1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 31
Instead, Kohl seized his chance between November 9, 1989, and October 3, 1990, to establish a durable, democratic order in united Germany, and to anchor the new nation in the EC and NATO. He sensed, rightly, that it was necessary to act quickly. But did the balancing act between chance and necessity require stopping there? Was there not a real opportunity to take advantage of the unexpected opportunities and accomplish more at a pan-European level? The eventual outcome of NATO expansion was already unfolding in 1990. But was there some form of international economic support or guidance, other than large handouts from Kohl, that would have eased the transit of the Soviet Union into the company of modern democracies and economies in exchange for its consent to peaceful German unification in NATO? Did the West “lose” Russia, and did it do so as early as 1990?31
Clear answers to these questions are elusive. Any speculation about them must start with Gorbachev’s hopes for a better economic future, however. As described in the text, both Teltschik and Genscher noted a strong desire on the part of the Soviet leader in 1990 and a number of his advisers to move ahead, not in confrontation, but in cooperation with West Germany. Gorbachev’s hope was to achieve prosperity at home via close links with Bonn. This desire for cooperation was obviously not universally shared, as the bitter resentment of Gorbachev’s actions among his enemies shows. But the Soviet leader recalled the squalor of life in the Gorkaya River valley, with the pitiful huts and the endless barking of stray dogs, until the end of his career, and wanted better. It was not entirely unreasonable to hope that extensive cooperation with wealthy West Germany, traded for its unity, could provide help in reaching that goal; Teltschik thinks this was his main motivation.32
Gorbachev’s desire to negotiate such a future peacefully rested at the heart of his willingness to approve German unification. For this reason, he gave his approval for both unity and NATO membership to Kohl (who was willing to provide credits and cash) rather than Bush and Baker (who were not, in part because of the weakening domestic economy in the United States at the time). The Soviet leader seemed to have accepted that it was too costly for the USSR to try to direct political events in regions, whether in Afghanistan or Europe, that clearly had goals other than those set for them by Moscow, and decided to cut his losses. In keeping with this view, he set in motion a truly astonishing amount of disarmament. Between 1990 and 2008, the number of Russian nuclear warheads on ICBMs was cut almost 70 percent, and four thousand of its tanks left Europe.33
Teltschik feels strongly that Gorbachev thought he could completely transform the Soviet Union with the German help that he would receive in return for cooperation over unification. Gorbachev’s hope may have been naive, and structured far too much as a pedantic top-down initiative. Yet it appears to have been a sincere desire to improve the daily life of the broad mass of his people, and as such, laudable. As Gorbachev’s biographer has rightly argued, the Soviet leader’s goal was “the creation of a better society and system than that which he inherited.” The “democratic shortcomings of post-Soviet Russia notwithstanding, the country Gorbachev bequeathed to his successors was freer than at any time in Russian history.” 34
As a result, it is hard not to regret Kohl’s failure in his repeated, insistent, but largely fruitless efforts to create some kind of international coalition in 1990 for providing comprehensive financial aid and advice to Gorbachev. Opponents of such aid pointed out, both at the time and afterward, that there was no good reason for the West to prop up Gorbachev’s Soviet empire, and that incompetent governance would have wasted any aid. Indeed, help in setting up competent domestic authorities early on may even have been more valuable than aid to Moscow. Gorbachev would complain to Baker in 1991 that the money from Kohl had already vanished: “‘Things disappear around here. We got a lot of money for German unification, and when I called our people, I was told they didn’t know where it was. Yakovlev told me to call around, and the answer is no one knows.’” Clearly, Moscow needed more than just credits to ease its transition to being a modern market economy, but (other than from Bonn) it got little. Western advisers would descend on Russia later en masse, of course. But they arrived after fatal resentments had already piled up.35
Kohl’s efforts seem to have been undone by a contest between deterritorialization and provinciality churning away beneath the public surface of events.36 In other words, 1989–90 was a time when, on one level, multilateral institutions like the EC and NATO began to expand eastward. They therefore blurred the borders between, or deterritorialized, states in their ambit. On another and more old-fashioned level, however, wagons still circled. Deterritorialize the West, but get as much property into it as possible before you do so, and then protect the united province from the crumbling though still dangerous East, ran the argument. This animus represented the thinking of Bonn and Washington; it contrasted badly with Gorbachev’s hope that deterritorialization could extend from the Atlantic to the Urals. The Soviet leader’s advisers kept trying to make the contrast clear to him, without success.37
Fig. C.3. The concert hall on Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, decorated to celebrate the extension of the EU to Eastern Europe in May 2004. © Langevin Jacques/Corbis Sygma.
