Mikhail Gorbachev was instrumental in the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war.


"The Anti Fascist Protection Barrier".


The Berlin wall was used as a canvas for many artists.

Unification of Germany

After the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, eleven months passed until the re-unification of Germany. Before the joining of East and West Germany both German states had to agree. In the first (and last) free parliamentary elections on 18 March 1990 the East Germans voted overwhelmingly in favor of the parties, the rapid accession of East Germany called for the Federal Republic. This was in the summer of 1990, as previously, the German monetary union, negotiated contractually between the two German states. In parallel, the Federal Republic and the agreed DDR with the four powers responsible for Berlin and Germany contributed as a whole, ie the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France, in the Two Plus Four Treaty on foreign and security policy terms of German unity.

The German question in 1990 resolved in favor of the old demand for "unity in freedom". Germany could only be solved in agreement with all the neighbors, and that is also: only simultaneously with the solution of another problem of the century, the Polish question. The final, binding under international law recognition of Poland's western border on the Oder and Neisse was a prerequisite of unification of Germany with the borders in 1945.

The unified Germany is its self not as a "postnational democracy among nation states", such as 1976, the political scientist Karl Dietrich Bracher had the "old" called Federal Republic, but a post-classical democratic national state among others - firmly embedded in the supranational confederation of states of the European Union (EU) be exercised in the parts of national sovereignty jointly with other Member States. From the first German national state the second separates much - namely everything that the Bismarck Reich has made a military and authoritarian state. But there are continuities between the first and the second nation state. As legal and constitutional state, a federal and welfare state the reunited Germany is in traditions that go back well into the 19th century. The same applies to the general equal suffrage and the parliamentary culture, which had already developed in the Reichstag of the Empire. It is also obvious spatial continuity: The Two-plus-Four Treaty , the international law of incorporation of the reunified Germany, has the smaller German solution, the separate statehood for Germany and Austria, once committed.

The German Question has been resolved since 1990, but the European Question remains open. Since the 2004 and 2007, the EU consists of twelve other states, of which ten were under Communist rule from 1989-91 to the new epoch. They are all states that belong to the former Occident - defined by a largely shared legal tradition, the early separation of religious and secular as of princely and corporative power, but also by the experience of the murderous consequences of religious and national enmity and racial hatred. The merging of the separate parts of Europe requires time. It will only succeed if the deepening of European integration with the enlargement of the Union keeps pace. This development requires more than institutional reforms. Makes you think about the common history of Europe and the inferences necessary arising from her. The implication that towers above all others, is the appreciation of the overall binding nature of Western values, at their head the inalienable rights of man. These are the values that Europe and America have brought together, which they uphold and by which they must be measured at any time.