On 9 November 1989, the Berlin wall was torn down. Some people used tools, others used vehicles while the vast majority used their bare hands to tear down the symbolic divide between East and West.

It seems like a lifetime ago. And indeed it was. On the 9 November, the world awoke to grainy colour television footage of the whole of Berlin, out en masse, destroying the structure.

The massive street event not only heralded the reunification of East and West Berlin, and East and West Germany, but the eventual fall of the USSR and the Iron Curtain.

The wall separated East Germans from the supposed ideological contamination of the West. Between the time it was erected in 1961 and its fall in 1989, at least 136 people died at the Berlin Wall, according to the reunified city's Senate Chancellery. The Wall's demise was preceded by weeks of protests. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans had taken to the streets, demanding free elections, the right to travel without restrictions, and other democratic reforms.

The tearing down of the wall also morphed the European Union into a greater experiment with democracy. At the time, it was not even called the European Union. But the opportunity was seized. As the years went past, the Iron Curtain began to be peeled back across Europe. The Baltic States ceded from the Soviet Union. One by one, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and all other countries in the Eastern Bloc overthrew their despotic governments. Less than 20 years later, they are members of the European Union. Europe was, for the first time in its history, as close to democratic unity as it had ever been before in its turbulent past.

Germany's decision to unite into one Federal German Republic brought it enormous political clout and its economy turned into a thunderous powerhouse. But it was not without problems. Many East Germans feel that they do not have the same quality of life and opportunities as their brethren in the West do.

Also, the West still subsidises the East in terms of industrial output and economic growth. As this fall of this wall is commemorated, we see that problems in the East are still simmering away in Ukraine. The Eastern European nation is torn between wanting closer ties with Europe in the West and a desire for closer ties with Russia in the East. In essence, it is a reverse situation. Europe is a strange animal. But when one considers that only 60-odd years ago, Europe's nations had engaged in a bloody battle for domination on the continent, it is not all the surprising. The world changed forever on the day that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. And it continues to change as every single day goes past. But if there is one lesson to be learned, Europe is better together. And above all else, our people are better together.