Jeffrey A. Engel is Associate Professor and Evelyn and Ed F. Kruse ‘49 Faculty Fellow at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He is also the editor of The
Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989, which takes a fresh look at how the leaders in four vital centers of world politics- the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and China- viewed the world in the aftermath of this momentous event. In honor of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened twenty years ago today, we have excerpted some of Engel’s words on the event.
…On November 9, the once unthinkable occurred: the Berlin Wall fell, not to a conquering army, but to the regime’s own citizens. First erected in 1961, the Wall symbolized the permanency of the Cold War divide. Dozens had lost their lives in the intervening years in vain attempts to cross its iron and wire in search of a better life on the other side. The Wall did more than divide East from West. It also made real the notion that Europe’s future offered two distinctly different paths: one socialist, the other capitalist. American presidents ritualistically travelled to the Wall when on European tours, using it as a backdrop to proclaim their personal opposition to tyranny. The images are iconic: John F. Kennedy stood above the newly constructed barrier in order to declare: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” A generation later, Ronald Reagan stood before the Wall in order to call for wholesale change behind it. “General Secretary Gorbachev,” Reagan thundered in 1987 (to the great dismay of his own state department, which loathed such fiery rhetoric and urged its removal form the president’s prepared text), “if you seek peace-if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe…come here to this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
For a generation of Communist leaders raised to believe that theirs was a particular claim to mankind’s future, the demise of the Wall and, more broadly, the erosion of the Soviet empire were traumatic blows indeed. “We will not change our positions, our values, or our thinking,” Gorbachev promised Reagan in 1985, “but we expect that with patience and wisdom we will find some ways toward solutions.” Four years later, Gorbachev was largely out of solutions to the problems that plagued him. With the Soviet Union’s empire in disarray, with the loss of the lands won at such great cost in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s Germany and subsequently ruled so tightly and at such investment, the society Gorbachev longed to preserve through transformation had lost its very reason for being. As Anatoly Chernyaev, one of Gorbachev’s close