CHAPTER 4

The Pivot: A New Germany in a Different Europe

In February 1989, Bertrand Dufourcq, a French career diplomat and political director of the Foreign Ministry, circulated a note to his colleagues on the journey from the Europe of “today to that of tomorrow.” “Everyone has the feeling,” he wrote, “that the organization of Europe as it resulted from the Second World War is about to give way to something new without anyone knowing clearly where we are going.”¹

Had Dufourcq returned to his February note only six months later, in August 1989, he could already have cited five developments of shattering proportions.

• Poland and Hungary were conducting negotiated revolutions. Gorbachev-like reform in the region was giving way to the end of communist regimes and the establishment of multiparty systems through democratic elections.

• The world’s foundational communist state, the Soviet Union, had begun an experiment with partial democracy—ripping away the authority of the Communist Party in favor of “normal” governance. A continent away, China crushed a large pro-democracy movement. The leaders in Beijing had no intention of following Gorbachev’s lead.

• In Europe, the largest military confrontation in the world seemed to be unwinding. For the first time in history, the great armed camps on the continent converged on a framework for Europe-wide reduction and limits on conventional armed forces.

• The epicenter of the Cold War—Germany—was about to explode onto the international agenda. Massive refugee flows challenged the communist regime in East Germany. The “German question” was back on the table.

• West European leaders were contemplating economic and monetary union. These plans could also be linked to the creation of a new system for global trade.

In the last months of 1989, Dufourcq, like his counterparts around the world, would be forced to write, tear up, and rewrite new guides to “where we are going.”

The Revolutions Begin

After his pleasant visit to France, Gorbachev traveled to Romania, to Bucharest, to sit down with the other leaders of the Warsaw Pact on July 7–8, 1989. The meeting became an argument about the future of traditional communist rule in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev and the new, reform-minded leaders of Poland and Hungary were on one side; the conservative communist leaders of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were on the other.

“We are receiving letters of panic from everywhere, written by those who believe that socialism is seriously threatened,” Gorbachev said. Well, “these fears are not founded and those who are afraid had better hold on, because perestroika has only just begun.” He added, “We are going from one international order to another.”²

In the last days of August 1989, Poland’s leader agreed to form a noncommunist government. Hungary’s leaders decided to open their borders to Austria, allowing growing numbers of East German refugees to flee west. These two choices were more parallel than connected. The Hungarian choice—and its significance—was especially unexpected.

East European communists were saddled with bad economic conditions, and the hapless and unhappy citizens of the region faced shortages of goods and valueless money. Those circumstances were not new.

But it was different this time. Polish and Hungarian rulers were not willing to crush opposition with the usual instruments of beatings, arrests, and imprisonment. Some of the reasons were specific to Poland and Hungary—a loss of confidence in the communist system and a culture in which overt political violence seemed more abhorrent than it had in the “old days” earlier in the twentieth century.

The crucial difference, though, was that Moscow was now led by a reformer who wanted the people to have legitimate confidence in communism—not a grudging obedience imposed by force. The Poles and Hungarians took their cues from Gorbachev. Earlier, Hungarian conservatives had warned that the Soviets would be angered by democratic reforms, and “each time, those reactions did not materialize, and the conservatives’ position kept weakening.”³

It could have gone very differently. Poles could have turned on each other—communist against noncommunist, drawing on the deep-seated hatred between them. Or the economic transitions in Hungary and Poland could have failed, giving the communists new life, particularly if there had been violence as a result. But the worst did not happen, thanks to cool heads and considerable skill in Warsaw, Budapest, and Moscow—and in the international community as well.

When Bush had visited Budapest and Warsaw in July, the memory of the “Chinese solution” was very fresh. Bush’s public speeches sounded the trumpet call for freedom. In private, he urged care. To the Hungarian reformers, Bush and Baker seemed overly cautious.⁴

In Warsaw, though, Bush’s step-by-step approach seemed very well judged. Following the advice of his State Department experts and the very influential American ambassador to Warsaw, John Davis, Bush encouraged Poland’s leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, to run for president in the upcoming elections. Jaruzelski had been the hated leader of the martial law regime. Yet in a communist country, his role was a strange one.

Generals were not supposed to run a communist government. During the 1980s, Jaruzelski had turned a party-led government into a military junta. Though allied with the Polish communists and using state institutions, a “core group of generals” really ran the show. They made decisions outside of the usual party apparatus and helped drain legitimacy away from the party.⁵

On June 23, Ambassador Davis had cabled a blunt warning. “Most Solidarity leaders are apparently convinced that Jaruzelski must be elected president if the country is to avoid civil war.”

It was his conversation directly with Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa that impressed Bush most. Wałęsa wanted to avoid a “Chinese” outcome. He believed that the terms of the Roundtable agreement with the communists needed to be respected. That would calm nerves in Moscow because Gorbachev trusted the general.⁶

Jaruzelski, though, was a proud man and was concerned that his unpopularity might lead to an embarrassing outcome: He might be spurned by his fellow citizens in the elections. In the end, the Americans succeeded in getting him to take on the presidency, keeping intact the bargain that Solidarity and the communists—and by extension Moscow—had made. He was elected in mid-July.

Though he was the president, Jaruzelski then had to form a government. Once again, he confronted his old foe, Wałęsa. Since 1988, for more than a year, neither side had felt strong enough to overrun the other.

Jaruzelski could not do much about the economic problems without Solidarity’s support. Solidarity was not yet sure it could run the government—or that it even wanted to take responsibility for the current mess. One of Wałęsa’s chief allies, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, believed that Solidarity might wish to stay in opposition, or at least stay out of a leading role, for a transition period that could take years.

Poland badly needed a functioning government. Jaruzelski tried and failed to form one. After weeks of tension, Wałęsa suddenly decided that Solidarity should make its move to power. It should take the lead in forming a government. Mazowiecki himself was to be the prime minister.⁷

To do this, Wałęsa and his core allies decided to compromise. Mazowiecki and Wałęsa chose a peaceful transition, in partnership with the communists. For that very reason, these choices are still very controversial in Poland.

At the time, this compromise worked. It did reassure Gorbachev. And Gorbachev responded constructively. From his vacation spot on the Black Sea, the Soviet leader intervened personally, on August 24, to help persuade the Polish communists to go along.

He sent his KGB head to Warsaw for consultations with the new prime minister and the communist leadership. Mazowiecki announced what the Soviets wanted to hear most: Communists would retain the Defense and Interior Ministry portfolios. Poland would remain in the Warsaw Pact. Satisfied, Gorbachev went along with establishment of the first noncommunist government in Eastern Europe since 1948.⁸

Gorbachev had stuck with the nonintervention policy. The Brezhnev Doctrine was not just rhetorically dead now—it was in reality no longer a factor in Soviet policy toward the Eastern bloc.

Fresh from his triumphal trips to Western Europe, Gorbachev was aware that his openness to change in Eastern Europe had become a defining test of his promised “new thinking.” It was the test of his commitment to a “common European home.” It was also a test of how Gorbachev saw himself, of his sense of what it meant for him to be a humane citizen and leader in Europe and the world.⁹

Wałęsa too was aware of the international environment that favored compromise. He and Jaruzelski also knew that the West was gearing up to provide some substantial assistance to Poland.

Polish leaders had been speculating about aid based on analogies to the scale of Marshall Plan aid for European recovery that the United States had offered between 1948 and 1952. No one using the Marshall Plan analogies had looked hard at exactly how that program had worked.

None of the Western nations had identified large amounts of money they could offer as incentives or grant programs that made sense. As to the existing Polish and Hungarian debt, American banks actually held little of it. Most of the debt, and most of the relevant experience with East European finance, was in West European and Japanese institutions and in the IMF.

In any case, Western governments could not do much until they saw what kind of regimes might emerge and what economic program they were prepared to adopt. Since any such program was bound to be painful, at least in the short term, Bush had been careful throughout his visit and the surrounding talks not to promise any “blank check” that would deflect the Poles from making hard choices.

Bush had scraped some U.S. aid to offer in his visits. Although the move included a novel idea that turned out to be productive, “Enterprise” funds to stimulate small business, its scale was initially modest.¹⁰

At the G-7 summit in Paris in July, the Americans and the West Germans argued for two main steps. First, they pushed to relax and reschedule the foreign debt, especially Polish debt. This had been high on the Polish list of concerns. Eventually, in 1991, the arguments would get down to which banks and which countries would accept major losses, an issue that would be especially painful for the Germans.

Second, the West Germans and the Americans proposed a multilateral conference to develop a significant aid and reform program for Poland and Hungary. The idea appears to have originated with Kohl, in a secret set of suggestions that he sent to Bush in June.

Kohl was especially focused on Poland. He remembered that 1989 was the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War with Germany’s invasion of Poland and the Hitler-Stalin partition of the country.

Everyone could begin to see that their various bilateral aid efforts had to be coordinated somehow. There were also debt discussions among government creditors (the Paris Club) and private creditors (the London Club). The governments also quickly realized that most of the experience with planning economic transition on this scale was in the international financial institutions, especially the World Bank and the IMF. Also, most experience in trading with Eastern Europe was in the European Community.

The leaders created a new ad hoc body to get all the concerned states and organizations together. This new Group of 24 (G-24) would move on urgent matters, like quick food aid, and also on longer-term transition plans and assistance.

Baker wanted the West Germans to organize the G-24 work. The Germans preferred to give the job to the European Commission. The Americans agreed to this. That result also pleased the French.

The G-24 quickly got to work, holding its first meeting two weeks later, on August 1. Just in the rest of 1989, Poland received 359,000 tons of food aid, most of it from Western Europe, amounting to about 20 pounds of food for every person in the country.¹¹

Wałęsa thought the aid plans should be much larger. But he also knew that disorder and violence would hurt Poland’s chances of receiving any significant aid at all.

Both Jaruzelski and Wałęsa were focused on a key Western institution for them, the International Monetary Fund. In chapter 2 we introduced the significance of the IMF role in Poland and Hungary.

The IMF had a French managing director and a mostly non-American staff, headquartered in Washington, DC. Created at the end of the Second World War, the old IMF had played an important but relatively limited role, helping governments manage balances of payments in a highly regulated international financial system where cross-national capital flows were modest.

During the 1980s the IMF began to transform into a very different kind of organization. As capital began flowing freely, some borrowers built up large debts. When money became tight and interest rates went up in the early 1980s, the profligate borrowers of the 1970s and early 1980s could not pay. This was the debt crisis we mentioned in chapter 1.

In that crisis, the IMF turned into the institution that took the lead in reestablishing the terms of creditworthiness in the debt workouts. It thus became a kind of standard-setter for access to foreign capital. The support of the IMF would be vital if Poland wanted to get on top of its debt crisis and sustain access to Western credit.

The IMF would not do anything significant for Poland unless the new Polish government undertook restructuring of the economy. That would require an inclusive government able to carry the political burden of the dramatic and very painful changes that would be required. That was a big part of the reason why the Roundtable process had taken place at all, why the Poles had opened up their politics. The next step, then, was that Jaruzelski ended up having to appoint a non-communist-led government, one that might undertake a dramatic, market-oriented reform program.

Yet Mazowiecki’s new government inherited an economy “in free fall.” The IMF, like Western governments, suggested that the only way out was for his government to take a leap, with a program of “genuinely radical and comprehensive reform.” His government did this. They did it with lightning speed.¹²

Theirs was a daring and difficult leap. No one really knew exactly what to do. There was no established playbook for radical post-communist economic transition. Some experts and politicians might wave at analogies to the Marshall Plan or to reform plans in East Asian countries like South Korea. But these analogies were actually not terribly useful for a country in Poland’s circumstances.¹³

A little more useful was the experience accumulating with developing-country debt crises during the 1980s. Western experts, mainly in the IMF and World Bank, were fashioning a paradigm for thinking about the reform of communist economies. But the new cases in Eastern Europe, led by Poland, presented this challenge in an extreme form.

Mazowiecki and his ministers called the West’s bluff. Aided by Western advisers, they came up with a credible program for economic transition. Their approach is known, for good reason, as “shock therapy.” It was an immediate transition to a convertible currency with the prompt elimination of price controls and nearly balanced public budgets.

In exchange, in September 1989 the new Polish government asked for some big, quick help from outside governments. It asked, in several forms: a billion-dollar stabilization fund to sustain a convertible currency, credit lines from the IMF and the World Bank, suspension of debt servicing, and a program of debt relief that would write down and reschedule loans without damage to Poland’s future access to credit markets. Poland also would need specific technical help and some targeted foreign money to make structural adjustments.

The West, led by the United States and Western Europe, delivered on its part of the bargain. As the Polish government adopted the internal plans by the end of 1989, the Stabilization Fund was created (with contributions from seventeen countries, 20 percent from the United States). The international financial institutions played their part. The desired process of debt restructuring was under way.¹⁴

The G-24 also helped organize a new institution, a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to provide more varied, longer-term support. The United States and other governments added significant bilateral aid programs, in which Poland (which had plenty of supporters in the U.S. Congress) received especially generous priority.¹⁵

The transition was difficult, with very high inflation and great turmoil. But it was successful—at least measured against the original objectives of the Poles who led the program.¹⁶

The Polish crisis had come on very visibly, with plenty of advance warning at each stage. The crisis in East Germany crept in through the side door.

Bolstered by relatively greater affluence than his country’s Eastern European neighbors enjoyed and a fantastically elaborate system of internal controls, East Germany’s longtime leader, Erich Honecker, seemed secure in his position. An English observer, Timothy Garton Ash, visited the GDR in July 1989. Opposition activists were deeply pessimistic about any chance for change. “The State Security Service—the ‘Stasi’—still seemed all-powerful, the population at large not prepared to risk its modest prosperity. Above all, the ranks of the opposition had been continuously thinned by emigration to West Germany.”¹⁷

Western observers had long known that many East Germans despised and even hated the regime, but their bitterness seemed to lapse into passive, cynical resignation. There were a tiny number of open critics, thinly tolerated with the watchful bemusement of the secret police, their ranks honeycombed with informers. There were leaders of peace movements, feminists, and ecological groups; a few figures in East Germany’s literary establishment; and a handful of dissident Marxist intellectuals. Many of these individuals found shelter in the highly influential Protestant churches and their reformist ministers who enjoyed a modicum of freedom from the state.

If there was a threat to the regime in East Berlin, it appeared to come from reformist elements within the ruling Communist Party, called the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Reformers, such as Dresden party chief Hans Modrow, seemed ready to take their cue from Gorbachev and begin East German perestroika. But the GDR’s rulers held fast. In June the East German parliament applauded Beijing’s bloody crackdown.

To Gorbachev and the Kremlin, the East German reformers were the solution. Honecker was the danger. The more stubborn and reactionary he was, the longer he put off needed reform, the more danger of an explosion.

And then the side door opened.

Hungary was a popular travel destination in the communist bloc. Some East Germans had noticed a May announcement that Hungary’s border with Austria, and thus the West, would open. The new Hungarian prime minister, an admirer of Gorbachev, thought the old barbed wire border was a “gruesome anachronism.” When Bush visited Budapest, the leadership proudly presented him with a piece of the barbed wire. It was a nice and symbolically meaningful gesture. But almost all Hungarians were already permitted to travel freely to Austria, with which Hungary had built “a masterpiece of European détente.”¹⁸

The Hungarians had not expected ordinary East Germans to take much interest. Only those with valid GDR exit stamps in their passports could leave. Illegal crossers would be arrested and sent home, as in the past.

