The ‘peaceful’ decade that set up our current turmoil

Extract from The Guardian

Jonathan Freedland

The 1990s felt like a holiday from history at the time, but landmines were being planted that would explode into Brexit and Trump

‘Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, the 90s look like a spell of respite.’ Photograph: José Giribás/Alamy

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Saturday 22 April 2017 04.44 AEST 

To voter fatigue we can add news fatigue. When Theresa May announced a June election, to add to the votes Britons had already cast in 2015 and 2016, to say nothing of the Scottish referendum in 2014, only part of the reaction – captured so perfectly by Brenda, she of the viral “Not another one!” video – was weariness at the prospect of enduring yet more politics. There is a wider exhaustion too, at the sheer pace of events.
Big, important news keeps happening, whether it’s Brexit and Donald Trump, murderous violence in Syria, nuclear confrontation with North Korea, or another act of terror in a European capital. Events of great moment refuse to let up.
Surely this is nothing new. Surely this is just the way things are and have always been. Doubtless, if we feel overwhelmed now, we’d have felt the same in any other era you could name.
Actually, no. There was a time, not that long ago, when things were different. I’ve been thinking again about that period, in part for a programme that will air tomorrow night on Radio 4 – The 90s: A Holiday from History. What I have in mind is the long decade that stretched from the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 to the fall of the twin towers on 11 September 2001. Sandwiched between the cold war and the war on terror, the 90s now looks like a spell of respite – a decade of relative peace and prosperity, free of the geopolitical, existential angst that came before and since.

Strange to imagine it now, but a staple of 1990s news coverage was the handshake ceremony announcing a historic peace

But it’s more interesting than that. For it turns out that the 90s was also the time when, below the surface, the tectonic plates were shifting – making the gradual moves that would culminate in the earthquakes and seismic shocks we’re witnessing today.

Strange to imagine it now, when every bulletin seems to bring word of more bloodshed and calamity, but a staple of 1990s news coverage was the handshake ceremony announcing a historic peace. If it wasn’t FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela sealing the end of apartheid in South Africa in the early 90s, it was a bleary-eyed group of nationalists and unionists reaching the Good Friday agreement in Belfast in 1998. For a while, even the most intractable conflict seemed within reach of resolution, as the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993.

President Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela at the 4 July ceremonies in Philadelphia, 1993. Photograph: Greg Gibson/AP

Of course, war didn’t go away – as the people of Iraq and Kuwait, Rwanda and the Balkans can testify. But the first Gulf war, fought in 1991 by a US-led coalition with Moscow’s blessing, was proof that the wider cold war was truly over. The Bosnian conflict ended in another set of peace accords – a prospect that seems fantastical now, when applied to the war in Syria that has consumed most of this decade – while the tragedy of Rwanda’s Tutsi people was that their genocide was not deemed part of any larger, global clash, and was therefore ignored.
But in much of the west, the 90s was the decade when the previous – and future – sense of constant geopolitical danger receded. Francis Fukuyama declared “The End of History”, as if all the big conflicts were now resolved and liberal democracy triumphant. Making his point, we soon became diverted by smaller, less fateful concerns.
I saw it first-hand as a correspondent in the US for this newspaper. What were the big issues back then? For an entire year the dominant news story, discussed with high seriousness, was the OJ Simpson murder trial. Gripping, it most certainly was, and charged with racial meaning – but it was also soap opera, an entertainment for a society that didn’t have larger things on its mind. (In Britain, a country that had spent the previous decades roiled by IRA bombs and industrial strife, the saga of Charles and Diana served a similar function.)
Politics was not much different. The consuming so-called scandal of the time was Whitewater, a nothingburger whose central charge few could put their finger on. Later, the Clinton White House would be shaken by the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Think of today’s accusations against Trump – whether egregious profiteering from office or treasonous collusion with a hostile foreign power, and you can see how Bill Clinton’s relationship with an intern compares. How fitting that the number one TV comedy of the era was Seinfeld, the show that was, legendarily, about nothing.

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair in 1994. Photograph: Tim Rooke/Rex Features

And yet throughout this apparent lull there were shifts under way that we could barely see. We were quietly planting landmines that would only explode two decades later.
Take Brexit. The 90s saw the birth of Euroscepticism as a serious political force, galvanised in part by Black Wednesday – Britain’s ejection from the exchange rate mechanism – in 1992. Ukip was founded in 1993, but more important was the continuing rebellion in parliament against the Maastricht treaty, which began that same year. Both the new party and the Tory rebels were dismissed at the time as cranks, but their fight would not rest until they their victory in June 2016.

Similarly, the 1990s saw the birth of New Labour. The trajectory is complicated, but two dynamics might be relevant. The first is that the election of Jeremy Corbyn was, in part, a reaction against the centrist project shaped by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in that decade. But more subtly, as Labour began to look and sound more metropolitan, more middle class, many of its longtime working-class supporters felt steadily more remote – an estrangement that culminated in large swaths of traditional Labour territory voting leave.
Beyond these shores, the 1990s saw the birth of the internet and, with it, globalisation in its contemporary form. Millions would benefit, but millions would also be left behind – including many of those who voted for Brexit and elected Trump.
And this was the time when, amid all the jubilation about the end of the cold war, the headlines declared that Russia had ditched communism and joined the west. In fact, it was being quietly humiliated by a programme of economic shock therapy that was more shock than therapy, and by an expansion of Nato that bruised Russian pride. That sense of defeat would fester, ready to be exploited by one former KGB officer who watched as his beloved Soviet Union crumbled: Vladimir Putin.
So the 1990s might have felt like a vacation at the time. But while we were sleeping, the world we inhabit today was slowly taking shape. And now it will give us no rest.