I was born in West Germany in 1975. Yes, it was still West Germany then. The country was divided, Europe was divided, and much of the world lived under dictatorships.

A year before my birth, Portuguese soldiers overthrew their country’s dictatorship. The political scientist Samuel Huntington later called this the beginning of the “third wave” of democratisation, a surge of countries moving from dictatorship to democracy that would last decades.

To read the article on the Newsroom website, click here.