1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 3
Fig. I.2. Vladimir Putin, future leader of Russia, poses with his parents in 1985 just before departing for his KGB posting to Dresden, East Germany. Courtesy of Getty Images.
In exploring these questions, this book will focus on the contentious international politics of German unification that were at the heart of the creation of post–Cold War Europe. Many nations contributed to the demise of the old order over a series of decades in the past, but it was the contest over the terms of German unity that decided the future.8 The dramatic months of transition between November 1989 and the end of 1990—the focus of this book—produced decisions about political order that have shaped international relations in the decades since.
This transition was swift, but its brevity does not negate its importance.9 Changes do not need to be slow moving to be significant. Astronomers believe that the entire universe arose from a single instantaneous Big Bang, the consequences of which still determine life today. There is obviously an interplay between long-term and proximate causes; but the emphasis here will be very much on the events immediately surrounding the collapse of the wall and on the ways in which the new order emerged.
The argument of the book is as follows. For roughly a year following the collapse of the old order in November 1989, various groups of actors—some leaders of nation-states, and some not—competed and struggled vigorously to re-create order in a way most advantageous to themselves. The longer-term goal, of course, was to dominate that order in the post–Cold War world. Ultimately, Bonn and Washington, working together, would win this competition, but that was not a foregone conclusion. The legacy of their victory still has profound consequences for international relations today.
To explain how they won, I contend that we should follow the lead of the main participants in events by adopting their own metaphoric understanding of what was happening. Again and again, in multiple languages, key actors in 1989–90 employed the terminology of architecture to describe what they wanted: to start building anew, to construct a European roof or a common European home, to create a new transatlantic architecture, and so on. Leaders consciously proposed a number of competing blueprints for the future and described them as such. This metaphoric understanding, on top of its grounding in historical evidence, is an apt one for a study centered on Berlin, where so much real architecture went up after the wall came down. As a result, I will use this metaphor as the organizing strategy for the pages to follow; it will, I hope, make sense of a story playing out on many levels and in many locales simultaneously.10 This book thus conceives of the competition of 1989–90 as an architectural one, where various models of future order—some more promising than others—competed against one another.
I must acknowledge that the use of phrases evocative of building—such as “constructed” and “fabricated”—has become a common scholarly method of questioning whether an objective reality exists. That is not the sense in which such phrases will be employed here, however. Rather, the metaphor is a more simple-minded one. It is the adoption of terminology from a field that has a similar goal to politics; in other words, politicians and architects want the same thing. They are both seeking permission to fabricate the future. Moreover, the idea of an architectural contest is helpful because it creates an awareness of ongoing episodes of competition. In such a contest, winning the selection round by no means guarantees that the victor will actually get to erect anything. It is one thing to wow the clients with a model, but quite another to get it actually built. Like politicians, architects must continue to cater to their supporters as they remove old detritus, prepare the site, and secure the necessary building permits. They rarely have the luxury of beginning work on a green field—the architectural equivalent of a blank slate. But there are consolations; one is that the process is path dependent. Put another way, once the foundation is laid according to the new blueprints, it is hard to remove. The normative power of the factual, a favorite concept of German theorists, comes into play; facts on the ground are difficult to change.11 The legacy of both architectural and political decisions will last for decades, centuries, and even millennia, once the concrete is poured. It is therefore crucial to be the first to lay that foundation.12
The competition of 1989–90 centered on a specific future building site—that is, the center of divided Europe. Despite the fact that the Cold War conflict took place across the globe over a number of decades, it originated in Europe, and this book shows that the endgame was European as well.13 Europe was the site of the culminating round not only of a contest of geopolitical power but also of modernities. Put another way, the Cold War was not just a military standoff but also a conflict between two completely different visions of modernity: a Western versus a Soviet one.14 Ensuring victory for the Western model would, participants in events believed, signify not just a material but also an ideological triumph in the contest to define what was modern. Indeed, years later, both the Reagan and Bush presidential libraries would choose to display portions of the former Berlin Wall as trophies on their grounds; each wanted to lay claim to the success. In short, 1989–90 was the final round in a competition that was long-running, multi-layered, and profoundly significant.
During this final round, what specific models for the future did the key actors propose? This book will describe them in detail, after an introductory summary (in chapter 1) of why November 1989 became the moment that the models were launched. Chapters 2 through 4 will then focus on the four major variants, listed here in the chronological order in which they appeared.
