Thirty years after its sensational fall, it is somewhat hard to quantify what the Berlin Wall meant. The division created by that wall shaped world politics from the moment it started being built.
It was a very different world to the one we live in today. The U.S.S.R. is today no more and, with it, other countries such as Yugoslavia and East Germany ceased to exist while dictatorships largely disappeared, even if their legacy is still felt.
It was a world of only one wall, two superpowers, no Internet, no tweets and a media scene controlled by a few for the many. It was days in which when a political leader spoke, people stopped to listen. Fake news did exist, however, but it was called ‘propaganda’.
There are more nuclear weapons today than necessary, but in those years, it was MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. It was a lethal doctrine of military strategy that basically guaranteed total annihilation inthe event of nuclear confrontation.
MAD is all but forgotten now but, ironically, as the world prepared to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, the START Treaty crumbled. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that saw its birth in 1991 between the U.S.A. and what was then the U.S.S.R, whose nuclear weapons were mostly inherited by Russia.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world took great strides forward, and also a few backwards. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S.S.R. and all it symbolized were quick to declare that it was “the end of history”.
But as usually happens, the world adapted and morphed. There was terrorism back then, but as with everything else in those years, its tentacles reached out to the dominant few.
Wars continued to be waged, Wall or no Wall, even if by proxy. Climate change was an issue too, but it was more of a propaganda weapon – theunfortunate consequences of which are being reaped today.
Nuclear weapons were once in the hands of few, now they in of many and what is now the European Union is an economic grouping formed by those who knew what war meant.
The world made great leaps forward since those historic days; many other walls came crumbling down. And yet, new ones are going up, forgetful of the time when half of Europe was led by an iron fist that many died trying to remove.
