LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- In a recent editorial, the Financial Times admonished the European Union and its member states, "(for) having consistently failed to grasp the broad historic significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly 13 years ago." It is in fact an awesome event, the significance of which it will take years to distill.

Just before I was born (in 1945), the number of countries in Europe that were democratic numbered four: Britain, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland, the latter two being exceptions on the European continent thanks to their "neutrality." With Hitler's defeat, democracy was restored in most of Western Europe, but communist dictatorships imposed in eastern and central Europe and the fascist regimes in southern Europe (Spain and Portugal joined by Greece after a coup d'etat in 1967) survived. For the next 30 years, the political map of Europe was frozen. Attempts at political change, including the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Spring of Prague in 1968, were brutally aborted.

When Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, it was not at all obvious that Spain would embark on democratization. That was not the legacy Franco had intended; theories on "Iberian values" held that Spain and Portugal were not fertile ground for democracy. Although the Spanish Civil War had ended 36 years earlier, the wounds were still there. Both Portugal, which still had an extensive empire that had cost considerable bloodshed and needed to be dismantled, and Spain went through an initially quite traumatic transition.