But Western Europe would soon drift into a lethargy of planned economies at the very time that a cold war was being waged to free Eastern Europe from those very ideas. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the West had lost or deliberately given up many of the freedoms that the East had sought and just gained. And within another decade still, the advent of the European Union would subtly and quietly impose controls on ordinary life that, while wrapped in a velvet glove, felt to some like the iron fist they had resisted.
Worse still, Europe was not alone. From 1945 to 1970, virtually all of the then-labeled Third World, including Africa, Asia, and Latin America, embraced state planning and rejected markets. Many of the European colonies (Uganda, Congo, Rwanda), winning their freedom in the postwar division of the world, immediately put dictators in power who squelched talk of republics and democracy. By the 1970s, postwar optimism had been replaced by widespread anger and desperation, with one set of masters exchanged for another.