Citizens did take an interest, and rising numbers of East German travelers, mainly East Germans traveling in Hungary but also some traveling in other East European countries, attempted to push through the Hungarian exit. Hundreds, then thousands, of them were detained in Hungary or stranded in other ways, now purposefully trying to get to the West through the side door.

The East German leaders felt growing alarm. It reminded them of the terrible days before they had built the Berlin Wall in 1961 and closed off the border with West Germany. One Politbüro member recalled “this unspeakable and unbearable manifestation of desertion” that created a spontaneous, if usually unspoken, sense of “concern and malaise.”¹⁹ By the end of August the refugee problem became a significant international crisis. A cartoonist in a South Carolina newspaper later portrayed it in the drawing we reproduce here.²⁰

West Germany was not encouraging anyone to flee the GDR. In August, Kohl assured Honecker that his only wish was for the East German refugees to return to a worthwhile life back in the German Democratic Republic.

But legally, and politically, the West German government felt obliged to help East German refugees who wanted to find their way to the Federal Republic. Other West Germans accused Kohl of doing too much to help, saying he was destabilizing the situation. Mainly his government was just improvising. Genscher’s Foreign Ministry was “absolutely taken by surprise.”²¹

The Hungarian authorities met secretly with Kohl and Genscher. They cut a deal to allow East Germans detained in Hungary to come to the FRG. One reason Hungarian leaders were willing to cut their deal to facilitate refugee flight to West Germany was that they were preoccupied with their foreign debts, an issue that was still mostly secret.²²

East Germany had to close its border with Hungary. Then, in September, East Germans began trying to get out through Czechoslovakia. Failing, they sought refuge in the West German embassy in Prague. The East German government now had to close practically all its exits in order to hold its citizens in the country.

By the middle of September, the East German refugee problem had come home. Though the secret police had seen scarcely any visible dissident movement, the landscape was like dry brush after a long drought. The refugee crisis provided the spark that ignited a mass movement of protesters, practically overnight.²³

The regime, then still led by its seventy-seven-year-old longtime head, Honecker, did have the plans and the means to implement a massive crackdown. In East Berlin, more than a thousand people were arrested on October 7–8. Police told them they would end up in “the garbage dump.” The protesters were not deterred but they were angered.

Demonstrations broke out in more than fifty cities. A massive demonstration in Leipzig on October 9 was pivotal. Robert Darnton, a historian living in East Germany at the time, recalled that “everyone present at that demonstration was convinced that the government had prepared to commit something comparable to China’s Tiananmen Square massacre.”

Yet, at the last minute, the troops withdrew. The communist officials in Leipzig had been unable to get any final guidance from their leaders in East Berlin. Those officials were too paralyzed by indecision to order a violent “Chinese solution.”²⁴

This paralysis effectively became a crucial choice, between October 4 and 9, 1989, that East Germany would not choose the “Chinese solution.” The East German Politbüro was undecided because many of the leaders could see an alternative to mass killing and arrests. The alternative—serious internal reform—had not yet been tried.

With encouragement from Gorbachev, who had just been in East Berlin to celebrate the GDR’s fortieth anniversary, the East German Politbüro deposed Honecker. The new leader was Egon Krenz.

The new East German government of Krenz confronted crises at every turn—but perhaps none more urgent than the crushing debt burden. Right after Krenz took power he flew to Moscow. He talked in depth with Gorbachev on November 1. They spoke in Russian without interpreters present and with only two other people in the room.²⁵

Gorbachev said that he was aware of the true economic condition of the GDR, that production figures had long been exaggerated.

Krenz heard Gorbachev out. Then he told him the real story. The GDR owed the West $26.5 billion as of the end of 1989 and had a current account deficit for the year of $12.1 billion.

The notetaker recorded, “Astonished, Comrade Gorbachev asked whether these numbers are exact. He had not imagined the situation was so precarious.”

There was no mistake. In fact, Krenz explained that just to pay the interest on the GDR’s foreign debts would require $4.5 billion, or about 62 percent of all the foreign currency earned by the country’s exports.

East Germany had been living well beyond its means, starting in the early 1970s. If it based its standard of living only on its own output, then that standard would immediately drop by 30 percent.

To avoid that, Krenz needed to get financial credits. He had considered going to the International Monetary Fund, but giving the Western-dominated IMF an influence over the economy would create an extremely difficult political situation.

Gorbachev advised Krenz to tell the East German people the truth, that they had been living beyond their means. The Soviet Union would supply vital raw materials. The GDR would also have to continue a “principled and flexible” policy toward West Germany. “Naturally,” Gorbachev remarked, “one must handle things so that decisions will be made in Berlin and not in Bonn.”

What Gorbachev had in mind, as he explained to Krenz and shrewdly explained to his Politburo two days later, was that the Soviet Union would help strike the balance in managing both Germanys. He would not let the West use him as the bad guy, to oppose German aspirations. Instead, “we should proceed in a triangle, with the participation of the FRG and the GDR, and do this openly.”²⁶

Krenz understood. After all, he said, “the GDR is in a certain sense the child of the Soviet Union, and one must acknowledge paternity for his children.” On November 6, Gorbachev telephoned Ambassador Vyacheslav Kochemasov in East Germany and had told him emphatically, “Our people will never forgive us if we lose the GDR.”²⁷

Gorbachev needed a stable and successfully reformed GDR. But with his own deteriorating economy at home, it was not at all clear that he could keep his promise to help the failing client state. Perestroika, launched with such hopeful enthusiasm in 1985, was stalling. The republics of the Soviet Union were becoming restless. Moscow too was confronting chaos.

The Soviet Agenda: Beyond Containment—and Beyond Communism?

With all the excitement in Central Europe, it is easy to lose sight of the choices that the international community still had to make about another crucial vector of change, the future of the Soviet Union. By the last months of 1989 the seriousness of the problems within the borders of the USSR were becoming obvious.

The Baltic republics were claiming national autonomy. In the southern USSR there were more strikes and struggles between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. There was unrest in the Moldavian Republic, bordering Romania. And at the end of August ethnic violence swept the Abkhaz region of the Georgian Republic. The security forces cracked down in a decision that Gorbachev would later say he regretted. In Ukraine, nationalist demonstrators demanded independence.

In September 1989, Gorbachev had a difficult trip to Lithuania. He called a special party plenum (a full meeting of the Central Committee) to deal with mounting problems. The session, held on September 19–20, led to more personnel shakeups, including the replacement of the longtime party chief in Ukraine. This Band-Aid did not deal with the underlying problem. The multiethnic Soviet empire was fraying badly.

The economic situation was deteriorating too. To meet all the demands, the Soviet government had been printing billions of rubles, flooding money into the economy. In a free market system, experts would expect sky-high inflation. But this was a system where prices were set by decree. So the money was out there, with few ways to spend it, in what was called a “ruble overhang.” Incomes began going up by double-digit amounts but goods disappeared from the shelves.

The Soviet Union was running short of food, and also of the foreign currency to buy it, since rubles were not a convertible currency. The Soviet Union had to engage in more foreign borrowing. For the first time, during 1989 and into 1990, the Soviet government began to feel threatened by the size of its growing foreign currency debts.

Even in the best case, a thoughtful U.S. administration had to at least imagine and plan for scenarios in which Gorbachev was deposed. These would obviously include a takeover by conservative forces, and they could extend to violent upheavals approaching civil war.²⁸ In fact, Gates commissioned just such a study—not from the intelligence community, however. Fearful of leaks, he asked Ross, Rice, and Bob Blackwell (of the CIA, not the Bob Blackwill working on the NSC staff) to think through these scenarios. Their work was so closely held that there were no calendar entries for their meetings. A leak that the United States was even considering such scenarios would have been disastrous.

The United States was faced with crucial choices about Gorbachev and his country. Conditions in the Soviet Union seemed to confirm those CIA analyses that were pessimistic about Gorbachev’s chances for success. In October, Bob Gates attempted to give a speech saying this publicly. Baker angrily quashed the Gates speech. He refused to go along with Gates’s attempts to edit it. Baker had no particular quarrel with the intelligence assessment, though he thought that assessment should remain secret. To Baker, the question instead was, “What should the U.S. do?”

Bush and Gorbachev had arranged to meet in a harbor off the island of Malta, in the Mediterranean Sea, on December 2–3. Early in September, Baker framed the issue for Bush and the rest of the cabinet. Rather than the standard sort of Cold War question about how to manage the Communist threat, now he described the issue as: How do we manage the “crumbling of Communism—not the threat of Communism but [the] consequences of its failure?”²⁹

After all, pessimism is not a policy. Appraising attitudes in the Bush administration in the last months of 1989, Scowcroft recalled a nice little group portrait in which “everyone” agreed that Gorbachev’s chances of pulling off a comprehensive reform agenda “were not good.”

Beyond that assessment, there was no consensus about what to do. There was Baker, on one side. He was “the most optimistic concerning [Gorbachev’s] sincerity about reform.” Scowcroft placed himself as being more suspicious, but also eager to see what was possible. Eagleburger was close to this position, finding the debate about whether to support Gorbachev “academic and sterile.”

Gates emphasized pessimism about Gorbachev’s prospects. He worried that any reforms could easily be reversed. Cheney was still more negative. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, avoided contradicting Cheney but seemed “on the moderate side.” Vice President Dan Quayle was even more negative than Cheney.³⁰

But Bush did not try to find the median point in this group. His views were practically identical to Baker’s.

Moreover, Bush was determined to use the thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations to make big progress in arms control, in part because—as he confided to his diary—“we’ve got to do less in the way of defense spending.”³¹ He was determined to carry out a general fiscal retrenchment to deal with the hangover from the Reagan era and cut the public deficits.

If “everyone” was pessimistic about the prospects of Gorbachev’s program, Bush and Baker also believed in his sincerity. Even if Gorbachev and his circle were sincere, however, the United States and its allies were uneasy about how deeply these changes were accepted in the rest of the Soviet government. At his December summit meeting with Gorbachev, in Malta, Bush raised a recent discovery of Soviet/Cuban arms supplies, including surface-to-air missiles, in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It was not at all clear that Gorbachev had ordered or was even aware of this.

Bush and Baker therefore answered the “what to do” question with a strategy that had two dimensions:

• Moving “beyond containment,” the United States would try, as best it could, to help Gorbachev. The U.S. role might be marginal, compared to what Soviets did. But such a course might improve the odds that the Soviet leader’s program would succeed. Good on the merits, the effort would also demonstrate at least that the United States wanted to help. That itself was vital.

• The United States would hedge against failure, and against the disconnect between Gorbachev and his security establishment, by trying to cement objective achievements as rapidly as possible. Since May–June 1989, the arms control tempo had already accelerated on all fronts, mainly in the Baker-Shevardnadze work. Bush would redouble pressure, including on officials in his own government, to turn this into a full-court press to reduce strategic nuclear arsenals, achieve a worldwide ban of chemical weapons, restrict underground nuclear testing, establish Open Skies, and push the radical downsizing and redeployment of conventional forces in Europe.

Bush wanted to get most of this work done in only about one year, by the end of 1990. That rushed timetable would also later figure in the push to accelerate the unification of Germany. No one knew how long the “Gorbachev window” would be open.

Preparing for the Malta summit, Baker suggested that rather than wait and react to a presentation by Gorbachev, Bush should lead off the whole set of meetings. Bush should outline a comprehensive program with these ingredients. Scowcroft was hesitant. But Bush liked the idea. He pushed his staff to redraft presentations and be as forthcoming as possible.

American and Soviet leaders arrived in Malta along with one of the Mediterranean’s violent winter storms. They had intended to meet aboard cruisers of the respective navies. Instead, as the winds howled outside, the talks on Marsaxlokk Bay were confined to the wardroom of a support ship, the Soviet cruise liner Maxim Gorkii.

Amid the waves, Bush, old sailor that he was, climbed aboard the Soviet vessel for the first full meeting. He moved right into outlining a “framework of areas in which we want to move forward with you.”³²

After Bush finished, Gorbachev said he had been looking for a tangible demonstration of American support. “During your presentation, I heard it. I was going to ask you today to go beyond words. But you have done so.”

Where Bush had tabled initiatives, Gorbachev spoke about his political philosophy. “The emphasis on confrontation based on our different ideologies is wrong.” Those “methods of the Cold War were defeated.”

The Soviet leader knew that some Americans thought Eastern Europe was falling apart and the United States only needed “to keep its baskets ready to gather the fruit.” But he did not think that Bush believed this.

Bush assured Gorbachev—and it was a recurrent theme—that as Europe had changed, “we have not responded with flamboyance or arrogance.… I have conducted myself in ways not to complicate your life. That’s why I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall.”

Gorbachev said he had noticed that and appreciated it.

Bush and Gorbachev agreed on the goals and urgency of the arms control agenda. Baker and Shevardnadze would follow up (and spent a fair amount of time at Malta, while the leaders were in their small meetings, on a U.S. move in the chemical weapons talks).

On no subject was the new agenda “beyond containment” more evident than on economics. Bush had offered a series of proposals that were, in essence, about how to bring East and West economic systems closer. The U.S. and Western side would have to lift old sanctions. They would have to open more trade and investment. They should offer whatever advisory help might be welcome and bring the Soviet Union—at least as an observer—into the new global trade system that was being worked out in the Uruguay Round negotiations.

One of the Malta meetings was devoted to discussion of the Soviet economy. With Bush’s support, America’s chief central banker, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, had gone to the Soviet Union in October 1989 (accompanied by Zoellick) to survey the Soviet economic situation. Never before had Soviet economic officials opened up this way to such an American economic inspection.

Greenspan came away “skeptical” that the Soviet leadership would be able to develop and execute a difficult, coherent program to attain any “quick takeoff into a rapidly growing market-oriented economy.” Market pricing alone was not an answer unless there were competitive enterprises and competitive pricing, thoughtful sequencing of the needed changes, and more institutional capacity to handle the disruption. Analyzing various scenarios, Greenspan saw serious dangers of disorder and violence.

Greenspan did not think the Soviet military was the big obstacle. The soldiers were worried about the economy too. He found that his Soviet counterparts were “surprisingly open to our ideas,” but had trouble seeing how to carry them into practice.

Despite his unease, Greenspan supported U.S. help “to improve the performance of their economy which is in our longer-term interest. The odds on the success of such activity are long; but the potential payoff is large.”³³

The Soviet economic problems were enormous. No one had easy answers for how to do a post-communist transition. Government as well as academic expertise was thin. The IMF was one of the few places that had relevant experience on the financial side; the World Bank one of the few that had serious institutional knowledge about all the microeconomic and sectoral changes that might be needed. But it was a giant undertaking and the transition was bound to be painful.

The United States simply did not find the kind of economic policy partners in the Soviet leadership that the U.S. had found among the new leaders in Poland. The Soviet system was far less flexible and much more burdened by the huge claims of monopoly industries and the military complex.

