some other initiatives.
(Applause)
Jacques L.J. Delors
former President of the European Commission. - (FR) Mr President, Mr de Maizière, Mr Van Rompuy, Mr Barroso, Excellencies, Members of the European Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, barely a year elapsed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.
During the whole of 1989, the peoples of Europe expressed themselves: in Poland, the events that had begun with the Gdańsk strikes in the summer of 1980 led to the Belvedere Agreements between February and April 1989, followed by the first free elections on 4 June 1989; in Czechoslovakia, the people commemorated Jan Palach's sacrifice by fire; in Hungary, they marked the solemn funeral of Imre Nagy, at last rehabilitated; in Bulgaria, President Zhivkov was forced to stand down; and, of course,in East Germany, increasing numbers of people took part in peaceful demonstrations. The people's demands were gaining strength and, on 2 May 1989, the opening of the border between Hungary and Austria enabled some East Germans to cross over to the West.
We therefore witnessed a moment in time when history accelerated, and we must admit that it took us all by surprise. Some of us knew intuitively that there were growing imbalances in the communist countries, but no one could have known that the lid would blow off so fast. 1989 was a year of profound change in many parts of the world, with, as I recall, the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the Tiananmen uprising in China.
To come back to Europe, the events of