If you're confused about where Europe is headed, join the club. Last week at a seminar a colleague with considerable knowledge of European affairs confidently told me "Don't sell your euros ... the Germans will eventually step in and rescue the whole thing." He may be right, but the head of the Bundesbank isn't stepping up yet and there are significant political obstacles to the level of integration that would be necessary to make the European Central Bank a true "lender of last resort."

My concern is more long-term. It's possible that Germany is bluffing, and that Europe's leaders will find a way to stagger through the current crisis. But as I've noted before, the underlying issue isn't just the rickety structure of the euro itself. In addition, it is whether economies like Greece and especially Italy can generate enough economic growth to make it plausible that they will ultimately repay their debts. An all-European guarantee (funded largely by Germany) might help in the near-term, because holders of Greek and Italian debt are less likely to panic if they think a bailout is available if needed and reduced fears of default will lower spreads on Italian and Greek bonds and thus allow them to continue to finance the debts they already have.

Unfortunately, economic growth in the entire eurozone is sluggish, and troubled economies like Italy aren't likely to see sharp increases in growth, especially if they are being forced to adopt austerity budgets that shrink public sector spending and/or throw more people out of work. Plus, over the longer term most of Europe --including Greece and Italy -- are going to decline in population, while the median age will rise sharply. For example, Italy's population will decline by about 1 million by 2035 and its median age will rise from 43 today to nearly 50. A growing population of retirees and a shrinking number of active workers is not exactly a formula for robust economic growth, even in the best of circumstances.

Even if my friend is right and the Germans eventually go "all-in" to save the euro, isn't there likely to be a point where the more prosperous European countries are no longer willing to finance bailouts in perpetuity? And what if a situation arises where they aren't in such great shape themselves and aren't able to fund a bailout? This is where nationalism will really kick in: it is one thing for wealthy New Yorkers or Californians to subsidize poorer U.S. states more-or-less forever, because the subsidies are mostly hidden from public view and in the end we all think of ourselves as part of the same country. But I don't think the existing sense of common European identity is powerful enough to neutralize stubborn local nationalisms, even when the bond market is pushing in that direction. I continue to hope that Europe's leaders will find a way out, but I've yet to hear a convincing story that tells me how.

I've been in Berlin since last Thursday, and it's been an interesting exercise in slightly rueful nostalgia. I lived in West Berlin for a semester in 1976, as part of an undergraduate overseas study program. It was the first foreign country I'd ever visited and one of the great formative experiences of my early adult life.

I've been back for very brief trips twice (in 1991 and again in 2007) yet this time I've found that my memories from that first trip aren't very reliable, and even supposedly familiar haunts look odd. Of course, this is partly because Berlin has been transformed by reunification -- most obviously in the areas where the Wall was -- but also because it has been thirty-five years. Cities can change a lot in that time, and my own memories have clearly faded with the passage of time. There are moments when the past comes come back vividly, as when I read the U-bahn (subway) map and recall the names of the stations on the route from my apartment to class, or when I heard the recorded announcement saying "zuruck bleiben!" just before the subway doors close. But apart from those Proustian moments, it mostly feels like I am visiting an unfamiliar place.

I took a walk last Thursday after I arrived, strolling from my hotel through the Tiergarten to the Holocaust Memorial -- which is very effective and moving, though not without controversy -- and then onto Pariser Platz. This is the area just east of the Brandenburger Tor, and it was an abandoned zone during the Cold War, with large empty spaces around the Wall itself. It has now been transformed into a vast and inviting public square, complete with fancy hotels, a Starbucks, the "Kennedy Museum," and other classic tourist attractions. There's a wonderful bit of not-quite-accidental symbolism in the fact that the British, French, and American embassies are all located there. These were the three Western powers that governed different German zones after World War II, and it is probably no accident that they ended up with this choice real estate in the very heart of reunified Berlin.  

