But this year has  marked far more — the culmination of a decade during which the shine came off the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama blandly labeled the post-communist period. First came the wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) often irresponsibly dressed up as civilizational struggles, then a collapse of faith in capitalism so stunning that, had it happened during the Cold War, might have sparked, if not a reverse 1989, a considerable propaganda coup for the Soviet bloc. Whereas one of the cataclysmic events of 1989 — the fall of the Berlin Wall — was more widely celebrated in the soaring boom of the late 90s, 2009 seems more ripe for an exploration of the ambiguous legacy of both the popular movements that swelled, on both sides of Eurasia, twenty years before.

Enter the Iranian election imbroglio, perfectly timed to capture a zeitgeist brimming with expectation of cultural chaos and refreshed by reminders of the popular demonstrations that erupted on the streets of Berlin and Beijing. Salient memories of the former make it unsurprising to watch media figures, cheerleading what they hope is yet another replay of 1989 Berlin, lump the demonstrations against the election result with other recent “Twitter Revolutions”. While Evgeny Morozov disputed social media’s usefulness for such movements in the March/April issue of BR, he is having slightly more trouble doing so in the context of Iran, where the government — let’s all stop inconsistently plastering every momentarily disfavored system with the epithet “regime” — is either much less sophisticated at harnessing the internet for propaganda purposes, or doesn’t need to.

After all, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad counts among his supporters significant numbers of the lower classes, and, though reported on with far less zeal by the BBC or (when it finally stuck its head out of the embarrassing gutter of celebrity gossip in which it’s been increasingly entrenched) CNN, many thousands of them also managed to mobilize in Iran’s capital without the aid of an expensive iPhone. Indeed, missing from the many discussions about the protests in Iran, from technology to the flared tempers on display in the streets, are they they, like many large street demonstrations over the past decade — and unlike the uprisings of 1989 — have been taking place in an atmosphere charged with class politics.

This fact appears lost on the State Department, which, in contrast to the sober statements being issued by the White House, which were cautious not to play into any belief in further U.S. interference in Iran, effectively intervened on behalf of Iran’s largely pro-Moussavi Twitterati when it asked the site to defer its planned downtime today. Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the reformist presidential candidate, began his political career popular with Iran’s lower classes, but his ascendancy to his new status as icon of the reform movement has aligned him more closely with the slightly more secular Iranian elite. In other words, the reason so much Twitter traffic appears to support the Iranian “revolution” is because those that can afford to tweet and SMS — that is, one side of the digital divide — are largely arrayed on one side of the political spectrum.

The difference between Tehran 2009 and the uprisings of 1989, therefore, is not simply the technology available to participants. After all, it didn’t take mobile web to assemble thousands of Germans in Leipzig, weeks before the fall of the wall, for the “Wir Sind Das Volk” (“We Are the People”) protests that are being commemorated across the former East Germany this year. No, the movements in Berlin and Beijing were qualitatively different than the likes of Tehran 2009 — or recent rallies in Bangkok, Kiev, and Caracas.  In these examples, large masses of protesters have turned up on either side of the political debate.

Of course, class has fueled street demonstrations — from the French to the Russian Revolutions — throughout history.  And many recent manifestations of “people power” — from Pakistan’s Lawyers’ Movement to many of the “Color Revolutions” in the former Soviet bloc — also implicated class. But in many recent movements, what is notably gone is the simple formula — which so many Western commentators have tried to impose on the much more complex situation in Iran — of “the people versus the regime”. In the new class conflicts, a much broader economic and cultural elite — the upper middle class — has faced down a proletariat standing behind a charismatic leader. Consequently, both sides claim democratic legitimacy — and, in the most extreme examples, accuse the other of being anti-democratic.

In the ideological vacuum opened by the so-called “end of history”, epic conflict can be staged between forces which each claim the democratic mantle. Even the greatest perceived contemporary threat to democracy, Islamism, largely fits this mold. The protests in Iran have not challenged the fundamental character of the Islamic Republic, and three of the largest Islamist groups — the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon — are all deeply engaged in the political process. In the recent elections in Lebanon, in fact, Hezbollah displayed political maturity by conceding defeat to a “pro-West” coalition of Christians and Sunnis.

Protests such as those in Iran have broken out, specifically, where there are wide class cleavages in nominally democratic states, and when orderly transitions of power were distrusted, resulting in alternating demonstrations of approximately equal size. Members of such crowds occasionally engage the police, when they swelled to the point of threatening disorder, but governments have declined to confront them, lest their own popular allies, whose protests were a sign they were counting on their own democratic legitimacy, be accused abusing their power — or worse. While 1989 has been largely euphemized as the year history ended when the Berlin Wall fell, memories of Tiananmen remained much more salient among those who feared being charged with repeating it.