Gorbachev’s aide, Chernyaev, took some time during the autumn of 1989 to read over a set of Western writings about possible Soviet reforms. Two points stood out to him about how Westerners saw his country. One was that the Westerners thought that “Gorbachev needs to finally decide to make a breakthrough, he cannot linger and play on the safe side any longer, he has to step away from half-measures, time is working against him.” More and more, Chernyaev had come to share this view. During 1990, Gorbachev’s unwillingness or inability to “make a breakthrough” became Chernyaev’s greatest single frustration with the boss to whom he was so devoted.

Yet Gorbachev could not do this alone. The other point Westerners kept making was that “Gorbachev” needed to make this or that choice. “Everybody appeals to the personality,” Chernyaev noted in his diary. “But the problem,” he added in this personal journal, “is that Gorbachev no longer has the power to do anything decisive, even if he makes up his mind.”

Why? “This is not because, as the West thinks, he is hindered by Ligachev [a ‘right’-wing opponent], the apparatus, or the bureaucracy. It is because Gorbachev does not have a mechanism through which he can implement his decisions. There is nobody to enforce them. The Party is no longer recognized as a governing body.”³⁴

Whatever the specific policy proposals, in retrospect a modest start on an ambitious agenda, Malta had done what Bush intended. Chernyaev was “simply astonished” at the cooperative approach Bush and Baker adopted, as if they were colleagues at a Politburo meeting trying to solve common problems. To his diary, he noted that “M.S. [Mikhail Sergeyevich] acted like he and Bush were old pals—frank and simple, and openly well-intentioned.” He thought the meeting made “a big impression” on Gorbachev too, “convincing him on an emotional level that the U.S. administration had made a choice.”³⁵

Putting Words into Action

Throughout the turbulent winter of 1989–90 and on into the spring of 1990, the U.S. government maintained this dual approach: Help Gorbachev politically and economically and raise his odds for success; at the same time consolidate the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe and lasting arms control.

As Scowcroft put it to Bush, this was a “rare period in which we can seek to achieve a fundamental shift in the strategic balance, especially in Europe,” with the opportunity to gain “freedom for Eastern Europe,” a “significant reduction of the Soviet military threat to the West,” and “the demilitarization of Soviet foreign policy in the regions.” The United States would help perestroika as much as it could, “as long as Gorbachev continues to tolerate the diminution of Soviet power in Eastern Europe.”

Within a few years the change would be irreversible; the USSR would not be able to restore its military domination of Eastern Europe without a “full-scale invasion.” The United States had to do all it could, since it expected that Gorbachev’s power would face even more serious challenges during 1990.³⁶

The arms control work was running through five different sets of negotiations. Bush and Baker were pressing for all of these to produce mutually satisfactory results within a year.

Bush’s instrument for managing this staggering agenda within his huge national security machinery was a special interagency group, called an “Ungroup” because it was outside the usual interagency system. This was run with great skill by one of Scowcroft’s staffers, Arnold Kanter, and ramrodded with superb staff work by Gates.

If the combination worked, if Gorbachev could manage change and the changes could be consolidated in all these military spheres, the result would be a different kind of global system. It would be one in which the United States and the Soviet Union would have a fundamentally more cooperative relationship, in a system with new structures for such cooperation, even as national interests occasionally diverged. Gorbachev told Bush flatly that he believed, and would say, that the United States and the USSR were no longer adversaries.

For the Soviet military the CFE talks on conventional forces in Europe were always the most consequential and threatening. Most historians have paid little attention to the details of CFE; many hardly mention it, even though it was the most ambitious arms control agreement of all time. CFE was negotiating ceilings from the Atlantic to the Urals, among twenty-three states, on tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery, combat aircraft, and helicopters. The 1989 add-on of limits on foreign-deployed U.S. and Soviet forces was another item.

But the main focus in CFE was on reductions and limits of equipment, which were vital and more verifiable. The planned reductions would have a fundamental impact. Soviet combat power west of the Urals would be cut by about half. The crunch time for those choices would come during 1990. The conclusion and difficult implementation of this agreement put more strain on Gorbachev during 1990 and 1991 than any other set of arms control problems.³⁷

Himself a combat veteran who had fought against the Germans during the Second World War, Chernyaev had a jaundiced view of the Soviet military brass. He privately noted that Gorbachev “knows that nobody will start a war against us. There is no real military threat. We need the army for the superpower prestige, and internally because there is nothing we can do with it right now. It has turned into an organic burden on society.”³⁸

Bush did want to help Gorbachev, but it was hard to know what to do. At least on economic matters and in matters of arms control, the United States could offer constructive ideas—and in the case of security policy, push ahead with forward-leaning agreements. But on the nationality problem it was harder to find the right balance between wanting Gorbachev to succeed (and stay in power) and America’s long-standing support for self-determination in the Baltic states.

It was also hard because Gorbachev himself did not seem to really have a strategy for dealing with the problem. It often seemed as if he was temporizing.

The Baltic republics of the Soviet Union—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—had once been part of the tsarist Russian Empire. They had gained their independence after World War I. In 1940, while Hitler and Stalin were dividing up Eastern Europe, the USSR had forcibly annexed these short-lived republics. The United States had never recognized the annexations.

Early in 1990, the Lithuanian leaders demanded full independence from the USSR. After narrowly heading off demands for immediate use of force against the dissident republic, Gorbachev canceled all his foreign appointments and headed a delegation that flew to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, on January 11. The results were inconclusive. The Lithuanians formally declared their independence in March 1990.

Also in January, a little more than a week after the talks in Lithuania, there was interethnic violence in Azerbaijan. Gorbachev sent defense minister Dmitry Yazov to the scene. Yazov ordered the use of force.

Hundreds were killed during fighting in Baku on January 20. As one top aide bitterly remarked, “Trans-Caucasus became Soviet Lebanon.”³⁹

Gorbachev was a complex man who had often responded to challenges by trying to leap ahead of them—even if he didn’t seem to know quite where he was going. In early 1990, the Soviet leader took another such leap. He decided to revolutionize the structure of executive power in the Soviet Union.

The USSR had a dual structure on paper. Government officials were in charge of administering the country. But any decision that mattered was up to the party apparatus itself, not the government structures. The party told the Soviet government what to do. Gorbachev owed his power to his position as head of the party.

As the changes that Gorbachev himself launched gained momentum, the power and legitimacy of the party eroded. Gorbachev became more and more frustrated with party officials and the structures that supported the status quo.

His risky alternative, his leap forward, was to create a normal government that no longer ruled through the party. During January 1990, he appears to have decided to make himself a direct state ruler. Yakovlev urged him to concentrate “the real, plenipotentiary State power in your hands, removing the Politburo and even the talkative Supreme Soviet from the levers of power.”⁴⁰

In the first months of 1990, Gorbachev and his team developed a plan to turn him into a president. A president of the Soviet Union would gain his legitimacy through election. Then he might wield broad executive power directly over the government officials across the Union.

To design this new presidency, Gorbachev chose a model with elements drawn from both American and French experience, with ministers looking toward both the president and the parliament. He would be advised by a newly created Presidential Council, a kind of cabinet of ministers and leading intellectuals, and a Federation Council, representing the different republics (and reminiscent of the Bundesrat model in German history). Gorbachev’s team secured this massive revision of the Soviet constitution in March 1990. They then sought and received advice and help in this work from the American and French governments.

Conservatives were willing to support the new moves, which sounded like a way to strengthen executive power and restore some order.

Liberals were suspicious. But they liked the multiparty democracy the reforms seemed to invite. The constitutional guarantee of a ruling monopoly for the Communist Party was repealed.

Rather than risk a divisive Union-wide election campaign and a possible conservative coup, Gorbachev took one step back. Rather than run for election to the presidency, he instead sought an indirect election to his new office. The new Congress of People’s Deputies—the legislative body of the government—would choose the president, not a popular election. Not surprisingly, he was chosen as the Soviet Union’s first president on March 14; he took his oath of office the next day.⁴¹

Gorbachev was very proud of his new title. When he visited Washington three months later, his aides told the Americans to refer to him as President Gorbachev, not General Secretary Gorbachev. The Soviets landed at Andrews Air Force Base in a plane bearing the Soviet flag on the tail—Air Force One, Soviet-style.

As Gorbachev took office, the Russian republic had just run its own elections. These were popular elections on a more open and democratic model, with a range of parties.

Almost half of the elected deputies followed a coalition called “Democratic Russia,” and about another 40 percent were “Communists of Russia,” with the rest swinging back and forth. Yeltsin led the “Democratic Russia” camp. He, like other leaders in the republics, could now claim legitimacy from having been directly elected, and he was a dominant figure in the newly elected Russian parliament. He was elected its chairman at the end of May 1990.

A New Germany?

The new Krenz government in East Germany tried desperately to fulfill the promise to Moscow to reform and tell the people the truth. This resulted largely in ridicule and an increasing sense that the GDR was beyond help. Still, many wanted to believe that East Germany would survive and that the reform of the country and the question of eventual unification could be separated. Some wanted to contain even any talk of unification.

No one expressed herself more clearly on this point than Margaret Thatcher. She visited Moscow late in September. At one point in the conversation, she asked the Soviet notetaker (Chernyaev) to put his pen down. He did.

“Britain and Western Europe,” she said, “are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words are written in the [May 1989] NATO Communique, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany.”

Such a development, Thatcher explained, “would lead to changes in the post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the entire international situation and could lead to threats to our security.

“We are not interested in the destabilization of Eastern Europe,” she added, “or the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty either.”

“What a woman!” Chernyaev confided to his diary. Later, Thatcher praised Gorbachev for an hour on Soviet television.⁴²

The Soviet government certainly agreed with Thatcher. Shevardnadze, in America, had complained privately to Baker and said publicly, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, “It is to be deplored, that fifty years after World War II some politicians have begun to forget its lessons.… It is our duty to warn those who, willingly or unwillingly, encourage those forces.”⁴³

When he met with Krenz on November 1, Gorbachev confidently listed all the West European leaders and other prominent people, including Americans and West Germans, who had pronounced that German unification was anathema.⁴⁴ Gorbachev admitted, however, that Bush’s government was making some troubling noises.

Bush did indeed have a different view. On September 7, Baker’s deputy, Eagleburger, told Kohl’s chief of staff, Rudolf Seiters, that “one thing needed to be clear about U.S. policy: although it does not make much sense for the U.S. to talk a lot about the subject of reunification, when President Bush says that he favors reunification, he means it. The U.S. private position on reunification is the same as our public one—we favor it.”⁴⁵

If that point was not already clear, Bush made it again, in public, on September 18. Reacting to a couple of columns that morning, a reporter raised the subject. Bush said, “I would think it’s a matter for the Germans to decide. But put it this way: if that was worked out between the Germanys, I do not think we should view that as bad for Western interests.”

He went on, “I think there has been a dramatic change in post–World War II Germany. And so, I don’t fear it.… There is in some quarters a feeling—well, a reunified Germany would be detrimental to the peace of Europe, of Western Europe, some way; and I don’t accept that at all, simply don’t.”⁴⁶

Helmut Kohl was rethinking the possibilities too. As a young politician in the postwar Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he had been a follower of then-chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Back then the CDU view was that the GDR was illegitimate. Change would come from Western strength and Western pressure.

That hope faded as years of division hardened into a modus vivendi to support two separate states—both UN members, both internationally recognized. Annually on the “day of German unity,” the German chancellor would say something vague about the hope for one country again. But it was just that—a hope, with no operational implications at all.

By October 1989, Kohl was reverting back to the old ideas of his political youth. The communist regime was illegitimate. Western firmness and pressure was the way to get results.

Kohl was careful. “Now a clear head is necessary, not excitement,” he told his party colleagues. A political revolution was brewing inside the GDR, he believed. The Krenz government would not last.

So Kohl pushed for free elections in the GDR that could end the communist monopoly on power. As for what would happen after that, it would just be left open. At the time, this short-term agenda was radical enough.⁴⁷

To ask for help, Kohl called Bush on October 23. Bush promised he would help, and he did. The next day he gave an interview to the New York Times. He said, “I don’t share the concern that some European countries have about a reunified Germany.”⁴⁸

Kohl sought and received similar support from Mitterrand, who saw the matter in broad historical currents. To him, the German nation was a historical force. Reunification was a possibility, not to be ruled in or ruled out.

Secretly, Mitterrand’s cabinet had held a quite farsighted discussion about Germany’s future on October 18. So Mitterrand’s position was considered and deliberate. After meeting with Kohl on November 2–3, Mitterrand announced that “I am not afraid of reunification. I do not ask myself that kind of question as history advances.… The answer is simple: insofar as Eastern Europe is evolving, Western Europe must itself grow stronger, strengthen its structures and define its policies.”⁴⁹

Kohl then took his stand to demand free elections and change in the GDR. As for the long term, he emphasized “free self-determination.”

But he went on, “Our fellow Germans do not need lectures—from anybody. They themselves know best what they want. And I am sure: if they get an opportunity, they will decide in favor of unity.” After quoting, significantly, Konrad Adenauer (“We strive for both—for a free and united Germany in a free and united Europe”), Kohl concluded, “We have less reason than ever to be resigned to the long-term division of Germany into two states.”⁵⁰

There he left if for another day—one that would come sooner than anyone, even Kohl, could have imagined.

As the new East German government prepared to announce its reform program at an upcoming party meeting (called a “plenum”), ordinary citizens poured into the streets to voice pent-up dissatisfaction with decades of hardship and repression. The daily public protests were capped by the rally of an estimated half a million in East Berlin on November 4.

Krenz replaced part of the ruling Politbüro. The plenum reorganized the government and vaulted Hans Modrow, a reformer within the SED exiled as party boss in Dresden, into the Politbüro. The new government promised to legalize the New Forum and other opposition parties. The U.S. embassy in East Berlin reported to Washington that the plenum had demonstrated “a significant shift toward potentially credible reform, primarily because of the dramatic rise of Modrow.”⁵¹

The Soviet government liked Modrow more than Krenz. Moscow had long harbored a friendly interest in the Dresden chief’s future.⁵² Now that reformist communists such as Günter Schabowski and Modrow were coming to the fore, the USSR felt even more strongly committed to backing a new leadership. The Soviets hoped this group could now stabilize the situation.

The reorganized East German government quickly faced the question of travel restrictions. Should they continue to keep East Germans penned up in their country? On November 4 the GDR had begun allowing East Germans to travel to the Federal Republic through Czechoslovakia. Once again tens of thousands of East Germans crowded the roads into Czechoslovakia, trying to make their way west. Once again, the West German embassy grounds in Prague began filling with refugees.

Krenz had promised Gorbachev that he would allow almost all East German citizens to travel, so long as they took no money with them, and Gorbachev had posed no objection.⁵³ Shevardnadze’s top deputy told the Soviet ambassador to let the East Germans decide this, treat the travel laws as a GDR decision. The ambassador insisted on receiving a written instruction telling him to step back. After a few days, he got one, duly stating that the travel law was “an internal responsibility of the GDR.”⁵⁴

The East Germans gave the job of writing the new travel law to the former security chief, Erich Mielke, who had just been forced out of the government and the Politbüro. The text of the law was hastily drafted, the Soviets were later told, by two Stasi colonels and two departmental chiefs from the Interior Ministry.

