Party Like It's 1989

            This month the news needs hourly updating.  It is February, 2011, governments have fallen in Tunisia and Egypt, and today the Libyan Air Force bombed its own people in Tripoli while there have been active and unprecedented protests in Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria and Iran.   

           Everyone who can remember thinks back to 1989 and wonders if the Middle East will remake itself in the same manner as Eastern Europe did, but my thoughts are more about how blind we really were then, and how short is our foresight.

           On May 2, 1989 the Communist government of Hungary opened its borders to trade with Austria.  Under treaty obligations with East Germany, however, East Germans who could travel to Hungary were not allowed to go to Austria, and  East Germans began seeking asylum in the West German embassy in Budapest.  On August 24, 1989, dealing with overcrowding at the embassy but certainly in no way seeking to overturn the world order Hungary allowed 108 asylum seekers to leave the embassy and cross into Austria.  By September 10 with “intolerable conditions” at the embassy Hungary temporarily suspended its treaty obligations and allowed 7,500 refugees to leave for West Germany.  By September 25 Time Magazine noted that 14,000 German refugees has left Hungary, but still no one perceived any existential threat to the Communist bloc.  Within weeks East Germany was hemorrhaging people out the back door, and on November 9, 1989 – a mere two months after the first refugees escaped the Berlin wall was breached and an era had ended.

           Talking heads now speak either of the birth of Middle Eastern democracies or of islamofascist thugocracies.  The truth is we did not predict what has happened to date and we do not know what will happen in 2 months.  In a future retrospective  I’m sure whatever  happens will all have been obvious, but the future is opaque and for now the news is updated hourly.