(1) To begin with, in late 1989, there was the Soviet restoration model. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) hoped to use its weight as a victor in the Second World War to restore the old quadripartite mechanism of four-power control exactly as it used to be in 1945, before subsequent layers of Cold War modifications created room for German contributions. Moscow wanted to strip away those layers and revert to the legal status it had enjoyed at the start of the occupation. This model, which called for the reuse of the old Allied Control Commission to dominate all further proceedings in divided Germany, represented a realist vision of politics run by powerful states, each retaining their own sociopolitical order, whether liberal democratic or socialist, and pursuing their own interests.
(2) Next and almost contemporaneously, there was Kohl’s revivalist model. This variant represented the revival, or adaptive reuse, of a confederation of German states. Such a Germanic confederation had not actually existed since the nineteenth century (Nazi expansion notwithstanding). It had endured rhetorically, however, into the period of détente—“two states in one German nation” was a common phrase—and it was now to be revived in reality for two twenty-first-century Germanies. This latter-day “confederationism” blurred the lines of state sovereignty. Each of the Germanies would maintain its own political and social order, but the two would share a confederative, national roof. There were echoes of this idea on a large scale; Mitterrand speculated about creating a Europe of confederations, yet neither Kohl’s version nor the French idea was ever fully developed. Originally intended as serious options, they (like Gorbachev’s initial restoration model) would be overtaken by events more quickly than anyone imagined.15
(3) Next, in early 1990, there was Gorbachev’s challenge to his own original plan: a heroic model of multinationalism. Gorbachev dropped the restoration concept entirely and instead proposed to build a vast new edifice from the Atlantic to the Urals: the fulfillment of his desire to create a common European home of many rooms.16 States under this model would retain their own political orders, but cooperate via international economic and military institutions. This model was heroic in the architectural sense of the word, which is much more ambivalent than the popular usage; indeed, “heroism” is a term that has fallen into disrepute among architects. The era of heroic modernism in the twentieth century produced a number of utopian design exercises, sometimes explicitly in the service of political regimes, that proved to be illusory or misguided.
Gorbachev’s vision fit into this pattern: it was sweeping in intent, but it was also fatally uncompromising. Ironically, former East German dissident movements, having done so much to unsettle Soviet control, proposed a similar model. They wanted new construction as well, though of a more limited expanse. Their goal was the construction of an improved socialism in East Germany, with a curiously prescient kind of “property pluralism” that would allow both private property and state intervention in times of economic crisis.17
(4) Finally, the Western allies, and Kohl in particular, responded in 1990 with the fourth and winning proposal: the prefab model. In other words, the United States and West Germany convincingly made the case for taking the West’s prefabricated institutions, both for domestic order and international economic and military cooperation, and simply extending them eastward. This institutionaltransfer model had the advantage of being quick, and dealing in known and successful commodities, such as the West German Basic Law, the West German currency (or DM), and the Article 5 mutual defense guarantee of NATO, to name a few. Indeed, the fact that both the EC and NATO were structurally capable of expansion (and had already been enlarged from their original footprints) provided useful precedents. The prefab model was the one model that proposed to harmonize both domestic and international institutions in Eastern Europe to preset Western standards. Moreover, it helped Kohl to justify his drive for rapid unity to skeptical West Europeans. When faced with the question of how to reconcile his neighbors to a process that might well threaten the delicate balance of strength within the EC, Kohl, already one of the more pro-European leaders of his generation, could argue that German unity was an extension of European integration.18 Just as West and East would unify within existing German structures, so too would West and East join under the existing EC institutions.
There was a large disadvantage to the prefab model, though. This disadvantage was not that prefab represented inferior goods; quite to the contrary, Western institutions had proven themselves to be durable and successful. Rather, it was the issue of perpetuating structures fabricated for a divided world into an undivided one, thus raising the issue of whether such a construct would in fact be suitable for the new site. Even as borders were dissolving, in other words, political institutions created and shaped by the decades-long Cold War division of international politics would exert and extend themselves eastward over a unified world. This was a necessary decision, born of the need to move quickly, with fateful consequences. Extending Cold War structures was a quick fix. But these structures, conceived in hostility, could not easily be recast to accommodate the great enemy—the Slavic other—because their original function was to resist that enemy. As the former secretary of state, Baker, later observed in his memoirs about this era, “almost every achievement contains within its success the seeds of a future problem.” He was right; the problem in this case was that no clear place was carved out for Russia, while a window of potential cooperation between Russia and the West was open. Before long, it closed, and the opportunity was lost.19
In addition, designers of all four models had to deal with an overarching contradiction in 1989–90. The competition among their models of order unfolded in an extremely disorderly way. It commenced unexpectedly, with East European states and the Soviet Union itself all on the verge of collapse, and took place between a number of competitors of unequal size and resources. The struggle to create a new order oscillated between, on the one hand, the highly public events dominated by the crowds or electorates, and on the other, the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of political elites, who could make agreements in secret, but ultimately would have to face the public again.
