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

  First, he had to find a way to extract himself from Poland without insulting his hosts. After a morning that retraced the footsteps of Brandt, the former chancellor who had fallen to his knees at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto victims on his own visit to the city, Kohl got more unsettling news. The mayor of West Berlin, Walter Momper, a member of Brandt’s opposing Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), had organized the first major press event for 4:30 p.m. that very afternoon. It would be held at the Schöneberg Town Hall, or Rathaus, the location where President Kennedy had made his own pilgrimage to Berlin. Missing it would make Kohl and his party seem out of control. Kohl’s close aide Teltschik, his most trusted adviser on foreign and security policy, thought that was precisely the point.

  The chancellor called President Jaruzelski at noon and got his agreement to reschedule their talk, originally set for that afternoon. Kohl made similar arrangements with the rest of the Polish leadership, who were less than happy about it. The chancellor then had to deal with the fact that under still-binding occupation air traffic rules, a West German plane was not allowed to fly to West Berlin. To get there by air from Warsaw, a trip of 320 miles, the chancellor did what Cold War realities required. He asked the United States for help.10 The U.S. Air Force agreed to have an American aircraft meet Kohl’s in Hamburg and take his party to West Berlin. With a 2:30 p.m. departure from Poland, Kohl and his advisers just made it to the site of the event at 4:30 p.m.—only to find that the starting time had been pushed back.

  For their efforts, they were greeted by boos from the hostile West Berlin crowd and worse news from the home team. The local branch of Kohl’s party, the CDU, had organized yet another event for the same night. Kohl would obviously have to speak there as well afterward; the chance of getting back to Bonn any time soon, where he had access to support staff and secure communications with other world leaders, was dwindling. It was too much for the man who was supposed to be in charge, and instead had been scurrying from Warsaw to Hamburg to West Berlin on little notice. The chancellor exploded with rage and declared every member of his party in West Berlin to be incompetent.11

  Going on stage, he in turn had to face another explosion of anger, this time from the audience. West Berlin was known for its vocal and active left-wing political organizations as well as its regional pride. Even if it had been a less dramatic moment, a left-wing West Berlin rally would not have been an event at which a conservative Catholic politician from the Rhineland—that is, Kohl—would be welcome. Now, with emotions running high, the crowd had no patience for him whatsoever. Having just applauded a hero of the Left—“Berlin will live and the wall will fall,” the elderly Brandt had told the crowd, to great effect—the spectators wanted to show their opposition to the CDU by drowning out Kohl and driving him off the stage.

  Ignoring their deafening catcalls, Kohl focused on the millions who would be watching on television, particularly in the East. “I would like to call out to everyone in the GDR: You are not alone! We stand at your side! We are and will remain one nation, and we belong together!” 12 It had been a long time since a leader of West Germany had spoken that way. Momper subsequently called Kohl’s appearance an embarrassment. “He is stuck in yesterday’s thinking,” the mayor proclaimed. He had “apparently failed to comprehend that the people of the GDR are not interested in reunification, but rather in a free Europe with open borders.” 13

  Indeed, there was some question as to whether the people of the FRG were interested in reunification. Pollsters in 1987 had found large majorities who said simultaneously that they favored unification in theory but had no particular expectation that it would ever happen. A West German identity, committed more to a multinational European vision than to the nationalistic and problematic German past, had established itself with younger generations. Momper and many others in his party, the SPD, were guessing that Kohl was falling afoul of that identity. Europe should matter more than the nation-state at the end of the twentieth century, they felt.14

  They were not the only ones unhappy about Kohl’s expressions of nationalism. While the rally was going on, Teltschik was called to the phone to take an ominous message from Gorbachev. Its gist, which was repeated to other Western leaders the same night, was that the events of that evening “could create a chaotic situation with unpredictable consequences.” 15 Such a message did not bode well, and capped a deeply unsettled couple of days. In short, the experience of November 9–10 for Kohl was one fraught with disruption, uncertainty, and risk.

