THE IMPACT OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL ON SOUTH AFRICA AND THE WORLD

ON 16 NOVEMBER 2009, F W de Klerk told the Global Strategy Forum in London that the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 would reverberate through history with similar impact to the fall of the Bastille two hundred years earlier.  The fall of the wall had come to symbolise the collapse of international communism and the end of the bipolar world.  Perhaps, even more significantly, it signalled the failure of ideology and social engineering to provide workable solutions to the challenges of human societies.  Above all, it had been a victory for freedom – for the citizens and countries of the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European Allies.

One of the South African Government’s central political and strategic concerns before 1989 was the expansion of Soviet influence in southern Africa.   A large majority on the ANC’s National Executive Committee were also members of the SACP.  The contest between the free world and the Soviet bloc was taking place through third world liberation struggles – some of them in southern Africa.   Throughout the 1980s, SADF units had been involved in direct conflict with Soviet and Cuban-led forces in southern Angola.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had removed one of the major obstacles to a negotiated settlement  in South Africa and had opened a window of opportunity through which the government had unhesitatingly jumped.  Never before and never again would the balance of forces be so favourable for an equitable negotiated settlement.