Nostalgia comes for everyone in the end. There is a human predisposition to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles and to anticipate the future with a sense of dread. Politically that impulse manifests in declinism, the belief that civilisation is in a state of decay or even collapse from an imagined better past, exemplified in slogans such as “make America great again” or “take back control”.
The appeal of harking back to a supposedly simpler, better time has been ruthlessly exploited and commoditised both by politicians and the entertainment industry to such an extent that some people are now nostalgic for a time before they were born.
But, as Marcel Proust knew, the true bittersweet pleasure of nostalgia derives from contemplation of one’s own vanished youth and, by implication, one’s mortality. As hundreds of thousands of ageing millennials across Ireland and the UK brace themselves for the tidal wave of 1990s memorabilia that will accompany next summer’s Oasis reunion tour, the world of their teens will come sharply back to life. Jack Charlton and Riverdance. Tony Blair and the Spice Girls. A hundred pop culture signifiers jumbled together to define a decade that began a little early with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ended a little late when the first plane hit the World Trade Centre.
Like every decade, the 1990s had their horrors: war in the former Yugoslavia; genocide in Rwanda. But for a remarkable number of people across the world, it was a time of relative peace and rising prosperity.
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Nowhere was that more true than in Ireland, where the economic miracle dubbed the Celtic Tiger in 1994 by economist Kevin Gardiner was accelerating, peace was breaking out in the North and for the first time a generation of young adults could be utterly confident of making a career in their own country.
To be truly compelling, though, nostalgia must include some sense of paradise lost. The 1990s were the final decade before the internet seeped into all corners of public and private life. It was the last time when a home could be bought by a single person for a reasonable sum. More ambiguously, it was the moment when the seeds of future discontents were sown by economic globalisation. Everything that has followed, from military misadventures in the Middle East to the 2008 financial crash and the rise of the new nationalist right, can arguably be traced back to the 1990s.
None of this is likely to trouble the newly reconciled Gallagher brothers as they cycle through Oasis’s greatest hits in Croke Park next August. But they might be forgiven a wry smile in recalling how in their mid-1990s pomp they were frequently accused of being nothing more than a Beatles tribute act. Even nostalgia, it seems, is not what it used to be.