1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 19

  Zoellick reportedly defended Baker’s belief in 2 + 4 by saying that “the presence of 380,000 Soviet troops in the GDR was means enough for obstruction.” 29 The 2 + 4 would recognize and manage that obstructive power, not add to it. Besides, it was now a done deal. The public announcement had cut off not only other countries but also the NSC. The best they could do was to ensure that the 2 + 4 did not have real veto power.30

  Baker addressed these concerns personally in a meeting at the White House on Friday, February 16. As part of his preparation for selling these ideas to the home team, he spoke with Wörner. Baker was therefore up-to-date on NATO thinking and ready to defend himself. To those who claimed that 2 + 4 might cause obstruction, he would reply that 2 + 4 was about “discussions, not decisions.” His handwritten notes emphasize this point: “2 + 4 is not negotiation it’s consultation. Soviets[,] Brits. 1 French will want more decision making auth[ority].” He was right. Thatcher would soon be arguing that “the Two plus Four negotiations should negotiate on wider issues.” 31 In response to such pressures, Washington would simply “[k]eep saying ‘it’s a framework 1 mech[anism] for managing ext[ernal] aspects of German unif[ication].’” In his view, the 2 + 4 forum was not a worry but a success. Since neither the “2, 4, 16, or 35 would work”—meaning that the two Germanies, the four powers, the sixteen members of NATO, and the thirty-five CSCE states were all inappropriate groupings, and the “12,” or the EC, apparently did not merit consideration—this was the least bad alternative. In fact, it “is probably the bare minimum process the Soviets will need to express their interests and justify the result at home.” The implication was that it would prove to be the least costly way of getting a united Germany into the Western alliance; two plus four would equal NATO membership. The gist of Baker’s argument was that the benefits of the 2 + 4 forum would be worth the exertions needed to ensure that its scope did not expand. Bush would make such exertions in April, when he met Thatcher in Bermuda and explicitly told her that 2 + 4 would not address the truly major issues, namely “Germany’s membership in NATO; the status of Western nuclear and conventional forces stationed in the FRG; the size of German armed forces; or … new discriminatory limits to place on German sovereignty—a sure recipe for future instability.” He also met Mitterrand and told him the same thing.32

  In addition, Baker argued that the 2 + 4 forum had a major additional benefit—one that addressed Scowcroft’s worry that Bonn and Moscow could shut out Washington. “Frankly, it’s in our interest as well as it prevents separate German-Soviet deals that could be prejudicial to our interests.” Any possible concerns could all be discussed with Kohl personally, as he had accepted an invitation to Camp David and would be arriving in a week. “Do we know whether Kohl intends to bring Genscher? Frankly, it’s difficult to manage this on two tracks, and it would help us if we could urge the Germans to make it easier for us to discuss these items with the two of them together,” Baker added.33

  Kohl did not, in fact, bring Genscher when he arrived at Dulles Airport on Saturday, February 24. Instead, only Teltschik, aides Walter Neuer and Uwe Kaestner, and Kohl’s wife, Hannelore, came along. In his memoirs, Kohl said that he left Genscher behind because “the American side” had announced Baker would not attend; but Baker was not only there, he had hoped Genscher would be too.34 Either someone other than Baker on the U.S. side had quietly vetoed Genscher’s participation, or more likely, Kohl had decided that he wanted to make important decisions without his difficult coalition partner.

  The meeting was the first visit to Camp David by a West German chancellor—a particular honor that was not lost on the FRG delegation. Teltschik remembers a warm and friendly atmosphere developing as they sat in front of a fire.35 Although the setting was informal, the meeting accomplished a great deal of business, both on the overall manner of proceeding and particular issues. The Americans wanted U.S.–West German consultations on all issues of significance, which would then form the basis for later consultations among the four powers and finally by the 2 + 4. The West Germans naturally found this agreeable.