Yesterday I wandered through some old haunts in the center of what was West Germany (Kurfurstendamm, Savigny Platz, Zoologischer Garten, etc.), and then took the subway out to a trendy neighborhood in the old East Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg). There the contrast with 35 years ago was really striking; my overwhelming sense of the old DDR was drab and monotonal grey ... but today this neighborhood is funky and energetic and artsy. And I kept reflecting on how successive German governments made rebuilding and restoring Berlin a national priority and actually pulled it off, even if it hasn't become an industrial or financial center again. I wonder what it would take to get the United States to do something like that.

By the way, the conference I attended on "Social Science and the Public Sphere" was quite enjoyable, and I learned a lot from several of the papers and from the ensuing discussion. Sociologist Michael Burawoy gave two presentations, one on different modes of knowledge ("professional," "critical," "policy," and "public") and another on the threats facing the modern university (#1: excessive regulation, on the British model, and #2: excessive marketization, on the U.S. model). Not sure he persuaded me completely, but lots to think about. There was also a fascinating paper on the history of economic thought by Norwegian economist Erik Reinert, showing how economics evolved in a path-dependent fashion and that there were several forks in the intellectual road where the field could have gone in a more historical, institutional, and diverse direction, instead of the individualist, rationalist, and hyper-mathematical course the field has taken (at least in North America). He also quoted a passage from philosopher Francis Bacon' The Advance of Learning on "degenerate knowledge" which could easily apply to lots of social science today:

Surely, like as many substances in nature which are solid do putrefy and corrupt into worms;--so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrefy and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and (as I may term them) vermiculate questions which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality. This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen, who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit."

Yeah, what he said.

Economist Mark Thoma gave a nice presentation on his experiences as the author of a well-known economics blog, and historian Thomas Bender of NYU contributed a terrific paper on the evolution of the social sciences in the United States. Among other things, I learned from it that when Johns Hopkins University pioneered the Ph.D. degree here in America, it was not intended primarily as a credential for future academics. Instead, Bender writes, "it was intended to instill in [recipients] ‘the mental culture' that would serve them in careers in ‘civil service,' ‘public journalists' or, more generally, the ‘duties of public life.'" In other words, it took another few decades to create the inward-looking and frequent navel-gazing enterprises that the social sciences have become.

The audience offered up some challenging questions, and the other participants were a stimulating and likeable group. All in all, well worth the trip.  And then yesterday I gave a lecture at the Deutsche Gesellschacft fur Auswartiges Politik (DGAP, or "German Council on Foreign Affairs"), summarizing a forthcoming article on the "twilight of the American era." (You can get a preliminary sense of my argument here). I enjoyed the talk and especially the questions, and we could easily have continued the conversation longer. At dinner with some DGAP colleagues we spent a fair bit of time talking about the future of the Euro, and I would say that most of them were more optimistic than I have been. In particular, they emphasized the difference between public policy and public opinion: yes, German popular opinion is hostile to further bailouts, but German politicians understand that at the end of the day, letting Greece go down the tubes would be bad for everyone, including Germany. So long as they can make further aid conditional on genuine reforms, eventually the deal will get done. We'll see.

A final comment from the perspective of someone who bikes to work daily in Boston: Berlin is a wonderful city for bicyclists and there are lots of them. For one thing it's mostly flat, and doesn't get snow like we do in New England. But the Berliners have also gone to great lengths to make bike travel easy and safe, with dedicated lanes on streets and or sidewalks. And confirming stereotypes of Teutonic orderliness, you find most of the cyclists observing all the traffic regulations, including waiting a street lights even when there are no cars around and it would perfectly safe to cross. Definitely not instinctive scofflaws like me. Boston has been trying to do something similar for its cyclists, but let's just say we've got a ways to go. But once the price of gas gets high enough, maybe American cities will do more to encourage bicycle commuting. There will be less traffic, and we'd all be a lot healthier too.

