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IN 1990, just a year after the wave of democratic revolutions that swept central Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, who was in the process of becoming the main interpreter of those events to western Europe, wrote with some confidence that “the thing” installed by Russian power after 1945, the thing variously called socialism, Stalinism, real existing socialism, totalitarianism – “that thing will never walk again”, writes ENDA O’DOHERTY

Other analysts went further. Francis Fukuyama, in his book The End of Historyand the Last Man, wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such ... That is the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”