As world leaders past and present gather in Germany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a poll has revealed that one in eight Germans regret the day that their country was reunified.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are three of the world figures joining German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, in Berlin on Monday as celebrations to mark the event which signaled the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union take place.
Also attending the celebrations, that in the evening will include the toppling of 1,000 giant painted dominoes that have been set up over a 0.9 mile stretch next to where the Wall, constructed in 1961, used to run, are former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa, leader of the Polish trade union Solidarity at the time the Wall fell and a President of Poland in the early to mid 1990s.
As
Reuters reports Mr Gorbachev, now 78 years old, has appeared in an advertisement in a German paper alongside Helmut Kohl and George Bush Senior, leaders of West Germany and the U.S. respectively when the Wall, dubbed an "anti-fascist protection barrier" by the East German government that built it, finally came down.
In the advertisement Mr Bush comments "No wall is ever strong enough to strangle the human spirit".
The wall in Berlin was 27 miles long, and around the city's western sectors it was 97 miles long. During the 28 years that the Wall was in place, more than 100 people were reportedly killed trying to escape to the West. Some estimates are as high as 200 people.
But not everyone in Germany will be joining in the celebrations.
In a poll of more than a 1,000 Germans, conducted by the daily Leipziger Volkszeitung, one in eight said that they want the Wall rebuilt.
Reuters notes that of those ruing the day the Wall fell, there are almost equal numbers from East and West Germany.
The
BBC has commissioned a poll by Globescan to ascertain what the views are around the world regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union, which followed the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
Opinions were gathered from 29,000 people living in 27 countries and it was in the U.S. and Poland that 80 percent or more of the respondents considered the fall of the Soviet Union to be a "Mainly a good thing". In Germany itself 79 percent of those questioned were also of the opinion that the end of the Soviet Union was a positive thing, with 76 percent in Britain and 74 percent in France agreeing with the German respondents.
However in Egypt approaching 70 percent of those asked about the Soviet demise felt it was a bad day when the USSR came to an end. Some 50 percent of Ukrainians and 60 percent of Russians agreed.
The "defeat" of the Soviet Union was considered by many as a victory for the proponents of the free market, as well as for the populations of Central and Eastern Europe.
Yet the recent global economic crisis seems to have shaken people's faith in the efficiency and validity of a lightly regulated market.
When asked by Globescan how they viewed the current state of Free Market Capitalism, large numbers indicated that problems existed, but they felt that reform and regulation could remedy the situation. Only 11 percent of the participants in the poll believed the system currently in place to be working well.
Those in the U.S. and Pakistan were the strongest supporters of the current system, some 20-25 percent responding that the system "Works well and increased regulation will make it less efficient".
Furthermore significant numbers in France, Mexico and Brazil, 43 percent in the case of France, thought the current system to be "Fatally flawed", believing that an entirely new system is needed. Overall 23 percent of the 29,000 people polled considered the current system irreparably damaged.
Additionally government intervention to ensure a more even distribution of wealth was supported by the majority in 22 of the 27 countries included in the poll.