I'm typing this from Lille, where I participated in a seminar on the "Arab spring" at the University and gave an evening lecture on U.S. Middle East policy and the role of the -- surprise -- Israel lobby.  We had a good discussion, and the students asked some excellent questions. And now home to Boston, where I have a pile of neglected duties waiting to greet me.

I gave a talk in Washington the other day about the future of the EU and transatlantic relations more generally, and I thought FP readers might be interested in what I had to say.  Here's a short summary of what I said. 

I began with the rather obvious point that the highwater mark of Europe's global influence was past, and argued that it would be of declining strategic importance in the future. The logic is simple: After dominating global politics from roughly 1500 to 1900, Europe's relative weight in world affairs has declined sharply ever since. Europe's population is shrinking and aging, and its share of the world economy is shrinking too. For example, in 1900, Europe plus America produced over 50 percent of the world economy and Asia produced less than 20 percent. Today, however, the ten largest economies in Asia have a combined GDP greater than Europe or the United States, and the Asian G10 will have about 50 percent of gross world product by 2050.

Europe's current fiscal woes are adding to this problem, and forcing European governments to reduce their already modest military capabilities even more. This isn't necessarily a big problem for Europeans, however, because they don't face any significant conventional military threats. But it does mean that Europe's ability to shape events in other parts of the world will continue to decline.

Please note: I am not saying the Europe is becoming completely irrelevant, only that its strategic importance has declined significantly and that this trend will continue.

Second, I also argued that the highwater mark of European unity is also behind us. This is a more controversial claim, and it's entirely possible that I'll be proven wrong here. Nonetheless, there are several obvious reasons why the EU is going to have real trouble going forward.

The EU emerged in the aftermath of World War II. It was partly intended as a mechanism to bind European states together and prevent another European war, but it was also part of a broader Western European effort to create enough economic capacity to balance the Soviet Union.  Europeans were not confident that the United States would remain engaged and committed to their defense (and there were good reasons for these doubts), and they understood that economic integration would be necessary to create an adequate counterweight to Soviet power.

As it turned out, the United States did remain committed to Europe, which is why the Europeans never got serious about creating an integrated military capacity. They were willing to give up some sovereignty to Brussels, but not that much. European elites got more ambitious in the 1980s and 1990s, and sought to enhance Europe's role by expanding the size of the EU and by making various institutional reforms, embodied in the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties. This broad effort had some positive results -- in particular, the desire for EU membership encouraged East European candidates to adopt democractic reforms and guarantees for minority rights -- but the effort did not lead to a significant deepening in political integration and is now in serious trouble. 

Among other things, the Lisbon Treaty sought to give the positions of council president and High Representative for Foreign Affairs greater stature, so that Europe could finally speak with "one voice." Thus far, that effort has been something of a bust. The current incumbents -- Herman von Rompuy of Belgium and Catherine Ashton of Britain -- are not exactly politicians of great prominence or clout, and it is hardly surprising that it is national leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany that have played the leading roles in dealing with Europe's current troubles. As has long been the case, national governments remain where the action is.

Today, European integration is threatened by 1) the lack of an external enemy, which removes a major incentive for deep cooperation, 2) the unwieldy nature of EU decision-making, where 27 countries of very different sizes and wealth have to try to reach agreement by consensus, 3) the misguided decision to create a common currency, but without creating the political and economic institutions needed to support it, and 4) nationalism, which remains a powerful force throughout Europe and has been gathering steam in recent years.

It is possible that these challenges will force the EU member-states to eventually adopt even deeper forms of political integration, as some experts have already advised. One could view the recent Franco-German agreement on coordinating economic policy in this light, except that the steps proposed by Merkel and Sarkozy were extremely modest. I don't think the EU is going to fall apart, but prolonged stagnation and gradual erosion seems likely. Hence my belief that the heyday of European political integration is behind us.

Third, I argued that the glory days of transatlantic security cooperation also lie in the past, and we will see less cooperative and intimate security partnership between Europe and America in the future. Why do I think so?

