 1989 the number of those regimes fell, and the number of democracies grew. That has recently gone into reverse.

In Russia the signs have been there for years, in its transition under Putin to a proto-fascist state at home and aggressive imperialist power abroad. But when Putin invaded

Georgia and Crimea, backed Syria’s President Assad in using chemical weapons against his own people and launched a chemical weapons attack in Salisbury we and the West did very little.

Ukraine has changed all that. The indescribable brutality of the Russian forces and the astonishing bravery and resistance of Ukrainians have jolted the democratic world out of its stupor, united the West and strengthened both Nato and the European Union.

Ukraine has reminded all of us of the enduring value of freedom and democracy, their fragility and the need to nurture, protect and, sometimes, fight for them.

Ukraine has reminded all of us of the enduring value of freedom and democracy