Welcome to my blog. I am a former local journalist who now works in PR and a Conservative and community activist in Woking and Horsell. This blog will keep updated on local issues as well as my interests and quirky news stories.
The Berlin Wall two years before its destruction
My memories as an 11 year-old of the Berlin Wall crumbling 20 years ago today are a little hazy but such was the importance of the event that it is difficult for anyone to have forgotten those television images altogether. Four years later, my history teacher posited that in the future we would talk about “since the Wall” in much the same way that his generation spoke about “since the War“.
He believed that it was as important a historical event that would shape the future of Europe. To a certain extent he was right; it has paved the way for a unified Europe but a unified Europe is not what everyone wants and hasn’t had the impact on the world that many people thought it would.
If anything, much of Europe has reverted back to its pre-First World War nationalism – Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR are previously communist nations that are now footnotes in historical atlases. We have seen the rise of nationalism in Germany once again, borne out of the realisation that unification was not the emancipation of which many in the East had dreamed. Romania and Bulgaria remain very poor and propped up by EU investment. Albania harbours ethnic and religious conflicts that fed into the Serbian War of 1999.
To me, it seems that once more the victors have written the history books. The end of the Cold War was not, I think precipitated by the victory of capitalism over communism but by a victory of nationalism over empire. I don’t believe that East Germans wanted to be neo-liberal – they wanted to be Germans. Yugoslavs wanted to be Serbians, Croats and Bosnians and Czechs and Slovaks wanted their own nations, not puppet rule from Moscow.
Capitalism and the western standard of living was a bonus, sure; but if that was what eastern Europe had really wanted, would they not have worked to gain that first? Perhaps if they had been better supported by the other nations of Europe, the unified Europe would be a greater force than it has turned out to be.