One obvious reason is the lack of common external enemy. Historically, that is the only reason why the United States was willing to commit troops to Europe, and it is therefore no surprise that America's military presence in Europe has declined steadily ever since the Soviet Union broke up. Simply put: there is no threat to Europe that the Europeans cannot cope with on their own, and thus little role for Americans to play.

In addition, the various imperial adventures that NATO has engaged in since 1992 haven't worked out that well. It was said in the 1990s that NATO had to "go out of area or out of business," which is one reason it started planning for these operations, but most of the missions NATO has taken on since then have been something of a bust.  Intervention in the Balkans eventually ended the fighting there, but it took longer and cost more than anyone expected and it's not even clear that it really worked (i.e., if NATO peacekeepers withdrew from Kosovo tomorrow, fighting might start up again quite soon).  NATO was divided over the war in Iraq, and ISAF's disjointed effort in Afghanistan just reminds us why Napoleon always said he liked to fight against coalitions. The war in Libya could produce another disappointing result, depending on how it plays out. Transatlantic security cooperation might have received a new lease on life if all these adventures had gone swimmingly; unfortunately, that did not prove to be the case. But this raises the obvious question: If the United States isn't needed to protect Europe and there's little positive that the alliance can accomplish anywhere else, then what's it for?

Lastly, transatlantic security cooperation will decline because the United States will be shifting its strategic focus to Asia. The central goal of US grand strategy is to maintain hegemony in the Western hemisphere and to prevent other great powers from achieving hegemony in their regions. For the foreseeable future, the only potential regional hegemon is China. There will probably be an intense security competition there, and the United States will therefore be  deepening its security ties with a variety of Asian partners. Europe has little role to play in this competition, however, and little or no incentive to get involved. Over time, Asia will get more and more attention from the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and Europe will get less.  

This trend will be reinforced by demographic and generational changes on both sides of the Atlantic, as the percentage of Americans with strong ancestral connections to Europe declines and as the generation that waged the Cold War leaves the stage. So in addition to shifting strategic interests, some of the social glue that held Europe and America together is likely to weaken as well.

It is important not to overstate this trend -- Europe and America won't become enemies, and I don't think intense security competition is going to break out within Europe anytime soon.  Europe and the United States will continue to trade and invest with each other, and we will continue to collaborate on a number of security issues (counter-terrorism, intelligence sharing, counter-proliferation, etc.). But Europe won't be America's "go-to" partner in the decades ahead, at least not the way it once was.

This will be a rather different world than the one we've been accustomed to for the past 60 years, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Moreover, because it reflects powerful structural forces, there's probably little we can do to prevent it. Instead, the smart response -- for both Americans and Europeans -- is to acknowledge these tendencies and adapt to them, instead of engaging in a futile effort to hold back the tides of history.

It's not as though the world came to a halt while the Egyptian drama was keeping us glued to our laptops, and at least one interesting development is worth watching closely for a number of reasons. You all know that the EU has been facing a major crisis over the past several years, triggered by deep economic problems in Greece, and to a slightly lesser extent in Spain and Portugal. These troubles forced the eurozone countries to authorize a major financial rescue package last year and led some observers to question whether the euro itself might be at risk.

Over the past few months, however, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have been negotiating a joint proposal for deepening economic coordination within the EU (and especially the eurozone) in an attempt to solve some of the problems that produced the crisis in the first place. (The basic issue is that the eurozone countries share a currency, but do not have fully integrated tax systems, labor markets, or fiscal systems, thereby making it much harder for them to adjust when one economy gets into trouble). 

Not only does this question have obvious implications for politics and economics in Europe itself, but it also raises some fundamental questions about IR theory and might even be a revealing test of "realist" vs. "liberal" perspectives on international relations more generally. Realists, most notably Sebastian Rosato of Notre Dame, have been bearish about the EU and the euro since the financial crisis, arguing that European member states were more likely to pursue their individual national interests and to begin to step back from some of the integrative measures that the EU had adopted in recent years. 

