1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Read online

  Amazingly, despite the deployment for a German Tiananmen, the protest march of October 9 remained entirely peaceful. The guns stayed silent and hospital blood supplies went unused. A combination of Soviet unwillingness to interfere, public appeals for nonviolence by prominent Leipzigers, and personal ambition—Krenz seeing his moment for parricidal action—caused the East German Politburo to step back from the brink.29 After all, Gorbachev had been warmly welcomed by East German crowds chanting “Gorby” during a visit to the GDR’s fortieth-anniversary celebrations. The Soviet leader had made his displeasure with Honecker clear—even calling him an “asshole,” although not to his face—so Krenz clearly had a mandate from Moscow. Gorbachev seems to have believed that sweeping but peaceful change would prevent more serious crises later and make the use of violence obsolete. The main victim of Honecker’s lust to restore order with Chinese methods was, as a result, Honecker himself. Krenz formally replaced Honecker on October 18, thereby revealing the Politburo’s inner divisions and fearfulness to the world.30

  The Stasi’s old foe Jahn succeeded in playing a role in the October upheaval from afar. Honecker’s expulsion of foreign journalists from Leipzig prevented the broadcasting of live footage. The West German evening news program Tagesschau instead could show only a picture of its moderator talking on the phone to a Leipzig church leader.31 But a camera that Jahn had gotten smuggled into East Germany made it to the hands of the stealth photography team Aram Radomski and Siegbert Schefke. Filling the void left by the absence of the Western journalists, they climbed a church tower and illicitly used Jahn’s camera to film the massive crowds.32 Their video from the night of October 9 in Leipzig appeared on Western airwaves the next day. “For the first time, we have reporting about GDR protests with some degree of accuracy,” announced the news program Tagesthemen, without identifying the actual source.33 Former East German dissident Tom Sello recalls this footage, the first uncensored film of Leipzig protests made by East Germans to be broadcast in the West, as a huge victory for the opposition. As Sello put it, for images to have an impact, there needed to be someone in East Germany to take them, someone to smuggle them to, and someone to make sure they got shown, and thanks to Jahn, Radomski, and Schefke, all of that came together in fall 1989.34 Suddenly, Western television could broadcast the immense size of the protest and the utter lack of any real response to it. The most important audience for these pictures were East Europeans, viewing them (or hearing descriptions of them) illicitly on Western channels that could be received in the East.

  Fig. 1.2. Protest in Leipzig, East Germany, October 1989. Photo by Chris Niedenthal/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

  The significance of Leipzig in October is that it negated the Tiananmen model in the European context. The actions of the Chinese Politburo could have set the agenda for violent suppression of protesters elsewhere, but they did not.35 Instead, one of the many surprising aspects of 1989–90 is that the People’s Republic of China played a minor role after June 1989. As one historian put it, “China, having served as one of the catalysts in shaping a different international system, abruptly retreated, fearing an uncharted future.” 36 Its leaders decided to turn inward, focus on economic changes, and insulate China as much as possible from the consequences of Gorbachev’s initiatives.37 The inability of a Communist ruling regime in Europe to implement what the Stasi called a “Chinese solution” served as a signal that the Asian model would not readily transfer.38 With only a small exception for Romania later, it was clear after Leipzig in October 1989 that nonviolence had become the order of the day in Europe. The importance of this development cannot be overstated. It contributed greatly to the increasing self-confidence of protesters in Europe.

