Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I’ll be asking “What is the story of democracy in our time?” for this evening lecture in Paris. ULIP is located on the grand Esplanade des Invalides, where it shares a building with the British Council. It is a wonderful institution, and proudly European. A good place, in other words, to explore the idea that a history of the post-Cold War present should start before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (and treat the decline of communism as part of the ongoing transformation of the institutions and the manners of the liberal democratic west).