Organiser Explains Why Picnic Helped Bring Down Iron Curtain Special

An apparently insignificant but epoch-making event took place 20 years ago on the Austro-Hungarian border. The Pan European Picnic, held on both sides of the Iron Curtain was organised by Walburga Habsburg Douglas who explains what it meant.

Habsburg Douglas said in an e-mail to Digital Journal:

The picnic was in important piece in the historical development which led to the Fall of the Wall in Berlin, the fall of the Iron Curtain. A development that changed the Face of Europe. If you think that on the 19 august 661 East Germans fled through the border gate, this was the biggest refugee-wave since the building of the Wall in Berlin. Then this shows better than anything the significance of the event.

I asked her what part the picnic and the resultant exodus of East Germans played in the subsequent Collapse of Communism:

Well, when such an exodus happens it becomes clear to the whole world that the regime which triggers the exodus is not a good one. That it is a regime, which has less and less citizens living inside its borders

. Habsburg Douglas referred to what Communist countries called their societies, that is, Real, or Existing Socialism, as against socialist parties in democratic countries. The exodus showed:

That the "real-exisitng socialism" does not function. SED-Secretary general Erich Honecker recognized this very well in his uinterviews after the picnic when he attacked the Pan European Union for having destroyed the idea of communism.

I also asked how well she thought the changeover from communism to democracy went in the former East Bloc countries:

Just because it only took three months from the Picnic in Sopron to the Fall of the Wall in Berlin we think that everything must happen in three months. But historic developments take longer time. Which stresses only once again, that the European Union must work harder for the integration of the existing members, but also for the enlargement, so that there will be a future when the European union and Europe will be synonymous.

Walburga Habsburg Douglas was one of the organisers of the Picnic, she is a member of the Swedish Parliament and is involved in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE.)