Politics & Power Quote by Angela Merkel

Merkel’s sentence does what her politics so often did: it launders a thunderclap of history through the language of patience, responsibility, and coalition management. The surface message honors the obvious heroes of 1989 - citizens in Central and Eastern Europe and the GDR who took real personal risks. But the architecture of the line is the point: she pairs “courage” with “steadfastness,” turning liberation into a dual-authored achievement, not a spontaneous miracle and not a Western victory lap.

The subtext is an argument about legitimacy in the present tense. By insisting that the Cold War’s end “also required” Western partners who stayed the course “over many decades,” Merkel defends the slow, often thankless work of alliances: NATO deterrence, EU enlargement, the economic and diplomatic scaffolding that made integration plausible when it looked fanciful. The phrase “when many had long lost hope” quietly rebukes both cynics and opportunists - those who treated division as permanent, and those who later claimed they always saw unity coming.

Context matters: Merkel is East German by biography and European by vocation. She knows how easily reunification can be narrated as destiny or as a one-night revolution. Instead she frames it as a moral ledger with multiple creditors, reinforcing a post-1990 consensus: Europe is built by endurance as much as by uprising. And by linking “the two Germanys and Europe,” she smuggles in her core thesis that national unification is only stable inside a larger European project - a timely reminder whenever integration starts to look optional.