Human Miracles 20 Years Later: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

We are, it seems, insufficiently awed by the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Some might argue that our complacency results from other, now pressing concerns. We are eight years into a multi-front war, China has emerged as a capitalist competitor and environmental-degrader of unprecedented scale, and the US is being veritably torn asunder over the question of how best to address health care. Regardless, it is important to stop and be thankful for human miracles - and the invention, creation, and extension of ideals of freedom enshrined and protected through law amounts to one such miracle. Twenty years ago, that miracle was extended to millions more people, in a single moment. (Tears come to eyes when reading this or other first-hand accounts).  

Our understanding and appreciation of this anniversary is not important merely because of the importance of celebrating great human achievements; the world remains locked in an ongoing struggle to define itself, to determine whether individuals will all have basic freedoms - or to pursue another route, where individuals are not valued as rights-holders. We have drifted away from defining our contemporary struggles in these terms, but the terms are often present.

Democracy and democratic freedoms cannot be taken for granted. In Latin America Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales are undermining press freedoms and marginalizing dissenting voices; freedom of the press is arguably on retreat throughout Latin America. In Africa Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, once a favorite of the West, continues to extend his Presidential terms long past the originally-promised peaceful transition to the next democratically-elected ruler; Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe is of course a disgrace for any proponent of basic democratic freedoms, and even in Kenya there is need for substantial education and development of civil society before democracy and democratic transitions will be respected. Much like was true in the communist bloc, some of these leaders are able to buy brief loyalty through economic programs for their citizens, but as we have seen time and time again, a few unsustainable benefits are not enough to compensate for living in a state of civil, political, and economic liberty. The citizens of these countries are looking for a fair shake, and will only get it through continuing global collaboration to promote basic human rights and liberties around the world.

In China as well as in large parts of Latin America and Africa the battle is often between basic individual freedoms and an excessively strong state, but in much of the Middle East, Northern Africa, and portions of Asia, the fight is with those who put religious fundamentalism ahead of individual development, individual rights, and individual liberty. The fight is for individual access to broad and wide education, for boys and for girls. Strong democracy is fundamentally dependent upon education, as Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser recently pointed out in the New York Times, total average years of schooling in a country is strongly predictive of the likelihood that country will be democratic.

Twenty years ago, the world witnessed a human miracle. Today, civil society organizations and citizens' groups around the world continue to cooperate with sympathetic governments and businesses to work to extend that miracle - to extend basic human freedoms to every individual around the world. We would do well to remember our history and to recall the broad vision that is part of our efforts.