Greatest Year in European History

The year is 1989. Timothy Garton Ash, in The New York Review of Books, reviews what many historians consider to be the last great year in European history, and draws from nine different books. My favorite insight from his essay was how, in retrospect, history has a way of looking so inevitable, but in reality is anything but.

Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened "hindsight bias"—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time (for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe).What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson talked of "the illusions of retrospective determinism." Explanations are then offered for what happened. As one scholar commented a few years after 1989: no one foresaw this, but everyone could explain it afterward. Reading these books, I was again reminded of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski's "law of the infinite cornucopia," which states that an infinite number of explanations can be found for any given event.