  THE AMERICANS STEP BACK

  This leads to another surprise in the second half of 1989: like China, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union served as leaders for the events that unfolded.39 For that brief but important time, events on the ground in Europe mattered more than superpower action. Western countries and international institutions, such as the EC, NATO, and the United Nations, were basically spectators to the dramatic upheaval at the end of that year.40

  For the United States in particular, this was a conscious choice. At the beginning of 1989, the newly installed President Bush intentionally instituted a pause in the rapid dismantling of Cold War weapons and attitudes. This desire for a slowdown became apparent as soon as the Bush staffers took the reins. It was clear immediately that they were going to pull hard in another direction, partly to steer clear of Reagan’s shadow, and partly to get off of what they saw as the wrong track. As Robert Hutchings, a National Security Council (NSC) member under Bush, put it, an “entirely new team came in, representing foreign policy approaches fundamentally at odds with those of the Reagan administration.” In essence, there was “no such thing as a ‘Reagan-Bush’ foreign policy. Before 1989 there was Reagan; afterwards there was Bush.” 41

  Scholars still use the Reagan-Bush transition as an example of how vicious an intraparty White House handover can be. As one transition expert noted, “George H. W. Bush fired everybody.” 42 There was a sense that Reaganite wild-eyed idealism about relations with Russia and nuclear disarmament had started to outstrip practical realities, and now the time for sober policymaking had returned. Robert Gates, the deputy national security adviser in 1989–91, and later the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the defense secretary, found that Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz “had sped past both the U.S. military’s analysis of the strategic implications and the ability of U.S. intelligence” in their bid for glory before the clock ran out in 1988.43

  Now that it was their watch, Bush and Baker wondered whether there was any reason that the United States should continue to support the Soviet desire to change to the status quo. As Baker wrote in a summary of U.S.-Soviet relations in early 1989, the Russians “have to make hard choices. We do Gorbachev no favors when we make it easier to avoid choices.” Baker believed that necessity had definitely been the mother of virtue in Gorbachev’s case. “He made a choice in Afghanistan because he saw the need for it. He made a choice in arms control because there was a need for it.” Baker kept these thoughts private, but Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told CNN bluntly that Gorbachev would “‘ultimately fail.’” Eduard Shevardnadze would later respond to Cheney’s comments by calling them unsurprising; “‘I know that the Secretary of Defense needs money. How would he finance his defense programs if there were no Soviet threat?’” 44

  A clash between Baker and the former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was revealing. Bush had sent Kissinger as his envoy to Gorbachev in January 1989, even as the new president was just taking office.45 When Kissinger met with Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev and then Gorbachev himself in Moscow on January 16 and 17, the American suggested that the USSR did not need to rush out of Afghanistan. “With regard to Afghanistan, we want you to withdraw, but we do not want you to have a security problem [as a result].” On the subject of Germany, Kissinger pointed out that the United States and the Soviet Union shared a common interest in preventing the rise of nationalists. Close U.S.-USSR contact—using himself as the go-between of course—was essential in preventing any kind of political explosions happening in Germany and the rest of Europe. There was a need for guarantees against the “recklessness of Europeans themselves.” 46

  Kissinger faxed a summary of his meetings to Washington on January 21: “In my view Gorbachev is treading water with perestroika. He is looking to foreign policy as a way out. He will pay a reasonable price to that end.” 47 But Baker was not convinced that Kissinger’s understanding approach to Soviet positions was the best path forward and definitively quashed the nascent back channel. Baker’s actions left Kissinger scrambling to control the damage to his own reputation with the new Bush team. In happier days past, Baker had sought Kissinger’s advice about leading the State Department and dealing with its career bureaucrats. Kissinger had joking
ly responded that Baker should watch out for the long-term civil servants, because they were “‘very ingenious. They give you three choices: nuclear war, unconditional surrender, and their preferred course of action.’” Now, however, Kissinger had to engage in what Baker called Washington’s “time-honored ritual” of reaching out to the offended party and groveling.48 He wrote a private note to Baker: “The newspapers have been having so much fun describing how I will be influencing policy via surrogates that I think a note is appropriate.” Kissinger promised that he would resist future meddling: “I have a firm policy never to volunteer policy advice to already overburdened senior officials.” 49 He did not specify at what point in his life he had implemented that policy.

