“Here’s Timothy Garton Ash writing in the New York Review of Books: ‘The year 1989 was one of the best in European history. Indeed, I am hard pushed to think of a better one. It was also a year in which the world looked to Europe – specifically to Central Europe, and, at the pivotal moment, to Berlin. World history – using the term in a quasi-Hegelian sense – was made in the heart of the old continent, just down the road from Hegel’s old university, now called the Humboldt University. Twenty years later, I am tempted to speculate (while continuing to work with other Europeans in an endeavour to prove this hunch wrong) that this may also have been the last occasion – at least for a very long time – when world history was made in Europe. (Guardian)
