November 10 1989

Early in december 1989, I was sitting at lunch in a renowned hotel in Century City, Los Angeles, California. (Each year I participated in an international professional seminar in various locations in the US, and the organisers always chose top hotels with resounding names, but got a good deal because as a rule, the hotels were undergoing renovations.)

Anyway, I was sitting at that table with a couple of Americans, a Brit, and a French or a Swiss guy.

A couple of weeks before, a senior officer in the DDR decided to open one of the transit points in the Berlin Wall, and the rest was history. All those who are old enough will remember the scenes which followed ...

One of the Americans asked us Europeans what we thought about the fall of the wall.

I was really surprised by the unanimity of our reactions.

We all said that one would have had to be inhuman not to be moved by the tsunami (a word unknown then, but in its place here) of joy and roaring happiness of the freed people.

We all agreed that none of us had expected to see the fall of the wall and the reunification of Germany in our lifetimes. We all agreed that the power and might of the reunified Germany was a major point of concern to us.

So many years later, we know that the reunification was partly botched and that one German in five (in east and in west Germany) longs for the period before 1989.

We also know that in communist Eastern Europe, which crumbled soon after, people were housed, fed and clothed at the cost of their personal freedom.

Now they all have tasted the joy of capitalism and of the free maket economy. A very few have made scandalous fortunes by robbing their countries blind in the chaotic transition period. Most of them just scrape by in a "competitive" environment, and a significant minority lives in hunger and abject povery.

And the magnanimous West got something in return too : valuable assets almost for free, and the "Russian" and other East-European mafias !

About the might of the Germans - well, they most certainly have not been throwing it around as ostentatiously as I would have expected. But in the economic field, I have seen acquisitions that never would have taken place in the previous circumstances : not all of them were roaring successes.

But then, those who know me know I have an almost pathological problem with Germans (and with some of their little brothers slightly further West).