History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Altogether, the problem with the foreign policy of the new Germany would seem to be not that it has any bad intentions but that it has too many good ones. Hans-Dietrich Genscher says, “We Germans want nothing else than to live in freedom, democracy, and peace with all the peoples of Europe and the world.” A modest aspiration: Germany as Europe’s “honest broker.” But, as Richard von Weizsäcker’s unification speech reached its climax with an appeal to Germans to set about “preserving the creation” (i.e., the natural world), I could not help recalling the description of Germany’s possible role that Bismarck rejected in his “honest broker” speech. Germany, said the chancellor of the first unification, should not aspire to be the schoolmaster of Europe.

  The schoolmaster of Europe—that seems to me perhaps the best phrase to summarize the aspirations of Germany’s present political leadership. The schoolmaster has passed his own exams over the last year with flying colors. There is a great deal of sense in what he has to say. But one does wonder how much of the schoolbook can ever be translated into practice, even by the Germans themselves—let alone by more recalcitrant pupils (J. Delors, smirking in the front row; F. Mitterrand, looking grandly out the window; M. Thatcher, giving her own lesson in the corridor). Are they not perhaps aiming a little too high? As Robert Browning has it in “A Grammarian’s Funeral”:

  That low man goes on adding one to one,

  His hundred’s soon hit:

  This high man, aiming at a million,

  Misses an unit.

  In the immediate future, German foreign policy will face some hard choices. American readers may think first of the decision about how far and in what form Germany should take greater responsibility outside Europe. Within Europe, I see two major choices, which in a deeper sense are one. The first concerns the former Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the second the (West) European Community.

  Since 1955, when Adenauer opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union (but with no other Soviet-bloc state), then very clearly since the Moscow Treaty of 1970, the relationship with the Soviet Union has taken top priority in Bonn’s Ostpolitik. On a sober analysis of national interests, this has been wholly understandable. As many observed, “The key to German unity lay in Moscow”—from 8 May 1945, one might say, until 3 October 1990. Plainly, this priority remained throughout the negotiations on German unity. Chancellor Kohl emphasized that he would have liked to have signed a comprehensive friendship treaty with Poland at the same time as he signed the treaty with the Soviet Union. As it turned out, in 1990 as in 1970, the Moscow treaty preceded the Warsaw one, which is still to be negotiated. And what a treaty this Moscow one is!

  Francis Fukuyama has proclaimed the end of history, but the German-Soviet friendship treaty, initiated in Moscow on 13 September, goes one step further. “The Federal Republic of Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” says its preamble, “wishing finally to put an end to the past.” To put an end to the past! “Determined to follow on from the good traditions of their [i.e., Germany and the Soviet Union’s] centuries-old history,” the two sides produce another catalogue of good intentions, mainly gluing together prefabricated phrases from German-Soviet documents of the last twenty years but also declaring that “they will never and under no circumstances be the first to use armed force against each other or against other states. They call upon all other states to join in this commitment to nonaggression.” If we take this literally, it means that Germany is joining the Soviet Union in calling upon, say, the United States not to use armed force against, say, Iraq.

  “But,” your German colleague will respond privately, “you mustn’t take it literally!” Then why write it if you don’t mean it? Well, to get Russian agreement to unification, of course! Fair enough: Machiavelli dressed as Luther. The question then becomes, Is this really the last page of an old chapter—the forty-five-year-long story of German liberation—or the first page of a new one? (GERMANY AND THE SOVIET UNION AT A NEW BEGINNING, a headline in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung memorably announced at the time of the Stavropol agreement in July.) Time will tell—meaning the Germans will decide. Or perhaps will not decide. For my impression is that German policy makers do not at the moment have a private set of priorities in foreign policy that is much clearer than the public rhetoric.

  The consciousness of promises made, gratitude, habit, the faint hope of a great market to open, above all a deep fear of disorder and chaos—the dreaded “instability”—all these will incline Bonn to make quite substantial efforts to help the Soviet leadership (and the Soviet leadership rather than, say, the Russian, Ukrainian, or Baltic leaderships) to proceed along the path of economic transformation. Yet the Soviet Union is collapsing at such a rate that these efforts are probably doomed to failure, at least in this well-ordered form (Germany—Soviet Union). Moreover, so long as the Soviet-American relationship remains highly cooperative, German-Soviet cooperation need not adversely affect German-American relations. In the short term, then, the “Big Three” of post—cold war Europe—America, Germany, and Russia—can probably remain more or less in sync.

  The immediate problem lies closer to home. At the same time as they promise extensive help to the Soviet Union—to be set out in a second comprehensive treaty on economic, scientific, and technological cooperation—German policy makers say they want especially to help their neighbors in “Central, Eastern, and Southeastern” Europe. But, as the Germans have themselves discovered in the GDR, the problems and costs of the transition from a planned to a market economy are vast. If this is true of the small and relatively prosperous GDR, how much more is it true of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, let alone of Romania and Bulgaria—not to mention the East European republics of the Soviet Union? If German, European, and Western help is spread more or less indiscriminately across this whole vast region, then the three mutually dependent transitions— to market economy, to parliamentary democracy, and to the rule of law—will not succeed even in the nearest east of Europe, in East Central Europe. And then that region could indeed become Europe’s Near East: not the Central Europe of the intellectual antipoliticians’ dreams, but the Zwischeneuropa of a nightmare—an area of weak, undemocratic states, riven by social and national conflicts. This would obviously be bad for all of Europe, but it would be especially bad for Germany, since the resulting chaos would be just thirty miles east of the capital, Berlin. The pressure of immigrants would grow, not decline, and they would be knocking first at Germany’s doors.

