THEN AND NOW: THE WALL THAT SPLIT OUR CONTINENT On the 25th anniversary of the crumbling of the Berlin wall that tragically separated the city between East and West, Huffington Post has published a remarkable montage of before-and-after photos. The tearing down of the Berlin wall represented the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union that shrouded half of our continent behind an oppressive Iron Curtain for more than 40 years. Having seen off the violent occupation of the fascist Nazi regime, these countries were then consumed by the totalitarian rule of the Communists. Some historians argue that for these countries, the Second World War didn’t truly end in 1945 as it did in the West, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After at last winning their freedom from Nazi and Communist rule, most of these countries then voted for a diametrically different kind of Union: not Soviet, but European, whose values and membership requirements are based on democracy, free trade, good governance and human rights. These countries will take time to fully recover from their traumatising ordeals spanning more than half of the last century. Currently, they need ongoing support and are net beneficiaries of the EU budget. But as they grow and start to thrive again, it’s predicted that these nations of east and central Europe will eventually become net contributors to the EU, with blossoming economies that will enrich all the continent. Already, Latvia has one of the EU’s fastest growing economies; Romania was described by The Economist as a “tiger economy” and Poland was recently reported to have Europe’s fastest growing number of millionaires. Welcome back to the family of Europe. huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/11/06/berlin-wall-25th-anniversary_n_6113268.html (Posted by Jon Danzig)
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 19:56:51 +0000
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