The Berlin Wall: Twenty Years Later

November 9, 2009, The Independent Institute

The fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years ago today, was not inevitable. Nor was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The failure of central economic planning does not explain those remarkable events because if it did, communist policies would not still govern the everyday lives of millions in Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Cambodia. (China and Vietnam have at least introduced aspects of markets, with notable success.)

The liberation of Central and Eastern Europe in 1989--and related events two years later in the Soviet Union--could not have happened without one essential ingredient: people choosing freedom. "History did not make them; they made history," writes Independent Institute Senior Fellow Alvaro Vargas Llosa.

The mantra of "inevitability" masks the heroism of ordinary people and a handful of leaders who defied reactionary hardliners, often at great personal risk. It also plays down the distorted view that many intellectuals had held about the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies before the collapse of the wall. Writes Vargas Llosa: "If much of the world's intelligentsia thought that socialism's triumph was unstoppable before it was stopped, their peers today conveniently dismiss the importance of those events as 'predictable' in order to concentrate the mind on the true enemy--capitalism."

Top Stories