Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (127 page)

Gorbachev did more than just let the colonies go. By indicating that he would not intervene he decisively undermined the only real source of political legitimacy available to the rulers of the satellite states: the promise (or threat) of military intervention from Moscow. Without that threat the local regimes were politically naked. Economically they might have struggled for a few more years, but there, too, the logic of Soviet retreat was implacable: once Moscow started charging world market prices for its exports to Comecon countries (as it did in 1990) the latter, heavily dependent on imperial subsidies, would have collapsed in any event.

As this last example suggests, Gorbachev was letting Communism fall in eastern Europe in order to save it in Russia itself—just as Stalin had built the satellite regimes not for their own sake but as a security for his western frontier. Tactically Gorbachev miscalculated badly—within two years the lessons of Eastern Europe would be used against the region’s liberator on his home territory. But strategically his achievement was immense and unprecedented. No other territorial empire in recorded history ever abandoned its dominions so rapidly, with such good grace and so little bloodshed. Gorbachev cannot take direct credit for what happened in 1989—he did not plan it and only hazily grasped its long-term import. But he was the permissive and precipitating cause. It was Mr Gorbachev’s revolution.

PART FOUR

After the Fall: 1989-2005

XX

A Fissile Continent

‘I don’t have to do anything to stop it; the Soviets will do it for me. They
will never allow this greater Germany just opposite them’.
François Mitterrand, November 28th 1989

‘When we started, we did not understand the depth of the problems
we faced’.
Mikhail Gorbachev, 1990

‘Our country has not been lucky. It was decided to carry out this
Marxist experiment on us. In the end we proved that there is no place
for this idea—it has simply pushed us off the path taken by the
world’s civilized countries’.
Boris Yeltsin, 1991

‘The existence of the Czech nation was never a certainty, and precisely this
uncertainty constitutes its most striking aspect’.
Milan Kundera

Liberated from Communism, eastern Europe underwent a second and even more striking transformation. In the course of the 1990s four established states disappeared from the map of the continent and fourteen countries were born—or resuscitated. The six westernmost republics of the Soviet Union—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova—became independent states, together with Russia itself. Czechoslovakia became two separate countries—Slovakia and the Czech Republic. And Yugoslavia broke apart into its constituent units: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia-Montenegro and Macedonia.

This making and breaking of nations was comparable in scale to the impact of the Versailles treaties that followed World War One—and in certain respects more dramatic. The emergence of nation-states at Versailles was the culmination of a long drawn-out process with its roots in the mid-nineteenth century or before; it came as no surprise. But the prospect of something similar occurring in the late twentieth century was anticipated by almost no-one. Indeed, three states that were to disappear in the course of the 1990s—Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR—were themselves of post-1918 vintage.

It is not, however, a coincidence that these were the last remaining multi-ethnic, federal states in the region. The territorial fission of the Nineties accompanied the extinction of the last of Europe’s four continental empires—that of Russia. It was, in effect, a delayed epilogue to the post-imperial state-making that had followed the fall of the other three: Ottoman Turkey, Habsburg Austria and Wilhelmine Germany. But the logic of imperial break-up would not in itself have triggered the institutional re-arrangement of Eastern Europe. As so often in the past, the fate of the region was determined by events in Germany.

Credit for German re-unification—a unique case of fusion in a decade of fission—must go in the first instance to Helmut Kohl. The West German Chancellor was initially as hesitant as everyone else—on November 28th 1989 he presented to the Bundestag a
five-year
program of cautious steps toward German unity. But after listening to East German crowds (and assuring himself of the support of Washington) Kohl calculated that a unified Germany was now not merely possible but perhaps urgent. It was clear that the only way to staunch the flow west (2,000 people a day at one point) was to bring West Germany east. In order to keep East Germans from leaving their country, the West German leader set about abolishing it.

