Matthew Ryder: In-between generation will have to do more

Opinion

As a student in 1989, I remember turning on the television each morning to check on the protests as they unfolded in Tiananmen Square.

Later that year, I was again on the sofa, staring incredulously as the Berlin Wall fell. And I was back in front of the same screen, just a few months on, transfixed as Nelson Mandela walked free from prison.

Those events did not just change the world, they transformed many of the young people watching them. Which is one of the things that made last Monday's celebrations in Berlin so interesting.

For the first time, everywhere one looks - from the United States President to Europe's emerging political and business leaders - it is the generation that grew up watching those historic events that has become the generation to watch.

As they move into positions of power and influence, it is the very qualities that seemed to define them, 20 years ago, that may be tested most of all.

For those born between 1960 and 1975, the shadow cast by the radical, hedonistic baby-boomers was so large that it felt as if popular culture barely noticed them.

The closest they came to any form of recognition was as the burned-out slackers of Generation X, from the novel by Douglas Coupland, a term even he subsequently disowned.

But if they were defined by anything, it was by watching that sequence of events between 1989 and 1990.

The baby-boomers will always remember 1968 and the millennial generation were awakened by 9/11.

For those in between, it was 1989 that made them who they are. More than they were ever "yuppies", they were 1989ers.

There were two unusual qualities that made the 1989ers - or "Niners" - different from the politicised youth of earlier times. First, against the backdrop of the 80s, Niners had no faith in organised political groups and their doctrines.

Brought up when Thatcher ruled, they saw the battered trade unions and the lumbering leviathans of the unreconstructed left as no match for the light efficiency of individual action. In any event, with socialism in crisis, the time for dogma had passed.

Nothing illustrated this better than "Tiananmen tank man" becoming the Niners' poster of choice. He was someone whose name we did not know, who did not seem to belong to any organisation and was part of a protest that did not seem to have a unified cause.

Yet for that one act of personal defiance, as he stood there alone before the tanks, holding - of all things - his shopping bags, he was the Niner hero.

The second distinguishing quality of Niners was their confidence in what personal power and self-interest could achieve. Their ambition was global, not local, and they had watched individuals bring down governments across eastern Europe and South Africa, in a way that had seemed inconceivable to their parents.

By 1990, anything seemed possible. Those impressionable 20-somethings are today's influential 40-somethings and they carry the legacy with them.

No Logo author Naomi Klein credits those years as the period that turned her student interests towards global issues. UK politicians, such as Labour's David Miliband and the Conservative leader David Cameron, fresh out of university, opted not for the yuppie jobs that the 80s had offered, preferring to enter the loftier world of political research.

Across the Atlantic, Sergey Brin claims it was a trip to the dissolving Soviet Union that "awakened his childhood fear of authority" and influenced the culture of the famously informal company he started eight years later - Google.

Last year, Jeff Gordinier published X Saves the World. He says the great achievement of the post baby-boomer generation was that it "stopped the world from sucking".

Maybe so. But if Niners are really going to make the difference that they believed they would, they will have to do more. And they will be challenged on the very things that once made them different. This is already happening with regard to violence and conflict. At the key moment of their development, Niners witnessed dramatic political change occurring without bloodshed.

Television pictures had become a more effective revolutionary tool than an AK-47. That influenced the Niner outlook in a way that was a genuine break from the past.

Previously, baby-boomers from George Bush to Osama bin Laden seemed to believe that you had to fight for what you wanted - and kill or be killed if necessary. But Niners questioned the need to pay that price.

In this regard, President Obama's position is revealing. He is certainly a Niner - choosing Berlin as the location for his first international address and declaiming how the fall of the Wall and the end of apartheid were defining moments of the modern era.

More important, his talk leading up to the White House perfectly articulated Niner thinking, as he deprecated the bellicose errors of his predecessor. But has he maintained that approach?

A year on, Guantanamo is still open, American troops remain in Iraq, and an unwinnable war in Afghanistan escalates.

On the other hand, he has continued his emphasis on dialogue over threats and launched an unprecedented anti-nuclear agenda. He has even chosen a civil court, rather than a military tribunal, for the trial of alleged 9/11 conspirators.

But they remind us of the problems that arise when expectations are high. Even though a Niner like Obama may be naturally averse to war, he is struggling to deliver real reductions in military activity.

Perhaps most significantly, Niners will be tested on the quality that defines them most: their reluctance to take classically defined "right" and "left" positions.

Niners are stepping into leadership roles just when the world is faced with epic problems - from an economy still teetering on the brink to imminent climate change catastrophe.

The pressure of such intense and complex issues tends to reduce debate and encourage dogmatic thinking, as we saw after 9/11. This is something Niners will have to work hard to resist.

At the same time, pretending that it is always appropriate to take the middle ground is equally problematic. After 20 years, many Niners have learnt that a dangerous side-effect of abandoning traditional political positions is to portray as "neutral" or "practical" policies that are essentially reactionary.

For example, that post-1989 overconfidence in self-interest and the benefits of free markets has polluted everything from banking regulation to public health and education. Recognising that error without slipping back into polarised positions will be one of the greatest challenges of all.

Over those incredible few months in 1989, it became clear that the existing doctrinal walls and barriers had outlived their use. New thinking was needed. The post-baby boomers finally found their own identity and purpose. Now, two decades later, we are about to find out how successfully the Niners live up to that challenge.Observer

* Matthew Ryder is a barrister at Matrix Chambers, London.