1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 29
First, the restoration model—or reassertion of the status of 1945—could have succeeded if the brush with a stage of terror in January 1990 had escalated into massive bloodletting. It is particularly surprising that such bloodletting did not occur. Given the extent of domestic repression in the former GDR (to repeat, roughly 1 Stasi agent per 180 East Germans), it is remarkable that there were so few attempts to extract bloody vengeance after the wall came down. If victims had decided to attack members of the secret police, the latter may well have sought the protection of Soviet troops. Certainly when the Dresden KGB office where Putin worked in the second half of the 1980s came under direct threat, the future Russian leader called the Soviet group of forces in the GDR for armed support, and the group provided it. Indeed, it is possible that former Stasi agents intentionally tried to incite violence in 1990 for that reason; that is, they wanted to set off a chain of events that could lead to the forceful reimposition of hard-line control.8 Moreover, the clear tension between Gorbachev and the Soviet military raised the question of whether or not he could command it in a crisis.
Both Bonn and Washington worried constantly about what would happen if Soviet soldiers in East Germany—who were demoralized, hungry, and selling weaponry for cash in 1990—began using violence. The beginning of widespread bloodshed in East Germany, particularly if it involved Soviet troops killing civilians, would have caused the Western powers to put their own troops on high alert, especially the U.S., British, and French forces in West Berlin. The end result might not have been the restoration of 1945-style occupation (indeed full restoration was unlikely), but it certainly would have caused a reassertion of quadripartite authority unseen in decades.
Or, recognizing that he did not have enough support among his Western partners to re-create quadripartitism fully, Gorbachev could have tried to take advantage of Soviet status as a major victor of the Second World War to restore the legal status of 1945 by rapidly convening a peace conference in Moscow in 1990. Such a conference would have attracted a number of the 110 states that had been at war with the Third Reich in 1945. The chance of receiving reparations, the main issue such a conference would have addressed, would have inspired a number of countries to attend and cooperate with Moscow.
Reverting to 1945, however, required either that Gorbachev choose the path of confrontation with West Germany, which was the desire of some of his advisers but not Gorbachev himself, or that the Soviet leader manage to convince the three Western powers to restore quadripartitism. But his advisers failed to convince him, and he failed to convince the West. Mitterrand decided that the greater opportunity was to focus on the future of the EC, rather than on the past of European conflict; and Washington was always strongly in favor of solutions that did not involve active decision-making roles for Moscow.9 Absent the kind of violence described above, the restoration model faded.
The second model of order—the concept of reviving confederative structures but updating them for the twenty-first century—appeared viable precisely because there were a number of successful precedents for it. As discussed above, the creation of a German nation-state was a relatively recent invention. Before Bismarck accomplished it, a number of different German-speaking entities had existed in a variety of loosely confederative configurations. Moreover, confederationism remained a live political tradition. The notion of “two states in a German nation” had rested at the core of Brandt’s efforts to create a sense of unity in divided Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Mitterrand found the concept appealing as well and thought that a confederative Europe, or a Europe of confederations at different levels, would be the best manner for structuring post–Cold War international relations.
In other words, it was precisely because they were convinced of the concept’s viability that Kohl and his advisers proposed confederative structures via the Ten-Point-Program in November 1989. They came to the conclusion that such structures were a reasonable way to proceed in the midst of chaos. In many ways, a slow merger of the two German economies would have avoided a number of the problems that actually occurred when Eastern businesses suddenly had to face market conditions. But the revival model never got a full airing. Kohl himself withdrew it, once he went to East Germany after the collapse of the wall and got a personal picture of the fervor in the East for rapid unity. The negotiations that he had scheduled with counterparts in the GDR to create a confederation became empty exercises as a result. East Germans from both the old ruling SED party and the new round table realized that their carefully prepared requests to Kohl about this confederation were falling on deaf ears.
Finally, how could the third model—Gorbachev’s vague vision of pan-European structures (largely excluding the United States)—have succeeded? Even as Gorbachev and his advisers were searching for new ways to structure political, economic, and military alliances across all of Europe, East European leaders were also struggling to find new national paths forward. The desire of the East German round table, acting in concert with its East European peers, to create property pluralism and a demilitarized zone in post–Cold War Eastern Europe could have been useful to Gorbachev, had he made more of it. Even after the GDR round table disbanded in March 1990, the new East German leaders kept the dream of a neutral Central Europe alive well into summer 1990 despite opposition in Bonn. Meckel in particular, a pacifist and devout Christian, felt strongly that the enormous opportunity created by 1989 should not be wasted; it should result in widespread disarmament in Central Europe and denuclearization in Germany. Coordinated action among these disparate voices calling for a new, pan-European, post–Cold War order never truly emerged, though. If those voices had produced a well-thoughtout blueprint for a common European home, with Eastern and Western wings, and a militarily neutral bridge linking the two at its center, it would have enjoyed the support of a number of leading figures in Europe. Coming from a leader of Gorbachev’s international stature at that time (Time magazine’s “Man of the Decade,” not just of the year, and soon to be the 1990 winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace), it would have required serious attention in capitals around the world.
