This article deals with the author’s personal narratives and expectations vis-à-vis world-changing events between 1989 and 1991. It illustrates the ways in which the Cold War and its end, as well as the Soviet Union and its end, represent powerful psychological factors in personal narratives of growing up and giving meaning to the world. In an autoethnographic manner, it approaches research and writing from the perspective of the researcher’s experience in order to produce new layers of understanding about the world. It builds on the assumption that big events on the world stage are composed of micro-stories that both nourish them and are nourished by them, and in so doing it makes the micro and the macro two inseparable, interwoven approaches to cultural experience and change. A conversation is forged between past and present, expectations and delusions, life of author and life of Europe, personal new beginnings and continental cul-de-sacs.
Marcos Farias Ferreira, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lisbon, and Centre of International Studies, University Institute Lisbon, Portugal (marcosfariasferreira@gmail.com)