"The forty-year-old Iron Curtain fell because tens of thousands of people, long denied democracy, simply voted with their feet. They were able to do so because Gorbachev had abandoned the centralized discipline on which the Soviet empire relied. Other regimes lacked the political will to enforce the incarceration of an entire generation of Europeans. Later that month, I visited a small border village in Upper Saxony to witness local people cutting their stretch of the fence. They rushed through the gap to embrace their erstwhile neighbours, elderly relatives whom they had thought they would never see again. It was a tear-stained vignette of Europe’s most uplifting moment since the end of the Second World War. A divide had been crossed, but had a division been ended?"