A Unified Germany’s Foreign-Policy Mantra Will Be: Go East, Young Germans : Unification: As the two nations become one, German political and economic power will fill the vacuum created by a retreating Soviet Union.
WASHINGTON — It is easy to believe that a unified Germany will essentially be the Federal Republic writ large, the loyal North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally that, for the past 40 years, has been “Germany†for Americans. Each passing week, unification looks more and more as if West Germany is simply absorbing East Germany.
Ministries in Bonn are already running the “German Democratic Republic.†East Germans scurry to adopt the practices, norms, values and identity of the Federal Republic, whose constitution and democratic institutions have helped Germans regain the respect and trust abroad that Adolf Hitler gambled away.
But the resulting country will differ from the Federal Republic in ways difficult to discern today. Yet one characteristic is already clear: The new Germany’s foreign-policy orientation is moving eastward. The re-emergence of a unified Germany will shift the European power balance profoundly.
During the past two months, the real business of bringing about German unification has been conducted in intensive talks between West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard A. Shevardnadze. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who has been reticent about the bilateral negotiations, flew to Moscow yesterday to put the finishing touches on a deal that will include enormous West German economic and military concessions.
Bonn has already committed itself to be the Soviet Union’s chief banker and benefactor. It will guarantee a $3-billion credit line extended to the Soviet Union by major German financial institutions, led by the Deutsche and Dresdner banks. It will pay hundreds of millions of dollars to get the 380,000 Soviet soldiers out of East Germany during the next three to five years. It pledges to carry out the terms of all East Germany’s official trade agreements and fulfill all contracts East German firms had with the Soviets.
And in keeping with its view that “legitimate†Soviet security interests must be respected, West Germany last week agreed to do what it has long insisted it would never do--impose strict limits on the size of the Bundeswehr , the armed forces of a united Germany.
These concessions are more than negotiating ploys to buy Soviet assent to German unity. They presage and lay the foundation for the new German orientation East. Its nature will not become evident immediately, since Germans will be absorbed for several years in theirNo. 1 mission: reconstituting the ruined East German economy. For the remainder of the 1990s and beyond, however, the new Germany will increasingly turn to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
For centuries, German influence in what has suddenly become Europe’s new political and entrepreneurial “frontier†has been strong. As Soviet power rapidly wanes there, German dominance will fill the vacuum.
Germany’s mittellage , its central location in Europe, has always determined its foreign and much of its domestic policy. It becomes a huge economic and political advantage in a Europe that is no longer divided. Transfer of Germany’s capital city to Berlin, probably within a year, will symbolize Germany’s eastward shift.
Already, Germany champions the causes of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary within Western economic and political organizations. More important, it is becoming the Soviet Union’s advocate in Europe. Kohl and Genscher have fought to ensure that a collapsing Soviet Union not be humiliated politically or excluded from Europe. They have emphasized the importance of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe as a political clearinghouse, precisely because it is best suited for keeping the Soviets involved in Europe’s affairs.
Adding East Germany will strongly reinforce the German tilt eastward. Seventy percent of the German Democratic Republic’s trade is with the East, nearly 40% of it with the Soviet Union. Networks and relationships with Soviet and Eastern European partners have multiplied during the past four decades. Russian is the second language in East Germany.
All this does not presage the nightmare of U.S. and French planning staffs for the last 40 years--a new “Rapallo,†a German-Russian deal that turns the Germans away from the West. The Western links established by Bonn in the postwar years will not be discarded. But their importance will diminish as the ties to the East grow stronger.
Germany’s turn to the East is bound to transform the Western structures the Federal Republic belongs to. German membership in NATO will continue--for a while--but only as a transition to the Germans’ preferred solution: membership for all NATO and Warsaw Pact countries in looser collective-security arrangements based on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. If the new Germany gets its way, NATO will become a subsidiary of the CSCE.
Germany’s most important Western anchor will be the European Community. It is there, with France in tow, that Germans can best exercise its power in Western Europe and keep the EC open to the countries of Eastern Europe, perhaps even to the Soviet Union.
Hitler tried to make Europe a bulwark against the Russian Bolsheviks. Instead, his disastrous war brought them into the heart of the Continent. Today’s German leaders see their mission as keeping the Soviets, who no longer seem to be Bolsheviks, in Europe--not militarily, to be sure, but politically, economically and culturally.
Theirs can be a risky game. Brimming with a confidence born of their astonishingly rapid and successful drive toward German unity, Kohl and Genscher are intent on bringing Germany’s Western partners along. Their Germany, they contend, deserves to be trusted, because the West Germans have definitively changed since Hitler’s era. Sharing Western liberal democratic values, irrevocably incorporated into Western institutions and possessing a dynamic economy, Germany is best positioned and best equipped to win and keep Eastern Europe and Russia for the West.
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