Progressivism is dangerous, whatever form it takes. It’s the human factor: we tend to warp our collective dreams. This was the insight of St Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, when he was confronted by the sudden collapse of the once-mighty Roman Empire. Human political systems may have all the appearance of iron-clad permanence and manifest destiny. But they stand on suspect foundations. They may fall over without notice and disappear with little trace, just as the statues of Lenin and Stalin were taken down in less than a season.

I used to have a piece of the Berlin Wall.

I kept it in a tiny box. Held in my hand, it seemed an unremarkable thing. On one s,ide it was coloured garishly with spray paint – a fragment of who-knows-what squiggle, a piece of who- knows-what slogan. Under the surface, it was just a plain old piece of rather porous twentieth-century concrete, as drab as the tower blocks of Eastern Europe.Before I forgot where I put it, it was a reminder of 1989 – that remarkable year in which maps and atlases became obsolete. A political system founded on an ideology of revolution was dismantled from below by ordinary people who massed together in the streets in defiance. In Berlin, the wall once defended by tanks was pulled down by hand. In Wenceslas Square, Prague, 300,000 people pulled out the keys from their pockets and waved them so that they sounded like Christmas bells. The door is opening!In Romania, resistance began with the congregation of Reformed pastor László Tőkés – a preacher of sermons against the regime – surrounding his house to prevent his eviction. They precipitated a rebellion.

At the time, the feeling of euphoria was palpable even from the antipodes. I was of the generation that grew up under the shadow of the bomb, hoping that ‘the Russians love their children too.’ And now, extraordinarily, all that was gone. One after the other, the states of Eastern Europe cast off their Communist governments like ill-fitting garments. There was some bloodshed in Romania, the domain of the tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu. But on the whole, this was not a violent moment. With characteristic wit, the Czechs called their revolution the ‘Velvet Revolution’, so elegant was the transfer of power.

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