By contrast, institutionalists, and EU-philes more generally, have suggested that the only way forward was to deepen political integration within Europe. The basic idea here is that economic integration is central to European economic health and one of the keys to continued amity within Europe. Equally important, any attempt to leave the eurozone or to dismantle the euro itself would cause an immediate collapse of the currency (and plunge several European states into even deeper crisis). In this view, there's no going back; Europe can only plunge ahead toward closer integration.   

As you'd expect, I've tended to be among the bears, in part because I don't think greater "policy coordination" between the member states can eliminate occasional fiscal crises and because I think nationalism remains a powerful social force in Europe. European publics won't be willing to keep bailing out insolvent members of the eurozone, and the integrative measures that have been proposed won't be sufficient to eliminate the need. The original Merkel-Sarkozy proposals got a pretty hostile reception when they were rolled out, and Merkel's hopes of pushing them through probably declined when her designated choice to head the European Central Bank (Axel Weber) withdrew from consideration. So it remains to be seen how much of their program will actually get adopted.

But the EU has surprised doomsayers before, and I can't quite convince myself that a collapse of the eurozone is inevitable. So what we have here is a nice test of two rival paradigms, and students of international politics should pay close attention to how this all plays out. But remember: Like all social science theories, no general theory of international politics or foreign policy is right 100 percent of the time. Accordingly, the future evolution of the EU/eurozone won't provide a decisive test that will validate one approach completely and render the other view totally irrelevant and obsolete. Proponents of each perspective will probably try to claim total victory if events turn their way, but that's not really the way that social science operates.

The following commentary is by Professor Sebastian Rosato of Notre Dame University, who offers a decidedly pessimistic take on the EU's future. His new book,  Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community, will be published by Cornell University Press in January 2011.

The Untied States of Europe
by Sebastian Rosato

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Europe's debt crisis. Optimists, such as Princeton political scientist Andrew Moravcsik, declare that "it is too soon to count Europe out." The European Union has survived plenty of crises in its time and will get through this one as well. Pessimists like Harvard historian Niall Ferguson disagree, arguing that what has happened in Greece is likely to happen elsewhere. To his mind, Europe could be on the verge of a "disastrous Europewide banking crisis" that has the potential to bring down the euro.

Given the amount of ink spilled on the Greek drama, it's easy to lose sight of the real tragedy here. Regardless of how the EU navigates the current mess, the dream of a United States of Europe -- a political, military, and economic union from Lisbon to Latvia and the Baltic to the Balkans -- is over. What most people don't realize is that this has been the case for almost twenty years.

Nothing can be done to salvage the dream because deep structural forces are at work. The Europeans formed their union during the cold war to counter the awesome power of the Soviet Union. So when the USSR collapsed in 1991 there was suddenly no need for a United States of Europe.

The events of the past two decades show clearly that the end of the cold war also signaled the end of the European dream. EU member states have made no significant move toward political or military union and have begun to unravel their economic union. Absent a serious external threat to Europe, this process will continue. In the future, the current crisis will be remembered as just another warning sign that the dream was ending.

Although calls for a European union go back centuries, they were never seriously entertained before 1945. Nation states like France and Germany jealously guarded their sovereignty -- their right to independence.

It was only in the context of the cold war that the Europeans took a big step toward creating a United States of Europe. In 1951, France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux states created the European Coal and Steel Community. In 1957, they extended the coal and steel model to the whole economy by forming the European Economic Community. Then, determined to preserve their new trading bloc, they fixed their currencies through the European Monetary Agreement. In less than a decade, they had established an economic union.

Read on

I'm in Athens at the moment, attending an Economist conference on "What is Shaping the Global Agenda?" My task, in case you're curious, was to offer an American perspective on the global foreign policy agenda, in fifteen minutes or less. I focused on four issues: climate change, the changing balance of power, Israel-Palestine, and global nuclear security. I may not have offered many bold new insights, but at least I didn't exceed the time limit. And if you want to know the basic line I took, read this.