Fig. C.1. Gorbachev receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Courtesy of Getty Images.
Indeed, if Gorbachev had been thinking more strategically, he would have pushed harder to enlist not just East European but also West European leaders in his planning. His tentative efforts in this direction with Mitterrand failed, but they were not doomed from the start. The lineup of West European characters dubious about German unification early on, from Andreotti to the Dutch to Thatcher to a not insignificant portion of the West German population in an election year, was long. There existed realistic counterfactual scenarios in which coordinated, no-holds-barred criticism by West European leaders about Kohl’s nationalist dreams—“the death of the European project”—would have had a good chance at swaying West German voters in an election year.
Alternatively, if Gorbachev had listened to Falin and his other hard-line advisers at home, he could have pushed harder in negotiations. That is, he could have insisted that German unification could occur only at the price of participation in his new pan-European structures, with, at a minimum, a firm limit to NATO. If the Soviet leader had made a request for a written guarantee that NATO would not move eastward (which he had heard as a proposition in oral form) early enough, he might well have gotten it.
Yet Gorbachev’s advisers failed to convince him that he needed to negotiate harder on behalf of the Soviet Union. A number of them would become despondent over this failure, and the coup in 1991 would be the ultimate expression of their despair. And above and beyond any questions of tactics, Gorbachev’s ideas suffered from the pace of events and the sheer number of unfolding issues, which were moving too quickly to permit the kind of new conceptualizing that he wanted. In talks with the Americans at the time, Gorbachev would repeatedly say that creativity was needed in devising a new European order, without understanding that timing was critical as well. He simply had too many
balls in the air and too little time to deal with them.
In contrast, one of the greater successes of Kohl’s team and the Bush administration was that they both sensed the need for swift action, although Washington was initially slower to realize it than Bonn. The chancellery and the White House guessed, correctly, that the speed of the implementation of change was critical, not least because Gorbachev’s time was limited. Kohl repeatedly used the metaphor of trying to get a harvest in before a storm. As a result, the transfer of known commodities to the East—such as Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the Basic Law of West Germany, and last but not least the DM—became the favored route to transformation. Such a transfer wasted no time on conceptualizing new accords and institutions. Prefab conferred a strong element of predictability on the chaotic and disorderly overhaul of both domestic and international order, and succeeded for that reason. People knew what they were getting.
The success of the prefab model was also due to the tactical savviness of the West German chancellor. In 1989–90, he displayed a talent for knowing when he should submit his visions to authentic and credible legitimizing moments. In other words, he knew when he needed popular support, but realizing that did not mean either that he should completely stage an appropriate event or be at its mercy. Rather, by influencing the East German vote with promises about the one-to-one exchange rate, scheduling the FRG’s own election early in December 1990, and ensuring that it would be the first all-German national election, he improved the chances that both elections would produce results favorable to himself and his party, yet remain credible. He thereby made a virtue out of necessity. Kohl knew that he would have to put his visions to a democratic test, but he made sure to do so in ways that would enhance their standing. On top of this, the chancellor had a great talent for using the media to his advantage, which he shared with Baker. Kohl, like the secretary of state, was skilled at locking in his diplomatic gains through clever, selective, and well-timed press disclosures. Easterners, who had much less experience with a free press, had lacked an incentive to acquire the same skills. They were therefore at a disadvantage.
In short, working together with Washington, the chancellor was able to market his vision successfully to all audiences: East and West Germany, EC and NATO allies, and Gorbachev, if not his opponents in the Soviet leadership. Of course, the marketing process cost West Germany a great deal: an extremely generous exchange rate when the currencies merged, a long series of credits, payments, and subsidies to Moscow, and the ongoing costs of propping up the economy in former East German regions after unity, to name a few expenses.10 Such costs would ultimately lead to Kohl’s own electoral downfall, but not for another eight years.
CONSEQUENCES
The consequences of these events for the post–Cold War world were to be farreaching. A political theorist (Fukuyama) speculated in 1992 that the single biggest one for the United States and its liberal democratic allies would be the challenge of dealing with the magnitude of their own success. They had created a new world, he thought, which was “less and less the old one of geopolitics,” and increasingly a “post-historical” one in which the old “rules and methods” were not appropriate. They would have to learn politics anew.11 The irony, of course, is that Bonn and Washington had achieved exactly the opposite. Rather than bringing an end to the history that had culminated in the Cold War, they had perpetuated key parts of it instead. As British Foreign Minister Hurd concluded, they did not remake the world. Rather, the struggle to recast Europe after the momentous upheaval of 1989 resulted in prefabricated structures from before the upheaval moving eastward and securing a future for themselves. Americans and West Germans had successfully entrenched the institutions born of the old geopolitics of the Cold War world—ones that they already dominated, most notably NATO—in the new era. This success was deserved, but not without costs. It is thus necessary to ask, what is the legacy of the way that they restored order?12
Stepping back from all the details presented in this book to look at the overarching themes that link them, four prominent components of the legacy emerge. The first component is also the most commonplace. A close examination of 1989 and 1990 shows that the people who brought the previous order to an end enjoyed no particular claim to run matters after the dust settled. This is the core meaning of the old saying that the revolution eats its children. It is worth reviewing how this became apparent in 1989: it was nearly inevitable after a certain point that the old Soviet regime would collapse. But there was nothing at all inevitable about what would follow. The dynamics of the competition to create order yielded a triumph above all for Kohl, thanks to his penchant for quick, spare-no-expense action, but little for the East European revolutionary leaders who had opened the door to change in the first place. Former Czech and East German dissidents in particular had no interest in contributing to a project to promote NATO in the post–Cold War world. Their priority was less military security than new forms of democracy and property pluralism. They saw their dreams thwarted by Kohl’s success.
