Must-Read: Branko Milanovic: The Long Shadow of 1989

Branko Milanovic: The Long Shadow of 1989: “The [Eastern European] generation born around the early 1990s, which has now reached its maturity…

…has on average a height of about 1 cm less than the previous generation…. Plummeting incomes… parental stress, alcoholism and drug abuse…. The good news is that the happiness gap between Eastern and Western Europe has closed. East Europeans are no longer systematically unhappier (in terms of self-reported happiness) than their Western counterparts…. Both the height loss and the happiness stories illustrate well the importance to people’s lives of traumatic events like the economic collapse during the transition or the Great Recession….

I read Simon Kuper’s today’s piece in the Financial Times on the diverse fortunes of Merkel, Putin, Kaczynski and Orban who were all, in different places and positions in 1989, and whose 1989 experience very much influences their today’s beliefs and policies…. What I found interesting… are two points which were very seldom found in Western press…. The first is recognition that the 1989 revolutions were essentially… revolutions of national self-determination…. Even Yeltsin’s revolution was a peculiar nationalist revolution where the core nation decided it wanted to get out of a federation…. For the other leaders, from the Baltics to the Balkans, nationalism as the main ideology was self-evident….

The second interesting point… is the… diversity of experiences…. Sizeable minorities, who either were of mixed backgrounds or had identities associated with the country that was now divvied up, were left totally unmoored…. I know of many people, myself included, who for several decades had one national identity, and then within months had to start believing they had another one…. [We] cannot… forget not only how traumatic and bloody the process was, but also how many of the newly-created countries, from Ukraine to Bosnia, remain utterly fragile and, it seems, permanently suspended over the precipice of yet another war…