The reunification of Germany
From skepticism to reality
Even before they had succeeded in chasing the Communists out of their government, East Germans had already begun to “unify” the country with their feet: 133,000 people picked up and moved westward in the month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Such an influx of people placed tremendous strains on West Germany and all but forced Chancellor Kohl to begin immediate measures toward reunification in order to stem the tide. On November 28, 1989, he shocked the world with his announcement of a 10-point plan under which the East and West German governments would gradually expand their cooperation on specific issues until full economic, then political unity was achieved. He proposed no timetable and sought to appease the Soviets and western European powers alike by emphasizing that the process must occur within the contexts of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE; now the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe), the European Community, and East–West disarmament regimes.
The Kohl plan was more than an emergency response, however; it was also the culmination of a West German policy dating back to the founding of the two Germanies in 1949. Reunification was provided for in the West German Basic Law (constitution) and had remained the primary goal, no matter how distant, of its foreign policy. Even Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in 1969 had differed only in regard to means, looking to increased contacts and aid to educate East Germans about the freedom and prosperity prevailing in the West, and so gradually and peacefully to undermine the legitimacy of the East German regime.
Almost no one was entirely comfortable with the prospect of a reunited Germany. West Germany alone had become the economic colossus of Europe; augmented by the East, it might come to dominate the European Community. Moreover, how was a united Germany to be prevented from aspiring to military power or hegemony in the power vacuum of eastern Europe? The Soviets seemed unlikely to countenance a united Germany fully allied with the United States and the EC, while a neutral Germany might become a loose cannon vacillating between Moscow and the West. So it was that on the day after the Malta summit, President Bush declared his support for a gradually reunited Germany to remain in NATO and the EC, within a “Europe whole and free.” French President Mitterrand warned the Germans against pushing it too hard, while British Prime Minister Thatcher was openly skeptical. Gorbachev was expected to demand large concessions in return for his approval. Bush presumably had reassured him at Malta that events would not be allowed to get out of control. To underscore their intention to assert their rights in Germany dating back to the 1945 Potsdam conference, the Soviets requested a meeting of the old Allied Control Council in Berlin. To underscore their intention to respect Soviet feelings, the other World War II Allied powers (the United States, Great Britain, and France) agreed to meet on December 11.
The reunification of Germany, for so long thought impossible and, by many, perhaps most people in the U.S.S.R., France, Britain, and the United States, even undesirable, now suddenly appeared inevitable. Whatever their misgivings, the Allies could hardly deny Germany the right to the self-determination they claimed for themselves and all other peoples. When members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact convened at Ottawa, on February 11, 1990, Bush skillfully won universal agreement to a prudent format for talks on the unification of Germany. The French, British, and Soviets had considered involving the four powers from the start in group negotiations with the Germans, thereby calling into question German sovereignty. Bush’s plan, however, would permit the German states themselves to work out their future and then submit their wishes to the four powers for final approval. These “two plus four” talks were expected to be a slow, deliberative process.
In fact, the overwhelming will of the German people and the press of events brought negotiations quickly to a head. First, the East German elections on March 18 revealed a strong majority in favor of immediate unification. Second, the East German economy underwent sudden collapse after the disappearance of Communist discipline and the flight of hundreds of thousands of people. Third, the East German infrastructure was now revealed as decrepit and backward, the environment grossly polluted, and the currency worthless. Talks began at once on an emergency unification of the two Germanies’ economies, and in April, after much hand-wringing, Kohl and the Deutsche Bundesbank accepted a plan to replace the East German currency with deutsche marks on a one-to-one basis. The “two plus four” talks moved to the foreign ministerial level in May, and within two weeks East and West Germany published their terms for their imminent merger. Moreover, it would not be achieved by the laborious crafting of a new constitution but by the quicker provisions of Article 23 of the West German Basic Law, whereby new provinces could adhere to the existing constitution by a simple majority vote. The Bundestag approved these terms on June 21, and West and East Germany were unified economically on July 1.
Assurances were required to the effect that a united Germany, far from making NATO more threatening, would in fact be constrained by its membership in the U.S.-led alliance; that German military power would be limited by treaty and that Soviet troops might remain in East Germany for a time as a guarantee; that Soviet–German relations would improve after unification and yield vital economic assistance for the Soviet Union; and that the new Germany would recognize and respect existing international boundaries. Bush moved to satisfy the first and second of these desiderata at the NATO summit in July; its declaration defined NATO and the Warsaw Pact as no longer enemies, renounced NATO’s long-standing policy on first use of nuclear weapons, agreed to limits (proposed by Shevardnadze) on the size of the German army, and invited the Warsaw Pact countries to establish “regular diplomatic liaison with NATO.”
