German author Florian Illies in his book “1913: The Year Before the Storm” through a series of snapshots from the lives of artists, scientists, inventors and politicians tells the story of the year before the outbreak of the First World War. Many of his little stories do not suggest that the war is so near. In another popular book “The Nineties” (2022) an American author and essayist Chuck Klosterman argues that the 90's were probably the last time when the West maintained the idea of a progress, better future and the belief in salvation of general economic growth. I presume that the disparate array of good and evil “futures”, the features and tendencies we witness today are rooted in the bedrock of events which happened and ideas emerged in different parts of East and West Europe between 1989 till 2000.

Meanwhile:

On June 5, 1989 an unknown Chinese man stood with shopping bags in both hands in front of a column of tanks. Tanks were leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing where on the previous day, the government ordered the protesting students after six weeks of standoff to clear the square. The students maintained their peaceful protests. The Chinese army during the brutal intervention killed hundreds (or thousands) of people. Whem the first tank maneuvered to pass by, the standing man repeatedly shifted his position and obstructed the tank's attempted path around him. The man forced the tanks to halt and then climbed on top of the tank where he talked to a soldier. After ending the conversation, the man descended from the tank and was seen speaking with another person who was riding his bicycle across the street in front of the stationary tanks. The man received the nickname “Tank Man” or “Unknown Protester”. It is not known until today what he carried in his shopping bags and what happened to him after his encounter with the tank.

An influential book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” was published in 1988. Authors argue that the mass communication media in the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion. Book was honored with the Orwell Award for "outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse" in 1989.

The “surprising” disintegration on December 25 1991 of the Soviet Union supposedly being the result of the weapon competition with the USA influenced the collapse of many of socialist utopias. The glorious victory of the ideology of capitalism, neo-liberalism and of planetary extractivism consuming and utilizing the body of Mother Earth by humans seemed to be ultimate.

The national environmental policy of the new era of environmental protection The Rainbow Programme  - the Recovery Environmental Programme of the Czech Republic, was adopted by Government Decision No. 338 on 12 December 1990. It marked the beginning of the Founding Period and defined the framework of legal, economic, institutional, information and voluntary instruments and set out seven basic objectives for 1992. The first of which was to stop the unfavourable development of environmental pollution in two years; other objectives concerned air, water, waste, forest and landscape protection and nature conservation. The priority was to focus on human health protection and a better life style and was preceded by the socalled Blue Book assessing the condition of the environment from 1989 onwards. In the context of the catastrophic condition of the environment in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, in particular air and water, very short terms were set for the implementation of corrective measures.

Francis Fukuyama in his bestseller “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992) concluded that we just now entered the “Hegelian End”, with the consequences such as “eternal and universal laws of liberal capitalism, democracy, and globalization”, including welfare-state retraction, financial deregulation and free-trade pacts.

On July 10th 1991 Boris Yeltsin was elected as the president of the Soviet Union's successor, the Russian Federation. In August same year Michail Gorbachev holidayed at his dacha, while the "Gang of Eight" launched in Moscow a coup d'état. They demanded that Gorbachev declare a state of emergency, which he refused. Boris Yeltsin atop a tank in front of the White House in Moscow gave a speech and condemned the hardliners standing behind the coup.Two days later, Gorby resigned as general secretary. Boris Yeltsin presided over 8 years of political unrest, economic crisis, and social anarchy. On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin resigned, leaving as acting president Vladimir Putin, who became famous when “solved” the First Chechen War (1994 -1996). The number of Chechen civilians deaths in  Grozny is estimated between 30,000 and 100,000.

