Former Luxembourg PM and MEP Jacques Santer on the fall of the Berlin Wall

 

At the time I was Prime Minister of Luxembourg and in 1990 we held the presidency of the European Union. We were surprised and excited like everyone else at the time by the break out of East Germans that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But before that we already knew that there were other such events, like those in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

 

The day after the Wall fell, there were plenty of "Trabis" (East German cars) at the Luxembourg border and Luxembourg customs officials called me asking what they should do with these cars which didn't have visas - many of the people in them wanted to see Radio Luxembourg. So I let them in, they got to see the Radio and then they had to go because they weren't authorised to stay.

 

Thereafter, there was much discussion and dissension among Christian Democrats. As Chairman of the EPP, I called a summit of Christian Democrats in Pisa, an initiative that was little known elsewhere, where we agreed to get behind German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to have a strategy to defend German unification.

 

Twenty years after the fall of the wall and seen from Western Europe, how do you see the situation now? Have the reforms succeeded?

I think it's been a success story. Of course, it also created new problems, because it required considerable efforts. I am still proud of two events when I was President of the Commission: firstly, given the crisis of today, the introduction of the euro on 1 January 1999. We do not know what the EU would be now without the euro; and secondly, for being the first Commission to set the enlargement strategy, which led to the enlargement in 2004 and 2007. I am very happy to have contributed in this way to the unification of our continent in peace and freedom.