  Contemporaries soon sensed the differences between Reagan and Bush. In a one-on-one meeting in June 1989, Kohl and Gorbachev compared the two presidents, to the benefit of the latter. Kohl recalled meeting Reagan when the former actor was still a presidential candidate in 1979. Helmut Schmidt, the West German chancellor at the time, had refused to meet the American because he considered it a waste of an hour. Kohl, however, made time to see Reagan, and was deeply disappointed by the experience. Reagan, he was shocked to discover, “knew practically nothing about Europe.” Kohl asked himself at the time “what consequences that would have.” The situation with Bush was “completely different,” fortunately. “To a great extent, Bush sees many problems with European eyes … he understands more about Europe than Reagan.” 50 Mitterrand had a different opinion, though, which he also expressed to Gorbachev just a couple of weeks later over a private dinner at his apartment in Paris. Despite Bush’s efforts to improve U.S.-French relations by inviting Mitterrand to Kennebunkport, Maine, in May, the French leader still thought that “Bush, as a President, has a very big drawback—he lacks original thinking altogether.” With both Kohl and Mitterrand, Gorbachev kept his own thoughts about the Reagan-Bush comparison to himself.51

  The differences between the Reagan and Bush approaches became even more obvious on February 15, 1989. On that date, Bush announced publicly that he was calling for a large interagency study on U.S. foreign policy, known as National Security Review 3.52 This announcement brilliantly managed expectations, which was presumably its goal, because it bought the new administration a few months of time during which both domestic and foreign audiences knew they should not expect anything. It sent out a clear message that the Bush administration was not nearly as determined a foe of the status quo as Reagan had been.

  In policy terms it produced little. Gates admitted later that “there was never much expectation that the policy reviews would result in a dramatic departure.” Scowcroft, the national security adviser, found the whole exercise to be a big disappointment. He began working on a replacement study immediately thereafter.53 And Baker, who agreed that the result of the review was useless “mush,” assigned the blame for its failure to the fact that it “was run by Reagan holdovers … these officials found themselves incapable of truly thinking things anew.” 54 Yet Gates defended this much-criticized exercise on one account: precisely because of its failure to produce any new initiatives or approaches, the top-level officials in the Bush administration knew that they would have to come up with them personally. As a result, policy would come solely from “Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and their respective inner circles working in harness together.” 55

  Bush administration reserve about the Soviet Union extended to its allies in Eastern Europe as well. The Hungarians would complain repeatedly to the West Germans about the difficulty of getting aid out of the United States.56 And President Bush came in for criticism both at home and abroad for being reticent with regard to Poland. Bush explained his thinking to Kohl in a confidential phone call on June 15 before his own July trip to Warsaw. The president knew that emotions were running high in Poland, but while he shared such sentiments, he also “felt it important to act carefully and to avoid pouring money down a rat-hole.” 57 Bush came to this conclusion despite the strong ties between Poland and U.S. voters. As his ambassador in Warsaw, John Davis, advised him on the eve of the July visit, the “United States occupies such an exaggerated place of honor in the minds of most Poles that it goes beyond rational description. One opposition leader described it aptly as ‘blind love.’” 58 None of this swayed the president. In his address to the Polish parliament on July 10, 1989, Bush focused on debt rescheduling and World Bank help for the country rather than direct U.S. aid, but did promise to ask Congress for funding.59 Later in 1989, Congress would eventually authorize $938 million in aid over three years, but given that Poland was $39 billion in debt and had been unable to make payments on time, it needed more.60 Bush also expressed unequivocal support for the candidacy of General Wojciech Jaruzelski for president. Following Bush’s lead, Ambassador Davis urged Solidarity to ignore the fact that the general was the very person who had once implemented martial law against them. This support may have helped Jaruzelski in winning a narrow victory.61

  In summary, despite travel to Germany and Poland, the Bush administration had intentionally stepped back. A sense that Reagan had gone too far, too fast, prevailed. This cautious attitude put the United States on the back foot during the drama of fall 1989.