Not surprisingly, the big topic in most of the conversations (and many of the sessions) is the Greek financial crisis and its broader implications. There's been a pretty clear consensus from the people here that I've talked with (most of them from the business community): 1) yes, there will be a bailout, 2) it will probably work; 3) Greece's situation is mostly of its own doing (poor investment choices, ineffective tax system, padded public budgets, fatal combination of persistent deficits and falling competitiveness, etc.) and 4) the whole mess raises big questions about the EU.

I am hardly an expert on financial markets (though like a lot of other Americans, I've gotten more interested in them since 2008!) so I have no great wisdom to impart on the origins of Greece's troubles or the specific nature of the rescue package that is now being assembled.  But it seems to me that this crisis is a serious body blow to the European Union itself. The EU can point to plenty of successes over the years, but the combination of continued expansion and the creation of a common currency back in 1995 now looks like an exercise in hubris. 

The central problem, as plenty of people pointed out, is that EU didn't create the right institutional machinery when it created a unified currency. Once states give up their own currencies, they can't deal with financial or fiscal crises by devaluation. With that flexibility lost, the EU needed far more centralized economic authority (e.g., a true European central bank and a centralized European tax system) to make things work properly. As one banker told me here, it would be no problem if Europe were really one country and Greece was just a poorer province. But Europe's member states refuse to give up those powers, and so the stability of the euro rested on the naive assumption that all the member states would follow the rules and stay within certain fiscal targets.  This was like assuming that it would never rain, or that at least everyone would always be carrying their own umbrella. Or as one European academic recently put it: European monetary union was "not ready for bad weather."

Indeed, as Steven Erlanger points out here, it's been a pretty tough couple of years for the EU. It didn't cover itself with glory in response to the 2008 recession, and the EU had no mechanism for dealing the volcanic eruption in Iceland that snarled air traffic all over Europe. Instead, what we got was a confused array of poorly-coordinated national policies.  And then Greece had to turn to the IMF rather than its European partners to arrange a proper restructuring program.

Among other things, these events cast further doubt on the possibility that Europe will ever speak with one voice on foreign policy. By creating a president of the European Council and a High Representative for the Union of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 was supposed to be a step in that direction. In reality, however, foreign policy (including economic policy) remains primarily the prerogative of national leaders, with all the potential for division and delay that this implies.

There are in theory two ways that the EU could go in response to these events. One possibility is that these recent failures will eventually prompt a further expansion of all-European institutions.  This view is the modern version of old-style functionalism: if Europe needs certain institutions to work properly, it will eventually create them. 

The second possibility-which I'd deem more likely -- is that we have in fact seen the high-water mark of the EU project.  Nationalism is still alive and well in Europe, the Cold War is over and there is thus less need for unity against an external threat, Germany is gradually shedding its post-World War II reticence, and the consequences of over-expansion and excessive ambition have been fully exposed. I'm not saying the Union is headed for the dust-heap of history or anything like that (no bureaucracy goes out of business that quickly, especially when there are thousands of pages of laws involved), but a significant consolidation of power in the near future seems most unlikely.

Given that the EU Union has been one of the more interesting political experiments in recent decades, this is going to be fascinating to watch. Time for IR theorists to place their bets?

I first saw the Berlin Wall in March 1976, when I arrived for a semester's study at Stanford's overseas program there. As an international relations major interested in security affairs, I wanted to see the Cold War "up close and personal," and what better place to do it than the divided city that was the site of numerous Soviet-American confrontations?

It was an education, especially for a rather naive kid from California who had never been outside the United States. Foreigners could visit East Berlin relatively easily by then, yet crossing at Checkpoint Charlie was always a somewhat forbidding experience. The lines to cross were often long and tedious, the border guards sullen and arbitrary, and I always seemed to be the person they wanted to take into the back room for an extra search and a lot of questions.

