At the invitation of the Mayor of Berlin, we would like to invite you to the 10th Annual Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates which will gather in the German capital from 9 – 11 November 2009 in conjunction with celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.

The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall presents a unique opportunity to examine global developments since then – including the rise and fall of unipolarism – and to consider the strategic, ideological and economic implications of the emerging multipolar world.

It is intended that the 10th Summit would consider how the ideological, economic, strategic and religious walls that continue to divide humanity can best be dismantled and replaced with bridges of communication and understanding. It will include the following sessions:

• 20 Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: what were its implications and what has changed since then? In an historic debate, Nobel Peace Laureates as Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, F W de Klerk and others are invited to discuss the meaning of the fall of the wall twenty years after the event and the implications of the new emerging multipolar world. The panel will include laureates who played leading roles in the historic developments of 1989 – not only in Europe, but as far away as southern Africa.

• Breaking down walls created by nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, i.e. the walls of strategic military advantage that continue to divide mankind.

• Breaking down walls between cultural, religious and ethnic communities and the ways and means of building bridges between such communities. Nearly all conflict in the world today is caused by continuing walls between ethnic, language and religious communities within the same societies, as well as by the walls of religious fundamentalism that continue to divide the world.

• Breaking down the walls that prevent progress toward sustainable development. The walls of short-term economic interest and governmental and public apathy will have to be dismantled if mankind is to succeed in building bridges to an environmentally sustainable future.

• Breaking down walls between the developed and developing world, i.e. the walls that continue to divide developed and developing countries and the bridges that can be constructed to ensure that all mankind will increasingly share in the benefits of the globalizing world economy.

The Summit is working on the possibility to involve one of the major TV channels (Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeira, CNN, BBC World, NBC and other) to broadcast the Berlin Nobel Summit Debates to audiences all over Europe and the world.

Each discussion will be moderated by a journalist or an expert and will be introduced with short statements by the panel leaders followed by a panel discussion and questions from the floor and youth representatives.

An important contribution to the debate about Breaking Down Walls And Building Bridges would be signing by the laureates a declaration on the Breaking Down of Walls and the Building of Bridges and – based on the panel discussions – identifying a specific project and action plan to break down walls and build bridges that they will collectively support during 2010 in order to implement the project and the action plan.