In spring 1990 American Jewish author and journalist Alan Levy returned from Vienna to Prague. In the first issue of The Prague Post newspaper declared that the capital became the world’s “Left Bank of the ‘90s”. “For some of us, Prague is Second Chance City; for others, a new frontier where anything goes, everything goes and, often enough, nothing works. Yesterday is long gone, today is nebulous, and who knows about tomorrow, but, somewhere within each of us, we all know we are living in a historic place at a historic time. Future Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, Audens and Isherwoods, Boswells and Shirers will chronicle our course …”

On 20th March 1992 the first McDonald opened in Vodičkova street in Prague. The members of Hare Krishna, Anarchists, and Animal SOS (animal rights defence) prepared a demonstration against the first McDonald's franchise restaurant. "We are fighting for people stop exploiting animals, stop misuse them for their wealth, stop making their work easier, for their lust," said one of the organizers Petr Bergman. In four years McDonald expanded into its 100th country and earned more revenue from overseas than from restaurants in USA. McDonald president Mr. Cantalupo said in interview with Thomas L. Friedman for the NYT: ''I feel these countries want McDonald's as a symbol of something - an economic maturity and that they are open to foreign investments. I don't think there is a country out there we haven't gotten inquiries from. I have a parade of ambassadors and trade representatives in here regularly to tell us about their country and why McDonald's would be good for the country.'' Friedman concluded that “no two countries with a McDonald’s franchise had ever gone to war with each other”. He named it as "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention’ and explained: "when a country reaches a certain level of economic development—one where the middle class is big enough to go to a McDonald’s—people lose interest in starting wars".

During the 1990s the concept of Anthropocene was still a scientific obscurity, waiting to be discovered and popularized in the year 2000, when (in the text published in the Newsletter #41 in International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme - GBP), Paul. J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer emphasized the central role of mankind in geology and ecology and proposed this term for the current geological epoch. “To assign a more specific date to the onset of the "anthropocene" seems somewhat arbitrary, but we propose the latter part of the 18th century, although we are aware that alternative proposals can be made (some may even want to include the entire holocene)”. The endangering of planet Earth became move visible for people thanks to electronic media and Internet.

Politician, environmentalist, vice president of US between 1993 and 2001, the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 2000. Al Gore has been involved with the environmental movement for decades. He is the author of the best-sellers “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Assault on Reason,” “Earth in the Balance,” “Our Choice: A Plan To Solve the Climate Crisis,” “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change,” and most recently “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” Gore lost the presidential elections in 2000 with George Bush Jr.

In Finland the first GSM network called Radiolinia was launched in 1991. The Internet was atill an unstable telephone patchwork of plaintexts and of snail-slow distribution of hazy images. It rapidly expanded around the richer part of the globe, to contribute to dissolving of the aesthetic and ideological frontiers between mainstream and marginal cultures, between communities enforced by a hyperobject of a Planetary Spam. The term of digital divide was introduced as the unequal access to digital technology, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and the internet. The tension between establishment and avant-garde, between commercial and radical cultures seemed to be as obsolete as to watch films from VHS tapes or write letters on typewriter and walking to the post office.

In spring 1990 in the deep nuclear bunker under the void of the former Stalin monument the first independent, pirate Radio station Stalin started to FM broadcast.

On January 20, 1990, Frank Zappa arrived at Prague’s Ruzyne airport and was greeted by 5,000 fans, chanting and holding handmade banners aloft. Zappa was given the royal treatment with a series of meetings with influential Czech figures, culminating with a meeting at Prague Castle with Havel. Zappa said: “So there I was in the Oval Office or something and the President is talking about Captain Beefheart and rock’n’roll.  I was thinking: ‘Is this The Twilight Zone or what?’” Zappa impressed Havel with innovative ideas on trade and communications, which led to Havel’s announcement that Zappa would represent Czechoslovakia on trade, tourism, and cultural matters. US Secretary Of State James A. Baker called to Prague shortly after and Havel reduced Zappa’s role to be an unofficial cultural emissary.

The mega-concert HIStory World Tour of Michael Jackson in 1996 was the second largest concert in Prague ever, second to the Rolling Stones’ performance at Strahov Stadium in August in 1995. As a present The Stones gave Václav Havel the new lighting system to make the Prague Castle even more spectacular. This turned the National Czech panorama definitely into a simulacra. HIStory World Tour was attended by 125 000 fans. The huge plastic statue of Michael was erected already two weeks before on the same place where 40 years ago even bigger - and made from granite - monument of Josef Stalin was erected. It was soon (1962) after the condemnation of the Cult of Stalin by Nikita Chruschov dynamited and fragments from the stoned Stalin and his stone comrades were catapulted all around the Letná plain. Some even according the story of Bohumil Hrabal fell on the Old Town river bank of the Vltava river.

