1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 22

  The chancellor also went to England at the end of March and met with Thatcher alone for the first and only time between the fall of the wall and unification.119 It was not a particularly successful meeting; their face-to-face encounters never were. Kohl remarked on this phenomenon in his memoirs, saying that although in the abstract they both had sympathy for each other’s goals, they were no good in the same room together; she thought he improvised too much, and he found her “grim obsession with details” to be “burdensome.” 120 For her part, Thatcher was rumored to have been deeply insulted by a long-ago meeting in Salzburg when they were both in the opposition. Kohl had reportedly ended a scheduled meeting with her early since he was bored by it, claiming that he had pressing business; but Thatcher later caught a glimpse of him enjoying cream cakes at a café right afterward. Whether it actually happened or not, it became widely known in London as the “cream cake incident.”

  But despite their personal incompatibility, at least in March 1990 they were speaking again. By April 11, the U.S. ambassador in London, Henry Catto, could report to the State Department that Thatcher, who was preparing to meet Bush in Bermuda, was honestly trying “to patch things up with her European partners, particularly Germany and France.” 121 Baker noted after the Bermuda meeting that the United States and United Kingdom were “genuinely in sync” while the British summary expressed the sentiment in London that “it had been a much better meeting … than Camp David.” 122

  All of these steps were precursors to a special session of the European Council called for April 28 in Dublin, with the intent of accelerating integration. Kohl’s meeting with Thatcher and others had allowed “the Germans to continue to propel themselves as ‘good Europeans,’ willing to accelerate the process of integration and surrender [of] sovereignty to EC institutions,” reported the U.S. ambassador in Bonn. The trip to Britain was just “the latest in a series of steps aimed at reassuring other EC partners” in advance of the Irish meeting. Kohl’s hope was that the “payoff for all these efforts will be a strong endorsement of German unification at the April 28 EC summit in Dublin.” 123

  To prepare for the Dublin meeting, Teltschik began coordinating closely with key Mitterrand advisers Attali, Elisabeth Guigou, and Hubert Védrine on April 4.124 Despite some conflicts, this cooperation resulted in a joint Kohl-Mitterrand “initiative,” a statement forwarded to the current president of the EC, Irish Prime Minister Haughey, in the middle of April. In it, Kohl and Mitterrand jointly called for a conference in Italy before the end of 1990 (which had long been Mitterrand’s goal) to advance European economic and monetary integration, thereby hitting the accelerator on creating a single market.125 The initiative also called for preparatory work for political union to begin as well. Kohl’s motive in joining France was not stated explicitly, but it was plain. He wanted the blessing of his European allies for rapid unification, and in exchange would aggressively promote European integration. He also, over the course of the summer, made it clear to the poorer member states that they would not lose funds to the cause of East Germany. West Germans would pay instead.

  The initiative worked. Both Mitterrand and Kohl got what they wanted. The French president, who had auditioned a number of possible strategies with Gorbachev, Thatcher, and the Poles, had made up his mind to work with Kohl. Now, in Dublin, he felt vindicated and validated in his choice. A sequence of events that would eventually lead to the Maastricht Treaty and the common currency had been set in motion.126 In June, a second Dublin summit called for another intergovernmental conference to transform the EC into a political union with a common foreign and security policy. Mitterrand’s biographer concluded that the French president saw the Dublin events as the “Franco-German relaunch of the EC” and a “quantum leap in the history of European integration.” 127 The U.S. ambassador in Paris, Walter Curley, reported to Washington that “the lovers’ spat between Paris and Bonn is over and the two countries will be going hand in hand towards … greater bilateral cooperation across the board.” 128

  As for Kohl, he was pleased that the April 28 meeting approved a three-phase plan for the Eastern German territories that would allow them to join as part of the FRG. Delors agreed that there was, as a consequence, no need for East Germany as a separate state to go through the lengthy negotiations usually imposed on potential new members. It would slot into the preexisting membership of the FRG.

  Teltschik concluded that the Dublin summit was the moment when, finally, all of the other eleven members of the EC made their peace with German unification.129 The chancellor would return home from it and announce to the Bundestag that “our partners in the EC unanimously and without reservation supported German unity.” He set the date for the start of the single market for December 31, 1992, and pointed out that German unity would not happen “at the expense of others in the EC.” 130 Kohl could celebrate his sixtieth birthday in April 1990 knowing that he had accomplished a great deal.

  CONCLUSION

  Kohl’s model—copying existing structures on East German territory—had clearly beat out other visions of the future. His plan was that in all ways, East Germany would become part of the West: militarily in NATO, economically in the EC, and politically under the Basic Law. He had agreed on this approach with the Americans; in doing so, his close relations with Bush, so evident at Camp David, had helped a great deal. He had then sold the concept to the East German population via his campaign speeches; in doing so, his ability to promise quick monetary union at a favorable exchange rate had helped a great deal. Voters opted partly for the model and partly for the architect; they clearly trusted Kohl more than the others to deliver on his plans. He had used his executive authority skillfully both at home and abroad.

