One day in Berlin changed the world

Berliners celebrate on top of the wall as East Germans flood through the dismantled Berlin Wall into West Berlin on Nov. 12, 1989.

It was the day the world changed.

Rather, it was the day the world changed in some ways, both expected and unexpected, while in other ways it has continued on in much the same way and in some respects has become a good deal worse because back then there was a lot less terrorism.

For all its unevenness and after taking account of the disappointments that have succeeded it, the Fall of the Wall in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1989, is still beyond any question the single most important political event in the now nearly two-thirds of a century since the end of World War II in Europe.

The most obvious example of the kind of consequences brought about by the event is that Europe, after four decades of being split in two, is today a single continent. Russia still finds reasons to quarrel with just about everyone else, but these are the product of ordinary national interest rather than of ideology or of imperial overreach.

The new Europe is a far more comfortable place than the old one. It is also, though, a more inward, less-ambitious and just an older and a less-interesting place – sort of like a large Austria, or a huge open-air museum. It's very likely that the Fall of the Wall will be the last event of global importance to happen in a continent that once dominated the world for the better part of 500 years,

China's ascent to the rank of an economic superpower, although this may appear much less obvious, can be traced back to that now 20-year-old event.

Earlier in 1989 – on June 4 – China's rulers sent in the tanks to crush the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

After the Wall's fall, China's rulers explicitly rejected Soviet leader Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost (openness) and of perestroika (restructuring). To keep their people bonded to the Communist political system, though, their chosen alternative was to commit their country to the free market economic system. The consequence of that is now economic history.

A last example of the kind of change catalyzed by the event – this one a mix of the expected and unexpected – is that after the Wall's fall and the collapse not long afterward of the Soviet Union itself, communism and also socialism, even to a degree social democracy, were consigned to history's trash can. No alternative to free market capitalism was left, it was widely assumed.

Or so it seemed. Except that only a year ago, capitalism itself came close to an equivalent catastrophic collapse – a comparison made recently by the economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. (To illustrate the connection, it's now become popular to dismiss Communist and socialist economics as "a Ponzi scheme," which in fact is pretty accurate.)

The depression that threatened last year was avoided, although a troubling recession continues. The political ground has shifted, though. After two decades of neo-conservative dominance, government is once again seen to have a real role – in the regulation of the market, above all of the financial market.

Nor is this process – that of a rebalancing of the credibility and influence of the political left and right – yet complete. The project to develop a global policy to reverse climate change constitutes at its core a turning back to reliance on government on a scale unequalled since the construction of the modern welfare state right after the end of World War II (itself prompted in part by a perceived need to counter the appeal of communism).

The left that "lost" when the Wall came down thus has been reborn in a different guise – even if its prospects for success are far from certain, as President Barack ObamaBarack Obama is now discovering.

In this sense, the Fall of the Wall has functioned like a kind of Rorschach ink blot: Into it, almost anything can be written.

This is a remarkable legacy given that the event itself was mostly an accident. Early on Nov. 9, a mid-ranking East German official made a confused announcement at a news conference that seemed to suggest that East German citizens would be allowed, in unspecified numbers, to cross into West Berlin. While nothing like this had been intended, that evening ever more people crowded against the gates until the guards, fearing a riot, decided to let them through.

In fact, a cluster of preceding events made the actual event inevitable. Gorbachev had already told the East German government he would not send in the Red Army to save it. Poland had pulled off the first ever more or less free and democratic election in a Communist nation. Hungary had already opened its border with Austria.

Afterward came events that at the time seemed almost miraculous – Czechoslovakia's bloodless Velvet Revolution and, more amazing still, the dismantling of the Soviet empire, with, again, almost no blood being spilled.

Those miracles haven't lasted. They were fractured by the hijacked planes flown into New York's twin World Trade towers, and are now being blown to bits in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan.

Afghanistan confirms that while the world has changed in the past 20 years, it also hasn't. In February 1989, eight months before the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union ended its 10-year war against Afghanistan's mujahideen by pulling out its last troops.