I’m old enough to remember the euphoria felt around the world with the triumph of Solidarity in Poland, the success of the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, and – most especially – the fall of the Berlin Wall. The images of happy young Germans scrambling over the wall that had divided them for so long were all over television, magazines and newspapers. Some of us at the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency (which found new life as the International Information Programs Bureau at the State Department) wondered what directions our jobs would take, now that communism appeared to have collapsed. And our trustworthy journal – “Problems of Communism” ceased to exist after 40 years of publication.

But the euphoria didn’t last as the countries of the former Soviet Eastern Bloc grappled with the daunting problems of free markets, corruption, ethnic tensions, and the difficulties of creating legitimate governments that would protect what for many of them was a strange new thing called “democracy.” “Problems of Communism” was replaced with a new journal — this time produced by a non-government publisher – called “Problems of Post-Communism.”

While I was working on the America.gov feature “The Evolving Work of Democracy,” I was struck by what, I suppose, is the inevitable generation gap in remembering and thinking about democracy 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For example: Some of my younger co-workers couldn’t recognize Lech Wałęsa in photos showing him leading the workers of the Solidarity Free Trade Union at the Gdansk ship yards. One twenty-something identified Wałęsa as Stalin! (Must be the mustaches – they both sported bushy ones.)

And when I asked Michelle Austein Brooks, a co-worker (also a twenty-something) who recently visited Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, if young people there are disillusioned with the promise of democracy, she reminded me that young people never lived under communism, so they don’t have the life experiences to make comparisons.

Nonetheless, I wonder if disillusionment and apathy — among young and old alike — are greater threats to freedom and democracy than communism ever was.

For those old enough to remember, President Ronald Reagan deplored communism as “the focus of evil in the modern world” and was confident of its eventual demise. But he also warned: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

More recently, in July 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama went to Berlin and said the fall of the Berlin Wall “brought new hope,” but he also cautioned: “History has led us to a new crossroad, with new promise and new peril.”

What do you – whatever your age — think is the greatest challenge facing democracy today?