Collective Spiral Tribe was formed as "a sound system" in 1990 in UK. Thet organized free parties, combined pagan beliefs with the New Age traveller culture and rave movement. Between 1990 and 1992 they organised more then 30 free parties, raves, and festivals in indoor and outdoor locations. Spiral Tribe were involved in the famous Castlemorton Common Festival.  After the trial part of the group exiled UK, organising tekno events in the Netherlands, Germany Austria and formed their base at Kunsthaus Tacheles. This squatted building in East Berlin they shared with the multimedia travelling performance group Mutoid Waste Company. In 1994 travelled together to find out  how to set up in Prague. Later Spiral Tribe were involved in the organization of the first CzechTek festival in Hostomice (July 28, 1994), and later in different locations in 1995 and 1996. Mutoid Waste Company decided to move futher and founded the libertarian community in the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy.

During the early 1990s, the UK group Reclaim the Streets was one of many who was influenced by the ideas of Hakim Bey's book “The Temporary Autonomous Zone” (1991 by Autonomedia). Their adoption of the carnivalesque form of protest evolved into the first "global street party" held in cities across the world in May, 1998. "Rave parties" developed into the “Carnivals Against Capitalism” movement and worldwide antiglobalization protests announced by the network “Peoples' Global Action” during the G8 summit meeting in Cologne, Germany.

Brian Springer spent one year while searching for footage grabbing back fro the air channel news feeds which were not intended for public consumption. He used them for video documentary SPIN about the US presidential elections and he finished in in 1995. Springer deconstructed commercial television in a way which the NY Times called “a devastating critique of television’s profound manipulativeness in the way it packages the news and politics". Brian Springer produced SPIN as a followup to Feed in 1992, for which he also provided raw satellite footage. Spin was banned for screening in USA for several years.

In 1997 Václav Havel received the Fulbright Prize and gave a speech in Washington “The Charms of NATO”. “I believe that, for the rest of the world, contemporary America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the best and the worst of our civilization. On the one hand, there are its profound commitments to enhancing civil liberty and to maintaining the strength of its democratic institutions, and the fantastic developments in science and technology which have contributed so much to our well-being; on the other, there is the blind worship of perpetual economic growth and consumption, regardless of their destructive impact on the environment, or how subject they are to the dictates of materialism and consumerism, or how they, through the omnipresence of television and advertising, promote uniformity and banality instead of a respect for human uniqueness.” He enthusiastically welcomed NATO’s decision to admit Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and called for the US to assume responsibility for the whole world. According to Havel, “only the United States could save our global civilization by acting on its values — values that should be adopted by all cultures and all nations, as a condition for their survival”. His statement today seems to be a sign of wrong estimation.

In 2000 Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that during an interview with former President Bill Clinton raised the possibility that Russia could join NATO. Clinton said he had "no objection. “But the entire U.S. delegation got very nervous."

The transformation from a centrally planned economy to a market economy caused a serious recession and structural crisis, which in the cultural field led to rather drastic under-financing and eventually led to the downfall of the pre-existing support system model for art and artists. Furthermore, the existing art infrastructure was centrally controlled; hence, it required de-monopolisation and the development of bottom-up structures in its place.

This was one of the main goals why Soros decided to support The Open Society Fund and The Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts (SCCA) Network. This international non-governmental organisation was established in 1991 in Budapest and several of its branches opened same year in 18 Eastern European countries: Almaty, Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest, Chișinău, Kyiv, Ljubljana, Moscow, Odessa, Prague, Riga, Saint Petersburg, Sarajevo, Sofia, Skopje, Tallinn, Warsaw, Vilnius and Zagreb. Until 1999, the Network functioned as an operating programme of the above mentioned Open Society Foundation. However Soros decided to end the programme in 1996 arguing that the processes of democratisation had advanced enough and the local contemporary art scenes had already diversified their funding sources; therefore, the centres had to survive without his further support. Some of them did.

In the beginning of the 90s the front doors in most Czech towns were usually left unlocked, even at night. Tenants living in those houses had access to their own space in cellars and sometimes spaces in attics.

