In hindsight, what makes the 1990s appear to be worthy of nostalgia is the fact that almost everything ran on autopilot. European integration hummed along with Austria, Sweden, and Finland joining the European Union in 1995, turning a club of 12 into a club of 15. The former countries of the Warsaw Pact were cleaning up what remained of their communist legacy and embarked on a period of economic growth, refuting all the nay-sayers who claimed that it would take decades for Poland, Hungary, et al. to successfully evolve into capitalist-democratic systems. The President of Russia was the amiable Boris Yeltsin (from 1991 to 1999) and Moscow seemed poised to become a member of the European family of nations once again, correcting the horrible mistake of 1917. Germany was reunified, but instead of a much dreaded “fourth Reich” the Germans were more interested in Lebensfreude — the “joy of life” — than Lebensraum, and they did not send tanks to the East but tourists to the West (Spain) and South (Italy). German engineering, Finnish cell phones (Nokia), French Art, Austrian Energy Drinks (Red Bull) – only doom-mongers would claim that the EU was on a path of decline.

The dominant ideology of the time was embodied by the Washington Consensus and neoclassical economics, with the latter being the academic justification of the former: All that was needed for peace and prosperity were open markets and capital inflows, with everything else taking care of itself. The guarantor of this simple-yet-beautiful new order were the United States of America, who intervened with mixed results from the Balkans to the Middle East to put out smaller fires on the fringes of the map. Great Power Politics was a relic of the past, and that new powers can emerge peacefully was shown by China, with the former communist country becoming the poster boy for capitalism. The crown of this development was Beijing’s membership in the World Trade Organization, symbolising the idea that free trade and economic prosperity can bring the world together, regardless of existing cultural differences. 

There were, of course, some signs that thunderclouds have already been gathering as soon as the mid-1990s. European right-wing parties like the Austrian Freedom Party rose in prominence due to their worries about mass migration, and US presidential candidate Pat Buchanan warned that trade deals with China will hurt American workers. Even the often quoted author of “The End of History and the Last Man”, Francis Fukuyama, dedicated almost the entire second half of his book to the question why maybe his own end of history theses was premature.