Wall's fall started leak that became flood

Twenty years ago this month, the Berlin Wall fell. The collapse of this man-made cement block barrier between Soviet communism and Western democracy has little meaning for many younger Americans.

But for those of us who were in Berlin before the wall went up -- and then returned after it was first breached on Nov. 9, 1989, it was an exhilarating experience.

We saw people who had been prisoners in their own city finally have freedom and access to the rest of the world. The destruction of the wall and the disbanding of Checkpoint Charlie a few months later represented a Cold War tragedy that had finally been corrected.

It's easy to forget that at the end of World War II, the world was tightly grouped into just a few economic and political camps. The Soviet bloc included most of the Eastern European countries and Muslim regions to the south. Today, depending on how you count, that area makes up about 20 independent countries. The Western bloc included the United States, its Western European allies and the Asia/Pacific region. And there was China, which for most of this period remained pretty much closed to the rest of the world.

The threat of a nuclear confrontation loomed over the world from the time the Russians announced that they, too, had "the bomb.'' This point was clearly brought home in 1961 when Russian and American tanks faced each other across the border between the American and Soviet zones in Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie.

For 28 years the wall came to signify the extent to which the Soviet Union was willing to impose its will on formerly sovereign countries. It was a battle between democracy and all it stood for and communism and all it seemed to be against.

But even before the wall was erected, the people of Eastern Europe, who were, in effect, prisoners in their own countries, did not accept their fate without a fight. On several occasions the people attempted to throw off the yoke of their Soviet oppressors. The Hungarian revolt of 1956 was perhaps the most striking example of a people willing to take on the Soviet tanks. For a few days the Hungarians were free until the Russians returned to Budapest to crush the vastly outnumbered freedom fighters.

But while the wall came to identify the philosophical battle between good and evil, as a practical matter the world economic conditions at the time meant economic development for a large part of the world was stymied.

While the Western bloc dominated the world's economy, most of the rest of the world suffered from the lack of trade and the financial investment required to modernize and expand their economies.

China was just starting to move forward with its economic plan and was barely Roable to feed its 1 billion people. India had not yet figured out how it might move toward something other than its Soviet-taught planned economy. Africa and much of South America were off the economic radar. And even the Soviet Union realized it was a superpower in military terms only.

In a recent article in the Financial Times, writer John Lloyd suggests that former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the events that followed the wall's collapse to play out, a move that, over the next few years, led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. At the recent ceremony celebrating the wall's collapse, German Chancellor Angela Merkel lauded Gorbachev for his courageous act.

But as Lloyd points out, the Soviet leader didn't really understand the power of what had happened in Berlin and was not prepared to take advantage of the economic opportunities unleashed.

What started with a leak in the wall was only the beginning of the domino effect that would eventually lead to what would come to be known as globalization. Once people could move freely, the flow of humanity swarmed across the globe. Once the Russian people could see how much better off people were in the West, the jig was up.

In his memoir, "Against the Grain,'' former Soviet President Boris Yeltsin told the story of his visit to a supermarket in Houston. "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people," he wrote.

What began in November 1989 at the Berlin Wall was not just the opening of Berlin. It signaled the opening of the entire world as one large economic community. The Soviets could no longer deceive their own people about what their political system could deliver. For that matter, the resulting globalization did the same for the world at large.

To the courageous people of Berlin the world owes a debt of gratitude.