[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and the author, most recently, of Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments (2008) and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).]

How is it that a Communist Party organized along Leninist lines remains in charge in Beijing so long after its counterparts in cities such as Budapest and Bucharest were toppled? Why hasn't there been a sequel to the Tiananmen Uprising, ending this time not in a massacre like that of June 4, 1989, but in China getting with the program of the trend that some two decades ago Ken Jowitt dubbed memorably (even if somewhat inaccurately as it turned out) the "Leninist Extinction"?

I get asked questions like these whenever I give public talks about China. So, naturally, they are among the key ones that I try to answer in China in the...

[Joshua Stanton, a former JAG officer, is an attorney in Washington, DC.]

A quote sometimes attributed to Trotsky is that “revolution is impossible until it is inevitable.” Not for the first or last time, Trotsky was wrong, and as the leader of a well-organized revolutionary movement who’d watched the Czar crush the rebellion of 1905, he certainly knew better. There is a tendency for events that were once chaotic, precarious, and ultimately consequential to seem inevitable once they’re chiseled into our tablets. Today, an equally dismissive approach suggests that those events were inevitable. In fact, they were neither.

The error of assuming impossibility is more forgivable. For me, the fall of The Wall is among a few of those “I remember where I was” moments. In Rapid City, South Dakota, that was a miserably cold day, and ironically, I was a driving a Chinese friend and fellow student to the grocery store. Yes, it was clear that discontent in the Warsaw Pact...

[Michael Meyer, Newsweek's bureau chief in Eastern Europe in 1989, is the author of The Year That Changed the World.]

Too often, we see history as inevitable. What was had to be, the culmination of seemingly tectonic forces. We tend to forget that history is also defined by the logic of human messiness. Happenstance, chance, even accident always loom large in grand events.

Consider the iconic image that will play and replay on our TV screens over the coming weeks: Berliners dancing atop the fallen wall, marking the end of the Cold War 20 years ago. I was there, that night to remember: Nov. 9, 1989.

The scene was Checkpoint Charlie, the famous border crossing in the heart of divided Berlin. A heaving crowd of East Germans faced a thin line of Volkspolitzei, nervously fingering their weapons. The standoff had just entered its fourth hour. "Open up! Open up!" the people cried out. Past the police and their guard dogs, past the watchtower and...

[Cameron Abadi is a Berlin-based writer with a focus on contemporary Europe and the Middle East.In addition to his work for Germany's two largest weeklies, Die Zeit and Der Spiegel, he has contributed to Foreign Policy, Financial Times magazine and the New Republic. He's also worked for the Berlin bureau of Associated Press.]

Many Berliners feel that the true cause for celebration has been overlooked.

The official proceedings of Monday’s day of remembrance for the fall of the Berlin Wall will begin when Angela Merkel, international dignitaries and heads of state in tow, comes to the bridge at Bornholmer Strasse. This quiet, far-off corner of Germany’s capital offers little indication of having once been at the crossroads of history.

Only a small plaque, marred by graffiti, and a gray stretch of the city’s eponymous wall together make quiet claim that this is where East and West Germany first met on the fateful night of Nov. 9, 1989. Tourists don't...

[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.]

Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell. And as soon as it did, a myth began to arise: that it was Ronald Reagan’s uncompromising anti-communism that brought the Soviet Union to its knees. The myth’s consequences have been immense: Again and again, post-Cold War hawks have invoked Reagan to oppose negotiations with America’s enemies, and to justify the threat—if not the actual use—of force. There’s just one problem: The myth is almost entirely false. Two decades later, it’s high time ordinary Americans learn what most serious historians already know: that Reagan didn’t end the Cold War because he was a hawk. He ended it because he turned into a dove.

To be sure, Reagan began his presidency as a hawk: He jacked up defense spending, created "Star Wars," and...

[Steven J. Erlanger is an American journalist who has been the Paris bureau chief for The New York Times since 2008.]

PARIS — The historical legacy of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the cold war thawed, is as political as the upheavals of that decisive year.

The events of 1989 spurred a striking transformation of Europe, which is now whole and free, and a reunified Germany, milestones that are being observed with celebrations all over the continent, including a French-German extravaganza Monday evening on the Place de la Concorde.

But 1989 also created new divisions and fierce nationalisms that hobble the European Union today, between East and West, France and Germany, Europe and Russia.

Some of the intensity of those divisions is evident in the tug of war, in both Europe and the United States, over the achievements of 1989 — whether they owe more to the resolute anti-Communism of Ronald Reagan or its inverse, the white-glove...

[Katrin Bennhold is a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. An economist by training, Katrin has been covering French and European politics for the IHT and its parent newspaper, The New York Times, for almost three years.]

PARIS — Like most people, I had slept through the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was Friday, Nov. 10, 1989, and I was 15 years old, a teenager with boys and ballet classes on my mind and an identity firmly rooted in the western part of West Germany. History had happened overnight, and as the day after unfolded, everyone in my hometown seemed giddy with excitement — everyone except my parents.

This was before taxi drivers in West Berlin started to complain about the cheap competition from their Eastern colleagues and before jokes began circulating about “Ossis” who were crazy about bananas and didn’t know what broccoli was. Westerners had not yet seen their taxes rise to finance Eastern reconstruction, and...

[Hubert Védrine was spokesman for President François Mitterrand when the wall fell. A future foreign minister of France, he was then 42 and a Socialist.]

What went through your mind when you first heard that the wall had fallen? How did it affect your life and/or your thinking? Looking back now, what one thing would you have done differently?

The opening of the wall by the rudderless Eastern German authorities confirmed that the country was finished. The event was therefore spectacular and moving, but not so astonishing. In fact, ever since Mikhail Gorbachev said in 1985 that he would not use force to maintain those regimes, they were condemned — unless they reformed themselves radically, which they were incapable of doing. The acceleration of events in November led us up to what had been the obsession of François Mitterrand: to ensure that German reunification, which would necessarily follow, went well.

November 9 in itself didn’t change...

[Jeffrey Simpson is The Globe and Mail's national affairs columnist.]

In June of 1989, five months before the Berlin Wall collapsed, the West German chancellor's foreign policy adviser told a visiting journalist: No, there was no chance of East Germany imploding for a very long time.

True, signs of discontent were popping up in Hungary and Poland, but East Germany would remain faithful to the Soviet Union and to its own Stalinist-inspired system.

The head of the East European section of the foreign ministry reported a similar take: Nothing would happen in East Germany. At lunch, a young member of the Bundestag from the liberal Free Democratic Party who had recently returned from a conference in East Berlin, said: No, nothing was on the horizon over there.

If the West Germans, with their intelligence agencies trained on East Germany in particular and Eastern Europe in general and with all their family and linguistic links, did not know...