The last mega exhibition project Documenta of the twentieth century in Kassel in 1997 was for the first time led by a woman - Catherine David. “Eight years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the cultural maps of Europe are shifting heavily” was assumed in the project “Deep Europe” which became a part of Documenta program: “still many things to see, learn and do, and conversations to be had, before we will be able to make sense of the new distances between Berlin and Warsaw, Paris and Moscow, Vienna and Belgrade, Kassel and Eisenach.” Echoing the words of the Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev, 'Europe is at its deepest where there are a lot of overlapping identities,' the former East German critical writer Inke Arns characterized the notion of Deep Europe as follows: 'With the notion of Deep Europe we refer to a new understanding of Europe, which leads away from the horizontal measurement of the size of a territory (thus including East/West etc.), towards something that could be called a vertical mapping, or a vertical measuring of the different cultural layers and identities in Europe.” This call to endeavor and facilitate a new (probably shorter) distance between the capitals of New Europe was interpreted by building more new highways and to limit the Pan-European train network, by selling it to national corporations.

Slovenia was attacked by Yugoslavian Army in 1991 and the Yugoslav Wars ended in 2001 in Kosovo. In total about 140,000 people were killed and over the decade-long duration of the conflict created biggest refugee and humanitarian crise in the Europe after 1945. It is estimated that the wars displaced about 2.4 million refugees and 2 million internally displaced persons. The air strikes of NATO lasted until 10 June 1999.

Huge anti-capitalist protests took place during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank summit on September 27, 2000 in Prague. This protest followed similar protests in Seattle and Washington. Thousands of activists, including Ya Basta Association, Tute Bianche, Indymedia and different other groups of activists and anarchists arrived from all over the world to express their discontent. About 12,000 were involved in the street protests and over 900 were detained by police. 64 policemen and 20 demonstrators were injured. During the Summit of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund the president of World Bank James Wolfensohn asked conference attendees to recognise the legitimacy of the protesters' concerns: "Outside these walls young people are demonstrating against globalisation. I believe deeply that many of them are asking legitimate questions, and I embrace the commitment of a new generation to fight poverty. I share their passion and their question, but I believe we can move forward only if we deal with each other constructively and with mutual respect," he said.

In a talk to the International Civil Commission of Human Rights Observation in November 20, 1999, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos said: “This Fourth World War uses what we call "destruction." Territories are destroyed and depopulated. At the point at which war is waged, land must be destroyed, turned into desert. Not out of a zeal for destruction, but in order to rebuild and reorder it. What is the primary problem confronted by this unipolar world in globalizing itself? Nation States, resistances, cultures, each nation's means of relating, that which makes them different. How is it possible for the village to be global and for everyone to be equal if there are so many differences? When we say that it is necessary to destroy Nation States and to turn them into deserts, it does not mean doing away with the people, but with the peoples' ways of being. After destroying, one must rebuild. Rebuild the territories and give them another place. The place which the laws of the market determine. This is what is driving globalization.
Subcomandante Marcos
La Realidad, Chiapas, México

In 1999, the two future member of the jamming media collective Yes Men received an email from a fellow who's had the foresight to register the domain "GWBush.com".  Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos modified that one "to explain George W. Bush" in more honest terms. The masquerade angers the Bush campaign that they send the website a cease-and-desist letter and complain to the Federal Elections Commission. When a reporter asks Bush about "the wrong website" at a televised press conference, the future president declares: “There ought to be limits to freedom.”

Keiko Sei statement for the exhibition Politik-um / New Engagement by Soros Center for Contemporary Art Prague opened on 15. 5. 2002: "Activists constantly monitor the "activities" of the "big guys" - such as corporations and governmental authorities - in order to create and invent tactics to make them aware that the "small guys" won't remain as ignorant and subordinate as they have been in the past, and are "supposed to be", and, simply to l et them know that: "We know what you are doing and we won't keep our mouths shut."  Their tactics and techniques have diversified over the decades as the citizens' consciousness grew and as new technology developed. We can usually see their activities on the Internet and, occasionally, we can see "fireworks", resulting from their actions, in various anti-globalization demonstrations. As their aim is to get the attention of the media and public, these actions have become more and more over the top; and this is what has caught the eye of the art world. "

(to be continued)