The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago this week. People on both sides filled the streets in celebration, cheered on by virtually everyone around the world. For all of us who were alive then, it remains one of the most hopeful historical moments we've ever experienced.
Now that 25 years have passed, it's an appropriate time to take stock. Have we seized our historic opportunity to create, at last, a more peaceful world?
Sadly, we have not:
As global citizens, we largely left the job of converting the end of the Cold War into a lasting peace in the hands of our national governments.
We had little alternative at first: in 1989, the Internet had not yet been
widely adopted, so people worldwide had no way to band together at scale.
The arrival of the Internet has upended virtually every major system on earth, revolutionizing our economy and breathing new life into grassroots politics.
Yet our governance structures remain stubbornly anachronistic. And they're failing us, not only on the great question of war or peace, but also on many other front-burner issues today, including global warming, economic inequality, disease response, immigration, human trafficking, and financial crimes.
Although we seldom consider it, one key factor that ties all these failures together is our fragmented system of nation-states, separated by militarized borders.
Almere-Digest Note: After the wall went down in Berlin many new walls went up. There is now a wall built by Israel which will eventually stretch for 750 km's between Palestine and Israel. There is also a new wall between the US and Mexico and China has built an electronic wall around China to curb what the Chinese citizens can see on the Internet .
Read more: 25 Years After Berlin, Do We Still Need Walls? | Peter Schurman
Now that 25 years have passed, it's an appropriate time to take stock. Have we seized our historic opportunity to create, at last, a more peaceful world?
Sadly, we have not:
- By Wikipedia's count, the US has engaged in 10 wars since then, and we now live in a surveillance state the East German secret police would have envied.
- Russia has reasserted regional military dominance, annexing Crimea, threatening other parts of Ukraine, and re-conquering Chechnya.
- The Middle East is a boiling cauldron of warfare, much of it touched off by the American invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003.
- China is building a potentially formidable Navy and picking fights with its neighbors.
As global citizens, we largely left the job of converting the end of the Cold War into a lasting peace in the hands of our national governments.
We had little alternative at first: in 1989, the Internet had not yet been
widely adopted, so people worldwide had no way to band together at scale.
The arrival of the Internet has upended virtually every major system on earth, revolutionizing our economy and breathing new life into grassroots politics.
Yet our governance structures remain stubbornly anachronistic. And they're failing us, not only on the great question of war or peace, but also on many other front-burner issues today, including global warming, economic inequality, disease response, immigration, human trafficking, and financial crimes.
Although we seldom consider it, one key factor that ties all these failures together is our fragmented system of nation-states, separated by militarized borders.
Almere-Digest Note: After the wall went down in Berlin many new walls went up. There is now a wall built by Israel which will eventually stretch for 750 km's between Palestine and Israel. There is also a new wall between the US and Mexico and China has built an electronic wall around China to curb what the Chinese citizens can see on the Internet .
Read more: 25 Years After Berlin, Do We Still Need Walls? | Peter Schurman
