Thirty years ago, a little under a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the two separated parts of Germany reunited. Fred Halliday looked at how the future might be managed. “What happened in Germany was the most horrendous disaster of European history,” he said, “and there can never be absolute certainty that something like it will not happen again”, even with a reunified country. The end of the German Democratic Republic meant the end of the dream of a socialist model in the East, and those who wished to preserve a distinct society “have been strangled by the python of the West”. The new nation would unequivocally be a Western nation, but the ramifications of the merger would need to be watched carefully and managed adroitly if it were not to unravel.
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