The third desideratum—improved Soviet–German relations—was, of course, up to Chancellor Kohl to satisfy. He offered to cut the German army to 370,000 men, renounce chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and aid in financing Soviet troops during an eventual withdrawal over a 3–4-year transition period. He also extended $5,000,000,000 in credits, with an expectation of more to follow. In return he secured Gorbachev’s acceptance of a united, sovereign, democratic German state to remain a full member of the Western alliance and the EC. Kohl also took pains to reassure the French that the new united Germany would pose no threat. In the ongoing EC deliberations about the greater unification to take effect in 1992, Kohl sided constantly and strongly with the French position. He made it as clear as possible that the Germans were “good Europeans” and that their unity would occur harmlessly within the context of greater European and Atlantic communities.
Meanwhile, the bilateral talks between East and West Germans proceeded at an emergency pace. The two governments signed the terms for their political union on August 31. The four Allied powers then ratified them in their own Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. Those signatures, affixed in Moscow on September 12, formally brought World War II to an end. The next day Germany and the U.S.S.R. signed a treaty of 20 years’ duration pledging to each other friendly relations and recognition of borders and renouncing the use of force. The four Allied powers renounced their rights in Germany on October 1, the final settlement took effect on October 3, 1990, and Germans tearfully celebrated their reunification.
One final issue remained—that of Germany’s permanent boundaries. Western powers and especially the Polish government had pressured Kohl from the beginning to recognize for all time the inviolability of the Oder–Neisse border and thus the permanent loss to Germany of Silesia, eastern Pomerania, Danzig (Gdańsk), and East Prussia. At first Kohl hung back, earning for himself much abuse from Western statesmen and scaremongers. His tactic seems to have been to make a show of standing up for Germany’s lost territories in the east in order to send a message to the Polish government about the need to respect the rights of ethnic Germans in Poland, as well as to minimize the appeal of the right-wing Republikaner party to the German electorate. As soon as German unity was assured, Kohl accepted Germany’s boundaries as permanent, and he signed a treaty to that effect with Poland on November 14.
Five days later the second CSCE summit convened in Paris to proclaim the end of the Cold War. In the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, the NATO and Soviet sides each pledged to limit themselves to 20,000 battle tanks and 20,000 artillery tubes, 6,800 combat aircraft, 30,000 other armoured combat vehicles, and 2,000 attack helicopters. The CSCE member states signed the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, in which the Soviets, Americans, and Europeans both east and west announced to the world that Europe was henceforth united, that all blocs—military and economic—had ceased to exist, and that all member states stood for democracy, freedom, and human rights.
Why the Soviet retreat?
On October 15, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev travelled to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace in honour of his having done much to bring the Cold War to a close. While few people in Europe and North America denied that Gorbachev’s restraint in 1989 was largely responsible for the liberation of eastern Europe or criticized the directions of his reforms in the Soviet Union, the Nobel Prize seemed to imply standards of historical and moral judgment that struck many critics as, at best, strange. Was the Soviet president to be credited with the world’s most prestigious prize for not sending in tank columns to crush innocent and unarmed people in foreign countries? What about the eastern European peoples themselves, who bravely seized their freedom in spite of the risks? Or the Western leaders whose denunciations of the Soviet empire encouraged the Polish Solidarity movement and other eastern European resisters?
Indeed, as soon as people in the West caught their breath after the cascade of events in 1989–90, they began to argue over why the Cold War had ended, why it ended when it did, and to whom the credit should go. Academic and liberal opinion favored theories crediting Gorbachev and the generation of “new thinkers” in the Soviet Union for the transformations. Conservatives preferred to give the credit to the statesmen of containment who had stood up to Soviet pressure for 40 years. (When President Bush visited Poland upon the invitation of Lech Wałęsa in 1989, thousands of Poles lined the streets to cheer and wave banners reading “Thank you!”)
