Stranded between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and 9/11 in 2001, the nineties tend to be misunderstood and even overlooked. But it was a pivotal decade, featuring rapid economic, technological and cultural change that reshaped the world. This week our writers explore what really went on in the 1990s.
Audacious dynamism and uninhibited creativity defined the music scene in the party-hard 90s – the last decade when outsiders could become bona fide rock n’ roll stars.
The beautiful game seemed made for the Italy of wild hair, baggy shorts and Euro-optimism. But did the glory days of Series A ever really exist?
In 1996 John Perry Barlow penned his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. The war between politicians and tech-idealists had just begun.
Niall Ferguson, Helen Thompson and Rana Mitter join Iain Martin to explore what happened to China in the nineties, and what created the conditions for China’s spectacular rise in the new millennium.
The breakdown of Yugoslavia in the 1990s shattered optimism in liberal democracy and transnational cooperation. History did not end – it continued.
The former Navy SEAL and WWE champion won Minnesota’s governorship in 1999 on an anti-elite ticket. His transition from showbiz to politics was a precursor of the age of Trump – but ’the Body’ was no ordinary populist.
Pop became Sweden’s biggest cultural export in the 1990s when the hit machine went into overdrive. The roots of it lie in the 1970s and the Swedish love of manufacturing.
The collapse of the Soviet Union drew back the Iron Curtain, integrating Eastern Europe in the Western order. Although Russia remained out in the cold, this was not inevitable. For a brief moment in the nineties, a very different Europe was imagined.
It was the decade of Friends, Bill Clinton and a fresh new pan-European passport. Underneath the teen-pop smile of the nineties there were blemishes.
Mattias Hessérus is in conversation with John Preston, author of ‘The Dig’, on his new biography of media baron Robert Maxwell.
In the digital age, intellectual debate is more polarising and vituperative than ever. To generate the new thinking needed to navigate our uncertain global landscape we should revisit the kind of serious ideas on geopolitics that scholars advanced in the 1990s.
Engelsberg Ideas is brought to you by The Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit
Stureplan 3, SE 103 75 Stockholm, Sweden editors@engelsbergideas.com www.axsonjohnsonfoundation.org
By subscribing, you consent to us contacting you by email. You may unsubscribe at any time, and we’ll keep your personal data safe in accordance with our privacy policy.