  Finally, the leverage that he gained as a result of his electoral victory allowed him to sell his model to the EC as well. He decisively lured Mitterrand away from Gorbachev and Thatcher. The French president felt that his best chance for securing a post–Cold War order dominated by the EC was to work with Kohl. German unity did not initiate European monetary union but it was certainly effective in catalyzing it. Previously Kohl had wanted to wait until after the next West German elections, due at the latest in January 1991, to make serious progress. Bonn was also interested in achieving parallel progress toward political union, which would clearly take time. Now, Mitterrand had made a deal: Kohl got quick German unity, and Mitterrand got quick monetary unity that would significantly outpace political unity.

  For his part, the chancellor was willing to bet that his own constituency, the voters of West Germany, would accept rapid unity now that East Germans and the EC had endorsed it. His strategy was consistent, in other words, and up to this point consistently successful: achieve a fait accompli with one audience to convince another to accept your plans.131 But he still had to convince one more audience. The final phase of Kohl’s attempt to restore order in divided Germany would be dedicated to winning over Gorbachev.

  CHAPTER 5

  SECURING BUILDING PERMITS

  Men’s indignation, it seems, is more excited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

  —Thucydides, fifth century BC

  “Utopia” has been, since the early nineteenth century, a controversial concept, used by everyone against everyone else. At first this reproach was hauled out on to the field of battle against the abstract thinking of the Enlightenment and its liberal descendents. Then it was aimed at Socialists and Communists, but also against Ultra-Conservatives—against the former, because they were loyal to an abstract future; against the latter, because they were loyal to an abstract past. Because everyone was infected with utopian thinking, no one wanted to be a utopian.

  —Jürgen Habermas, 19851

  By May 1990, it was apparent that the prefab model for the future had eclipsed all others. In architecture as in politics, however, winning does not automatically ensure that the victorious model will
get built. To start work, both architects and politicians have to fight against backlash from the losers, secure building permits to start anew, and clear the site of detritus. Kohl was now in that position. He had achieved a critical mass of consensus. He had gotten the nod from the East Germans to construct their future. His party’s victory in their first free election enabled him to secure the approval of his fellow members of the EC. He already had the strong support of Washington. But there were still resentful, major holdouts to his persuasive powers, and they were all east of the Oder-Neisse line. Gorbachev in particular was still hoping that if not a pan-European utopia, then at least some more ideal solution than simply extending Western structures eastward could be found.

  The chancellor knew that he would have to convince Gorbachev otherwise, because Kohl needed some form of permission from not only Moscow but also Warsaw to proceed with his plans for East Germany. Most importantly, Gorbachev would have to agree to remove Soviet troops from the GDR; Kohl would spend the rest of 1990 dedicated to convincing the Soviet leader of this. And while doing so, he would seek to keep both East German and West German voters happy, provide the economic upswing at home that he had promised them, and see his own party was safely through the West German elections. The story of the second half of 1990 is about his balancing act in front of all these audiences.

  While he pursued Soviet agreement, the chancellor was aware that he had to balance between being careful and being quick. Kohl suspected that Gorbachev’s tenure in office was uncertain, given the extent of the USSR’s economic difficulties and the number of people opposed to the Soviet leader’s handling of them. If the chancellor pursued his goals too aggressively, it might weaken Gorbachev to the point where he would no longer be in a position to grant East Germany permission to become NATO territory. On the other hand, if Kohl moved too slowly, then the Soviet leader might fall, and the opportunity would be lost.

  Thus, Bonn and Washington, working together, decided to use an approach of carrots and sticks to win Gorbachev over. Neither of them needed to invent sticks, since a big one already existed: the deteriorating economic condition of the Soviet Union. The carrots they decided on were large sums of money and the reform of NATO. The former carrot was Kohl’s, because he was the leader of a wealthy state and could afford it; indeed, Bush had repeatedly indicated that Bonn would bankroll Gorbachev, not Washington. Because it was clear that Moscow could not master its domestic problems without foreign aid and credit, and because Bonn and West German banks susceptible to Kohl’s influence were about the only places willing to give Gorbachev money anymore, Kohl had unique leverage. As such, the real question was not whether to offer Gorbachev aid but rather when and how; it had to be done in a face-saving manner. One U.S. analyst insultingly put it as follows: such funding could not look like “‘an Ethiopian relief program.’” 2

  Kohl did not have control of the second carrot, NATO reform. It required the approval of the United States and other NATO member states. Fortunately for Kohl, the Bush administration agreed with this approach. Close cooperation between the Kohl and Bush teams ensued—which involved the chancellor and his aides making repeated trips to the States in spring and summer 1990, often just weeks apart—with the mission of finding ways to convince their NATO allies to make reform a reality in time to sway Gorbachev. As Gates explained, it was obvious to both Bonn and Washington that they shared the same goal: “to bribe the Soviets out of Germany.” 3

