The great sweeps of history are seldom recognised for what they are until they have been entrenched for years, but it is already clear that what has come to be known as Thatcherism has in seven years evolved from a dangerous heresy into a consensus held to a greater or lesser extent by most governments – and there are strong signs of hope that the next great wave to transform the world may be alliance of glasnost and perestroika: if the world’s three great bastions of unreconstructed thought and blank impenetrability, the Soviet Communist Party, the Deutsche Bundespost and International Business Machines Company can simul taneously start thinking the unthinkable and begin to dismantle their rigid mental and physical barricades, there may indeed be hope for a better world.
