The picnic that changed Europe

Twenty years ago a picnic was held that went down in history as the event that would play a decisive role in the fall of the Iron Curtain. On 19 August leaders from eastern and western Europe will meet in Sopron in Hungary to take part in celebrations to commemorate this historic day.

Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt will be present, together with Hungary’s President László Sólyom and Germany’s Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Mr Bildt says that he will give a short speech at the celebrations, and that he will be attending to represent the EU and the new Europe which was a result of the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Mr Bildt travelled in the region a few years prior to 1989, and he says that he remembers the barbed wired and barriers of the Iron Curtain in Sopron.

“Developments in Hungary during those few weeks twenty years ago were vitally important when it came to pulling the rug from beneath the feet of the GDR dictatorship. Events in Sopron showed that there was an opening in the Iron Curtain, a way of getting out, and that set off a whole sequence of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, and within little more than a year the collapse of the East German state – the linchpin in the Soviet Union’s outer empire,” says Mr Bildt.

The origins of what came to be known as the Pan-European picnic lay in a demonstration that took place in June 1989, when the then Austrian foreign minister Alois Mock and his Hungarian colleague Gyula Horn symbolically cut open the barrier between the two countries.

In August of the same year another demonstration was held, this time organised by the Hungarian opposition, in collaboration with the Pan-European Union. In the same place as the Austrian and Hungarian foreign ministers had cut the border fence, a border crossing was to be held open for three hours - this, too, was a symbolic act.

The demonstration turned into the largest flight from Eastern Europe since the Berlin Wall was erected. More than 600 East Germans took the short-lived opportunity while the Iron Curtain was open to flee across the border to Austria. This resulted in East Germany closing off its borders. The seething discontent spread, and protests against the GDR regime grew, resulting in the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November.