But even if the movement aligned with the ruling class committed some grievous crime, the simple fact that no side can claim a monopoly over the “will of the people” means that the narrative of a struggle against authoritarianism cannot repeat itself. A replay of 1989 — either in the form of the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tiananmen — is impossible.

What could be more ironic than the return of class — driving force of the old “spectre haunting Europe” — on the anniversairy of communism’s demise? Perhaps it’s that this era of dueling mandates and electoral uncertainty began with a recount in Florida, followed by a definitive ruling from America’s Guardian Council, the Supreme Court. On average, a poorer, more rural voter preferred George W. Bush (“against their interests,” snorted the likes of Thomas Frank) — and a considerable number of coastal elites took to the streets to protest him as they never had before.

Such origins may suggest that the greatest contemporary threat to democracy is not authoritarianism, or its prohibition of forms of information-sharing, like Twitter, but, at the vulnerable point of democratic transition, social structures that cause people to mistrust fellow citizens, and such an overabundance of divergent information that one can always choose what to believe.

In BR’s January/February issue, David Cole grappled with the same question – and reached a remarkably similar conclusion. Detention without trial, Cole argued, was not only legal, but necessary. Many detainees could not be brought to trial in the U.S. under international law. What they could be afforded, he claimed, was some modicum of due process – proceedings to clarify whether they had actually been members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, for example. “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” moreover, would be firmly out of the question. Above all, Cole wrote, “Guantánamo is a black mark because of this resistance to law and refusal to recognize the basic human dignity of the detainees. If we are to fix the problem, we need not abandon military detention, but we must subject it to the rule of law.”

Still, Cole endorses a legally shaky principle of detention without trial as a “preventative” measure, meant to prevent strongly suspected terrorists from reengaging in violence. According to a recent New York Times article, one in seven former detainees returns to terrorism after release.

International humanitarian law affords Cole – and Obama – more flexibility with the Guantánamo detainees than they would have for domestic terror suspects. But human rights groups have been critical of ideas like these, which appear to represent an intermediary step between the “ad hoc” policies of the Bush years and a doctrinaire approach to detention that would essentially follow an established legal order — whether domestic or international. Leaks from a meeting between representatives from several leading human rights organizations and Obama indicate that they now see little difference between his policies and those of George W. Bush.

Lurking behind these debates are several definitional problems.

The detainees held at Guantánamo, many agree, are in legal limbo because their status falls outside both U.S. and international law. The “torture memos” authored by Bush administration Justice Department officials took pains to point this out. The question was whether this loophole allowed the U.S. to indefinitely detain and treat detainees outside any established legal framework, or whether it was compelled to release them — in other words, whether the absence of law covering a given situation allowed for the exercise of arbitrarily-applied, “ad hoc” power, or forestalled states from acting at all.

The issue of torture and detainment, then, was never really about the “rule of law”. The “law” in question did not exist. In this vein, the human rights organizations with which Obama met remain adamant that the president’s stated goal of preventing American image problems from becoming incitements to increased international tension would be best served by fidelity to the values Obama claims to lionize — not just as criteria by which to interpret law, but as means in and of themselves.

What remains an open question is what approach is more pragmatic in terms of preventing terrorism. To what extent can Obama maintain an intermediary approach without inflaming world opinion such that releasing the remaining detainees might be the lesser danger? So far, he has made mostly symbolic gestures. His proclamations upon entering office that Guantánamo would be closed and torture ended have run up against serious criticism from within his own party, which blocked funds for the closure due to the administration’s lack of a serious plan, and which demand a serious attempt to bring the architects of the Bush administration’s torture regime to accountability — if not justice.

Obama does appear to be revising some of his policies. Today, it was announced that a detainee accused of involvement in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania would be transferred for trial at a civilian court in New York. And Obama claims – despite vociferous attempts by Republicans to turn it into a national security issue – that many more detainees will be brought back to U.S. shores.

But with military tribunals set to continue, and the massive, Guantánamo-esque prison in Bagram, Afghanistan set to remain open, it will be increasingly difficult for Obama to claim he is turning the page on the Bush years, particularly given his reluctance to pursue either hearings or investigations of administration officials. Obama was aware enough of the role the U.S.’ reputation plays in ensuring its security to forestall the release of more photos of detainee abuse. Putting off accountability for existing evidence detainee abuse, however – Obama has claimed that transparency will come, later – may be a move laden with just as much risk.

Chris Szabla is a law student at Harvard and an editorial assistant at Boston Review.