25 years on: How the fall of the Berlin Wall changed the world

Writing in 1989  scholar Francis Fukuyama characterised the end of the Cold War as “the end of history,” arguing that liberal democracy would find no viable competitors in the future, and that history’s march to higher forms of governance was at an end in the philosophical sense. A quarter century later, while the U.S. remains the world’s most powerful nation, the status of liberal democracy’s domination is under assault from many fronts, perhaps nowhere greater than from its own struggles: the global 2008 financial crisis has seen somewhat of a retreat in the fortunes of liberal democracy, a fact demonstrated by the rise of far rightist parties in Europe and the bitter opposition to the liberal democratic state in power centers like Russia and China, as well as Iran and Saudi Arabia. While most countries today at least speak in the language of democracy to justify their policies, the liberal democratic state, especially in its American form, continues to be the target of much ire. “It is one of the ironies of the cold war that America’s victories in Europe were frequently offset by long-term damage to its reputation further afield, in Vietnam, for example, or the Middle East," wrote historian Tony Judt. "The Soviet Union was not the only 'loser' in the cold war.”

The United States may be the strongest superpower even a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but political power in Washington, D.C. has declined precipitously in that period. The Cold War principle that "partisan politics stops at the water's edge" is long forgotten, today, as partisan rancor has reached the point where the U.S. President – the nation's military commander in chief – is increasingly considered fair game in sharp-elbowed politicking. 

In appraising his own work from 25 years prior, Fukuyama admitted underestimating  the extent to which institutions of advanced economies with democratic institutions could "decay." Calling the current U.S. political system a "vetocracy," he said the "polarized — indeed poisonous — political atmosphere of today's Washington ... has proved unable to move either forward or backward effectively." The extent of Washington's scorched earth politics reached an apex last year when the government was shutdown over an ability to pass an annual budget, a piece of political theater that threatened the country's commitment to servicing its own debt obligations until an 11th hour averted potential economic catastrophe. Since President Obama's first term, the United States has witnessed levels of political gridlock unique even for its intentionally slow-paced constitutional governing structure, leaving open the question of whether the country is institutionally capable of addressing some of its most pressing long-term problems, among them economic inequality and the perils of climate change.

The sovereign nation state has been the primary form in which political power has been organized since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, but it has come under new pressure since 1989. Even if the nation state has yet to be displaced, economic, political, cultural and technological globalization have ushered in dramatic changes in the nation state. 

Corporations like Google, Facebook and Amazon wield far more economic and cultural power than most nations, while the success and failures of the global financial industry, as evidenced by the 2008 financial crisis, can almost single-handedly bring the world to its knees.

Information technology has eroded the nation state's ability to enforce a monopoly over its citizens' access to information (and when they attempt even to monitor it, as with the revelations unearthed by the the NSA leaks, the outcry has not been kind to government officials).

Even the identity of the nation is changing as migration makes the citizenry of the industrialized countries more diverse – and buries the idea that the nation is composed of people with a shared history. Supranational arrangements such as the European Union also posit a sense of common destiny and policy across national boundaries. Separatist national movements may not be going away anytime soon, but Scotland was the most recent example of an electorate being persuaded that they were economically better off in a wider political union than as independent nation state.