So the world has (not) changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall

- It's so strange with time. I think it's just as recently as the Berlin Wall fell. At the same time, I have realized when I have written this book, it is my life in something seen, says Annika Ström Melin.

She is a journalist and has watched events in Europe for most of her career, most recently as Dagens Nyheter's Brussels correspondent. She herself visited the GDR and Berlin when the city was divided and describes terrifying memorial images of watchtowers, barking dogs and border guards.

30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she has embarked on a modern history writing in the book World since 1989 - an attempt to summarize how the world has changed in recent years.

Is it really possible to write contemporary history?

- You don't really see what happened, it's so close to everything. And there are certainly those who would take up completely different things than I have done. But I am stuck for this way of telling about our present and I think I have found a red thread.

No one thought that the Berlin Wall would fall so suddenly and so peacefully. The pressure became too high for the leaders of the GDR and at a famous press conference on November 9, 1989, a journalist asked Soon Europe was opened up, the communist eastern bloc fell and the Cold War ended. In the new democracies in Eastern Europe, there were high hopes for increased prosperity and greater freedom.

They wanted to approach western Europe and become part of the stronger European Union. It became reality quite a few years later, in 2004, when the EU went from 15 to 25 member states in what was called the EU's "big bang".

- Today, it is so clear that in countries like Poland and Hungary, but also the Czech Republic and Slovakia, there is an anger about having to follow decisions that are made elsewhere. It has become clearer in retrospect that the countries also wanted to decide for themselves, and that leads straight into nationalism.

Annika Ström Melin tells how Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has drawn the parallel openly several times: first it was the communist dictators, and now the bureaucrats in Brussels.

- We are living in a time when we would need more decisions that cross national borders, but the trend is on the contrary that the countries are closing.

That the world is still, and increasingly, governed by self-determined nation states, leads to a global paradox, says Annika Ström Melin. Important issues about trade, migration, digitalisation and climate impact often have to be raised on a global level today, but the desire for cross-border cooperation is weak in many places. New boundaries and walls are being set up around the world.

- This global power is incomprehensible to us citizens: who is really making the decisions? Who is responsible for the decisions? You can only vote for the representatives of your own country. It's about how democracy should be able to solve our problems, says Annika Ström Melin.