  There were notes of discord. The Poles, with the clear backing of Thatcher, had already asked for additional West German aid on top of that agreed on in the November 1989 visit. Repeating the old Polish cry of “nic o nas bez nas” (nothing about us without us), they also sought a seat at the new 2 + 4 table. The foreign minister, Krysztof Skubiszewski, was calling for a peace treaty to end World War II as well. Thatcher also found such a treaty to be essential. To her dismay, she had been advised by her Foreign Office that CSCE did not actually prevent the changing of borders in Europe. The consequences of this finding—“that any frontier can be changed easily & without reference to any other state” distressed her. To avoid such changes, “we need a PEACE TREATY soon” (as she wrote in the margin of the relevant briefing paper with multiple underlinings).36 The concept of such a treaty also raised the question of reparations, as mentioned previously, which was something that the chancellor hoped fervently to avoid. He told Bush that reparations would be “unacceptable” for him. Not only had West Germany already paid a hundred billion DM in reparations, Kohl complained, but the large portion that had gone to Poland had been frittered away by a corrupt regime rather than forwarded to the intended recipients. A peace treaty would be equally unworkable, because at the end of hostilities in May 1945, Germany had technically been in a state of war with 110 countries. Presumably all of them would have a right to be involved in negotiations for such a treaty.37 In light of the potentially limitless delay and financial exposure, Kohl wanted to avoid a peace treaty altogether.

  Bush nonetheless urged Kohl to make some kind of concession to the Poles, who had strong allies in the U.S. Congress. The U.S. president was hardly the only one pushing Kohl in this direction; the West German press was also calling for some kind of border statement. Bush encouraged Kohl to endorse the inviolability of the future German-Polish border. Kohl felt that such a statement was superfluous since it already existed in the Warsaw Treaty of 1970, and he did not plan on repealing that accord.38 Kohl repeated to Bush a comment that he had made to Mazowiecki—namely, that the issue was a “psychological problem” in West German domestic politics. Kohl wanted to avoid alienating the Germans (and their descendants) who had been expelled from now-Polish territory after the war.39

  Although they could not find a common approach to Poland, the president and the chancellor reached an agreement on how to deal with Gorbachev. Moscow needed money badly and was in a weak position. (Indeed, the very next day massive protests in Moscow would further undermine Gorbachev.)40 Bush felt that the Soviet Union could not make demands about the future: “To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.” 41 He would not allow Russia to determine NATO’s membership. It seems that Bush’s tough talk persuaded Kohl to abandon an idea that he had been toying with—that is, some kind of so-called French solution. Under this concept, a united Germany might remain in NATO but leave its integrated military command. Yet it appears that in the course of the Camp David meeting, Kohl came to agree with Bush that he should push hard, and push fast, for full NATO membership for a united Germany. The Russians would eventually accept it, they were sure, but Kohl was also certain that “they will want to be paid for it.” Since Bush and Baker had already affirmed that the United States would not be offering financial support to their longtime enemy, it was clear who would be paying. Bush pointed out that the chancellor had “deep pockets,” but the hint was not necessary.42

  Afterward, the Bushes, the Kohls, Baker, Scowcroft, and Teltschik sat down for a cozy dinner. Over a hearty meal of roast beef in the president’s cabin, the evening became less a summit and more a Saturday night dinner party among friends. Kohl remembered this evening in particular as a happy one for his wife, Hannelore, who would later seclude herself from public life and ultimately commit suicide; but that night she and Barbara Bush seemed to enjoy themselves.
There were a lot of long conversations and laughter all around. Bush even screened a movie afterward, but most of the jet-lagged Germans begged off and went to sleep.43

  The next morning, after a church service attended not only by the participants but also numerous Bush grandchildren, the president and the chancellor had a final conversation.44 They did not reach an agreement on Poland and the gap between their two positions became apparent at the final press conference immediately afterward. Bush stated that the United States recognized the current border, while Kohl would only say that the matter would be settled after unity.45 Moreover, although the two leaders had accurately predicted that the central Soviet concern would be financial support, neither of them could figure out when it would come to a head. In February, Gorbachev was not yet ready to make big concessions.46 Kohl guessed that Gorbachev would want to make the deal on the most important issue, Germany in NATO, with a peer state. It would probably happen at the U.S.-Soviet summit scheduled for Washington in June, the chancellor thought.47 On this point, Kohl was wrong: the crucial final round would come down to just Gorbachev and himself in July 1990.