  “The western frontier of the Soviet Union must not become the eastern frontier of Europe,” says President Weizsäcker. A noble sentiment but open to question in two respects. First, the Soviet Union is ceasing to exist, and Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and Ukrainians no longer wish to recognize “the western frontier of the Soviet Union” as “the eastern frontier of Europe.” (The Ukrainian republic recently signed a separate treaty with Poland, including mutual recognition of frontiers.) Second, if we understand by “Europe” a community of more or less liberal democratic states with social-market economies, then the real question for the next five to ten years is not “Will Europe end on the present western frontier of the Soviet Union?” but rather “Will Europe reach even that far?” Unless a clear and very high priority is given by Germany and the whole European Community to East Central Europe, where the transition still has a sporting chance, Europe—in the constitutional and economic sense—will not end on the river Bug. It will end on the Oder and Neisse.

  This relates intimately to the second hard choice that faces German policy: that about the (West) European Community. As national unification reached its climax, so German policy makers and commentators redoubled their insistence that the EC must move forward in both domestic and external policy. Where Bismarck said, “Let us put Germany in the saddle,” the Nestor of German liberal journalism, Theo Sommer, says, “Now we must put Europe in the saddle.” Poor girl: up into the saddle, whether she wants it or not! And, of course, she hersel
f is, as always, of several minds. A significant part of Germany’s present political elite still has a genuine commitment to moving forward to closer integration at the EC intergovernmental conferences on political and on economic and monetary union (although there are also substantial reservations, for example on the part of the Bundesbank, which fears a softening of the deutsche mark). This commitment is shared, in different ways and varying degrees, by significant parts of the political elite in most of the other Continental members of the EC. But there is one quite fundamental and immediate problem.

  Germany’s present political leadership says it wants to deepen the community but also in the foreseeable future to widen it to include East Central Europe and some countries from the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). But many people at the highest levels of the EC consider deepening and widening to be not complementary but contradictory goals. Jacques Delors argues that if you are to deepen, for example by adopting a common currency and a central bank, then you cannot afford to widen. Mrs. Thatcher advocates a rapid widening, partly out of genuine concern for the fledgling democracies of East Central Europe but also to foil Brother Jacques’s designs of rapid deepening.

  One can quite plausibly argue that the EC is on the horns of a dilemma. If it moves forward soon in the general direction of a United States of Europe, then East Central Europe will join it only late or never. If East Central Europe joins soon, then the EC will move forward in the direction of a USE only late or never. In the former case, the position of the former Eastern Europe will differ from that of the former Soviet Union in degree but not in kind. “Europe” will, in some very significant senses, end on the Oder-Neisse line. In the latter case, however, in a looser “Europe des Patries,” Germany would willy-nilly come back somewhat more to the old post-Bismarckian dilemmas of the nation-state in the middle. So German policy makers quite rightly see that they must try to both deepen and widen the community. But how?

  There are a few people in Germany seriously seeking answers. (Perhaps it is always only a few.) Whether they find any, and, if so, what those answers will be, we will probably begin to learn only after the federal election on 2 December. The starting point must surely be, as it was for Adenauer and Brandt, the definition of national interests. For the last forty years (some would say for the last two hundred), the question of German national identity has provoked some of the longest, deepest, most contorted answers ever given to any question by any branch of humankind. The question of national interest, however, has been much easier to answer. For the last forty years, the answer was, in a nutshell, “recovery of sovereignty and overcoming the division of Germany.”

  Now, in one united, western Germany, the question of national identity should be easier to answer—although to judge by the hypochondriac effusions in recent weeks of many German writers lamenting unification (such as Günter Grass) or discovering a late love for the cozy old Federal Republic (such as Patrick Süskind), there is no guarantee that their answers will actually become any simpler. The question of national interest, by contrast, necessarily becomes more complicated. On my analysis, besides the consolidation of the constitution of liberty and an open society inside Germany, the first strategic answer would be: “to combine in one design the enterprise of sustaining the democratic transition in East Central Europe and that of further, primarily political, integration of the EC.”

  If, however, such a design is not spelled out clearly, if the hard choices are ducked, then national (and therefore European) interests will be defined on the hoof—dictated by dramatic external developments, such as the further collapse of the Soviet Union, or by domestic pressures, such as swelling resentment against immigrants, or by a combination of both.

  The second part of my answer to Adam Michnik, on the streets of Frankfurt, at two-thirty on the morning of German unification, was: “If I have a fear for the next few years, it is not that Germany will turn outward in any sort of bid for domination as an economic great power. It’s rather that it will turn inward, become obsessed with the problems flowing from unification, a little self-pitying, self-protective. And build a new wall on its eastern frontier, which its other West European partners will only help to reinforce.”

