1989 - Europe's Annus Mirabilis

Hundreds of people demonstrate in the streets of Warsaw during a May Day rally organised by Solidarity 1 May 1989.©Belga/D Wojteic
The two decades that have passed since Europe's revolutions of 1989 have only served to highlight the importance of those events. The Solidarity victory in Poland, people standing on the Berlin Wall and huge crowds on Prague's Wenceslas square, such images seemed impossible in the spring of that year. The end of the Soviet Empire in Central and Eastern Europe heralded the end of the Cold War and opened the door to Germany's unification and the uniting of independent states in a European Union.
Sommaire du dossier :
1989: The year of revolutions - a look back 20 years on
Róża Thun on democratic changes in Central and Eastern Europe
Anniversaries this year: From the Hitler-Stalin Pact to the fall of the Berlin Wall
Werner Schulz: the power of words and memories
Former Luxembourg PM and MEP Jacques Santer on the fall of the Berlin Wall
Summer of 1989: MEPs remember the Baltic Way
On this day: 27 June - the Iron Curtain was breached
1989: The year of revolutions - a look back 20 years on

11 November 1989: West Berliners watch East German border Guards knock down pieces of the Berlin Wall. ©Belga/AFP/G.Malie
bring down Communist Government.
Róża Thun on democratic changes in Central and Eastern Europe
Further information :
Anniversaries this year: From the Hitler-Stalin Pact to the fall of the Berlin Wall

Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin and others at the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact 23/08/1939 © Belga
Further information :
Werner Schulz: the power of words and memories

Elected as a German Green MEP in 2009, in 1989 Werner Schulz was a scientist who had already lost one job after protesting about the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan. ©Belga/M.Kappeler
Erich Honecker announced in early 1989 that the wall would stay for another 50 or 100 years, while the reasons for its presence remained. But the only reasons for the wall were the SED and to stop people fleeing the GDR. And when the Iron Curtain became porous, it sounded the death knell for the SED.
Further information :
Former Luxembourg PM and MEP Jacques Santer on the fall of the Berlin Wall
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.
Further information :
Summer of 1989: MEPs remember the Baltic Way

Baltic people unite across 600 km to denounce anniversary of Hitler-Stalin pact, August '89. ©Belga/AFP/A.Solovyov
Nazi-Soviet pact, August '39
- USSR given free hand in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Poland and Romania
- Nazi Germany given free hand in Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece
- 1-3 September 1939: German invasion of Poland. Britain and France declare war on Germany
- 22 June 1941: Germany invades the USSR
- 1991: Soviet Union collapses
On this day: 27 June - the Iron Curtain was breached

27 June 1989: The Foreign ministers of Austria, Alois Mock (L) and Hungary, Gyula Horn (R) cut through the barbed wire that separated the two countries, creating the first breach in the Iron Curtain. ©Belga/EPA/R.Jaegar
Europe divided 1945-1989
- "Iron Curtain" coined by Churchill in 1946.
- Built to stop westward exodus from Soviet rule.
- Between 1945 and 1950, over 15 million people fled Soviet rule in Central and Eastern Europe
- Between 1950 and 1990, due to the Iron Curtain, only 13.3 million people emigrated westward.