  THE POLITICAL SOLUTION: ARTICLE 23

  As a result of Camp David, the Western security solution was now clear. Washington and Bonn would insist that a united Germany—including former East German territories—would be part of NATO. The only concession that they would make was, in the words of Wörner, to give the Eastern territories a “special military status.” Baker’s notion that NATO would not expand its jurisdiction one inch eastward, seconded by Kohl, had turned out to be a limited-time offer, and now the time was up. Although Gorbachev did not realize it immediately, he would not be able to get that deal again. Instead, as consolation, he got the 2 + 4 process (which he preferred to call “the six,” thereby trying to make it more palatable to his enemies by demoting the two Germanies). He hoped at the outset that 2 + 4 would serve as a brake on German unification and give him a veto. As would soon become apparent, however, and as Washington and Bonn intended, the important decisions would not be made at the 2 + 4 sessions.

  One of those decisions concerned the legal means for carrying out political unification. The history of World War II and its aftermath played an enormous role in this decision. The FRG had, as mentioned, come into existence in 1949 after the three Western occupying powers, deciding that antagonism with the Soviet Union had reached such a level that four-power cooperation was no longer possible, decided instead to unite just their zones of occupation into a new country. They worked with the leaders, or minister presidents, of the various reconstituted German states in their zones to figure out how authority between occupier and occupied would be divided in the new entity. The three powers eventually suggested that the local minister presidents help produce some kind of constitution for the new country.

  The Germans agreed, but insisted that the new country and government should clearly be temporary structures. In other words, they did not want to divide Germany permanently. The capital of the new country should not be a major city like Frankfurt but rather a small, sleepy university town like Bonn; and the new country should not have its own constitution but merely a Basic Law instead. Indeed, the drafters of this Basic Law even prepared explicitly for unification (to take place at some unknown point in the future) by including instructions in Article 146 as to how it should happen. According to this article, once the German people were again united in free self-determination, they would finally write a true constitution for all of Germany. The Basic Law would correspondingly “lose its validity on the day that a constitution, agreed upon by the German people in a free decision, comes into force.” One expert described its effect as follows: the governance of the FRG was “explicitly designated as a provisional arrangement.” 48

  That had been the vision in 1949, at the founding of West Germany; but the world had evolved a great deal in the subsequent forty years. The supposedly temporary Basic Law, the democratic institutions that it had created, and the coalition parliamentary governments that had resulted were all durable and successful. Politicians at home and abroad routinely referred to the Basic Law as the best constitution that the Germans had ever had, even though it was technically not a constitution at all. Under it, West Germany had risen from the rubble, literally, to become a respected democracy and one of the wealthiest states in the world. It was a reliable leader in the EC and a trusted member of NATO.

  As a result, the notion that West Germany’s de facto constitution would self-destruct in 1990—and thereby call into question all treaties—was breathtaking. Article 146 was clearly the official road to unity, but executing it would be risky in the extreme. In short, it did not fit in the least with the prefab model that Kohl was working so hard to develop.

  This legal issue was clearly central to unification, so Kohl asked his interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, to look into the matter. At this point Kohl and Schäuble were extremely close; the latter was the heir apparent and a rising star in the CDU. Schäuble’s own dreams of the chancellery would disappear into the dual tragedies of a brutal assassination attempt in October 1990—leaving him in a wheelchair—and a party finance scandal, but all that was in the future. At the start of 1990, he was on the way up, and about to become the point man for negotiating the treaties that would unify Germany legally. Since he hoped to inherit a united Germany as chancellor on his own one day, he had a strong incentive for making sure that it was unified in a way that he thought was right.49

