Francis Fukuyama called it “the beginning of The End of History”: 20 years ago today, the fall of the Berlin Wall reunited Germany, and marked the official end of the 40-year Cold War. Crikey has pulled together a wrap of the best coverage remembering the fall of the Wall:

The Spiegel Online has dug into its archives to revisit how it reported the events on 9 November, 1989:

That night, the whole city celebrated a new Day of German Unity. The concrete behemoth that had enclosed the entire 165.7-kilometer (103-mile) circumference of West Berlin and claimed the lives of more than 70 people had outlasted its creator by mere days. Exactly 22 days and eight hours earlier, Erich Honecker, the East Germany leader who presided over the construction of the Wall and declared it would stand for 100 years, had submitted his resignation. Though the Wall is still standing, it has lost its purpose.

The AP reports that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for the anniversary to be more than just a commemoration:

“Our history did not end the night the wall came down, it began anew”

…

The moment the festivities begin “should be a call to action, not just a commemoration of past actions,” Clinton said. “That call should spur us to continue our cooperation and look for new ways that we can meet the challenges that freedom faces now.”

In an op-ed for the Times, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has called on the international community to use the momentum from the anniversary to address other issues of pressing global concern:

There is not just one wall to topple, but many. There is the wall between those states which are already industrialised, and those developing countries which do not want to be held back. There is the wall between those who cause climate change, and those who suffer the consequences. There is the wall between those who heed the scientific evidence, and those who pander to vested interests. And there is the wall between the citizens who are changing their own behaviour and want strong global action, and the leaders who are so far letting them down.

Meanwhile, Newsweek argues that the historical events that set the fall of the Wall into motion actually took place some 10 years earlier:

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.

The Vancouver Sun reports that Chinese netizens are leaping over their own Great Firewall to send messages of support to Berlin — even though, as The Economist points out, the official Chinese Government mouthpiece Xinhua has had very little coverage of the anniversary.

Despite polls showing widespread dissatisfaction with capitalism around the globe, economist Mark Thirlwell reflects in a speech for the Lowy Institute that the metaphorical wall of communism has well and truly fallen, and no viable alternative to the free market has yet emerged.

Finally, The Korea Herald raises the somber point that for all the triumphalism of the occasion, in North and South Korea, the wall still remains.