  The hostility directed at Kohl contrasted with the joy experienced by the crowds that succeeded in crossing the border. Thousands poured into West Berlin and West Germany, to be met with hugs, kisses, tears, and champagne offered by complete strangers. Throughout, the mood remained peaceful and joyous. Yet not everyone on the streets of East Germany was pleased to hear about the opening of the wall. For a long time, the GDR protest movement had been a kind of bedraggled elite: a small group that would often lose members to the West when they were expelled. The numbers of protesters had swollen massively with the advent of new reinforcements in fall 1989.16 But the opening of the wall exposed a fatal gap between the old and the new. Rather than fighting for a better socialism, would new protesters simply prefer to move West?

  Claudia Rusch, eighteen years old when the wall opened, expressed this fear in a memoir that she wrote as an adult. Rusch was the daughter of outspoken dissidents. For her entire childhood, she thought that the word “cockroaches” meant the men who spied on her parents regularly. She was no fan of the East German ruling regime, even though she had not consciously chosen to be a dissident. “I didn’t make the decision with my parents to go into opposition; I was born into it.” But she was grateful for it. “I know exactly what kind of country I grew up in. No one can tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  She knew what she believed in: an independent East Germany. The opening of the wall signified the dwindling of that dream. “That was the end. … The wall was open and the path to Aldi [a West German discount store] was open. It was too early, it meant reunification.” 17 Although she was only a child at the time that it happened, her sentiments echoed those of adult members of the dissident movement as well. They would soon begin to organize the round table in an effort to exert control over the future course of their own country.

  As East Germans tried to understand what November 9 meant for their lives and their country, leaders in capitals around the world tried to understand what it meant for them as well. Not long before Kohl’s press speaker interrupted his dinner in Warsaw, on the other side of the globe another aide—this time J. Stapleton Roy of the U.S. State Department—interrupted another meal, this time a luncheon. His boss, Baker, was hosting Philippine president Corazon Aquino. Roy slipped him a note. Baker read it aloud, raising his glass in tribute: “The East German Government has just announced that it is fully opening its borders to the West. The implication from the announcement is full freedom of travel via current East German/West German links between borders.” 18

  Soon thereafter Baker began receiving pages of press reports from around the world. He wrote on top of them in thick black pen: “Something we’ve wanted for 40 yrs * Eur that’s whole 1 free.” This phrase—“A Europe whole and free”—had been the theme of a major address by Bush given in Mainz in May 1989.19 His administration would repeat it often in the wake of the opening of the Berlin Wall, considering it a better idea than a “common European home” in which the Americans had no room.

  In the following days Baker would speak multiple times with the U.S. ambassador in Bonn, Vernon Walters, who would continually assure him that the situation remained peaceful. The secretary also dealt with and approved a West German request to use U.S. military facilities to provide temporary housing to refugees, who were arriving at the rate of ten thousand per day. As all of this was going on, Baker made time to appear on a number of television shows, partly to counteract what commentators were calling a
lackluster response from the president himself.20 Lesley Stahl, interviewing President Bush on the CBS Evening News on November 9, had been puzzled by his lack of jubilation. “You don’t seem elated and I’m wondering if you’re thinking of the problems,” she asked. Bush responded, “I’m not an emotional guy, but I’m very pleased.” He admitted that developments had caught him by surprise and said that he was determined not to create some kind of a backlash by acting in a triumphalist manner.21 As Zelikow and Rice, both NSC staffers at the time, would explain in their own joint memoir later, this behavior was “characteristic of Bush … often well reasoned on substance but inattentive to the ceremonial dimension of the presidency.” 22

  Fig. 2.1. President George Herbert Walker Bush, third from left, with his main advisers; from left to right, Chief of Staff John Sununu, Secretary of State James Baker, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Vice President Dan Quayle, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Deputy NSC Adviser Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and Office of Management and Budget Director Richard Darman. Courtesy of Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images.