Historians have argued over the end of the Cold War as intensely as they argued over its beginning, but some general observations can be made. First, the Cold War ended because the special sources of conflict and distrust between the Soviet Union and the West disappeared in 1989. That is not to say that geopolitical rivalry disappeared, or that conflicts of interest would not recur in many parts of the world. Great Power politics would go on. At the same time, the liberation of eastern Europe, unification of Germany, reduction of armaments, and suspension of Leninist ideological war against the outer world were symptomatic of the changed nature of superpower relations. Second, those relations changed their nature over the years 1985–90 because the Soviet leadership lost the ability or the will, or both, to prosecute the Cold War and seemingly came to realize that even the gains they had made in the Cold War were not in the best interests of the Soviet Union. Rather, the U.S.S.R. and its satellites and client states constituted a network of obligations that seriously strained the resources of the central economy and that had called into being a hostile alliance consisting of all the other major industrial powers of the world: the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, Japan, and China. What was more, the Communist (or Stalinist) command structure had proved woefully inadequate to the demands of a technological age. In sum, the Soviet Union had embarked under Stalin on a Sisyphean struggle against the entire outer world, only to discover over time that its huge conventional army was of doubtful utility, its nuclear arsenal unusable, its diplomatic attempts to divide the enemy alliance unsuccessful, its Third World clients expensive and of dubious value, and its pervasive apparatus for espionage, disinformation, terror, and demoralization of temporary effect only. Always the Western peoples recovered their will and dynamism; always the Soviet Union fell further behind, until finally, after 40 years, the empire fell, exhausted, to the ground.
That was when the younger generation came to the fore, promoting the “new thinking” that had sprung up from disgust with the rigid and brutal structures dating from Stalin and the rigid and counterproductive policies dating from Brezhnev. Perhaps Gorbachev himself remained a committed Marxist-Leninist—he said so at every opportunity—but the practical effect of his repudiation of old structures and policies was to dismantle much that had provoked the fear and hostility of the West in the first place. Nor would releasing eastern Europe suffice to reverse the inevitable decline of the Communist empire. The age of microelectronics, computers, space technology, and global communications was also an age in which human creativity, not brute labor, was the most valuable asset in a nation’s economic and military strength. Far from unleashing creativity and spontaneous production, as Marxist theory predicted, Soviet Communism had stifled it—through terror, bureaucratization, the lack of a profit motive and market mechanism, and hierarchical, centralized decision making. Eventually, if the Soviet Union were to remain even a great power, much less a superpower, it would have to jettison not only its subject empire but also Communism itself.
George Kennan predicted in his famous “Long Telegram” of 1946 and “X” article of 1947 that the Soviets would ultimately fail to digest the empire they had swallowed and would have to disgorge it. In the meantime, the West had to contain Soviet influence, neither retreating into isolationism nor overreacting militarily, and above all remaining confident about its basic human values. He was right. The most fundamental, long-range reason for the end of the Cold War was that Communism was based on profound contradictions and a misreading of human nature. So long as other nations refused to surrender to their fear, the Soviet system could never prevail. Perhaps the exhortations and policies of Reagan and Thatcher did determine the timing of the Soviet collapse, but the collapse was bound to come sooner or later.
Students of Soviet history with a more sociological bent offered yet another explanation for the Gorbachev phenomenon, based on irrepressible trends within Soviet society itself. For whatever horrors he committed against his own people, Stalin had made the U.S.S.R. into a modern, industrial, and primarily urban country. Khrushchev introduced television and spaceflight, and Brezhnev, through détente, multiplied the foreign contacts and experience of Soviet citizens. By the late 1970s a great percentage of Soviet people had ceased to be illiterate peasants easily suppressed, propagandized, and drafted into massive military, agricultural, or construction projects. Instead, a second- or third-generation urban population had grown up that inevitably came to demand more access to the information, political influence, and material rewards available to people of their station in the West. Once glasnost gave them a voice, these new “middle classes” loudly expressed their dissatisfaction with a regime that had become not only inhumane but irrational, even on its own materialistic terms. According to this view, therefore, Sovietism was doomed even by its relative success: the more modern the U.S.S.R. became, the less legitimate its party dictatorship became in the eyes of its educated classes.
A final, long-range interpretation laid stress on the nationality crisis in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. was the world’s last great multinational empire. The Communist party maintained its tight control over the Balts, Ukrainians, Moldavians, Georgians, Uzbeks, Armenians, and a dozen other major peoples by a combination of economic controls, censorship and propaganda, police methods, suppression of national cultures and churches, Russification, dispersal of populations, and in the last resort, force—all justified by the myth that Marxism transcended “bourgeois” nationalism and ensured equality and prosperity to all. Glasnost, however, released the real and abiding national sentiments of all the peoples under the Soviet yoke, allowing them to organize and agitate, while the economic breakdown gave the lie to Soviet promises. Finally, the discrediting of Communism itself removed the last justification for the very existence of the empire. Gorbachev did not foresee how far his policy of limited free expression would get out of hand, and by the time he did it was too late. He then gave up trying to hold eastern Europe and concentrated instead on trying to hold the U.S.S.R. together. It remained to be seen whether he, or his successor, could achieve even that.