As in the 19th century, German unification was in the first instance to be achieved by a currency union; but political union inevitably followed. Talk of a ‘confederation’, which the West Germans had initially encouraged and Hans Modrow’s GDR cabinet had eagerly pursued, was precipitately dropped and in the hastily called East German elections of March 1990 Christian Democrat candidates ran on a unification ticket. Their ‘Alliance for Germany’ won 48 percent of the vote: the Social Democrats, handicapped by their well-advertised ambivalence on the subject, won just 22 percent.
³⁰³
The former Communists—now the Party of Democratic Socialism—secured a respectable 16 percent showing; but Alliance ’90, a coalition of former dissidents including Bärbel Bohley’s
Neues Forum
, won just 2.8 percent.
³⁰⁴

The first act of the new majority in the GDR Volkskammer, represented by a CDU-SPD-Liberal coalition led by Lothar de Maizière, was to commit their country to German unity.
³⁰⁵
On May 18th 1990 a ‘monetary, economic and social union’ was signed between the two Germanies, and on July 1st its crucial clause—the extension of the Deutschmark to East Germany—came into force. East Germans could now exchange their virtually useless East German marks—up to the equivalent of DM 40,000—at a hugely advantageous rate of 1:1. Wages and salaries in the GDR would henceforth be paid in Deutschmarks at parity—a dramatically effective device for keeping East Germans where they were, but with grim long-term consequences for East German jobs and the West German budget.

On August 23rd, by pre-agreement with Bonn, the Volkskammer voted to accede to the Federal Republic. A week later a Treaty of Unification was signed, by which the GDR was absorbed into the FRG—as approved by its voters in the March elections and permitted under Article 23 of the 1949 Basic Law. On October 3rd the Treaty entered into force: the GDR ‘acceded’ to the Federal Republic and ceased to exist.

The division of Germany had been the work of the victors of World War Two and its reunification in 1990 would never have come about without their encouragement or consent. East Germany was a Soviet satellite state, with 360,000 Soviet troops still stationed there in 1989. West Germany, for all its independence, was not free to act autonomously on
this
matter. As for Berlin, until a final peace settlement was reached it remained a city whose fate formally depended upon the original occupying powers—France, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union.

Neither the British nor the French were in any particular hurry to see Germany reunited. To the extent that West Europeans even thought about a unified Germany they assumed—reasonably enough—that it would come at the
end
of a long process of change in Eastern Europe, not right at the outset. As Douglas Hurd (the British foreign secretary) observed in December 1989, reflecting on the imminent conclusion of the Cold War: This was ‘a system . . . under which we’ve lived quite happily for forty years.’

His Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, made no secret of her fears. In her memoirs she recalls a hastily convoked meeting with French President Mitterrand: ‘I produced from my handbag a map showing the various configurations of Germany in the past, which were not altogether reassuring about the future . . . [Mitterrand] said that at moments of great danger in the past France had always established special relations with Britain and he felt such a time had come again . . . It seemed to me that although we had not discovered the means, at least we both had the will to check the German juggernaut. That was a start.’

Mrs Thatcher—and she was not alone—was also worried that German unification might de-stabilize Mikhail Gorbachev, possibly even leading to his fall (by analogy with Nikita Khrushchev’s disgrace following his Cuban humiliation). But the British, for all their anxieties, had nothing to offer by way of an alternative to the course of events then unfolding in Germany and they duly acquiesced. Mitterrand was not so easily appeased. More than anyone else, the French were truly disturbed by the collapse of the stable and familiar arrangements in Germany and in the Communist bloc as a whole.
³⁰⁶

The first reaction from Paris was to try and block any move to German unification—Mitterrand even going so far as to visit the GDR in December 1989 in a show of support for its sovereignty. He declined Helmut Kohl’s invitation to attend a ceremony to mark the re-opening of the Brandenburg Gate, and tried to convince Soviet leaders that, as traditional allies, France and Russia had a common interest in blocking German ambitions. Indeed, the French were banking on Gorbachev to veto German unity—as Mitterrand explained to his advisers on November 28th 1989, ‘I don’t have to do anything to stop it, the Soviets will do it for me. They will never allow this greater Germany just opposite them.’