The Wall itself was an ugly thing: a concrete scar across a once-great city, complete with barbed wire, guard towers, and checkpoints. It was both an iconic symbol of division but also something very real and tangible. It divided families, stifled dreams, and sometimes killed people. Some 5,000 people reportedly tried to get across the Wall while it stood, and a hundred or more died in the attempt.

Like other barriers that divide human beings, the Wall was also a confession of failure. Had the communist vision been a success, there would have been no need for Wall to keep people in. It was an education in itself to live in West Berlin and to visit the East; whatever the failings of liberal capitalism might be, it was palpably superior to life on the Other Side. West Berlin seemed a bit like Oz -- a vibrant, lively, and decidedly materialistic city, filled with cafes, stores, students, dogs (and a lot of elderly people too), but East Berlin was a bit like Dorothy's black-and-white Kansas: drab, monochromatic, and obviously much poorer. And by most accounts, East Germany worked better than the rest of the Soviet empire did.

What lessons do I draw from the Wall, its history, and its eventual destruction? Here are five.

First, although the Wall was an affront to human freedom, it also made a signal contribution to global stability. Berlin had been a flash point for international politics in 1948, 1958, and again in 1961, largely because Germany's fate remained uncertain so long as the DDR continued to lose people to the economic miracle in the West. As Marc Trachtenberg pointed out some years ago, the erection of the Wall completed the Cold War division of Europe and dampened security competition there significantly.

The second lesson is that containment worked. The Wall eventually came down because the Soviet Union collapsed without a superpower war, and Eastern Europe was liberated peacefully. As Kennan had foreseen, the Western system was in fact superior to the communist order on numerous dimensions, which meant that patient forbearance made more sense than a strategy of "rollback" or preventive war. We might have brought the wall down sooner by starting a big war, but fortunately leaders on both sides understood how foolish that would have been. There's a lesson there for those trigger-happy folks who think preventive action is the best way to deal with threats, even dangers that far less ominous than the Soviet Union was.

Third, if containment worked, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a vivid reminder that empires don't. The history of the 20th century is littered with the corpses of the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, Dutch, and Soviet empires -- none of whom could withstand the corrosive solvent of modern nationalism. Once the desire for national self-determination had the opportunity to express itself, the Soviet empire collapsed with remarkable swiftness.

Fourth, the destruction of the Wall-and indeed, the collapse of the entire Soviet order-teaches that revolutionary upheavals are nearly impossible to forecast with any precision. As Timur Kuran and others have shown, an individual's willingness to rebel is a form of private information that cannot be reliably known in advance, especially in an authoritarian society where repression is a real possibility. As a result, seemingly minor events can suddenly induce rapid contagion effects that even the participants themselves did not anticipate. Although a few observers recognized that the Soviet order was in trouble, hardly anyone believed it could collapse as quickly as it did or that Germany would reunify in a few years. The real lesson, however, is that although dramatic political change does occur from time to time, it rarely does so accordingly to anyone's timetable. The moral: Don't base your policy towards an adversary on the assumption that its rulers are on their last legs. Maybe they are, but maybe not, and nobody really knows.

Fifth and last, the fall of the Wall highlights the critical role of the individual in history. I'm a big believer in the importance of large structural forces -- the changing distribution of power, economic growth rates, demographic trends, and even evolving normative understandings -- but history sometimes turns on an individuals's ideas and initiatives. As I see it, it wasn't Reagan's saying "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" that led to it being broken into a million pieces (and then sold off, in a wonderful symbol of capitalist triumph), it was the fact that Gorbachev listened and was already thinking along similar lines. Had Andropov or Chernenko been younger or in better health, the Wall would have remained standing well into the 1990s, and we would not be celebrating anything today.

So as we congratulate ourselves for winning the Cold War and congratulate Germans on the destruction of a hated symbol of division, let us also reserve a word of thanks for those on the other side who also helped make that destruction possible.

GERARD MALIE/AFP/Getty Images