  In short, the German eagle is unbound. The broken chains lie on the hillside. He has raised his wings a little and given a few friendly cries. Will he now spread his wings and rise up, this time to help, not to attack? Or will he rather, like the eagle donated to Washington Zoo by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, sit sulkily on his perch, gobbling his ample food and disconsolately scratching his breast feathers with that great beak?

  CHRONOLOGY

  1990

  12 OCTOBER. Signature of a German-Soviet treaty on the arrangements for remaining Soviet troops in Germany and their planned withdrawal by December 1994.

  15 OCTOBER. Mikhail Gorbachev is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  25 OCTOBER. The Slovak parliament votes to make Slovak the official language of Slovakia.

  28 OCTOBER. At the Rome summit of the EC, eleven leaders agree to proceed to a “second stage” of monetary union on 1 January 1994 and to achieve full monetary union by 2000. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher refuses to join them, denouncing this as the “back door to a federal Europe.”

  1 NOVEMBER. British deputy prime minister Geoffrey Howe resigns in protest at Mrs. Thatcher’s attitude to Europe.

  6 NOVEMBER. Hungary joins the Council of Europe—the first postcommunist country to do so.

  7 NOVEMBER. Mary Robinson is elected president of the Republic of Ireland.

  9 NOVEMBER. Chancellor Kohl and President Gorbachev sign a German-Soviet friendship treaty on the first anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall.

  14 NOVEMBER. Signature of a German-Polish frontier treaty.

  19-21 NOVEMBER. Paris summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Launch of the Paris Charter for a New Europe. Member states of Warsaw Pact and NATO sign the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.

  28 NOVEMBER. Margaret Thatcher resigns as prime minister of Britain and leader of the Conservative Party. She is succeeded by John Major.

  2 DECEMBER. The first all-German elections to the Bundestag result in a clear victory for the existing center-right coalition government led by Helmut Kohl.

  9 DECEMBER. Lech Wałȩsa is elected president of Poland, promising an “acceleration” of decommunization. Slobodan Milošević is elected president of Serbia on a nationalist platform.

  14-15 DECEMBER. The European Council in Rome launches twin intergovernmental conferences on economic and monetary union and on political union.

  20 DECEMBER. Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze resigns, warning of the risk of a renewed dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

  22 DECEMBER. In its “Christmas constitution,” the Croatian parliament proclaims Croatia “the national state of the Croatian people.”

  1991

  4 JANUARY. Liberal fan Krzysztof Bielecki becomes prime minister of Poland.

  11-12 JANUARY. Paris. At a grand dinner in the Hôtel de Ville, Henry Kissinger twits Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist mayor of Paris, about his earlier admiration for the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Chirac replies, “Oh, he’s changed you know.” Politician’s wisdom.

  13 JANUARY. “Bloody Sunday” in Vilnius. Some fifteen Lithuanians are killed following action by Soviet forces.

  17 JANUARY—8 FEBRUARY. Gulf War to liberate Kuwait from Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

  JANUARY-FEBRUARY. A wave of emigration by Albanian “boat people” attempting to enter Italy.

  27 JANUARY. Former communist leader Kiro Gligorov becomes president of the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.

  6 FEBRUARY. Stockholm. A memorable conversation with Carl Bildt, leader of the Swedish conservatives. The social-democratic “Swedish model” or “third way” has failed, he says. For too long, Sweden has stood apart, considering itself somehow closer to Africa than to Germany. And he talks, almost like a Polish o
r Czech politician, about the need for his country to “return to Europe.”

  9 FEBRUARY. Overwhelming vote for independence in a Lithuanian referendum.

  15 FEBRUARY. The “Visegrád Declaration” constitutes the so-called Visegrád group for Central European cooperation, comprising Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

  23-25 FEBRUARY. A congress of the Solidarity movement in Poland elects Marian Krzaklewski to succeed Lech Wałȩsa as its leader.

  25 FEBRUARY. The Warsaw Pact agrees to dissolve its military structures by 1 April. The trial of former Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov begins.

  3 MARCH. Referendums produce clear majorities for independence in Estonia and Latvia.

  4 MARCH. The Supreme Soviet ratifies the “2+4 treaty” together with the accompanying German-Soviet treaties.

  11 MARCH. John Major declares that Britain is “at the very heart of Europe.” In Greece, former prime minister Andreas Papandreou goes on trial, charged with bribery and embezzlement.

  11 AND 14 MARCH. Rallies for Slovak independence in Bratislava.

  14-16 MARCH. Dresden. For forty years, the British-German Königswinter Conference has met either in Königswinter on the Rhine or in Cambridge. Now, for the first time, it breaks this tradition to meet in Dresden, the beautiful city—“Florence on the Elbe”—destroyed by British and American bombs in February 1945. This is a moving event in many ways, but it is striking that, in the first Königswinter meeting after the liberation and unification of Germany, we come to the place in Germany where Britain has most to apologize for. It’s almost as if, after forty years of apologizing for Hitler, the Germans are saying, “Now it’s your turn.” The balance of apologies shifts with the balance of power?