LOST DECADE: Taking back the ‘90s.

The ‘90s don’t get a lot of love. The last decade of the 20th century is often seen as a kind of pregnant pause – a political and social interregnum between an event that put an (apparently) full stop on the conflict that had shaped much of the previous century (the Cold War) and one that shifted our gears into a new reality for which we weren’t prepared (the World Trade Center attacks). It was the decade that began with talk about a “peace dividend” and “the End of History,” and ended just as the internet was about to transform the way we read, learned and communicated.

There’s an argument that dividing history up into decades, or even centuries, is an arbitrary activity, shoehorning events and retroactively making judgments about what was important based on hindsight. Writing about “decade-ism” in the Journal of Social History in 1998, Jason Scott Smith said that “the concept of the decade represents thinking about time in a punctuated, discontinuous manner. Discontinuous time encourages viewing history not as a seamless web of events, but as discrete, temporally fragmented snapshots.”

We know now that the Cold War didn’t really go away as much as transform into something baroque, with Russia and China and the West assuming the stance of wary sides in a fight, eyes darting from one opponent to another like the gunfighters at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. (Your politics will help you decide who is which; you might even argue that Europe and America are no longer one, homogenous West, and that the end of the bilateral world is turning the gunfight into a melee.) We also know that terrorism against the West has long roots and precedents, and that 9/11 was mostly an institutional failure of imagination, policy and vigilance. Seen in that light, the ‘90s don’t seem like an interregnum as much as an anxious lull between eruptions.

Read the whole thing.

Related: The Media May Hate Brutal Putin Now, But Gushed Over ‘Mighty’ Soviet Union Then.

Robert Harris nods.