Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

The year 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall have long been seen as the axial time images that initiated the era in which we live. There is no doubt that the end of the Cold War has profoundly reshaped social and political life across the world. More specifically, it is routinely understood to have led not only to democratization, globalization, the rise of neoliberal capitalism and global human rights regimes, but also to the defeat of socialism and of the welfare state model of social solidarity. Francis Fukuyama (1992) famously and apodictically saw in these changes the ‘end of the history’, as there was presumably no more history that could supply alternative pathways for societies other than catching up with Western modernity. More than 25 years after these events, the present book is focused not on these changes themselves, but on the extent to which the end of the Cold War has reshaped social theory and the conceptual vocabularies social scientists employ to interpret the social world. Did 1989 bring about paradigmatic ruptures and enduring transformations within different social science disciplines and subfields? What shifts have been shared across different fields of research and theory? Do we have to argue in retrospect that these “new” shifts were actually “old” ones simply affirming what, in historical reality, had already been unfolding long before? For many critical observers and even former enthusiasts, 1989 failed to fulfill its historical promise of democratic renewal, while the triumphant end of history is now seen as a mocking trope that simply cemented the new ideological formulations. Any critical examination of 1989 will need to answer one central question: what was actually defeated in 1989, and what was actually won?