The draft extended new liberal rules to all trips, even short private ones, and to all of the GDR’s frontiers, including those in Berlin. No senior official on the East German side fully grasped that, in theory, the law would apply to the Berlin Wall, a border and a city under Four Power supervision.

“Four Power” controls were the rights of the four occupying powers in Germany—the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, and France—in 1945. Since there had never been a formal German peace treaty, these rights over “Germany as a whole” and over the administration of Berlin had never been relinquished.

The poorly drafted text of the travel law read, “Requests for private trips abroad may be submitted from now on even in the absence of special prerequisites.” There was certainly no intention to authorize trips abroad without forcing citizens to first get an exit visa. The draft was submitted to the 213 members of the SED Central Committee present for the party plenum. No one objected.⁵⁵

The Central Committee blessed the draft on November 9. Krenz then gave a copy to Politbüro member Schabowski, who had been holding daily press conferences on the activities of the SED party plenum. Krenz was busy with other matters.

One of the notes to the document promised that the new travel regulations would be announced the next day, November 10, after exact instructions on how to implement the law had been circulated to East German security authorities throughout the country. Krenz had told Gorbachev that he would submit the new law to the legislature before Christmas.

Schabowski overlooked this detail and read the new law near the end of his hourlong press conference. Reading and extemporizing, he said that interim travel regulations had been prepared that would allow anyone to apply for private travel, that permission would be forthcoming in short order, and that the police had been told to issue visas for permanent emigration “immediately,” without application. The new law, he said, would take effect immediately. Then, just after seven o’clock in the evening, Schabowski drove home.

Those watching the press conference were seized with curiosity. But the exact text of the draft was not available, so the journalists reported their interpretations of the law, garbling the language and creating a public sensation during the night of November 9–10. Confused diplomats and West German officials were trying to figure out what Schabowski had meant. During his press conference the West German mission’s press representative—clearly more aware of the import of the announcement than Schabowski himself—was seen to grasp his head, moan, and dash from the room to sound the alarm. Officials in Bonn, including the intelligence service, were taken by surprise.⁵⁶

Rumors spread that all travel restrictions were being dropped, including exit visa requirements. Thousands of people began massing near the Berlin Wall. They asked border guards about the new regulations, but the guards had no information and no guidance to offer.

As the night wore on, huge numbers of people crowded at the wall. The guards at their checkpoints still had not received their instructions. They did not know what to do and were uncertain about their legal duty.

Security forces might have been able to handle a planned demonstration, but this was not a demonstration. With hordes of people forcing the guards to give way or shoot the confused and milling throng, local guard commanders gave way. The bewildered interior minister ratified what his guard commanders had already decided. Crowds streamed through into West Berlin. The wall had been opened. November 10 became a holiday in Berlin as masses of East Germans joined their Western brethren in a tumultuous, euphoric celebration.

Krenz immediately put the best face on events and pretended that the opening of the wall had been intentional. That was true in substance. But it was not supposed to happen the way it did. Actually, the government had been so disorganized that it took months before Schabowski himself was able to piece together just what had happened that night.

Krenz had phoned the Soviet ambassador in the morning of November 10, and Kochemasov had told him that the Soviets were confused about what was happening and were angry that he, Krenz, was being so indecisive.

But, Krenz replied, we were planning to open the borders in any case, as your side knew.

Not this way, Kochemasov answered, and on the FRG-GDR frontier, not in Berlin. Matters in Berlin affect the interests of the Four Powers.

Well, replied Krenz, this is now a theoretical question.⁵⁷

In one of the most colossal administrative errors in the long, checkered history of public bureaucracy, the Krenz government abdicated responsibility for the most important decision in its history to the people in the street. The enormous façade of government authority had been devastated. Robert Darnton observed a week later that “in East Berlin especially, the idea has spread that in conquering the Wall the people seized power.”⁵⁸

The people never let the government have its power back again. It was a mortal wound to the communist regime.

Schabowski was not worried, however. He was just glad that the government had finally done something popular. “We hadn’t a clue that the opening of the wall was the beginning of the end of the Republic,” he said. “On the contrary, we expected a stabilization process.”

Years of insulation from the feelings of ordinary people had left East Germany’s leaders with no instincts for how they should seize this historic moment. In the next few days not a single leader of the GDR appeared at the wall. But every leading figure in the Federal Republic of Germany showed up there. They came to speak both to West Germans and to the new leaders of East Germany—the common people.⁵⁹

The opening of the Berlin Wall was as electrifying and emotional an event as the world had seen in many years. There were the scenes of families reunited after years of separation. There were the giddy East German citizens encountering the casual prosperity most West Germans took for granted, the bewildering array of material goods that had been nothing more than images on West German television. And there were the feelings of nationhood that welled up in Germans on both sides of the divide—among people who had assumed that those emotions were long dead and properly buried. Upon learning that the wall had opened, the Federal Bundestag broke spontaneously into the national anthem.

The moment did not produce immediate calls for unification of the country. But it did produce an atmosphere in which most understood that the old order was dead. The question would come rapidly onto the international agenda, and events threatened to overrun the ability of statesmen to answer it. What would the new Germany be?

By the end of November, the leaders of the two Germanys offered competing visions for their countries. Then, literally within a week and a half, so fast one could miss it, the French and American governments added their voices.

In Bonn, policymaking on the German question was dominated by a small number of key personalities. Helmut Kohl has already been a major figure in our story. It may help to recall that Kohl was the first chancellor of the FRG who had not been of military age or older during the Second World War. He represented the first postwar generation. This was the generation that remembered both the pain of German division and the riveting 1948–49 Allied airlift of food and coal into Soviet-blockaded Berlin as formative experiences. Kohl’s wife came from a family of refugees from Germany’s lost eastern territory.

Never known as a charismatic speaker or party visionary, never the ideological standard-bearer, Kohl had been underestimated throughout his career. A master of party politics, Kohl instinctually perceived the middle ground on an issue before others could discern it. By the time they found it, Kohl might already be standing there.

Kohl’s style was more distinctive than his ideology. He had a solid common touch, which was an authentic part of who he was. In private as well as in public, he was dedicated to traditional family values and a deeply felt, sometimes defensive, pride in his German nation. He was like Bush in the sense that underlying principles or convictions were more important to him than the particulars of policy disputes, although he could certainly handle details.

With Genscher and the Foreign Ministry barred from “domestic” inter-German unity negotiations with the GDR and some of the key high-level diplomacy, Kohl became the central figure for the FRG. Kohl’s closest aide for foreign policy was Horst Teltschik, forty-nine years old in 1989. Other staff members and relevant cabinet ministers (finance, interior) handled negotiations on internal German issues.

Teltschik had suffered personally from Germany’s defeat and division. He was six years old when, with his family, he had fled to Bavaria, refugees from the German-speaking community in the country of Czechoslovakia. The family had a difficult time.

After becoming an army officer, Teltschik trained as an academic. Like the American, Rice, Teltschik’s academic work focused on the workings of the communist bloc (his dissertation was on East German–Soviet relations, hers on civil-military relations in the Soviet bloc).

Neither Teltschik’s influence nor his brashness won him any friends at the Foreign Ministry, where Genscher had become an institution, and a powerful one. As foreign minister since 1974, Genscher was one of the most enduring and popular figures on the West German political scene.

Genscher had grown to adulthood during the Hitler period and the Second World War. At the age of ten (1937) he had joined the Hitler Youth. He was only sixteen when he found himself manning air defense batteries against the bombers raining explosives down on his country. American soldiers took him prisoner. Released, he rejoined his mother in Halle, in the Soviet zone of occupation.

After the war he studied law. He found life under communism unbearable. In 1952, after seven years of it, he made his way into West Germany (this was before the wall went up in 1961). There he settled into law and FDP politics in Bremen, then Bonn. The FDP, a small European liberal party, favored limited government; it rejected communism, socialism (the SPD), and clericalism (the Protestant CDU or Catholic CSU). Known for his wit and judgment, Genscher rose to become interior minister in 1969, then foreign minister in the 1974 coalition formed by SPD chancellor Schmidt.

As we mentioned in chapter 1, in 1982, Genscher and his party had left the SPD coalition and joined the government headed by Kohl. Genscher, whose wife’s family had also fled Germany’s former eastern territory, shared Kohl’s deep convictions about the nation’s larger national identity.

As foreign minister, Genscher had positioned himself as a bridge between East and West, between Germany and France. This stance was popular. So was Genscher’s energetic globetrotting style. By 1989 he personified German foreign policy to an entire generation that could barely remember a time when he did not hold the post.

No one—neither ordinary citizens nor heads of state—knew what would or should happen next in Germany. Years after the event it is easy to assume that the popular pressure for unity was immediate, predictable, and irresistible. It was not.

Even after the first popular voices for unification were heard on November 19 in Leipzig, many East Germans still thought that the GDR should remain a separate sovereign state. Even those who favored the idea of eventual unification wanted to retain “socialism.” East German dissidents wanted a better socialism in a separate German state, one that rejected the materialism and exploitation of the West.

At first, the dominant theme was wariness. Everyone was cautioning each other. Bush was criticized, and satirized, for offering what was regarded as an underwhelming public reaction. It annoyed him. He had made a deliberate choice not to humiliate the Soviets. “I won’t beat on my chest and dance on the wall.”

Telephoning, Gorbachev warned Kohl that every action must now be “carefully thought out.” He said that “we cannot allow clumsy actions to endanger this turn or, worse, to push events toward an indescribable path, a path to chaos.” Kohl readily agreed.⁶⁰

In the first weeks, the West German line was clear. As the new British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, summarized it, “[The West Germans] want to encourage free elections, avoid talk of reunification, and reassure the Soviet Union.”⁶¹

In East Germany, leaders began moving to follow the Polish and Hungarian models for change. This was a Roundtable process to set up elections to be held in 1990.

The East German parliament, no longer a rubber stamp for the ruling party, elected a new prime minister, the one credible communist reform figure, Hans Modrow, the party secretary from Dresden who had been chastised in early 1989 for supporting Gorbachev-style perestroika.

Unassuming, straightforward, Modrow formed a government with several new faces, including some noncommunists. Political reform, he explained, would establish the legitimacy of the GDR as “a socialist state, a sovereign German state.” The GDR would reject the “unrealistic as well as dangerous speculation about a reunification.”

The two German states would now have a “cooperative coexistence” on all questions, from peace and armaments to culture and tourism, cemented by a “treaty community” (Vertragsgemeinschaft).⁶² The two German states could form a relationship akin to that of members of the European Community, including harmonization of rules and even, perhaps, a form of economic union.

In mid-November, Modrow’s approach won support. For the first time there was a voice in East Berlin to counter Kohl’s vision for Germany, backed by many voices in both East and West Germany.⁶³

The new East German government was looking toward multiparty elections that, it then thought, would be held in late 1990 or early 1991. Public opinion was cautious. Polls indicated that the largest segment of West Germans, 44 percent, foresaw closer relations between the two states along the lines of the Federal Republic’s ties to Austria and Switzerland. Another poll showed that most West Germans at least supported unification in principle, and nearly half thought it might be achieved in maybe ten years.

Kohl’s likely opponent in his 1990 reelection campaign, Social Democratic Party leader Oskar Lafontaine, had a clear view—against unification. He said that “the conservative right wing” might have “the old national state as its point of orientation.” To Lafontaine, “this isn’t appropriate anymore, and it certainly has nothing to do with the current wishes and feelings of the people of the GDR.”⁶⁴

In the third week of November, after his staff had some initial discussions with the new East German leaders, Kohl decided to announce his preferred agenda for change. It was the most daring and consequential move of his public life.

Teltschik and a constitutional law scholar whom Kohl admired, Rupert Scholz, had urged Kohl to outline a concept of his own. They said he had a historical duty to offer some vision that might lead to German unity.

As we have mentioned, Kohl’s attachment to this ideal ran deep. It distinguished him from some of his political rivals, even inside his own party.

Teltschik and Scholz encouraged Kohl to believe that such a program could be outlined as a step-by-step plan. The steps could walk through a confederation (a little like Modrow’s “treaty community”) and on to unity.

Teltschik had been encouraged by his much too optimistic reading of an informal paper that he had just received from a Soviet German expert. The paper seemed to imply flexibility in Soviet analysis of the situation.

Kohl decided to move fast, gathering his confidants in his bungalow on the evening of Thursday, November 23. They decided that over the weekend they would secretly prepare Kohl’s speech.

Teltschik held the pen. Genscher and the rest of the West German cabinet was deliberately excluded from all of these deliberations. If they were included, one adviser counseled, “an hour later” Kohl’s idea would be in the press, where “it will fizzle and vanish (‘geht kaputt’).”⁶⁵

The following Tuesday, November 28, Kohl delivered his address to the West German parliament, the Bundestag. It was a ten-point program for German unity, phased as a series of steps. Kohl mentioned no specific timeline for achieving them. The international status of this united Germany was deliberately left vague. The plan, he said, would involve a “peace order” and arms control, all embedded somehow “in the all-European development and in the East-West relationship.”⁶⁶

With this speech Chancellor Kohl defined a path to German unity, both internationally and within German domestic politics. It was cautiously and reassuringly worded, implying a long-term time frame. Privately his advisers had a five-to ten-year timeline in mind.

But the endpoint goal, unity, was the magnetic pole that would attract or repel. Genscher felt he should congratulate Kohl on his “great speech” and stand by the program. The opposition SPD, divided on how to react, offered qualified support for the plan.

Teltschik exulted in his diary about the “giant success!” He wrote, “We have achieved our goal. The Chancellor has taken over the leadership of opinion about the German question.”⁶⁷

Fearful of leaks, Kohl had not revealed the contents of his speech to his Western allies either. He could hardly tell foreign governments what he would not tell his own foreign minister.

Some of his advisers foresaw that springing the move without any warning could prove to be counterproductive. Teltschik preferred the “surprise effect.” Kohl backed this view, but with one exception. He ordered that the text of the speech be sent to President Bush as it was being delivered, accompanied by a lengthy message explaining what Kohl was trying to do.⁶⁸

In Washington, at first some officials were irritated about the lack of consultation, until experts quickly realized that Kohl had not consulted Genscher either. There was angst about the absence of any specific mention of NATO. But Bush and others were essentially positive. He and Kohl discussed it (“We are on the same wavelength,” Bush said), and planned to meet together (without their foreign ministers, at Kohl’s request) in Brussels about a week later, after Bush’s Malta summit with Gorbachev.⁶⁹

“Every word of sympathy for self-determination and unity is very important now,” Kohl said. Bush knew it. Talking to reporters later in the day on November 29, he told them, “I feel comfortable. I think we’re on track.”

The reporters asked Bush what he wanted for Europe. He replied, “In terms of the ‘vision thing,’ the aspirations, I spelled it out in little-noted speeches last spring and summer, which I would like everyone to go back and reread. And I’ll have a quiz on it [laughter].… You’ll see in there some of the ‘vision thing’—a Europe whole and free.”⁷⁰

The opening of the Berlin Wall cracked the edifice of communist repression throughout Eastern Europe. In an instant the new leaders in Poland and Hungary felt more secure. People surged into the streets in Bulgaria, then Czechoslovakia, followed finally by a violent revolution that overthrew the Romanian dictatorship in December. The Romanian dictatorship was still willing to shoot its enemies. The revolution therefore ended with the dictator and his wife being lined up in front of a firing squad. The new Romanian government then abolished capital punishment. Communist rule in Eastern Europe had collapsed.

