Perils of a new East-West crisis in Europe

US SECRETARY of State Mike Pompeo is one of the keynote speakers this week at a major event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While that 1989 moment heralded much optimism, the promises of Western liberalism to transform the former Eastern bloc have fallen flat, giving rise to what some have called a potential "East-West rift".

The backstory to this is, of course, the post-1989 ambition of ex-Communist nations to emulate the West through modernisation and integration. At that time, liberal democracy was seen as the only political "game in town" as Francis Fukuyama famously, albeit wrongly, proclaimed as "the end of history... the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution".

Fast forward three decades, and the extent to which this apparent orthodoxy is seen as a "god that failed" as underlined by generally rising economic inequality and significant corruption in the region. The backlash is witnessed by the growth of what has been called authoritarian anti-liberalism across much of Eastern and Central Europe at the same time that liberalism has been tarnished in the West through developments like the 2008-09 financial crash, Brexit, and the US election of Donald Trump.