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The Berlin Wall continues to haunt the world. Only shards remain of the concrete and barbed wire that once divided a city and split a continent. Few can be found in Berlin itself. Sections adorn a men's room in Las Vegas, a pedestrian mall in South Africa and the dining room at Microsoft. Bits can even be found on EBay (buyer beware).

But the wall's legacy, not its collectibility, is the problem. The world cannot agree on precisely why it fell, and more broadly why European communism collapsed and the Cold War ended. Four contradictory explanations dominate, from the most powerful corners of the Earth: the United States, Russia, Europe and China. This is no mere academic debate. How political elites understand the past directly affects their strategies for the future, and conflicting readings of a shared pivot point offer a recipe for ongoing international instability.

Americans largely understand the Cold War's end as a story of triumph. "By the grace of God," George H.W. Bush declared, "America won." Forty-plus years of economic and military dominance won, to be specific. After decades of containment, Ronald Reagan commanded "tear down this wall," and the Kremlin, recognizing the folly of continuing an exceedingly expensive and unwinnable arms race, complied (a few years later, but still).

Soviet surrender, coupled with a democratic eruption in Eastern Europe, symbolized to American minds acceptance of not just U.S. global dominance, but of American values. Europe's oppressed peoples wanted to be like us, American leaders thought, because as George H.W. Bush said, "We know what works. Freedom works." All but ignoring the activism that helped erode communism from within, and lumping together Eastern Europe's reforming and recalcitrant regimes, the American story offered a profoundly simple, yet profoundly powerful explanation for the Cold War's end: Might makes right, and we were right all along.

Like all dominant historical narratives, this one's accuracy matters less than its popularity, even as it offers an obvious recipe for subsequent success: So long as the U.S. is strong enough to withstand any threat while holding fast to its ideals, the world will eventually fall in line. Believing ourselves capable of outspending and outfighting any potential adversary, just as during the Cold War we might time and again liberate oppressed peoples who yearn only for the opportunity to enjoy our way of life.

"If the wars of the 20th century have taught us anything," Bill Clinton explained, "it is that we achieve our aims by defending our values and leading the forces of freedom."

Such triumphalism proved bipartisan. "The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad," George W. Bush declared in 2003, "will be recorded alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall as one of the great moments in the history of liberty." Five years later, Barack Obama situated his international coming-out party in Berlin. In the midst of financial crisis and international critique, the site offered a reminder that the American system had worked. "Let us remember this history, and answer our destiny," Obama preached, "and remake the world once again."

Europeans don't buy this story. Their prevailing explanation for communism's collapse gives credit not to American might and ideals, but instead to their own continental elan. Force had not destroyed communism. Instead, its absence made Eastern Europe's velvet revolutions possible. By avoiding war for more than two generations, a long time given recent history, sage European strategists gave communists time to come to their senses.

Peace was no accident in this European narrative. It derived from transnational institutions and integration designed to heal bloody divisions. Europe had nearly committed suicide in World War I. It tried again in World War II. No one believed it might survive a third try in the Atomic Age. So its leaders finally forged a common home, melding divergent economies, religions, cultures and nations into a society in which even the threat of force had no place. By the close of the 1980s, victory seemed at hand. "The watchword of post-1945 politics: We must never go to war with each other again,' " the president of the European Commission explained, "buoyed the hopes of those who built the community. That objective has been achieved."

Europe had vanquished war! The hubris underlying that conclusion exceeds even the belief that people the world over desired to be American. Yet this narrative explained not only Europe's success, but also communism's surrender. When Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of a "common European home," stretching "from the Atlantic to the Urals," he was, it seemed, expressing less a desire to control Europe than to marry it, and a willingness to forsake even socialism to fuse East and West.

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U.S., Russia, Europe, China have different views on Berlin Wall's fall