  THE FIRST CARROT: MONEY

  Although Kohl’s party had won the East German election of March 18, he could not just immediately begin doing what he pleased. For starters, it was still technically a separate country, now with its first freely elected democratic leadership under de Maizière, not himself. On top of this, since the Alliance for Germany had not achieved an absolute majority in the end, the East German leader would have to produce some kind of coalition in the Volkskammer in order to govern. De Maizière opted for a large one, including both the SPD and liberals.4 One of the parliament’s first acts, just after the government formed on April 12, was to issue a parliamentary denunciation of the Holocaust. The official rhetoric of East Germany during the Cold War had long blamed the fascist West for the Nazi era, but the newly elected members of the Volkskammer wanted to assume their share of German responsibility.5

  Soon, statements by de Maizière himself and his new ministers began to worry Bonn. Chancellery staffers in Bonn noted with particular dismay that the declaration announcing the formation of the new government in East Berlin had thanked many people and groups for their help, but not NATO. This omission was not a mistake. At the end of April, on his first visit to Moscow as prime minister, de Maizière informed Gorbachev that East Germany did not think it was necessary to enter the Western military alliance. The kind of all-European structures that Gorbachev himself advocated were preferable. Gorbachev agreed heartily with the new East German leader, even if he disagreed with de Maizière’s support for using Article 23 to unify Germany. And in June de Maizière personally told Thatcher that the GDR “did not want unification to look like the victory of West Germany over East Germany: it should be a victory for the ideals of freedom and democracy.” Thatcher responded that she “sympathised” with what he was saying; she herself “quite often had to stand up to Chancellor Kohl and stop him trying to bulldoze his point of view through. He had done a great deal for West Germany, but subtlety was not his most obvious characteristic.” 6

  De Maizière was hardly the only leader in East Berlin thinking this way; the dissident and SPD leader Meckel, now the GDR’s foreign minister, also hoped to realize heroic visions of a pan-European structure with a neutral zone at its core.7 Meckel, a pacifist and devout Christian who had daringly refused to perform mandatory military service in the GDR when a teenager, had an important forum at which he could express his views: he now represented the GDR at the 2 + 4 talks. Yet it became clear to both de Maizière and Meckel from the beginning of 2 + 4 that despite an initially warm welcome, none of the other five states involved (including West Germany) expected or wanted East Germany to be an equal sixth member. De Maizière would later refer to himself as a cuckolded husband, always the last to know what was really transpiring, either in Bonn or at the 2 + 4 table. And Meckel felt like he was fighting a two-front war. Publicly, the bearded former pastor was surrounded by five experienced foreign ministers, unwilling to take his idealistic proposals for demilitarization in Central Europe seriously; back in his office at the Foreign Ministry, he was surrounded by the old bureaucracy of SED apparatchiks, unwilling to take a shaggy-haired dissident seriously; and both sets of critics felt that the theologian was hopelessly out of his depth in the swift-moving currents of international relations. Conflicts with Meckel’s own ministry quickly grew to be so serious that he preferred to use West German cars for his chauffeur service, because he suspected that the East German Foreign Ministry cars were bugged. Conflicts with the other foreign ministers and Bonn would eventually grow to be so serious that Meckel would be forced out of office in August 1990.

  Despite all of this, Meckel did his best in the time that he had between April and August 1990 to advance a vision of the end of the Cold War as the end of both military alliances, even though that vision did not accord with Bonn or Washington’s wishes. British negotiators in the 2 + 4 talks were amazed at the degree of divergence between the delegation from Bonn and the idealistic theologian from East Berlin. One British report concluded that the East German delegation represented a “loose cannon and on a number of issues departed from the FRG line.” They were particularly amazed when Meckel proposed at the June 22 meeting of the 2 + 4 that all of Germany be denuclearized. Bush had told Kohl that spring, “no nukes, no troops,” so the Americans wanted to avoid a 2 + 4 debate on the subject. Similarly the new East German defense minister, Eppelmann, was also a Protestant minister with pacifist leanings who had refused to perform military service. As mentioned earlier, he had co-authored a 1982 appeal with Havemann
calling on both NATO and Warsaw Pact troops to leave German territory. Shortly after taking over the Defense Ministry in April 1990, Eppelman told his Soviet counterparts that, as a compromise, “the Western Group of Soviet forces should remain on GDR territory as long as NATO troops are stationed in the Federal Republic.” He thereby not only established precisely the linkage that Bonn and Washington were fighting to avoid but also hinted that there might be an end to the presence of NATO. Despite the fact that Eppelmann had allied himself with Kohl and the CDU in the recent elections, the defense minister clearly differed from Bonn’s view of the future. Eppelmann felt strongly that the new united Germany was “supposed to, and will, assume a bridge function between NATO and the Warsaw Treaty.” In response, Soviet military leaders repeatedly told Eppelman and other Warsaw Pact Defense Ministers that they found German membership in NATO to be unacceptable under any circumstances.8

  On top of this dispute, the economic situation in East Germany continued to deteriorate. As the West German representative Bertele reported from East Berlin, the problem was that the March election campaign had raised expectations significantly, but real economic reform was still some time away. Given that hardly anyone accepted the East German mark as payment anymore, currency union had essentially already happened de facto—but without a concomitant social safety net. Hence, there was a great deal of “anger and disappointment” at rising costs and growing unemployment numbers. This disappointment, Bertele predicted, would turn into fury at Bonn, if it failed to deliver improvements soon.9