Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week, on 9 November, we marked the 20th anniversary of an event that truly shook the world. Nineteen eighty-nine was a very significant year when many important things happened, but the most significant thing for the course of human history occurred right at the end of that year with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was the most vivid symbol of the Cold War and the oppression of those trapped behind the so-called Iron Curtain—oppression that was both political and physical. It became the symbol of opposing ideologies: east versus west, communism versus capitalism. Although the wall symbolically represented the crushing power communism extended over its people, for the citizens of Berlin it was more than just a political symbol. It was a painful reality expressed in barbed wire, reinforced concrete and minefields. For the people of Berlin, the wall was the fence that made them prisoners in their own home.

For many, the erection of the wall came as a complete surprise. As late as June 1961, the head of state of the German Democratic Republic had remarked emphatically, ‘It is no-one’s intention to erect a wall in Berlin.’ And yet two months later, on 13 August 1961, beginning with road and rail closures, the first fixtures of the wall were built. These fixtures were built upon and expanded through a number of iterations before the final result emerged: a wall of reinforced concrete spanning 155 kilometres, containing metal fences and 96 watchtowers, numerous ditches and minefields, beds of nails, bunkers and electric fences.

Berlin was separated into two sectors, completely severing economic, political and social ties between the indivisible halves of the one great city. Over the ensuing decades, we were horrified to see the violence, the division, the tears and the grief that were all directly associated with the wall. We heard the stories of those who tried to cross it, risking their lives in a desperate bid for freedom, with many coming painstakingly close—only to have their freedom denied in a hail of machine gun bullets or at a barbed wire fence. As a child I had the privilege of travelling to Berlin. On a tour of the eastern part of the city—it was compulsory to undertake such visits on organised tours—we asked our East German guide why a wall was there. She said to us, ‘This is to keep the West out.’

For many, the Cold War was an abstract, ideological battle for presidents and generals—a war without apparent bloodshed or casualties. But the wall gave it a human face. In the wall the world saw the real difference between ideological systems played out on the streets of this great city. On 26 June 1963, in his famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, US President John F. Kennedy remarked:

Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in …

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… the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system … an offence not only against history but an offence against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.

The President’s eloquence seemed to make no difference. The wall stood beyond his words—the face of the Cold War; the symbol of the brutality, oppression and tyranny of communism throughout eastern Europe. Although the wall in Berlin was not replicated in the same form in other Iron Curtain countries, the citizens of those countries remained prisoners. They lived under rule that was forced, not chosen. They lacked that most precious freedom: the freedom of choice. This was not lost on US President Ronald Reagan when, in his speech in 1987 behind the Brandenburg Gate, he challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to ‘open this gate’ and ‘tear down this wall’. He went on to say:

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic South, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same—still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state.

Yet, it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world.

Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German separated from his fellow men.

Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.

Reagan’s most prescient words, however, were:

As I looked out a moment ago … I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner:

“This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.”

The President went on:

Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall, for it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

For nearly 30 years, the wall was the very embodiment of a lack of freedom, of restrictions, of oppression. But for the people of Berlin, the people of eastern Europe, the wall was not a persuasive symbol. It did not make people give up hope and accept the reality. Their desire for freedom, for the freedom to choose, remained and indeed gathered momentum as the years went on.

We remember the images of the wall falling, the sledgehammers and the people streaming through the gaps. But these were the images of the climax, not the beginning. The collapse of the wall was in fact the culmination of the revolutionary changes that had been sweeping eastern and central Europe earlier that year. Throughout the Soviet bloc, communist governments in the late 1980s were under siege as reformers emerged, seeking an end to almost half a century of communist rule. That change began in Poland, which had never been a particularly diligent part of the Soviet bloc, where the government had always remained a little more tolerant of its citizens’ desires for freedom and where enormous changes resulted. In June 1989, the first free elections led to the election of the Solidarity trade union movement to power. The fact remains that the Polish election was a watershed of huge proportions. It marked not merely the promise but the reality of a new non-totalitarian order. If the collapse of communism in Europe was an avalanche, the Polish election of 4 June was the start of the rockslide at the top of the mountain, and the Berlin Wall lay at the bottom.

The rockslide affected Hungary next. With the first multiparty elections in a generation, Hungary became, for the first time in many years, a genuine republic. Meanwhile, thousands of East Germans were fleeing their homes into West Germany through both Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The government of East Germany responded by closing the border to Hungary, leaving Czechoslovakia as the only option for escape. By October 1989, the government closed the border to Czechoslovakia as well, completely closing off East Germany from its neighbours. Thus, even as the neighbouring states were embracing reform, the government of the GDR refused to accede to the same demands.

In October that year, the long-term GDR leader, Erich Honecker, resigned and the new leader, Egon Krenz, undertook to open the border with Czechoslovakia once again, resulting in a flood of refugees pouring through. Unable to stem the flow, Krenz decreed that East Germans would be allowed to travel directly into West Germany through eastern checkpoints. As the announcement of this order was broadcast, tens of thousands of people instantly flooded the checkpoints, demanding passage through. As reporter David Molyneaux remarked:

Easterners who had been trapped inside the Soviet bloc crossed the border like water through a dam that had sprung a leak—first a trickle, then a torrent of people who climbed over the cement wall and through holes they chipped in the concrete.

Caught unawares, the border guards initially refused passage but, in the face of the overwhelming masses of people and with no-one willing to authorise the use of force, they relented, and on the evening of 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell.

This was not just another event that students in history might study; it was a truly important change in the direction of the world. In the wake of this dramatic symbol of surrender, democratic systems and genuinely independent governments multiplied across Europe and Asia. The economic potential of millions of people was released in newly created free markets. Billions of dollars committed to Cold War infrastructure in both the east and west was freed up for more productive uses. Free trade negotiations and globalisation gained a greater urgency, lifting millions of people out of poverty. It truly seemed that a new world order had arrived—and all of us are the better for that new world order having occurred.