The heart of the problem seems to be that Moscow did not understand to what extent, and for how little time, international order would be up for grabs during 1989–90. Indeed, historians arguing that the end of the Cold War was a transition of little importance are retrospectively making the same mistake that Gorbachev did at the time: failing to grasp what was at stake. Gorbachev and his advisers did not comprehend the chance that had opened up, and the necessity of moving quickly to seize it. In 1990, they thought that they had more time to sort out big issues for post–Cold War Europe, whether it was domestic reforms or new pan-European economic and security structures.
They did not. The negotiations about German unification were already shaping politics far beyond that country’s borders in ways both ideological and material. By achieving German unity, the major actors involved—and there were many, working first from below throughout Eastern Europe and then from above in the West—fabricated the future on a number of levels. They opened up new doors of possibility for the residents of the half of Europe that had paid the heaviest price for the Cold War. They negated the Chinese example of violent suppression as a model for the future. They created hope in the hearts of all those facing ideologically and physically repressive regimes around the world. They made it clear that the market economy vision of the future would dominate the vast majority of world economies afterward, even ones still calling themselves Communist. They cemented plans to create a common European currency, now one of the world’s strongest. They ensured that NATO would endure and remain the dominant international military alliance. They forced both the EC/EU and NATO to evolve, and in doing so, to lay the groundwork for later rapid enlargement. They ironically began creating a common European home of many rooms—just without one for Russia. Last but not least, they taught a lasting lesson to Putin, who had experienced the events of 1989–90 in divided Germany firsthand. Having prevented a sacking of the Soviet Union’s KGB office in Dresden, he did not want to find himself or, by extension, his country in such a position again.38
For all of these reasons, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent struggle to re-create order in post–Cold War Europe represent truly major turning points in modern history. It is essential to understand the legacy of the successes of 1989–90: Berlin did indeed gain the ability to understand the dream of freedom. Its peaceful transition from its former state to its present one, negotiated diplomatically with its international partners, holds hope for the many places that are just at the beginning of the same journey. It is equally essential to understand the legacy of the failings of 1989–90: the speed with which it happened resulted in imperfect choices and costly consequences. The chance to foster enduring cooperation with an unusually willing, if weak, Russian leadership passed, and it will not appear again soo
n. Looking back at the choices that defined the post–Cold War international order, we should strive to be clear-eyed about both their benefits and their costs.
AFTERWORD TO THE NEW EDITION
REVISITING 1989–1990 AND THE ORIGINS OF NATO EXPANSION
INTRODUCTION: FADING MEMORIES
The faded numbers on the concrete are gone now. Even if you had visited the site before the construction crews arrived and built the discount grocery store, you might still have missed them. They were hard to spot: large but faint white numbers, painted in a line across what used to be several lanes. One of my Berlin friends warned me in 2010 that construction workers were about to erase them, along with the other remaining traces of the old order—an electrical box here, dangling wires there. So we made a last trip to see those traces. It was no longer possible to find all of the numbers, but I could still photograph “6” through “10.” Soon thereafter, the construction workers eradicated them.
Although it has only been twenty-five years since they were in use, those faded numbers, along with the roofing that used to stretch over them and the long buildings full of armed guards that paralleled them, have now disappeared as completely as millennia-old paintings on the walls of caves. In their prime, the numbers helped to enforce the Cold War order. They marked the car lanes of the Bornholmer Street checkpoint between East and West Berlin, once the biggest combined auto and pedestrian border crossing between the two halves of Berlin. For Easterners, the lanes were largely forbidden altogether, as was the bridge to the West beyond. For Westerners, lining up in those lanes, or in the foot-traffic control chutes nearby, marked the last ritual of enforced obedience before returning home.
It is telling that at Bornholmer Street, where the wall first opened, a developer received permission to obliterate all signs of the past and to put up a grocery store. By way of compensation, a small (and soon-defaced) informational signpost was installed. Later, more information panels appeared, but they still fell short of marking the full import of the location. More triumphant markers of the fall of the wall exist, of course, but elsewhere. A free-standing memorial, showcasing a large portion of the wall against a beautiful landscape, rises not in Berlin but in Simi Valley, California, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Even more imposingly, horses gallop victoriously over a collapsed pile of pieces of the wall in College Station, Texas, at the George H. W. Bush Library. At Bornholmer Street, where the wall first opened, there is nothing to compare.1
The destruction of all traces of the past at Bornholmer Street by a grocery store shows how preferred current uses of historic locations often take precedence over conservation of historic remains. Put differently, as memories fade, past narratives lose ground to present needs. This process is perhaps unsurprising, especially in this case. Given the complicated manner in which the Berlin Wall opened unexpectedly—and how that opening, in turn, restructured relations between Washington and Moscow in ways that we are still trying to understand today–the actual narrative of what happened at Bornholmer Street in 1989 might be beyond the ability of any single memorial to convey.