Likewise, the brave Polish protesters who had done so much of the hard, frightening work of destroying the old Cold War order, rising from the dockyards and jails to the halls of power in Warsaw, saw their justifiable hopes for massive West German financial infusions dashed when the wall opened and Kohl’s priorities shifted. Instead, they had to settle for less than they wanted. They had to participate in a bitter exchange of recriminations over border guarantees. They had to endure Kohl’s use of Stalin era treaties as clubs to beat down their hopes of a peace treaty to World War II. The ironies of history were such that for a time in 1989–90, Polish leaders aligned with Moscow to see if they could force a peace treaty on Bonn; as mentioned, one State Department analyst thought that Stalin’s ghost got a good laugh out of that.
The situation of the Polish dissidents-turned-leaders paralleled that of the man most responsible for destroying the sorry stability provided by the old order: Gorbachev. He received accolades abroad but hostility at home for his decision to hand over territory soaked in Soviet blood to NATO. Events in divided Germany and Eastern Europe subsequently had a toxic spillover effect in the Soviet Union. Scholars have rightly argued that this spillover exacerbated the “political instability and intra-elite divisions in the USSR … and made it far more difficult for Mikhail Gorbachev to prevent the Soviet Union from unraveling.” As the Soviet leader would write to Kohl on that Christmas in 1991 when the union was no more and his long fall from grace finally concluded, ever since becoming general secretary he had sought one goal. He wanted to bring Russia into the fold of “modern democratic countries.” This concept was somewhat of a flattering self-portrait, since he had not sought to introduce completely democratic politics into the Soviet Union. But his disappointment was genuine; although “events did not go in the manner that I considered correct and most expedient, I do not lose hope for the final success of the matter.” 13
In short, an examination of 1989 and 1990 suggests that we need to understand the ending of the Cold War, and the process of constructing the post–Cold War Europe, as distinct and dichotomous events. The figures involved in tearing down the previous order—Gorbachev, Reagan, and masses of East European dissidents—were not those who ultimately built the new. A relatively small number of policymakers in Bonn, Paris, and Washington secured that role for themselves.
A second component of the legacy of 1989–90 is the conundrum of imperfect choices. Because the contest to define order in post–Cold War Europe took place at a blisteringly fast pace, there was not much time for perfecting plans and ideas. As a number of observers noted at the time, life simply speeded up. Gates described it as follows: “We shot the rapids of history, and without a life jacket.” J. D. Bindenagel, an American diplomat, remembered his experience working in the U.S. embassy in East Berlin in 1989–90 as the feeling of living in a video on which someone had pressed the fast-forward button. Falin said that it felt as if history were “pressing a hundr
ed years into a hundred days.” 14 Questions needed answers right away; but the quickest answers were not always the ideal ones. Once the speedy process of selecting and laying the foundation for the future was complete, however, it became hard to challenge, even if it was less than perfect. In the process of exporting Western order to the East—an understandable response to events on the ground—Bonn and Washington sowed the seeds of future problems, to reuse Baker’s phrase.
Within Germany, the sudden imposition of Western currency and standards on the East caused dramatic difficulties. Optimistic predictions about how well former East German firms would fare quickly proved to be illusory. At one point early on, Bonn estimated that the privatization of state-run businesses in the East would create a profit of 600 billion DM. Instead, taxpayers had to subsidize the process to the tune of 230 billion DM.15 Official unemployment rates in the former GDR hit 10.9 percent for men and 21.5 percent for women by 1994. Joblessness remained stubbornly high and productivity in the region peaked at little more than half that of the West for most of the 1990s. Former property owners from prewar, Nazi, and socialist eras gained the ability to fight out legal claims over real estate extensively. The costly and extensive litigation that resulted tied up buildings and land for years or even decades, scared off investors, and exacerbated the economic difficulties of the former East Germany. Former West Germans soon came to call the GDR territory a “barrel without a bottom,” into which unending Western subsidies disappeared; one expert estimates that Germany’s reconstruction of the East cost roughly 120 billion dollars per year starting in 1990–91.16 These costs soured not only the economy of Germany as a whole but also had an impact on all of East and West Germany’s former trading partners. The chancellor spent huge sums of money against the advice of his financial advisers, driving up German borrowing and setting off a sequence of events that later contributed to the severe European currency crisis of 1992. Of course, Kohl and his advisers were aware at the time that they were making costly choices, but the alternative—missing the chance to unify—seemed worse to them.17