Since consolidating his power in rigged elections at the start of the decade,the Russian leader has pioneered a politics of fictional threats and invented enemies. By Timothy SnyderAmericans and Europeans have been guided through our new century by what I will call the politics of inevitability – a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, or that there are no alternatives,and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American, capitalist version of this record, or nature brought the market,which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, or history brought the nation,which learned from war that peace was gracious, and hence chose integration andprosperity.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true,the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist record confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter-century after the finish of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history.
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Source: guardian.co.uk