As 1989 drew to a close, the question was no longer whether East Germany would remain communist in the old sense. It was about what would come next, as the former communist reformers now had become democratic socialists.

The choices about Germany’s future were no longer theoretical. At this point, in December 1989, the three main options were:

• Continue with two independent, democratic states, the FRG and the GDR;

• Two states in a confederation of some kind;

• Two states merging into a new, unified Germany.

And there was a corollary: How fast should all of this move?

Gorbachev, Thatcher, and many others favored the first option. Their answer to the corollary was clear—as slowly as possible.

Some Soviets and Germans, East and West, favored the second option, partly because they thought the first one was unsustainable.

Kohl, Bush, and Mitterrand all were at least willing to accept full unification, the third option. In this phase they all believed the process would go step by step, over a number of years.

One note about terminology: “unification” or “reunification?” About one-third of the pre-Hitler Germany had been annexed by postwar Poland and the postwar Soviet Union. So “reunification” might seem to imply the re-creation of that prewar Germany with those old prewar borders of 1937. Therefore, U.S. officials (like the authors of this book) usually preferred to talk of “unification” to describe the process of creating a fresh single German state.⁷¹

Kohl and Modrow framed the agenda for their opposing views. In December, the Soviet government was privately and publicly furious with Kohl. Several West European leaders were angry too.

The Canadian leaders, who had just come from Moscow, quoted to Bush and Baker a Shevardnadze comment that “all of us who were in the war are against revanchism and neo-Nazis.” Brian Mulroney remembered Gorbachev’s remark: “People have died from eating unripened fruit.”⁷²

If Gorbachev chose a confrontational response, he had options. There were nearly four hundred thousand Soviet troops in East Germany. Gorbachev could call immediately for a peace treaty conference that might reassemble all of Germany’s Second World War adversaries and would be inclined to cement the status quo. If there was a confrontation, Kohl would be blamed by many in West Germany and in the alliance.

Some Soviets wanted to get ahead of the action with a conciliatory confederation proposal. But the consensus in Moscow, at this time, was that “one could definitely not talk of the disappearance of the GDR. The Soviet Union will not permit it.”⁷³

Meeting at Malta, Gorbachev and Bush agreed to disagree on the long-range goal. At the post-Malta press conference, Gorbachev stressed the “Helsinki process,” involving all the countries of Europe, whose leaders had last met in 1975. That process, he said, “summed up the results of the Second World War and consolidated the results of that war. And those are realities.” That “was the decision of history.”⁷⁴

These cautions were quickly being overrun by events in East Germany, however. The more liberated press began disclosing the high living among the communist rulers, scandalizing the East German public. Upper-level officials of the old regime were charged with corruption; the arrests of former top officials began on December 3.

The ability of the government to do anything was waning. At one point, garbage delivery ground to a halt in East Berlin as workers simply refused to work.

Krenz resigned his post as head of state on December 6. Modrow took over. Civil authority began to break down. Some citizens’ committees seized public buildings in order to stop secret-police destruction of incriminating government records.

Some crowds attacked East German and then Soviet military installations in the GDR. For instance, in Dresden a crowd marched on the villa where the Soviet secret police, the KGB, had its headquarters. Colonel Vladimir Putin was in charge. The crowd had seized weapons from the East German secret-police armory.

Putin ordered his men to stand at the windows and display their weapons. He pleaded for the local Soviet garrison to send troops.

The general replied, “I asked Moscow but Moscow is silent.”

“But what are we going to do?” Putin asked.

“In any event, I can’t give you any help,” the general replied.

To Putin, recalling the episode years later, “it seemed to me as if our country no longer existed. It became clear that the Soviet Union was in a diseased condition, that of a fatal and incurable paralysis: the paralysis of power.” Moscow was silent.

Putin went to the crowd with a small armed escort. Pretending to be a German-language interpreter, he pleaded with the people to leave the building alone, that it was just a Soviet military installation. Some eyewitnesses say he brandished a pistol and said he was prepared to die. Then some other Soviet troops did show up after all, and the crowd eventually dispersed. Scenes like this were replaying around the GDR.⁷⁵

Gorbachev had reason to worry that a loss of face on Germany might be the final straw in his battles at home.⁷⁶ At the end of November he had phoned Mitterrand and reportedly told him that on the day Germany unified, “a Soviet marshal will be sitting in my chair.”

One such marshal, Marshal Akhromeyev, later reflected bitterly that Gorbachev’s failure to give a “concrete answer” to the German question must have convinced the West that they would encounter no decisive opposition from the USSR. He blamed Gorbachev. He blamed a Foreign Ministry that “was not ready for a serious discussion” of the issues.⁷⁷

But, back in Moscow, meeting with Genscher a few days after the Malta summit, Gorbachev unleashed his anger. In an extraordinary meeting that Chernyaev thought went “far beyond the bounds” of Gorbachev’s usual discussions with statesmen, the Soviet leader treated Genscher like an errant child.⁷⁸

Kohl’s move had been an “absolute surprise,” Gorbachev said. He thought that he and the chancellor had reached an understanding. Or perhaps the chancellor did not need this understanding anymore.

“Perhaps,” said Gorbachev, “he thinks that his melody, the melody of his march, is already playing and he is already marching to it.” This attitude could not be reconciled with the talk of constructing a “common European home.”

Gorbachev attacked the ten-point plan in detail. These confederation ideas, he exclaimed, what did they mean for defense and alliance membership? Would the FRG be in NATO or the Warsaw Pact?

“Did you think this all through?” he demanded of Genscher.

Shevardnadze interjected dramatically, “Even Hitler didn’t permit himself this.”

The Soviets “left no doubt” that the GDR must remain an independent state and a member of the Warsaw Pact.

With Mitterrand, a day later in Kiev, Gorbachev uncorked his full scorn for Kohl, the provincial, and his deep anger about what he thought Kohl was trying to do with this “diktat.” He told Mitterrand that when Genscher pleaded a cooperative desire, he had replied witheringly, “You tell me you agree with me, but your support for the Kohl plan and your whole career contradict that. After this plan you [Genscher] should resign.”

But Gorbachev did not yet have an alternative plan to propose. Mitterrand asked at one point, “What should we do concretely?” The meeting ended inconclusively.⁷⁹

Mitterrand was sympathetic to Gorbachev’s concerns. He alluded, as he would several times in this period, to the danger of going back “to the Europe of 1913.” But Mitterrand, like Bush, was in the midst of an intense effort to link Kohl’s plan firmly to a wider vision for Europe’s future.

A New Germany in a New Europe?

Of course, the future of the German state also held implications for the alliance structures that had dominated European security for nearly four decades. Several ideas were in play.

• Both alliances could remain and the unified Germany could be neutralized between them.

• Both alliances could disappear and U.S. and Soviet troops would go home.

• Both alliances could disappear and be replaced by an all-European security treaty of some kind.

• The united Germany could remain in NATO. This would go hand in hand with Germany’s continued membership in the European Union.

Gorbachev and Thatcher, among others, supported the first option. But with the states of the Warsaw Pact fleeing communism, it was hard to say how long the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact alliance could last.

And while others thought that some combination of option two and option three would work, the Americans were clear from the very beginning. Germany should choose. Washington was willing to bet that a Kohl-led, united Germany would choose NATO.⁸⁰

Kohl, however, tried for as long as he could to avoid giving specific answers to these key international issues. He was still reluctant to go further on European integration. He was reluctant to detail an answer to the NATO issue. He was reluctant to offer a public commitment about the future borders of a united Germany.

Privately, Kohl tended to say the right things, at least in a general way, on all these points. But he did not want to be publicly boxed in. For those who were distrustful, this could be very troubling.

The more trusting tended to believe that Kohl, having already taken a huge political gamble, was trying to hold every possible West German voter that he could. From a domestic political point of view, consider Kohl’s problem. None of these commitments on international issues, specifically, were big vote getters. All could antagonize some segment of the voting public.

On the other hand, the overall impression of international solidarity was popular and an essential vote getter. Kohl may well have reasoned that he had to preserve every appearance of such solidarity, while avoiding any unnecessary points of friction. (Genscher had some ideas of his own, but these were not deployed until late January 1990.)

Intuiting much of this, during this initial phase, France and the United States both played crucial roles. Their public support was indispensable for Kohl, especially with so much tension from the Soviet Union. They then leveraged their position, and their sympathy for Kohl’s aspirations, to nail down two essential conditions: Germany would unify fully and completely—within NATO and the European Community.

Mitterrand and his team had prepared themselves for this moment. In their sensitive cabinet discussion on October 18, Mitterrand’s longtime diplomatic adviser and sometime spokesman, Hubert Védrine, had prepared a remarkable analysis of German possibilities. He broke down all the different unification possibilities. He presumed that some sort of unification was already becoming inevitable.

Rather than try to stop this historical development, which was not Mitterrand’s instinct, Védrine argued that “it was necessary to go with the Germans by accompanying them.” What he meant was very close to what Bush and Baker would also soon start saying.

Védrine emphasized European integration. “Everything remains manageable if this movement toward the end of the division of the German people does not advance faster than the European construction and the overall removal of barriers between Eastern and Western Europe.”⁸¹

All of Mitterrand’s moves stayed with this policy line. He and the key policy advisers on his team, including Foreign Minister Dumas, Védrine, and (on Europe) Élisabeth Guigou, fixed on a litmus test. Would Kohl agree right now to start work on economic and monetary union with an intergovernmental conference that would get to work soon, during 1990?

This was the issue that, earlier in 1989, the leaders had deliberately left open. They had put off a final decision on what to do with the Delors report.

Now Mitterrand was chairing the next European Council summit, in Strasbourg on December 8–9. Beginning in late October, he pressed Kohl hard on this litmus test—to agree to begin work.

Kohl stubbornly resisted. He still preferred to put off such a decision for at minimum another year, at least until after his election campaign was over at the end of 1990. Then came his surprise announcement of the ten-point plan. Now the Franco-German interactions became truly intense.

Mitterrand met with Genscher on November 30. It was a meeting Genscher later remembered as the “most important” he ever had with the French president.

Mitterrand was angry. For him this took the form of becoming icy cold and unambiguous in tone. He did not threaten to oppose unification. Instead, he painted a picture of an alternative Europe, one in which Germany unified on its own terms. It is worth reading carefully what Mitterrand had to say:

If we want to go forward in East-West relations without risk, then it requires the parallel progress in European integration. If the West Integration stands still, it goes backward. If it goes backward, then the conditions in Europe would experience fundamental changes and new, privileged alliances would arise.

It is not even to be ruled out there would be a return to the conceptual world of 1913 [just before the outbreak of the First World War]. That Europe of 1913 would, however, be full of threats.

If the future German reunification is accomplished in such a Europe, whose structure had not been decisively further developed, then we will have risked getting back to the old ways. It was [Mitterrand’s] opinion that the reunification, if such a day comes, must be embedded in an even stronger, stabilized European Community. Otherwise the European partners would “seek new counterweights to line up against this new body of 80 million people.”

Genscher assured Mitterrand that these new counterweights would not be needed—if the European integration went forward “as we have wished.”⁸²

In following weeks, Mitterrand would return to these warnings, again and again. In late January 1990, meeting with Thatcher, he recounted how he had told the West Germans that they had to “think of the consequences” if the European construction did not keep pace with German unity. “Russia will send a diplomat to London, then to Paris: Let us understand each other. I will say yes. Then we will be in 1913.”

Thatcher, who had far less faith in European constructions, had already been thinking about such possibilities. Her private secretary and key foreign policy adviser, Charles Powell, had been musing with her, also using early-twentieth-century analogies, about bilateral British alliances with France, or with Russia, as well as with the United States. These all clearly would be aimed at containing German power in the absence of a NATO framework.⁸³

On December 8–9 the EC leaders held their summit in Strasbourg. The confrontation between Mitterrand and Kohl, over whether Kohl would pass France’s litmus test for commitment to European integration, had reached its height.

Pressed hard by Genscher, Kohl decided to give in on the core issue. The leaders agreed, and announced, that in 1990 they would go ahead and convene an intergovernmental conference to draft a treaty for European economic and monetary union.

The European summit in Strasbourg was still very tense. Kohl commented on the “icy climate.” Mitterrand and Thatcher were privately commiserating.⁸⁴

Yet Mitterrand had accomplished a major objective. On European integration he had put extraordinary pressure on Kohl to make a concrete commitment. And he got it.

Mitterrand accepted the possibility of unification philosophically. Or, as he drily remarked directly to Kohl early in January, “If I were German, I would be for reunification. That is patriotism. Being French, I do not have the same passion for it.”⁸⁵

Like Mitterrand, the Americans had been imagining an alternative Europe. They could easily envision a Europe in which, no longer needed, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact disappeared as outmoded relics of the Cold War system. A unified Germany’s place in the EC might also become uncertain, as East European economies and countries drifted once more between the traditional power centers in Berlin and Moscow.

As NATO disappeared, all the European armies—and above all the German one—would have to develop their own independent high commands, capabilities, and strategies. Outsiders did not fully appreciate that the West German army had no general staff, that traditional seat of German strategic culture, because its general staff was NATO’s International Military Staff.

In this different Europe the original, Cold War anchor for an American security commitment in Europe, NATO, would be gone. The United States forces would probably return home and disengage from Europe, as the U.S. had always done before 1917, as it had done in 1919, and as it had started doing again in 1945 before the creation of NATO in 1949.

For Americans, the burdens of a forward, evident security commitment could be quite tangible. Most of the benefits were not. Through history, many Americans had long regarded Europe and its problems with distance, or even distaste.

To Americans, this would not be a return to the world of 1913. It would not even be a return to the world of the 1920s. In the 1920s the United States had at least been a dominant financial creditor in the European economy. America was now a net debtor. Americans could easily find themselves turning inward in ways for which there was no ready historical analog.

“NATO” then was not just an organization. It was a shorthand symbol of a whole mental map of America in the world, a map in which America was a vital part of an Atlantic world, a member of an Atlantic community, linked by commerce, culture, and shared interests—ultimately including security.

On this point, Bush and his team did embody a distinct personal historical perspective. They believed in America’s place in an Atlantic community, right down to their bones.

For them, Europe had been the principal source of the last two world wars, both of which had drawn Americans in. Bush and his generation remembered this personally. As a young Marine, Baker had served in Europe in the early 1950s.

A new Europe without much American engagement, its future politics and alignments all reopened in a time of painful transition, could become another major source of global instability and insecurity. Unlike in 1913, that would play out in an age of missiles and nuclear weapons.

To prevent that world, Bush and his advisers believed it was now the time to stake out a historically controversial position. Mainly to shape the expectations of other Americans, Bush began to say firmly, even bluntly, that, looking back over the stream of history during the last hundred years, America was now and should remain “a European power.” It should remain so “as long as Europeans want that.”