  That same evening, Baker tried to be clearer, with mixed success. Speaking with Chris Wallace of ABC’s Primetime Live, he pointed out “that it has been the policy of the NATO Alliance and it has been the policy of the United States of America to support reunification for over forty years.” Wallace, unimpressed, responded: “That sounds like boilerplate.” Baker countered: “That is our policy.”

  Wallace missed a key hint: Baker had spoken of NATO in his comment, and the organization would loom large in the coming months. For Washington, it would be at the heart of all that was to come. Soon, extending NATO over a unified Germany would establish itself as the highest priority for Bonn and Washington, and finding the right way to react to this strategy would similarly become the most pressing item on the French and Soviet agendas.23

  In light of the importance of NATO at this crucial time, President Bush was particularly pleased that its head was Wörner, a man with whom he enjoyed a warm friendship. In fact, Bush would later be one of the last people to speak to Wörner, only four days before the German’s early death of cancer in 1994.24 This personal connection meant that Bush was open to suggestions from and cooperation with Wörner—something that would prove critical in the process of reconciling NATO and German unification. It was also helpful that Wörner was a member of Kohl’s party, the CDU, and therefore was trusted in Bonn.

  Besides NATO, the other important international organization in Europe in 1989—the EC—had a rotating presidency, which was held by France in the second half of 1989, the two hundredth anniversary of its own revolution. Mitterrand therefore spoke not only as the president of France but also as the leader of the EC that November. And both he and Kohl were powerful presences within the EC regardless of whether their countries held the presidency or not.

  On November 9, Mitterrand was as shocked as the rest of the world by what happened. He had (at Kohl’s urging) expressly stated that he was not afraid of German unification at a press conference just six days earlier, but without knowing that it would become a real possibility so soon.25 The French president was slow to develop his response to the opening of the wall, yet the unification process could not go forward without his response. Simply put, for German unification to be acceptable to its European neighbors, it had to take place in a way that was agreeable to both France and the EC. Mitterrand had long emphasized the essential nature of a European framework for any theoretical future German unification in his public remarks. He maintained that view even as unity became a lot more likely, but there still were many possible ways to construct such a framework. Forceful action by either France itself or the EC under its leadership could potentially slow the process of unifying Germany.

  Indeed, if events developed in such a way that either France or the EC, or both, felt threatened, Mitterrand could potentially align a powerful constellation of European actors to block unification. No-holds-barred comments by senior European leaders to the effect that rapid unification was ruining the EC, circulated in an election year among a West German population that believed strongly in European unity and worried about paying for the needs of the East German population, could have made life difficult for Kohl.26 As it was, Thatcher turned out to be the only one willing to make such take-no-prisoners comments in public, and her interest in the EC was limited. Others would confine themselves to private expressions, which did not have the same impact. Indeed, years later Scowcroft was still puzzled that the British, French, and Soviets did not manage to find any agreed strategy at the outset to slow the process down.27 For all of these reasons, the role of France is crucial in understanding the events of 1989–90.28

  One of the factors that complicated the response of France and many of Germany’s other European neighbors, such as the Dutch, was the painful memory of the Second World War. The key Americans involved—Bush and Baker—had little in the way of personal experience with the Nazis. Bush, born in 1924, had served as a naval aviator in the Pacific theater during World War II. Baker, born in Houston in the same year as Kohl, 1930, had served in the Marines in 1952–54. Thatcher and Mitterrand, in contrast, had experienced the German onslaught throughout their youth and young adulthood. Thatcher, born in 1925, had vivid childhood and teenage memories of the war; Mitterrand’s involvement with German aggression went much further.

