Antenna Europe Direct Assemblea legislativa della Regione Emilia-Romagna

20 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. What has changed and what has remained?

November the 9th, 1989, falls the Wall of Berlin, the symbol of the World’s division in an America sphere and a Soviet sphere.   This will be the beginning of one of the most important pages of the European history, that will put an end to the already non-sense war and that sees the long way towards the unification, monetary and especially ideological.

The wall that for 28 years had divided the families and the friends of the 2 German blocks, was created in the summer of 1961 by the Communist Government of the German Democratic Republic for getting apart from the German Federal Republic. That evening of the 9^th of November 1989 that represented the end of this division, all world’s television transmitted the images of the young people astride of the wall, half ruined, carrying with them colours for finally tearing away  from the history the grey colour of a too long war.

The 25^th and 28^th of November 2009: takes place the European Youth Meeting organized in its 5^th edition by the Legislative Assembly of Emilia Romagna Region and celebrating this year in Bologna the 20^th anniversary of the Fall of Berlin War. 200 students from the 27 Member States participated to the event together with the students from Turkey and Norway as non-Member States.
We have met a new generation on the occasion of the Meeting, one slightly different from the previous ones, bringing with a sense of heterogeneity, but still with a real resemblance between them. Surely, along the years the big technologic transformations together with the force of globalization created the premises of a widespread   homologation.
Nowadays these students are equally reached in every corner of Europe and even of the World by the same television channels, as MTV, DISCOVERY or other information channels such as FACEBOOK and at many kilometres distance it seems they have the same generation code.   Such a widespread communication phenomenon would had been out of the imaginable as for us is understandable to travel to London or to Helsinki with one click on a low cost flight.  

But nobody preoccupies of this phenomenon of homologation, only superficial in reality, because at the same time with the globalization phenomenon takes place the opposed phenomenon of “glocalization”  or more specifically   a phenomenon of coming back to the location, which looks for saving its own difference, the beauty of its own language particular sound or even the proud for its own culinary traditions.
During the Meeting the students talked also on the important thematic such as dignity, liberty, equality, solidarity, citizenship, justice, democracy, in other words the basic human rights embedded in the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights. Issues that the students proved to know confront with and express through communication channels appropriate and common to all of them, the force of internet being still underestimated .

December 10th, 2009: on occasion of the Human Rights World’s day celebration, the Italian Delegation within the Parliamentary Assembly of OSCE organized in Rome the Convention called “The role of the CSCE-OSCE and the Movements of civic resistance in the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet Union”.
The OSCE born as CSCE ( Conference in security and co-operation in Europe) has a peculiar mediation role, discussion and collaboration at the international level, which joins, on this study circumstance, the role carried by the Movements of civic resistance in the Central- Eastern European societies through the phase which preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The Convention specifically dealt with the question of the experienced function of the international institutions founded on dialogue and international co-operation such as OSCE and of the movements of civic resistance ( from the Solidarnosc in Poland, Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia, New Forum in Germany to the Independent movements in the Baltic countries.

I remember that in the first day of the Youth European Meeting, more than having had tackled all mentioned issues, a photographic exhibition on Solidarnosc was inaugurated, white and black photos which depicted the ones who fought for democracy and which explained the history of a divided Europe. The 200 students coming from all parts of Europe, East, West, all together, united, attentively observed the photos. They might have not understood, they were not born on that time, or they might have underestimated its sense. Now they live in the present globalized and “glocalised” World.

The new generation has changed, it is one more European and more homogenous. But there is still so much to do, from integrating the new comers, to the respect of the human rights from the part of those already in the Union, putting apart  all the nationalisms for a  possible real co-operation.


Andrea Zoppello

Translated by Paula Benea