America exercised that power through partnerships. The NATO alliance was its only anchor.

Shortly after the Berlin Wall opened, U.S. officials began drafting principles to accept German unification, “consistent” with German membership in NATO and a stronger EC, and accepting the CSCE principles that borders could only be changed peacefully. The day after Kohl announced his “ten-point” plan, Baker publicly announced these principles. The press did not notice. Teltschik did, though, and he passed Baker’s statement to Kohl.⁸⁶

Flying from his Malta summit with Gorbachev directly to Brussels, Bush had dinner with Kohl on the evening of December 3. At that dinner, Kohl accepted Bush’s and Baker’s principles.⁸⁷ Kohl then still thought it would take years, perhaps five or more, to work through the stages to reach the goal of unification.

Bush said Gorbachev was uncertain. That was why “we need a formulation which doesn’t scare him, but moves forward.”

Kohl referred to a recent Kissinger comment, that the Germanys might come together within two years. That was obviously impossible, Kohl said. The economic imbalance between the two states was too great. But Bush should not misunderstand; the unification question was developing “like a groundswell in the ocean.”

West European reactions were mixed, Kohl admitted. “I need a time of quiet development.”

At a gathering of NATO leaders the next day in Brussels, Bush then deployed a carefully prepared statement. It was about “the future shape of the new Europe and the new Atlanticism.”

He asked all the alliance leaders to agree that the “goal of German unification should be based on the following principles”:

First, self-determination must be pursued without prejudice to its outcome. We should not at this time endorse or exclude any particular vision of unity.

Second, unification should occur in the context of Germany’s continued commitment to NATO and an increasingly integrated European Community, and with due regard for the legal role and responsibilities of the Allied powers.⁸⁸

Third, in the interests of general European stability, moves toward unification must be peaceful, gradual, and part of a step-by-step process.

Lastly, on the question of borders we should reiterate our support for the principles of the Helsinki Final Act.

Bush added, “An end to the unnatural division of Europe, and of Germany, must proceed in accordance with and be based upon the values that are becoming universal ideals, as all the countries of Europe become part of a commonwealth of free nations. I know my friend Helmut Kohl completely shares this conviction.”

Then Bush proposed—this was the “new Atlanticism” part—that the basic purpose and character of the NATO alliance should change too. It would make the promotion of greater freedom in the East a basic element of its policy. The alliance’s original purpose, defense against the Soviet bloc, was fading. Instead it would evolve into a source of fundamental reassurance about stability in a period of historic transition.

Bush said, “I pledge today that the United States will maintain significant military forces in Europe as long as our Allies desire our presence as part of a common security effort.” He concluded, “The U.S. will remain a European power.”⁸⁹

After Bush completed his statement, Chancellor Kohl remarked that no one could have done a better job of summarizing the alliance approach. “The meeting should simply adjourn,” he said.

There was an awkward pause. Then other West European leaders—led by the Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, and by Thatcher—began voicing their disquiet about German developments.

Kohl responded sharply. The Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, interrupted the skirmish to rally a consensus behind Bush’s approach. One by one, other allied heads of state supported the general thrust of Bush’s principles.⁹⁰

Thatcher felt defeated. After the NATO meeting in Brussels, she later wrote, “[I knew there] was nothing I could expect from the Americans as regards slowing down German reunification [and] possibly much I would wish to avoid as regards the drive towards European unity.”⁹¹

Kohl and his advisers, by contrast, were elated. The world leaders would not derail Kohl’s plan. “On the contrary!” Teltschik wrote. “The signal stayed green—caution will be admonished, but the railway switches are all thrown the right way.”⁹²

A week later, Baker offered the fullest statement of the alternative vision for “a new Atlanticism in a new Europe.”⁹³

The first element of the new architecture would be a different sort of security structure for Europe. Yes, NATO should be part of it. But this would not be the same NATO. It would be a different kind of organization, a base for an Atlantic community’s political vision. It would attend more to nonmilitary aspects of security, such as arms control and the process of disarmament.⁹⁴ The security mission, Baker explained, would evolve to address future problems, such as regional conflicts and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It would no longer be an alliance aimed against the Soviet Union.

The second element was, as the French and Americans had stressed, the future development of the European Community. Since the U.S. vision accepted the Mitterrand-Kohl-Delors vision for a stronger EC, Baker then paired the Atlantic vision to it by stressing “a significantly strengthened” American partnership with the EC.

Further, Baker argued that the EC needed to become wider, not just deeper. It should become a base to engage the new democracies of Eastern Europe. This move had already been foreshadowed in the emerging structure of aid programs to help the economic transition in those countries.

A final element of the new architecture was the CSCE. Baker argued that the CSCE had outgrown the pessimistic view in 1975 that it would only codify the postwar status quo. Instead, the organization had set up standards for human rights and consultation that were already helping to overcome the division of Europe.

The CSCE should, then, offer overarching principles for all of Europe and the United States. He thus proposed new agreements in each of the organization’s three “baskets” of issues: security, economic transactions, and human rights.

One of the most interesting (and secret) reactions to Baker’s “new Atlanticism” came in Paris. The French officials instantly realized that the United States was proposing to transform NATO from an anti-Soviet military alliance into a primarily political entity.

Their initial reaction, which they shared with Mitterrand, was to see this as a battle for political dominance in the future new Europe between an American Atlanticist vision and a Franco-German European vision. A lead Mitterrand staffer called out an analysis that Baker wanted “to entrust the Atlantic Alliance, where American preeminence is guaranteed, with the overall mission of leading the evolution of Europe, in its place, in all areas.” Other staffers warned of a NATO that would “straddle” a rising EC. Or they complained that Baker wanted “to integrate the European construction into the Atlantic alliance,” a “dangerous” idea.

Their different vision was that the transition should make NATO’s role smaller, much more narrowly military. Mitterrand’s alternative was to construct a new “European confederation” that would take on broad political and security roles.⁹⁵

This French reaction to Baker’s vision was instinctive and defensive. In fact, Baker’s vision was genuinely inclusive. It was neither American-centered nor hierarchical. As Zoellick had explained it, writing to Baker weeks earlier, the “architecture of the New Atlanticism should not try to develop one overarching structure. Instead, it will rely on a number of complementary institutions that will be mutually reinforcing.”⁹⁶

Bush, Baker, Mitterrand, and Dumas had a chance to reassure each other about these plans. They submerged their differences, at least for a time, at their pleasant December talks on a French island in the Caribbean.⁹⁷

Mitterrand agreed to the linkages with NATO and the EC. But this meant that German developments should go no faster than the EC construction, or the whole thing “will end up in the ditch.” He referred again to how Europe could return to the world of 1913, in which case everything could be lost.

By late December, two basic visions had thus emerged for Germany’s and Europe’s future. Baker’s speech was the broadest articulation of a vision in which Germany could choose to unify, doing so as part of a different Europe, one with a transformed NATO, a transformed EC, and new roles for the CSCE.

The alternative vision was for a modified status quo. This was the view offered by East Germany and the Soviet Union but also with supporters in Europe and in the United States. In this vision, internal reforms and democracy were welcome. But the international status quo of the Cold War system should stay in place. This would preserve both alliance systems and maintain a divided Germany with two German states, even as the Soviet Union and its allies became democratic socialist states.

In a kind of response to Baker, Shevardnadze chose a December 19 address to the European Parliament, in Brussels, to make his major statement of the modified status quo position. Soviet officials in Moscow debated a key point: Should they fight unification inch by inch, which might require some massive help to shore up the transitional East German government? Or should they side with German national aspirations, freely accepting some form of loose German confederation in order to insist on conditions that would protect their international interests?⁹⁸

Shevardnadze leaned toward the latter course. But Gorbachev preferred to fight for the GDR’s continued separate existence and continued acceptance of the “postwar realities.”

After difficult internal arguments and last-minute rewrites, and without clearing the speech with the Politburo, Shevardnadze ended up with a strange hybrid of old policy and new.⁹⁹ He appeared to rule out unification. But at the same time he posed questions about how it could occur. He offered no alternative conception of East Germany’s future. The effect was at once puzzling and ominous.

He reminded his audience that the Allied powers had legal rights over Germany, dating back to the occupation agreements of 1945. If that were not enough, Shevardnadze added, the Four Powers “have at their disposal a considerable contingent of armed forces equipped with nuclear weapons on the territory of the GDR and the FRG.”

There had been a chance to get a united democratic Germany, Shevardnadze acknowledged. But that time had come and gone. It had passed after the rejection of a Soviet diplomatic offer in 1952 and the Federal Republic’s decision to join NATO.

Having denounced German unification, Shevardnadze then posed a list of (seven) challenges that would have to be addressed by anyone who hoped to restore German unity. There were no apparent answers to any of them.

Genscher acknowledged Shevardnadze’s challenge. He began suggesting some answers to Shevardnadze’s seven questions that might satisfy Soviet concerns. Meeting privately with his own officials, he held up an article from the popular newspaper Bild-Zeitung that suggested how Germans should answer Shevardnadze’s questions. The article said the Germans would not accept neutralization. But they would consider abolishing both alliances. They would consider reducing the American troop presence to a “symbolic contingent.” Genscher told his officials: If you want to know our answers to these questions, read this article!¹⁰⁰

As 1989 came to an end, Scowcroft gave Bush a memo (drafted by Zelikow) about “U.S. Diplomacy for the New Europe.” It had been quite a year. The year 1989 would be remembered as one, like 1848, that “transformed a continent.”

But the story of the European revolutions of 1848 had not ended very happily. Looking back, “when the democratic revolutionaries of 1848 were at the peak of their success, cowing kings and toppling princes, they thought the remaking of society would overshadow the old diplomatic rivalries.” They thought, as Victor Hugo put it, that “we are a predestined generation.” Sadly, the revolutionaries of 1848 soon met violent, overpowering reactions.

In 1989 the “outlines of ancient European antagonisms” were already beginning to reemerge. The still-powerful Soviet government was unsteady and anxious. The German question was back. The European future was under intense discussion in constant EC meetings without Americans there.

The goals set in 1989—“active support for democratic change in Eastern Europe, the search for a new security environment through the CFE process, the continuation of nuclear deterrence, and an American partnership with a more united continent”—were inspiring. The challenge for diplomacy in 1990 now, though, was how “to make these things happen.”

Scowcroft’s memo was a call to action. “Twentieth century history gives no encouragement to those who believe the Europeans can achieve and sustain this balance of power and keep the peace without the United States.” Kohl, in Bonn, had just told Baker the very same thing.

The United States was at a strategic crossroads. It would “either find a way to keep up” or “we will drift away from the inner workings and direction of European politics,” leading to a new kind of isolationism: “detachment by default rather than by choice.”¹⁰¹

Hit the Accelerator

That young theoretical scientist in East Berlin, Angela Merkel, was one of those swept up in East Germany’s autumn revolution. She obtained a leave of absence for a few months from the Academy of Sciences and visited the headquarters of some of the new political parties and movements, sampling their wares.

Naturally, Merkel checked out the East German Social Democrats (SPD-East). She noticed that “someone had come in from the West to organize it all.” She was put off by the singing of old Russian revolutionary songs (“Brothers, to the Sun, to Freedom”) and how everyone, even the Westerners, addressed each other as “Comrade.”

Shortly before Christmas 1989, she ended up signing up with a little party, headed by an outspoken lawyer, called “German Awakening.” It was fundamentally aligned with the new Kohl agenda, a step-by-step process leading eventually to a unified German federal state.

When she joined, the party manifesto was committed to a “social market economy with a high level of ecological consciousness.” It sought “nonalignment” and “demilitarization”: If Germany was united, then the FRG must withdraw from NATO, a position broadly supported in the GDR.

Merkel was happy to volunteer what help she could. Her language skills and ability to articulate positions soon elevated her into a role as one of the spokespersons for the little party as it prepared for elections.

It turned out that the lawyer who headed Merkel’s party had been one of the countless informers for the Stasi, the East German secret police. When this was disclosed, just before the elections, the party was discredited and received less than 1 percent of the eventual vote.

But because it was fundamentally aligned with Kohl’s vision, rather than that of Modrow or the SPD (East or West), her little party had joined a larger coalition, called the “Alliance for Germany.” The coalition was led by the CDU-East. In the old GDR, the CDU-East had been a puppet party. Now it was for real. It was headed by a musician (viola for the Berlin Symphony Orchestra) and lawyer, Lothar de Maizière. Like everyone in the GDR, de Maizière was inexperienced in democratic politics, but his party was getting plenty of organizing help from its Western counterpart.

As part of this Alliance for Germany, Merkel made new acquaintances. She did not return to the Academy of Sciences. Her professional life of scientific theory had now become compellingly practical.¹⁰²

Merkel’s experience was like that of many East Germans. By the end of 1989 a divide had opened between the civic groups, organized around small cells of longtime dissenters, that had played a leading part in the autumn revolution, and a mass movement of the general population. Unlike the Solidarity coalition in Poland, which had been organizing on a large scale for years, none of the civic groups in the GDR had a mass following.¹⁰³

The whole population of the GDR was now practically forced to pay attention to politics. The civic group leaders were understandably inexperienced in either politics or policy. So a great many East Germans began to identify themselves with one or another of the established West German political leaders in the CDU or SPD. Or they identified themselves with the former communists (now renamed as the Party of Democratic Socialism). Free East German elections were scheduled for May 1990.

Kohl experienced the volcanic changes in East German politics firsthand. After a difficult meeting with Modrow, in Dresden on December 19, he addressed crowds of cheering East Germans. He spoke emotionally of the German nation. The crowd reacted by chanting for unification. It seemed that the East German people were rallying to the dream he, Kohl, had told them could come true.

At first, the American reports of this clamor were worried. Baker advised President Bush that Kohl’s activities “may raise again the question with some, however, of whether the Chancellor’s domestic political interest is leading him too far, too fast on the issue of unification; he’s tapping emotions that will be difficult to manage.”¹⁰⁴

Genscher’s adviser, Frank Elbe, told his counterpart on Baker’s team, Zoellick, that the whole issue of speed was turning around. In the middle of November, he had told Zoellick that German moves might need to slow down, that “the tempo of German unification cannot be permitted to endanger the stability of Europe.” A few weeks later, in early December, Elbe now felt that unification should take off, and it was Europe that would have to adapt to that. “If German unity doesn’t come, that will endanger the stability of Europe.”

Zoellick replied, “We also see it that way.”¹⁰⁵

New battle lines were starting to form in German politics. Modrow’s government had gained some strength. The SPD—West and East—had more sympathy with his views. Kohl’s reluctance to talk about a united Germany’s future borders seemed to be pandering to a few voters who still resented the 1945 loss of so much historic German territory.¹⁰⁶

Modrow had weathered the storm of corruption allegations. His biggest challenges were the economic issues and the open borders with West Germany. The freedom of citizens to travel, combined with the artificial East German price system and currency, created huge distortions. Westerners could snap up anything valuable in the East German marketplace. Every week, thousands of East Germans were migrating westward, especially those who were most employable—and therefore also especially important to East German society.

Modrow’s government had no good answer to the economic crisis. He had difficulty staffing key positions and was unable to put together a budget. His program at first included only a few market elements. It offered little scope for privatization even as state enterprises, starved for subsidies, were starting to go bankrupt.