  Born in a provincial town in 1916 during World War I and in the armed services himself by 1938, he (unlike Thatcher) saw his home country become the subject of Nazi occupation. Even worse, Mitterrand became a German prisoner of war in 1940. Held captive in Kassel and Weimar, he learned hard lessons about “the reign of the knife” before succeeding, on his third attempt, in escape. Yet despite these experiences, he would return home and collaborate with the German-sponsored Vichy regime in southern France. In fact, Mitterrand would remain friendly throughout his life with Vichyites like Jean-Paul Martin and the infamous René Bousquet, who was facing trial for crimes against humanity when he was murdered in 1993.29 Mitterrand would eventually come to oppose Vichy and work to aid other prisoner of war escapees, coordinating with General Charles de Gaulle by means of clandestine trips to London, and taking part in the parade celebrating de Gaulle’s return to Paris on August 25, 1944. Later in life, Mitterrand would relive the more savory aspects of this wartime history with regular visits to sites associated with his escape; but an exposé about his Vichy connections put the unsavory elements back into the public view and caused a sensation in 1994. Even after his death in 1996, controversies would still rage over Mitterrand, and his personal history and achievements. There was no doubt, however, that Franco-German relations were a matter of great significance to him. During his presidency, reconciliation between France and West Germany was clearly his primary European concern. After leaving office, he went to his grave trying to finish writing a book titled Of Germany and of France.30

  Fig. 2.2. President François Mitterrand of France and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, circa 1986. Courtesy of Getty Images.

  This personal and emotional experience with Nazism was an attribute that Mitterrand shared with the Soviet leadership. The Soviet foreign minister, Shevardnadze, born in 1928, had lost his brother Akaky in the early days of the war. One statistic encapsulates the suffering inflicted on his generation: of the seven hundred thousand men called up from his home region of Georgia, only half would ever return. As Shevardnadze would write in his memoirs about 1989, “Even when we were forced to face facts by the pace of events, none of us dared to ignore the inborn wariness of our people about German unity.” It grew out of “the memory of the two world wars unleashed by Germany, especially the last war, which cost our country 27 million lives.” On some level, Shevardnadze found “it was useless to appeal to forgiveness. … The victors had become losers. When the heart is in such pain political rationality has little chance.” 31 Dealing with Shevardnadze in 1990, Telts
chik had the impression that it was harder for him than for Gorbachev to take a conciliatory line with the Germans, and that Shevardnadze’s advisers (often holdovers from his predecessor, Andrei Gromyko) made matters worse.32

  Gorbachev himself, born in the village of Privolnoye in the Stavropol region of southern Russia in 1931, had been too young to serve, but his hometown was occupied when he was a child. His village, it was rumored in January 1943, was scheduled to be the next target of mass executions that had been carried out elsewhere; but before that could happen, Soviet troops retook the city. “The battle front passed once more through our area, this time moving westwards,” Gorbachev remembered later. Everything had been destroyed; “no machines were left, no cattle, no seeds. Spring came. We ploughed the land by hitching cows from our individual households. The picture is still fresh in my memory, the women crying and the sad eyes of the cows.” 33

  As a result, in their conversations in the days and weeks immediately following November 9, Gorbachev, Mitterrand, and Shevardnadze would resort to Nazi metaphors to describe what was happening, as will be described below. These elements of their personal experience and background seem to have militated against the rapid formulation of policy in the early days, and meant that both were slow off the mark. While Mitterrand would eventually recover and get up to speed with Kohl, Gorbachev would never really do so.34

  The problem was, of course, bigger than simply getting over bad memories. The Soviet leader had tolerated and encouraged reformers within Communist and Socialist parties, but the complete breakdown of order in divided Germany had not been part of his vision. It further endangered the existence of the Warsaw Pact and made the economic weakness of socialist states, including his own, undeniably plain. Gorbachev had an additional reason for anguish: as the leader of the Warsaw Pact, he reasonably expected to be informed of major decisions affecting it, such as the decision to open an armed border to an enemy state. Given that there was no decision to open the Berlin Wall, in hindsight it is clear why there was no information about it available to the Russian; but that was not apparent at the time. Moscow was thus upset that in its eyes, the party had only received updates on how the new travel regulations were progressing and not word of the headline news that the border would open.35