The Road from 1989 by John O'Sullivan on National Review / Digital

The Road from 1989 by John O'Sullivan on National Review / Digital: "On Aug. 19, 1989, a “pan-European picnic” was held near the town of Sopron on the Austria–Hungary border by Hungary’s four opposition parties, under the joint patronage of Otto von Hapsburg and the Hungarian reform Communist Imre Poszgay. Hungary had already started to demolish its fortified border with Austria. East Germans now took the opportunity to flee in large numbers. By September the Hungarian government gave up all pretense of guarding the border, despite protests from East Germany’s dinosaur leader, Erich Honecker. The Iron Curtain was trampled down by an exodus of refugees from all the Eastern-bloc countries except East Germany. And in November that final domino fell when, in an entirely fitting epilogue to Communism, the Berlin Wall fell too — because the bureaucrats in charge of it couldn’t make sense of their orders."