BEARING UNWELCOME TIDINGS
A book, however, has adequate space to tell this complicated story. This volume, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, investigates the political legacy of the fall of the wall. As indicated at the outset, this book considers 1989 not as an end, but as a beginning, namely as the start of a heated, high-stakes debate about the future of Europe’s political order beyond the end of the Cold War. It explores the success of Bonn and Washington in winning that debate and in mastering the ordering moment that followed the collapse of the wall, with consequences that we are still feeling today.
In the months and years following the publication of the book’s first edition in 2009, it was both surprising and gratifying to see it receive attention in a wide range of countries and media outlets. To this day, I am still enjoying the resulting exchange of information and views with journalists, readers, scholars, and students around the world. There were also other surprises, including three notable ones.
The first surprise was that, immediately after the appearance of the first edition, I began receiving requests from broadcasters, classes, and various publications to explain the history of the wall’s opening in even more detail than I had already done in 1989. I was asked, more than a few times, questions such as “didn’t the wall open in 1987 when President Ronald Reagan said that it should?” or, less politely, “don’t you know that Reagan and Gorbachev (and/or the East German regime) decided to open it, and everyone knew about it well in advance?” I soon realized that many non-German speakers were unfamiliar with the actual events that produced the unintentional fall of the wall. Looking into the matter to understand why the historical narrative (briefly summarized in chapter 1 of this book) was so unfamiliar, I discovered, to my surprise, that there was relatively little in languages other than German explaining the proximate causes of the opening. As a result, I found myself writing another book to explain the immediate causes of the opening of the wall in greater detail, namely The Collapse.2
The second surprise was that, even though 1989 had been published, my research for it was not over. This unusual fact was due to the length of time needed by archives in four countries to process my Freedom of Information Act requests (or, in the case of countries without such legislation, my pleas in the name of transparency). To this day, I am still trying to get answers to requests filed as long ago as 2005. For example, as I write this revised afterword in 2014, I continue to wait for a decision on a particularly important FOIA query submitted six years ago in 2008 to the U.S. Department of State, requesting a single clearly identified document. Repeated follow-up letters have not yielded a result; if any reader can advise me on how to get a reply, I would be grateful.3
In cases such as this one, archives have yet to respond. In other cases, archivists replied positively to my requests after years of deliberations, but at a time that made it impossible to incorporate the new materials into the first edition. The most notable collection of new sources falling into the latter category came from the former West German and East German foreign ministries, now jointly under the control of the current German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (or AA in its German initials) in Berlin. The AA approved my 2007 request at the end of 2009, as 1989 was already shipping to booksellers, so I was no longer able to use the new evidence for the first edition. A similar problem arose with the papers of François Mitterrand. I was able to view them only as 1989 was already in page-proofs, thus significantly limiting the information that I could include from them in the text.
Once the publisher generously invited me to produce this new edition on the fifth anniversary of 1989’s original appearance, however, I received a welcome opportunity to revisit the book in light of this “late-breaking” evidence. In reading the new sources, I was pleased to discover that they bolstered the main arguments of the original edition. As a result, the publisher and I decided to present the original text more or less as it was first published in this new edition. We have changed only a handful of typos and other minor errors. The list of secondary literature has, however, been thoroughly updated for this edition and now incorporates the numerous publications that have appeared since spring 2009.
This afterword is also new, and aims to provide an overview of the most important evidence that I have uncovered since the first edition of 1989 appeared. Given the space constraints, this essay will focus on a single issue, but one that sheds light on the themes of the book overall: the question of the role of NATO in post-Cold War Europe. The issue of whether or not NATO would be able to expand beyond its Cold War borders after the fall of the wall was more than just a narrow question of the provision of security. Rather, it was closely tied to the larger competition between various visions of how Europe’s future should be organized, one of the main concerns of the book.
As described in 1989, political leaders—whether office-holders or dissidents
—differed in their opinions on the future role of NATO in European security. Some felt that the alliance was indispensable; others echoed long-ago calls by Charles de Gaulle, the former French president, for a more “European Europe” to emerge from the upheavals of 1989. Proponents of the latter view held that Europe should find a way to play a greater role in planning for, and in providing for, its own security, perhaps in some kind of a pan-European institutional fashion, perhaps even including Soviet territory. This vision for post-Cold War Europe did not, of course, prevail—and the NATO expansion story sheds light on why it did not.4 Instead of vague plans for pan-Europeanism from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a strategy that perpetuated both U.S. security dominance and a division of Europe into NATO and non-NATO areas succeeded in the struggle to define order in post-Cold War Europe. The mechanism whereby this happened—namely NATO’s survival past the end of the Cold War, along with the survival of its ability to expand—emerged from the negotiations on German unification in 1989 and 1990. This discovery, one of the most important findings of 1989, challenged, and continues to challenge, the common assumption that thinking about NATO expansion originated only well into the history of the Clinton Administration. According to these assumptions, no one mentioned NATO expansion before Clinton took office in 1993—or, if they did, they never mentioned it with regard to Eastern Europe, only former East Germany.