If these were the four most prominent models, who got to choose among them? Initially, by dint of the timing of their first free election since the Weimar era, it fell de facto to the voters of East Germany to choose from candidates representing these models. The electorate had a clear choice among parties supporting each of the four options (as well as other, less likely ones). The fate of any given model depended partly on its merits and partly on the ability of its designers to convince the public that they were more competent than their competitors.20
In the eyes of the East Germans, the contest ultimately came down to a choice between Gorbachev’s heroic attempt to build a mansion of many rooms, preserving some part of the old socialist order, and the wholesale adoption of the prefabricated institutions of the West. The latter won definitively. While there was some sympathy for expansive new multinational construction, the majority of these new voters felt that the safest option was proven structures to be put in place by proven politicians. As a result, the Western model under the leadership of Kohl would win, but not without some gloves-off power politics—particularly with regard to Poland and NATO—and not without problems in implementation.
If the East Germans got the initial say (and the timing of their input was significant), it was ultimately Germany’s neighbors, East and West, who had to agree with what was proposed. Most importantly, the Soviet Union had the ability to cause enormous problems for Kohl. Even though the USSR was on the verge of ruin, it held legal rights emanating from World War II and maintained roughly four hundred thousand troops in East Germany; these facts gave Gorbachev leverage regardless of his situation at home. As a result, even after the prefab model emerged as the winner, Kohl still had to secure building permits to start work, and that process is the subject of chapter 5.
Fig. I.3. The Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, November 1989. Courtesy of Gerard Marlie/AFP/Getty Images.
Finally, this book’s conclusion will look at the legacy of the contest of 1989 and 1990. It will discuss how, as in many architectural competitions, the model that won was not the most visionary one. Given all of the constraints involved, it was the most workable in the time frame available. It demonstrated the authority of competence crucial to all successful architecture and politics, and that proved decisive in the end. But workable is not the same as ideal, so it is necessary to be clear about the seeds of future problems that were sown by its victory.
In short, if Berlin is indeed the phoenix-like city that slowly rose from the ashes of Nazism and the Cold War division to realize “the dream of freedom,” then we need to understand how that happened, and at what cost it was achieved. Historians have already put a great deal of effort into analyzing the earlier decades of the division of Europe. Now it is time to think about the struggle of 1989 and what it bequeathed to the post–Cold War world.
CHAPTER 1
WHAT CHANGES IN SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1989?
Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
—T. S. Eliot, 19431
It is 1981. In the United States, Reagan is president. In the Soviet Union, Irina Scherbakova’s seven-year-old daughter has just come home from school. Scherbakova asks her what she did that day. Her daughter replies that her class was given an assignment. The students were told to write an essay called “The Person I Hate the Most.” Surprised and not pleased by the teacher’s choice of assignment, her mother asks, who was your person?
Adolf Hitler, her daughter replies. But I was the only one. All of the other students chose Reagan.2
It is 1983. Superpower rivalry has reached a new intensity as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan drags on, Reagan calls for his country to stand up to the evil empire, and short-range U.S. Cruise and Pershing II missiles are readied for installation in West Germany. In this overheated atmosphere, one of the members of the East German peace group Swords into Ploughshares, Roland Jahn, becomes a special target of the East German state security force, or the Stasi. Jahn has particular reason to hate the secret police: they took away a friend of his in April 1981, and the friend was dead two days later. Jahn has been a thorn in the Stasi’s side ever since. The secret police decide that the most aggressive action is now necessary. They take him prisoner in June 1983, not fo
r the first time; but this time they bind him inside a train.
Then, the Stasi agents watch as the train pulls out for the West, taking the unwilling border crosser with it.3
It is 1989. East Europeans can scarcely believe all of the miraculous things that are happening. Soviet troops are withdrawing from Afghanistan. The ruling Polish authorities have agreed to “round table” negotiations with the once-illegal Solidarity trade union. Hungary has legalized independent political parties. Gorbymania has swept the West, causing huge, adoring crowds to coalesce wherever Gorbachev appears. In East Berlin, young East Germans hear that restrictions on crossing the Berlin Wall have changed. Two of them decide to test whether this is true or not, and try to cross the wall.