No doubt the media will be covering the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today. A very important and symbolic day. But there are still some walls that continue divide people. But are the events of 1989 of world historical importance? I would think so. But Niall Ferguson writes that “1989 was less of a watershed year than 1979.”

“The reverberations of the fall of the Berlin Wall turned out to be much smaller than we had expected at the time. In essence, what happened was that we belatedly saw through the gigantic fraud of Soviet superpower. But the real trends of our time ”the rise of China, the radicalization of Islam, and the rise and fall of market fundamentalism” had already been launched a decade earlier. Thirty years on, we are still being swept along by the historic waves of 1979. The Berlin Wall is only one of many relics of the Cold War to have been submerged by them.”

An interesting view and argument. But it overlooks how the fall of the wall inspired the series of events that to German unification and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. 1979 was important, bit so is 1989.