The fall of the Berlin wall 20 years ago today set off a wave of change throughout Europe. Jonathan Rugman assesses the pros – and the cons – of what has happened since 1989
It is the anniversary of the most important political event in most of our lifetimes, and yet so accustomed have we become to budget airline flights connecting us with central and eastern Europe in an hour or two, for a matter of a few quid, that the tumult of 1989 seems rather more than a lifetime ago.
The fall of the Berlin wall heralded Communism’s collapse in eastern Europe and, indeed, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself two years later.
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel calls it the “happiest day in post-war German history”. Vladimir Putin, now Russia’s prime minister but back then a KGB agent in Dresden, East Germany, calls the USSR’s demise the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe”.
So clearly not every barrier between east and west was felled that night when President Mikhail Gorbachev refused to countenance sending Soviet troops, allowing an almost bloodless revolution to occur.
The Chinese must look upon tonight’s anniversary with some dread. 1989 was, after all, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when Communist China’s democratic urge was, unlike that of East Germany, brutally suppressed.
The Chinese state is reportedly blocking access to Berlin wall anniversary websites, so clearly the fear of that year of revolution lingers. And the Germans themselves may have mixed feelings about this anniversary, given the Nazi-led killing of hundreds of Jews and the torching of their synagogues on 9 November 1938 – infamously known as “Kristallnacht”.
So what happened next? In the positive column, the end of the cold war, of course, and with it the EU’s enlargement (10 new members), democracy’s advance and the advance of market freedoms eastwards – whatever globalisation’s critics have to say about globalisation’s excesses.
In the negative column, the 140 000 – yes 140 000 – believed killed in the former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, as ethnic hatred was unleashed.
Since 1989, another 9/11 anniversary – that’s 11 September 2001 – has opened a new ideological gulf between east and west.
But though British soldiers and civilians have died in the fallout from the war Osama Bin Laden first declared, it is surely worth remembering tonight that a tiny minority of radical Muslims is now hell bent on our destruction – rather than a Communist superpower with its nuclear missiles aimed at the west.