You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

Well, thank you very much all for coming on such a cold night.

And to Neil and the LRB for inviting me.

Now, I know the LRB well. I've been writing for it for a long time, and I think the instructions are usually very clear from the editor,

be conversational.

So I try not to get too angry today.

If we look at what is going on today, it's astonishing that after all the hopes that were

aroused in some that with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of one enemy,

the end of authoritarian rule in parts of Eastern Europe, the end of the dictatorships in South America,

that there was some hope, there was talk even of a peace dividend,

and in reality, what we have seen is wars, upheavals, religious intolerance, jihadi fundamentalism, continuous wars in parts of Africa,

some of which aren't even discussed in polite society, like what's been going on in the Congo,

where the figures of people killed in the civil war being waged by,

sometimes you feel corporations which have armies, to get the wealth of that country,

the figures have reached at least four to five million dead, if not more.

And then we have a growing feeling that actually democracy

and democratic institutions themselves are not functioning as they should. And in fact fact we are living in a sort of twilight

period of democracy itself. So what I want to do this evening is try and explain how I see

this. And I think a starting point has to be what happened in the 90s on a global scale, which was the implosion

of the old Soviet Union and the collapse, the demonstrations, the taking over of Eastern Europe,

by who? In many cases, by former bureaucrats within the

Communist Party apparatuses who, seeing their chance, both in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,

...