Like the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago, global civil unrest is finally stripping the political elite of power

While covering the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this month, I ran into a snag. Even though I had submitted my application to the German chancellor’s office well beforehand, the group of underpaid young temporary workers contracted out to process out press cards told me there had been last-minute “security” procedures, and that I would have to wait for clearance before I – as a journalist – could access an event celebrating freedom and the liberal order.

I wasn’t alone. There were dozens of other journalists caught up in the same “security” delay, some waiting as long as four hours in the cold drizzle to obtain press accreditations that they had been assured they would pick up without a hitch.

Like those dragged into secondary screening at airports, the journalists forced to wait for their “security” clearance were overwhelmingly Arab, Middle Eastern, or darker-skinned.

After an hour of standing in the cold, I demanded my identification back, noted the irony of hassling the media on this particular day, and covered the festivities without access to the main event. I filed while enjoying a Vietnamese dinner after watching frustrated Berliners eager to celebrate the reunification of their city thwarted by roadblocks and phalanxes of armed police.

It struck me that my experience that evening reflected some of the harsh intervening realities that have all but erased the joy of that moment of 30 years ago.

Over the last few decades, both the security apparatuses that arose in the wake of the 11 September attacks and the arrogance of the powerful elites who barricade themselves behind Green Zones have drastically tempered, if not crushed, the outpouring of hope in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate 30 years ago this month.

Coincidentally, I happened to be in both Berlin as a university student on 9 November 1989 and New York City as a magazine journalist on 11 September 2001, when two planes downed the World Trade Center.

In both cases, chaos ensued locally, with transportation and communications networks collapsing. For me, there was fear amid the mayhem in both cities, as I struggled to get to class or work, and check in with worried friends and family.

There had been harbingers in both cases. There were months of protests in eastern Europe. There was the USS Cole attack and the assaults on US embassies in Africa.

But both days were shocking. The worlds that we thought we knew came crumbling down within hours. The assumptions that politicians, scholars and journalists had made quickly unravelled, the edifices they had painstakingly built over decades became relics of a past era.

For me, 9 November and 11 September reinforced the view that history doesn’t move in nice clean lines, but that energy builds up imperceptibly before bursting suddenly – like an earthquake – delineating new conflicts and alliances.

Whether with barbed wire, barricades and concrete, or overwhelming glass-and-steel monuments to their power, the world’s elite and powerful seek to project an aura of invincibility or, even better, inevitability, as if they are the culmination of history.

But no matter how deeply entrenched, elites can be thwarted, or at least challenged. Over the last decade, there have been massive popular uprisings against regimes in Iran and the Arab world. Over the past year, there have been revolts against ruling elites in countries as varied as Chile, France, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Czech Republic and Algeria as well as the city-state of Hong Kong. Protests over fuel prices ignited this weekend in Iran.

While over different issues, there are general themes that cut across borders: economic polarisation, political repression, corruption and mismanagement.

Thirty years ago, the Cold War came to an end. Instead of building upon the spirit of joy that came of that moment, the inheritors of the new order botched it badly. They built up an economically unjust world increasingly kept in line with police-state tactics. That world is now bursting at the seams with popular dissatisfaction over obvious and damning failures by world leaders of the type who gather annually at ski resorts.

Yet the same elite political and corporate order remains largely in power, from Berlin to London to Washington. They have yet to pay a price for their mistakes, incompetence and corruption.

East German president Erich Honecker famously vowed just 10 months before its downfall that the Berlin Wall would remain for 100 years. But we know now that nothing is inevitable, and no one is invincible.