But once it became clear that this was not so—and following Kohl’s decisive victory in the East German elections—the French President adopted a different tack. The Germans could have their unity, but at a price. There must be no question of an enhanced Germany taking an independent path, much less reverting to its old middle-European priorities. Kohl must commit himself to pursuing the European project under a Franco-German condominium, and Germany was to be bound into an ‘ever-closer’ union—whose terms, notably a common European currency, would be enshrined in a new treaty (to be negotiated the following year in the Dutch city of Maastricht)
³⁰⁷
.

The Germans agreed readily enough to all the French conditions (though the maladroit character of France’s diplomatic maneuvers chilled relations for a while)—an echo of earlier days, when Bonn agreed after 1955 to confine ‘Europe’ to the original six countries in order to assuage French anxiety over the restoration of full sovereignty to Germany. Kohl even concurred in the coming months over a range of minor concessions designed to reward Paris for its forbearance.
³⁰⁸
Unification was well worth some appeasement of Germany’s nervous European neighbours. In any case Kohl—born in Ludwigshafen and like his fellow Rhinelander Adenauer instinctively disposed to look west—was not unduly troubled at the idea of tying Germany ever more closely to the European Community.

But most important of all, the German Chancellor had the wind in his sails, as any contemporary photograph of him will confirm: German unification had the full backing of the United States. Like everyone else, the administration of President George Bush initially supposed along with its allies that German unification could only come at the end of the series of unpredictable changes unfolding in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and then only with Soviet consent. But Washington was quicker to catch the prevailing mood, especially after a February 1990 poll showed that 58 percent of West Germans favored a united and
neutral
Germany. This was the very outcome the US (and many West German politicians) feared most: an enlarged Germany, neutral and unattached in the middle of Europe, destabilizing and unsettling its neighbours on both sides.

The US thus committed itself wholeheartedly to support for Kohl’s objectives, to ensure that Germans were never required to choose between unity and the Western alliance. Under pressure from Washington, the French and British accordingly agreed to sit down with the Soviet Union and representatives of the two Germanies and thrash out the terms of the emergence of a new Germany. These so-called ‘4+2’ talks, conducted by foreign ministers from February to September 1990, culminated in a Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, signed in Moscow on September 12th.

With this treaty, which formally recognized the borders of a future Germany as those of the two present German states, the four-power status of Berlin was brought to an end, expiring at midnight on October 2nd 1990. The Soviet Union agreed to allow a united Germany to remain in NATO, and terms were reached for the withdrawal of the Red Army and the departure of all foreign troops from Berlin (to be completed four years hence, after which only a small complement of NATO troops would remain on German soil).

Why did Mikhail Gorbachev so readily allow German unification to go forward? For decades the Soviet Union’s primary strategic objective had been to maintain the territorial
status quo
in central Europe: Moscow—like London, Paris and Washington—had become comfortable with a divided Germany and had long since abandoned Stalin’s post-war goal of extricating Bonn from the Western alliance. And unlike the French and the British, the Soviet leadership was still in a position to block the process of unification, at least in principle.

Gorbachev, like everyone else in 1990, was flying blind. No-one, in East or West, had a plan telling them what to do if the GDR disintegrated; and there were no blueprints for German unification. But the Soviet leader, unlike his western counterparts, had no good options. He could not realistically hope to prevent German unity except by reversing his benign public announcements of recent years and seriously damaging his own credibility. He did initially oppose the absorption of a united Germany into NATO; and even after conceding the point in principle
³⁰⁹
continued to insist that NATO troops not be allowed to move 300 kilometers east to the Polish border—something US Secretary of State James Baker actually promised to his Soviet counterpart in February 1990. But when that promise was later broken Gorbachev was helpless to intervene.