[CommonReader]

Thank you for this thread. I loaded "The Swerve" on my Sony and I am going to start reading it in a couple of days.

Living in Germany I have seen massive changes taking place during the last decades. The collapse of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall with subsequent reunification were the most immediate and visible historical changes. It is difficult to find any other period in history when a large Empire collapsed with such a speed for internal reasons only as we saw happening to the Soviet Union. Even though Putin is an autocrat his regime is so much more benign than what could have happened instead. Instead of dealing with Putin we could very well be dealing with some Stalinist dictator now.
As to Germany: when I lived in Berlin I passed every day on my way to work a discreet bar made of brass inserted into the pavement that indicated where only a few years before the wall had separated the city, guarded by armed men who were prepared to shoot and kill anyone taking the same path I was taking to work a few years later. Many positive developments but also negative things like the country's involvement in Afghanistan - something that has no support in the population and would have been unthinkable only twenty years ago.
The EU has also visibly arrived at a crossroads and the next months are probably going to be decisive for its future development. The linear post-war development of the EU has definitively ended, I am sure we can say so much already.
I also believe that we are seeing quite clearly how the historic anomaly of complete dominance of the "West" over the "East" is fading fast. Even though China may very well experience massive upheavals in the near future the "East" is in a position to reassert itself again. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s the only object "made in China" in my parent's household was a "Mao Bible" printed in China. Nowadays one is surprised when some cheap consumer goods turn out not to be made in China.