The other 9/11s

In talking about the latest wave of globalization, Thomas Friedman has often remarked that 9/11 was an important date, and this was before the events of 2001.
It was on September 11, 1989 that Hungary opened its border to the free world, and created a channel that eventually brought down the USSR itself.
And then, in even more coincidence, on November 9th, written as 9/11 in most of the rest of the world, the Berlin Wall fell.

This opinion piece in the LA Times tells the story, and it is worth reading in full:

[In Hungary] a new generation of reform-minded communists had taken charge. Almost overnight, they wrote a U.S.-style constitution and began speaking openly of a free press, free markets and free elections. Emboldened, a small group of local Sopron activists decided to celebrate the new spirit. Their modest aim: put up some tents, hire a brass band and let the beer and good vibes flow. One of the organizers came up with an especially inspired idea -- to briefly open a gate through the barbed-wire frontier to Austria, allowing people to casually stroll back and forth across the border for the first time in four decades. They called it the Pan-European Picnic.

Because anything involving the border was a matter of extreme sensitivity, their request for a permit came to the attention of Hungary's young prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, the man behind so many of the Gorbachev-like changes taking place. Immediately, a light bulb went off in his head.

Every summer, tourists from East Germany descended on Hungary, where "goulash economics," mixing Marxist industrial planning with a measure of free enterprise, provided things unavailable elsewhere in the grit-gray Soviet sphere: nice restaurants, ample food, good wine. But this year would be different. This year, Nemeth decided to use Hungary's visitors as pawns in a great geopolitical chess game.

Since 1988, Hungarian citizens had been allowed to travel relatively freely. But East Germans were still not allowed by their government to cross into Western Europe. Although they could vacation in Hungary, there was a mutual treaty in force obliging the Hungarians to ensure that East Germans did not escape to the West.

Earlier in 1989, before the seasonal onslaught of East German tourists, Nemeth had very publicly ordered the electricity in the barbed-wire border with the West turned off. Border guards began ceremoniously cutting down large swathes of the barrier -- filmed by Western TV crews summoned for the occasion. Nemeth intended this as a clear message to Hungary's East German guests. Look folks, he declared in effect, a hole in the Iron Curtain. There's nothing to prevent you from "escaping" through it to freedom.

Nemeth hoped to unleash a flood. He believed that a mass escape of East Germans from Hungary would pose an existential threat to the regime of Erich Honecker, the dictatorial boss of the German Democratic Republic. He also believed that if Honecker fell, it would bring down the Berlin Wall -- and with it the entire communist bloc. Amid the chaos, he could realize his true goal. Hungary too would gain its freedom.

The rest, as they say, is history.