  In a lengthy report, Schäuble informed Kohl that it was impossible to estimate how long the Article 146 process laid out in the Basic Law would take. Merely deciding what to do first, in order to deconstruct one constitution while constructing another, would be enormously time-consuming. Actually carrying out those tasks would be an immense challenge. Moreover, during the transition from one constitution to another, all state institutions would be called into doubt. From a purely legal point of view, they would, of course, continue to enjoy the authority that the old Basic Law granted them until a new constitution came into force. Politically, however, they would become weak and open to attack. On top of that, it was not at all clear how the four powers would be involved. Most problematically, a case could be made that in the places where the 1949 Basic Law talked about Germans coming together in self-determination, it was referring to all those who had been living within Germany’s 1937 borders. Many of these regions were now in Poland. “It will not be possible to realize the participation of the German population living beyond the Oder-Neisse border [that is, eastward of the GDR],” Schäuble stated plainly. He was thereby making a virtue out of a necessity; it was another argument against Article 146, which he did not like anyway. In fact, about the only positive remark that Schäuble had for Article 146 was that it would “raise the level of acceptance” of unification.50

  There was another legal and political option, though, and one that fit well with the overall model of taking existing Western institutions and transferring them to the East. The drafters of the Basic Law of 1949 had hoped that even if Germany did not unify, it might at least be possible for West Germany to regain some of the territory that it had lost during the war by peaceful means. They had thus included the controversial Article 23, which de facto allowed former parts of Germany—presuming the affected regions were in favor and they could resolve any outstanding international issues—to choose to put themselves under the jurisdiction of the Basic Law. The militarization of West Germany’s borders to the east ended any immediate hopes that Article 23 might be used for Eastern regions, but it turned out to be useful in the west. Thanks to it, the coal-rich Saar region joined West Germany more than a decade after the war ended. The area had spent the intervening period under an autonomous government set up under French occupation authority, but a popular vote in 1955 confirmed that it wished to join the FRG. On New Year’s Day in 1957, under Article 23, it became Saarland, the tenth state of West Germany.51

  Schäuble viewed this precedent as
a useful one. In his view, Article 23 was the equal of Article 146; in other words, it was a second and fully legitimate way to achieve unity—and one with numerous advantages. First, the four powers had tolerated exercise of this article when the Saar region had invoked it.52 That would make it harder for them to complain in 1990. Second, it meant that the Basic Law would go into effect immediately in East German regions, as soon as they organized themselves into states and indicated that they wished to come under its jurisdiction. There would be no waiting for a new constitutional consensus to emerge. Third, since the Basic Law would stay in effect, there would be no need to renegotiate all of West Germany’s treaties. The united country would remain firmly anchored in the EC and NATO. Finally, existing institutions would not have their authority questioned during the transition period.53 An added benefit that Schäuble did not mention was the fact that Genscher had already voiced support for Article 23; at least on this issue, the chancellor would not have to fight with his own coalition partner.54

  There would be some challenges, but not insurmountable ones. For one, there would be a need to reconcile existing East German treaty obligations with the Basic Law, although that was a much less daunting task than designing a new constitutional order altogether. Then too, the population of West Germany would have no vote in the matter, but Schäuble felt that the results of past elections signaled that they would accept what Kohl did.

  Finally, there would be the unavoidable appearance that another Anschluss was happening. A great deal of resistance to Article 23 would arise for this reason. Indeed, Shevardnadze used just this word when criticizing it, and closer to home, the left-of-center West German and East German political parties were already voicing their disagreement with it as well.55 The Poles would be especially upset by it, since the spectacle of Eastern regions rejoining a united Germany would raise questions about parts of Polish territory. Nevertheless, Schäuble felt that reasonable arguments could counter that appearance, since it would be a voluntary merger of new East German states with West Germany. He had in fact already started defending Article 23 on a recent visit with Baker in Washington. Schäuble had assured Baker that after the article’s final use to unify Germany, a way would be found to nullify it and prevent any future invocations of it. The new united Germany would do so because leaving such a controversial possibility open, Schäuble explained, would otherwise sour the foreign relations of the expanded country.56