Kohl’s government was reluctant to subsidize this East German system. As the weeks passed, his government was actively seeking to undermine it. Kohl became convinced that he should have nothing to do with Modrow or any other official of the old Communist Party. By the time Modrow proposed a draft treaty for confederation, Kohl was no longer interested.

Instead Kohl began preparing to take another risky leap. Seeing the CDU-East, despite its former status as a puppet party of the communists, as the only available Eastern ally for his own party, and also seeing the coming elections in the East as a preview of those in the West, he started to imagine a direct path to the unification of Germany on his terms. He and Teltschik became convinced that the East German elections should be held soon, earlier than May.

Modrow also realized that he could not hold the country together until spring. He and the Roundtable advanced the elections from May 6 to March 18, partly because they thought faster elections would help their parties win.

Kohl welcomed the move, even though he thought that earlier elections would actually favor the communists and the SPD-East since they had the best-known and best-organized parties in the GDR. By dropping any effort to negotiate a step-by-step arrangement with Modrow, Kohl had to put together an entirely new course.

The alternative was a straight line toward unification with no stops in between. That policy made sense on only one timetable—as fast as all the issues could be resolved, as fast as the international traffic could bear (although in late January 1990, Kohl still seemed to think that would be about five years).¹⁰⁷

In Washington, American officials had also begun to change course in the second half of January 1990. At the White House, Blackwill worried to Scowcroft that “we seem to be proceeding with business as usual—unwieldy… extended interagency disputes too small to be seen without the aid of a magnifying glass.… You will know the quality of exchanges on these breathtaking developments in Europe at your breakfast meetings with Baker/Cheney.”

The United States needed a more ambitious policy. Blackwill had concluded that the sooner Germany became unified, the better. There should be a rush toward de facto unification along lines worked out between the United States and the Federal Republic.

The international community would be presented with a fait accompli. Blackwill advised Scowcroft on January 26 that “reunification is coming rapidly, not gradually and step by step, and the process will not await ‘an increasingly integrated European Community.’” Baker and his aides had arrived at the same judgment.

That might mean the Americans would waive their Four Power rights, but Washington should spare no effort to seize the high ground with the German people in becoming the foremost advocate of their national unity.¹⁰⁸

When Teltschik met Scowcroft at a conference in Munich on February 3, he discovered that the White House had come to the same conclusion as the Chancellery. There should be a direct move, and at the fastest possible pace.

Such a fast pace would endanger all the international assurances that had been offered in late 1989. The Soviets would feel threatened. European integration could not keep pace. NATO issues and the future linkage of the United States to Europe were up in the air.

On the other hand, Blackwill feared that if unification were stretched out for years, the problems would become obvious. The international bargaining would become onerous. The Soviets and others would find too many opportunities to trade their acceptance of unity for concessions from Bonn on Germany’s NATO membership, its military participation in the alliance, and the presence of American forces and nuclear weapons in Europe.

The West German–American convergence on the need for speed became apparent by the beginning of February. As they wanted to hit the accelerator, French and British leaders worried that Europe would not be able to adapt in time. They shared the American worry that the Germans might trade off other issues to get unification done. The American answer was to jump on the fast-moving train in order to help steer it. The French and British had a different idea. They wanted to slow the train down.

For example, on February 2, Dumas told the British ambassador that the FRG was now putting reunification ahead of everything else. “[Dumas] feared that, if neutrality was the price to be exacted for reunification, the FRG Government would be ready to pay it. Similarly, if the FRG Government had to choose between reunification and the continued development of the EC, they would choose the former.”¹⁰⁹

The same day Dumas confided his worries about speed, the British ambassador to Washington sent back word that “the clear US message is that speed is essential if we are to avoid a free fall to German unity.”

Thatcher reacted: “The essential thing is to agree with Gorbachev/Shevardnadze. Then we can try to persuade Germany.”¹¹⁰

A week later, Thatcher’s adviser, Powell, went out to Bonn for a meeting with Teltschik. He was struck by the “heady atmosphere” in West Germany. “Great events are in the air,” he wrote to Thatcher, “and for the first time in 45 years Germany is out in front. For the Germans, this is the breakthrough. After decades of sober and cautious diplomacy, and adjusting themselves to fit in with decisions taken by others, they are in the driving seat and Toad is at the wheel. The exhilaration is unmistakeable. This time they are going to take the decisions and others can tag along.”

Powell’s report inflamed Thatcher’s concern about “nationalism with a vengeance.”¹¹¹ In Washington, though, U.S. leaders thought that speed was still the right choice. Blackwill believed that, at the moment, Gorbachev was still in power. The Soviets wanted the friendship of the West. Their German policy was cautious, even confused. This window of opportunity would not stay open much longer.

What would the Soviets do? Rice’s assessment was that “creeping reunification—because everyone is afraid to talk about terms—is probably not very smart.”

Of course, Gorbachev would be alarmed if the pace quickened. Yet the Soviets were in a difficult position. Rice thought that the United States should go ahead and hit the accelerator. “I believe (and this is a hunch and I guess if we did this that I would spend a lot of time in church praying that I was right),” she wrote, “that the Soviets would not even threaten the Germans. Within six months, if events continue as they are going, no one would believe them anyway.”¹¹²

Depending on how officials wanted to unify Germany, they argued about a process to negotiate the terms. A strictly Four Power process, with only the former victors of World War II, was now off the table. The United States, at least, would not go along.

A giant international conference to negotiate a German peace treaty, as had happened at Versailles in 1919, was another idea—perhaps organized using the CSCE process and its thirty-five member states. The French and the Soviets seemed to like that idea.

The Americans were against such an unwieldy conference, which they thought would be mostly an excuse to delay or—even worse—try to impose conditions on Germany that neither America nor Bonn wanted. At the White House, Scowcroft and Blackwill advised Bush that the CSCE venue could become an “open-ended negotiation about the future of Europe in about the worst multilateral setting one can imagine.”¹¹³ But the NSC staff had no other idea to suggest. During January 1990, it was Baker’s team that came up with a constructive answer.

On the other side, Gorbachev and Modrow were not standing still. On January 26, Gorbachev convened an extraordinary meeting of advisers for four hours of debate about policy toward Germany. He had just returned from difficult talks in breakaway Lithuania.

Chernyaev urged a radical position. He urged Gorbachev to align himself directly with West Germany, with Kohl. Chernyaev thought that Kohl was a reliable partner, that firm FRG ties to NATO were a good thing, and that Kohl would link German unification to development of the “all-European process.”

More traditional experts sharply disagreed. Yakovlev backed them.

Shevardnadze and Prime Minister Ryzhkov tried to find a middle ground. All but Chernyaev agreed, as Ryzhkov put it, that “one should not give everything to Kohl.” The Soviets should work more closely with those seeking to restrain the West Germans, particularly the British and the French.

Gorbachev summed up. Looking at West Germany, he wanted to balance between Kohl and Kohl’s opposition, the SPD. There were “six players” (the two Germanys and the Four Powers). There was Modrow and the former communists (“it is impossible that of 2.5 million party members there is no one to constitute a real force”). His attitude toward Kohl had softened a bit, thanks to Kohl’s help in expediting some needed shipments of food to the USSR.

The Soviet leaders opposed any enlargement of NATO and opposed a united Germany’s membership in NATO. They were willing to explore withdrawal of Soviet forces from East Germany, as part of a proposal to withdraw all foreign forces from both German states.¹¹⁴

The Soviet government coordinated these plans with the East Germans during Modrow’s January 30 visit to Moscow. Modrow and his advisers hastily refined their own plan for a confederation of two German states, bound by a treaty that would link them economically and in some spheres of governance while preserving political independence. The Modrow plan would strengthen the alternative German confederation. Eventually it might be possible to imagine both German states transferring sovereign powers to the new confederation. The German right to self-determination would be undisputed.

So Modrow could announce a plan for “unification,” but through a confederation that preserved two German states. This was the first time the Soviets were prepared to accept the prospect of some sort of German unification, albeit based on Modrow’s confederation plan.

Gorbachev presumed that a future German confederation would be militarily neutral. He could imagine working with the British and the French to develop a plan for all of Europe in which NATO would be transformed and Germany would be neutralized, all sealed by a German peace treaty.

Modrow publicly presented his new plan on February 1. It imagined a set of steps, with a peace treaty, elections, and the establishment of a single German parliament in Berlin. “Germany should again become the united fatherland of all the German nation,” he said.

Gorbachev and Shevardnadze enthusiastically praised Modrow’s plan. Gorbachev commended it to Bush, asking for Four Power negotiations to discuss it. Their vision was consistently linked to a peace treaty, the “all-European process,” and a new Germany that was militarily neutral and disarmed. Moscow finally had a coherent policy coordinated with East Berlin.¹¹⁵

In the space of about a month, from the end of January until the end of February 1990, all the Western countries faced another round of difficult choices in three dimensions. Based on their assessment of the choices and the problems, East German voters would in effect signal their choice in the March 1990 election.

To help see both emerging choices about basic direction, the “vectors,” and the choices that had to be made “to keep up,” here is another issue map, as of January 1990. As with the one we offered in chapter 3 (for the spring of 1989), we have tried to identify choices that were real at the time.

Issue Map

Building a Better World (January 1990)

Future of Eastern Europe

• Okay for noncommunists and communists to rule together? In GDR?

• What conditions to place on support for the new, democratic GDR?

Future of Soviet Union

• How to support Gorbachev? Any conditions?

• How to get ready for the “crumbling of communism… and the consequences of its failures”?

European Integration

• Atlantic vision (with North America) or European vision (continentalist)?

• Within European vision, stall European union or accelerate it?

• If more integration of Western Europe, what about Eastern Europe? Role for CSCE?

Security in Europe

• Should U.S. forces, including nuclear forces, stay or go home?

• Should Soviet forces, including nuclear forces, stay or go home? Symmetry with treatment of U.S. forces?

Future of NATO?

Future of Warsaw Pact?

Both alliances stay or both disappear?

• New pan-European security structures?

Arms control and transparency: CFE? Open Skies? Role of CSCE?

Collective security of all defending all? Including both United States and USSR? Role of CSCE?

Future of Germany

• Slow down process of German change or hit the accelerator?

• Ultimate outcome…

Confederation—two states, connected as one nation?

Merger—negotiated between two states and in constitutional convention to form a new German republic?

Takeover—West German annexation of the GDR?

• How to decide?

Big German peace conference (use CSCE?) to prepare final settlement?

None of the above… or something new?

• Germany’s international status…

Modified status quo (two states, two alliances)?

Unified Germany in NATO (and transformed EC, with enhanced CSCE)?

– If unified Germany, and in NATO, what about status of former GDR?

– If unified Germany, and in NATO, what about status of U.S. and Soviet forces there? And nuclear weapons?

– If unified Germany, and in NATO, Germany stays in NATO integrated military command?

And unified Germany and the EC/EU?

And unified Germany’s permanent borders?

• Can all this be synchronized? Should or can rapid German unification be coupled to settlement of the international issues?

Time to Decide on German Unity

By the beginning of February 1990, the two Germanys were clearly going to come together in some way. There were three broad possibilities:

• Confederation—two states, connected as one nation;

• Merger—negotiated between two states and in constitutional convention to form a new German republic;

• Takeover—West German annexation of the GDR.

Kohl’s and Modrow’s governments, and the major German parties on both sides of the border, were all coming toward agreement on at least the goal of creating an economic and monetary union between the FRG and the GDR. To Modrow, if the European Community could keep separate states and negotiate such a union among them, perhaps a German community of separate states could do its own such union. Vast economic support might flow into the GDR.

Inside his own government, Kohl submitted his proposal for economic and monetary union to his cabinet on February 7. To unpack the policy choices just about West–East German economic and monetary union, Kohl’s finance minister, Theo Waigel, outlined three possible designs.

The most complex plan envisioned a move toward full currency union, only after the GDR made progress with economic reforms.

A second option was to establish a fixed exchange rate between the deutschmark and the East German ostmark. That fixed rate would have to be propped up by the Bundesbank.

The third option, simplest and yet most radical, would be immediately to make the deutschmark the sole legal currency in East Germany as well as the FRG. This dramatic step would require the Bundesbank to take more responsibility for the GDR’s monetary policies as East Germany was absorbed into the West German economic system.¹¹⁶

The last option, the offer of the deutschmark, was one of the “riskiest decisions that Kohl had confronted.” Kohl’s government had decided to hit the accelerator with a “policy of big steps.” The common currency decision was a leap into economic unification, with incalculable costs, before the political side of unification had been resolved.¹¹⁷

Kohl hoped the offer might slow the flood of East German immigrants into West Germany. This flood of migrants was already becoming unpopular and helping the prospects of his SPD political opponent, Oskar Lafontaine.

But to go ahead with this option, Kohl’s government would have to take over at least the economic governance of East Germany too, to control its spending and currency management. This meant he would have to cut off and destabilize Modrow’s government, which was pleading for emergency financial help. This would antagonize the Soviets and many West Germans, while also inflaming West German fears about currency inflation from free spending to lift up the standard of living in the GDR.

During the first week of February 1990, Kohl chose this last option, the most radical approach. Doing this, he again put himself in front of the unification process, again staking out a position in domestic politics (looking to the West German election later that year) as well as his foreign policy.

Then his crucial problem was to decide on a position for the governance of the GDR. Modrow’s model for economic and monetary union would, like the EC ideas, be more about interstate coordination, not surrendering his government’s authority.

On February 13, Modrow came to Bonn for talks with Kohl and others to compare their plans. Modrow did, of course, want West German money—DM 10 to 15 billion worth. He also had just announced his vision for a specific kind of step-by-step, limited economic and monetary union with the FRG. It was not that far from Waigel’s first and second options, listed above. In other words, the East Germans wanted to receive the benefits of monetary union while maintaining their basic economic autonomy.

Kohl refused. The talks became bitter. East Germans accused the West Germans of trying to annex them as Hitler had annexed Austria in the Anschluss of 1938. The Westerners were offended. The Easterners were annoyed by what they perceived to be the haughty and peremptory tone of the Western side.¹¹⁸

The stalemate with the GDR was not just bad for Modrow. As more refugees poured in from the East, Kohl’s popularity was threatened. He needed to settle on a preferred path to unity and also to think through the possible political union.

The idea of a German confederation was not new in German history. There were a variety of precedents. Even after the original German unification from 1871 to 1918, the actual government was not so unitary. Various kingdoms and principalities retained their own governance (above all, Prussia), and the unitary forms were linked mainly by the person of the Prussian king/German emperor and by a relatively weak all-German parliament.

If it went straight to a unitary state, not a confederation, the FRG had to select between the two paths to unification provided in West Germany’s constitution, or Basic Law. The negotiated merger path would create a new state, with a new constitution and form of government, and a new set of rights and responsibilities in the international system.