  THE STATUS QUO CEASES TO CONVINCE

  For his part, Gorbachev could not make rapid headway without a like-minded U.S. president across the negotiating table, so he was stalled as well. His adviser Andrei Grachev remembers that Gorbachev was enormously disappointed by the change in U.S. attitudes. After years of work on improving relations, he retained his zeal for changing the status quo and could not understand why the new team suddenly seemed to want a moratorium on doing so.62

  Gorbachev was not alone in his desire to keep producing change, particularly in the field of arms control. Reagan and Gorbachev had signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987, but the Bush administration was not as interested in such cuts. At NATO’s fortieth-anniversary summit in May 1989, the United States insisted on maintaining up-to-date short-range nuclear forces (SNF) stationed in West Germany. This conflict highlighted the importance of the existing NATO status quo to the Bush administration, and the centrality of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to its strategy.

  The practical impact of that status quo on divided Germany in 1989 was the presence of hundreds of thousands of foreign troops on its soil. Originally they had arrived as conquering armies, but they stayed on as alliance partners (in the case of East Germany, without democratic legitimization). As Kohl pointedly remarked to Bush in May 1989, even though the FRG was only as wide as Long Island was long, “900,000 soldiers are stationed and carry out exercises” within its borders.63 On top of this, West Germany contained the largest concentration of nuclear weapons per square mile of any territory in the world, and all of them were controlled by foreigners. The much smaller East Germany held about 400,000 further troops, which added up to a total of 600,000 Soviet citizens along with their dependents.64 Some unclear portion of the four power rights originating from the unconditional surrender in World War II were still in force 1989, if with various curtailments. Although Kohl was always careful to point out that Western forces were invited to be there and therefore not analogous to Soviet troops, both the Western and Soviet troops had at least two features in common. They had both arrived in wartime (when they most definitely had not been invited), and, despite the thaw in the late 1980s, had no intention of leaving; they did have the intention of reducing head count, but not withdrawing.

  Worries that the West Germans might seek their own form of peace dividend in 1989, by asking to delay or cancel an update of U.S. missiles on its soil, gravely concerned Baker. The United States and the British wanted in particular to modernize the eighty-eight Lance missiles in West Germany. Such missiles were designed, with a range of about five hundred kilometers, to even out the conventional superiority of the Warsaw Pact, and were due for some kind of modernization or follow-on replacement.65 But West Germans from al
l points on the political spectrum opposed any updating whatsoever. Left-wing peace protesters received support not only from the foreign minister, Liberal Party leader Hans-Dietrich Genscher. (Genscher both opposed the updating and wanted the U.S. to negotiate with Moscow about a reduction in the number of such weapons.) They also got it from more unlikely quarters—namely, the leader of the right-of-center members of parliament, Alfred Dregger. Dregger pointed out publicly that the most terrifying aspect of the missiles was that they could not fly very far; in other words, they would land on the other side of divided Germany. “The shorter the range, the ‘deader’ the Germans,” he famously remarked.66 Baker put the topic on an agenda for a meeting with Bush, noting that “Genscher is getting more extreme [in his opposition to modernization], and is likely to pull Kohl more in his direction. We must start the high-level discussion with Germans on SNF immediately before Genscher moves too far.” 67

  Baker also spoke personally in April 1989 with both Genscher and the West German defense minister, Gerhard Stoltenberg, to tell them where the United States stood. “Let me be frank,” read Baker’s notes on what he planned to discuss at the meeting, “in stating my concern on where this will lead unless we’re prudent. I think we’re slipping down a path of denuclearization of our defense, with a big risk to nuclear coupling.” He told them that if they were to “denuclearize the Alliance defense before there’s a major change in the conventional force posture,” they would be “unravelling the forward defense strategy, too.” To these typed remarks, he added by hand the importance of the issue: it allowed the “Pres. of U.S. to maintain U.S. forces in Europe. We need those wpn’s [weapons] to defend our own troops.” 68