The West German takeover path would instead use a provision of the West German Basic Law that permitted “other parts of Germany” simply to join the existing FRG. This article had actually been used for the incorporation of the Saarland in 1957, after France agreed to end its military occupation of the province after the Second World War. The GDR would become part of the existing Federal Republic. The constitution, form of government, and rights and responsibilities in the international system of the FRG would remain intact. This was a profound choice.¹¹⁹

Yet many West Germans and some American officials were attracted to the annexation/takeover option. They reflected that by 1990, Germany had experimented with a constitutional monarchy (1871–1918) and three “democratic” republics: Weimar (1919–33), Bonn (1949–), and East Berlin (1949–). The track record of these experiments was… mixed. Should Germans (and the world) risk another?

From the beginning of February, Kohl’s circle of advisers started moving toward the takeover option. They feared what would happen if the FRG’s constitution were opened for renegotiation. The opposition and East Germans would probably want substantial changes in the founding document of the West German state, especially if the East German SPD won the March elections and established primacy in the constitutional assembly. There was simply no way to tell what the outcome might be, particularly given the external pressures now surrounding German unification from the Soviet Union and others.

A takeover through annexation had another advantage for Kohl’s advisers. It would simplify the problem of persuading the European Community to accept East Germany into its ranks. There would be no need to amend the Treaty of Rome establishing the community, if one member just got larger.

In the negotiated merger scenario, the transitional issues, including with the EC, would be more difficult. Thus this scenario would become an obstacle, not an ally, to the forthcoming intergovernmental conference to work up the Delors plan.¹²⁰

Finally, for both the West Germans and the Americans, the “merger” challenge—negotiating a new constitution for the new republic—was so great that this path could actually be used to block unification. The sides would argue about clashing political ideals. The arguments would become bitter. The inevitable reality of economic hardships would hit even harder in an East Germany exposed to West German market forces and open borders. The path to unification might seem long and twisted. A modified status quo might look better and better.

As doubts grew, Kohl’s political future would darken. The SPD’s political prospects would brighten. These conjectures worried American officials, because they felt that so much about the “new Atlanticism” and the future coupling of American and European security depended on the success of Kohl and his party.

By the beginning of March, only a couple of weeks before the East German election, Kohl decided firmly and said publicly that annexation/takeover was the only acceptable route to unity. An economic takeover with the D-Mark and a political takeover by West Germany. The CDU-backed parties contending for power in East Germany promptly adopted this position.

The East Germans understood what was at stake. An annexation of the GDR would liquidate their whole system of government. Kohl had to win the support of the East German people. He needed a clear mandate for his approach from the March 18 elections.

Unfortunately for him and his hopes, the conventional wisdom in both the West and the East was that he would lose. The East German Social Democrats (SPD) were expected to win the March 18 elections. The SPD-East, like the SPD-West, wanted monetary union without a West German economic takeover. It was sympathetic to the “confederation” approach to unification. If there was to be a single, unitary state, the SPD favored getting there through negotiated merger rather than a takeover.

In other words, the differences between the two main positions were clear and they were significant. Everything would be riding on the outcome on March 18.

Should the Unified Germany Be in NATO?

As the tempo quickened on German unification, the Americans worried that they did not have a firm answer from Kohl regarding NATO. Germany was now firmly planted in the plans for deeper and faster European integration. But there was still a good deal of international debate about the future of the alliance.

There were all sorts of possibilities being thrown about. Take, for example, the prominent views of an American conservative such as Henry Kissinger. He believed that a new Germany might take the form of a confederation linking the FRG and GDR, with a disarmed eastern portion integrated into NATO. The Western allies would cut their forces in Germany to a fraction of their former strength. Not only would NATO forces not move eastward, but the alliance would move westward—back to some agreed-upon line east of the Rhine.¹²¹

Entering February, the NSC staff rapidly sketched out their preferred blueprint. All of a united Germany would be in the NATO alliance, even if the former GDR territory had some special status. Refining this during the first week of February, the NSC staff specified that the former GDR would not be demilitarized. German forces should be allowed there, still in NATO’s integrated military command. But U.S. or other foreign forces would be excluded from the former GDR. Reduced but still substantial U.S. forces, including nuclear weapons, would remain in Germany.¹²²

Bush wanted Germany fully integrated into NATO. He hoped to convince Gorbachev of the wisdom of that view—once he had convinced Kohl.

He had his work cut out for him.

Kohl’s coalition partner was producing a very different set of ideas. Genscher had been working on the alliance problem too. He had developed a distinctive vision of his own.

Genscher went along with rapid progress toward German unification. Therefore, to him, the international side had to get a great burst of extra energy to keep up. On January 31 he announced his proposal in a speech, in Tutzing, on “German Unity in the European Framework.” He had worked on his plan with just a couple of aides. This time it was his turn to announce a position on his own, which he had not cleared in advance with the Chancellery.¹²³

On February 2, he came to Washington. He and Baker had a relaxed and friendly, jackets-off two-hour fireside talk. Genscher presented his core ideas.

Germany would remain a member of the EC and of the Western alliance. “We do not want a united Germany that is neutral,” he declared. He proposed that there be “no expansion of NATO territory eastwards.” The former GDR would not be incorporated into NATO or NATO’s military structures.

Baker went along with Genscher’s idea. He appears to have believed, then and for about another eight days, that Genscher’s idea was similar to the U.S. idea about German membership in NATO, with a demilitarized status of some kind for the former GDR.¹²⁴

In fact, they were not the same idea. At some level, Genscher’s idea would make no sense, since a united Germany could not entirely be a member of NATO yet have part of its territory outside of NATO.

But Genscher was imagining this NATO status only as a transitional stage. Baker may have been relieved that he was not proposing that Germany would rest somewhere between the two alliances. Genscher’s vision was that NATO, along with the Warsaw Pact, would become “elements” of new “cooperative security structures throughout Europe.”

Genscher’s plans were tied to the organization then called the CSCE, the “Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe,” which we have referred to briefly before. It was a forum that then included thirty-five states, including all the NATO and Warsaw Pact members, including, across the Atlantic, the United States and Canada. It also included a dozen “neutral” European states like (the then united) Yugoslavia, Ireland, Sweden, and Cyprus. It was sometimes called the “Helsinki process,” because this forum, originally usually called a European Security Conference, had been used with great ceremony to lay down the principles of postwar Europe in the first CSCE summit, held in Helsinki in 1975.

Gorbachev had proposed convening a “Helsinki II” summit meeting, to be held in Paris, probably later in 1990. France and other states, including the U.S., supported his proposal. Many in Europe hoped that all these issues about Europe’s future might be settled at this Paris summit, which might then become another great European peace and security conference, in the tradition of the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 or the Versailles conference of 1919.

The U.S. government thought the all-European summit might be good for several things. At a meeting of American, British, French, and West German political directors, “We all agreed,” the British representative reported, “that the CSCE was becoming more important as East/West relations become more fluid. It is the only body that involves all the key players, European and American. The Western objectives of democracy, the rule of law and human rights are on its agenda.”

But the U.S. government did not think this all-European conference was the right place to settle the future of Germany or NATO. Genscher agreed with the Americans on the German point.

But Genscher did think the CSCE process could handle the alliance issues, because the alliances might just disappear—and the foreign troops with them. He was not alone on this. None other than Vaclav Havel, the heroic Czech dissident now helping to lead his freed country, talked of all foreign troops leaving Europe—replaced by “a new European security system, also including links to the United States, Canada, and the USSR, but different from the present one.” The new Polish leader, Mazowiecki, had a similar view.

Bush was not a bit convinced that this leap into space would work. He thought the risks were too great. He said so directly to Havel.

Yes, he agreed that NATO had to be transformed into something different. But the existing treaty was the best way to keep the United States in Europe. He argued to Havel that “our presence in Europe—military and economic—has been a stabilizing presence, not a threatening presence.”¹²⁵

There was, then, a major difference between Genscher’s “Tutzing formula” and the U.S. government’s position. Puzzled about how a united Germany could stay in NATO while its eastern portion was excluded from it, journalists pressed Genscher to explain how the Tutzing formula would work. He gave a very revealing answer: “Nobody ever spoke about a halfway membership, this way or that. What I said is, there is no intention of extending the NATO area to the East. And I think you should wait for things to further develop.… That will be the situation at this summit, the CSCE summit.”

Genscher was trying to kick the issue down the road, worried as he was about the position of the Soviet Union. Elbe later recalled how “nervous” Genscher was, fearing that even the Tutzing formula’s commitment to NATO was on “thin ice.”¹²⁶

In their February 2 meeting, Baker went along with Genscher’s Tutzing formula, partly because he did not yet understand how it differed from what others in the U.S. government wanted, and mainly because Baker was concentrating on other issues.

Baker and his key aides, Zoellick and Ross, had developed the Two Plus Four negotiating plan, comprising the two Germanys plus the Four Powers with historic legal authority still pending from the military occupation agreements of 1945. In their plan, the Two Plus Four would also have a limited scope and a clear mandate. It would exist “to bring German unity to fruition.” It would begin work only after a freely elected East German government could participate, after the March 18 elections.

Others in the U.S. government, including the two authors of this book, had our doubts about the Two Plus Four approach.¹²⁷ But Baker was right. The “big peace conference” alternative to handle the German problem was gathering momentum. Baker’s alternative helped head this off. His alternative also helped give the Soviets a sense that there would be a meaningful process to engage key issues.

Baker was not opposed to any CSCE summit. But there would be a preparatory meeting in Bonn, in March, to start working up “a set of basic principles to guide the conversion of socialist systems to market economies.” Another preparatory meeting, in Copenhagen in June, would advance human rights and the new elections initiative, to get the CSCE into the democracy-building process.

Here, Baker said, were the American preconditions for the large and high-profile all-European summit.

• First, there had to be more progress on human rights, such as agreement to the U.S. initiative on principles for holding free elections at the Copenhagen meeting of ministers in June.

• Second, any CSCE summit had to be preceded by completion of the CFE treaty.

• Third, the CSCE summit should not be turned into a German peace conference.

With advance work by their key aides, Elbe and Zoellick, Genscher went along with these three conditions. He agreed to support Baker’s Two Plus Four plan. He agreed that the new forum would not start until after the East German elections.¹²⁸ They agreed to Genscher’s idea of “no intention to extend the NATO area of defense and security towards the East.”¹²⁹

While Baker was meeting with Genscher, Scowcroft and Blackwill were en route to Munich. There they received a report on Baker’s meeting and also met with Teltschik. Scowcroft wrote to President Bush that Germany “was like a pressure cooker.” It would take America’s best efforts, and those of Kohl, “to keep the lid from blowing off in the months ahead.”¹³⁰

First Baker, then Kohl, set off to Moscow to talk about Germany with Gorbachev. Beforehand, Baker had talked over his plans with President Bush. Baker had in mind a straightforward quid pro quo: The United States would help make unification happen. The West Germans should stand with the Americans on the issue of NATO. Scowcroft too advised Bush that “with Kohl traveling to what may be the most portentous foreign meeting of his life, I believe you should both give him all the personal support you can and make clear to him our preferences concerning the future of a united Germany.”¹³¹

On February 9, Bush sent an important letter to Kohl. Bush came straight to the point. German unification was coming soon. That “just means that our common goal for all these years of German unity will be realized even sooner than we had hoped.… In no event will we allow the Soviet Union to use the Four Power mechanism as an instrument to try to force you to create the kind of Germany Moscow might want, at the pace Moscow might prefer.”

The NATO alliance did need to become a different institution, one with “more emphasis on its original political role.” Then Bush laid out his approach on the status of former East German territory as Germany stayed in NATO. It differed from the Genscher approach.

• Eastern Germany would not be demilitarized; German troops could be stationed there.

• NATO’s defense commitment would cover all of Germany, not some of it.

• German troops in eastern Germany, and all other German troops, could thus still be part of NATO’s integrated military command.

• Eastern Germany would have a “special military status,” with only German NATO troops stationed there in peacetime.

• U.S. troops would remain in western Germany.

Germany would thus stay in NATO, linked to the military commitment of the United States. The Soviets would withdraw most or all of their troops from Central and Eastern Europe. The two sides would not be treated the same way, if that was Germany’s choice.¹³² A couple of weeks later, Kohl alluded to this letter “on the eve of my trip to Moscow… which will be going down in history as an important document of German-American friendship.”¹³³

In Moscow, Baker (who had not yet seen Bush’s final letter to Kohl) urged Gorbachev to accept a unified membership of Germany in NATO. Baker made the case for keeping German military power embedded in a NATO framework. For instance, “a neutral Germany would undoubtedly acquire its own independent nuclear capability.”

He then stressed that NATO itself would have to then become a “changed NATO,” one “that is far less of a military organization, much more of a political one.” In this context, the U.S. military presence was stabilizing and reassuring.” As for America, “we do not necessarily desire to keep troops in Europe.… So if there is any indication that the Allies don’t want them we will in no way keep our troops there.”

Baker repeated that point again: “[If foreign countries] don’t want [the U.S. military], our country is simply not going to be able to sustain a presence in Europe and we will immediately bring our troops home.” If Europeans wanted it, NATO would need to become a political alliance “by which we maintain our presence in Germany and elsewhere.”¹³⁴

Baker helped sell Gorbachev on Two Plus Four.¹³⁵ Gorbachev’s team had also been thinking about a “six-power” forum. “I say four plus two; you say two plus four. How do you look at this formula?”

“Two plus four is a better way,” Baker answered. It put the German states first.

The Two Plus Four process, Baker explained to Gorbachev, could work on security assurances. It also “could explore” certain assurances, such as “no NATO forces in the eastern part of Germany.” Or, as Baker put it in his meeting with Gorbachev, using the Genscher formula, NATO would not extend “one inch to the East.”

When we published our original, detailed account of this diplomacy, we did not try to rebut claims that, in this exchange, there was an agreement never to enlarge NATO. Back in 1994, when we finished drafting that book, we did not think that anyone would make such an argument.

Although new evidence has become available about the exchanges in February 1990, we think our original account is still factually accurate. It can now be supplemented by some even more detailed historical dissections of just what was said then and why, using all sources that have become available in all the relevant languages. The best of these reconstructions is by a European historian, Kristina Spohr, who most fully combines the story behind the scenes in all the major capitals.¹³⁶

A few key points stand out.

First, neither Baker, nor Kohl, nor any of the Soviets could quite understand or explain Genscher’s position. This was because they do not appear to have understood, and thus were not able to articulate, the full Genscher vision of how the half-of-Germany NATO jurisdiction was meant to work.

They could not articulate it because Genscher’s vision wasn’t meant to work in the long run. It was just supposed to be an interim stage, hanging in the air, until a succession of CSCE summits (in 1990 and 1992, he had told Baker) replaced the old NATO and Warsaw Pact structures with the new all-European structure.

Since Genscher himself had not worked out the details of that next stage, or secured any agreement to them, he therefore could only allude to them promisingly and vaguely. No one else could explain it. He regarded the Warsaw Pact and NATO as temporary structures.

Thus the Soviets could not have just locked in this deal in February 1990. They would have had to help develop and agree not only to the partial (temporary) membership idea, but also commit to the all-European half of the design. No one had even outlined how that might work.¹³⁷

Second, the Soviets themselves neither understood nor came close to accepting the Genscher position, as presented by Baker and Kohl. They heard out this odd assurance and were perfectly noncommittal, if not just puzzled. Baker presented a choice between his formula, on the one hand, and a neutral Germany with foreign forces gone, on the other. Obviously, this was a matter that would have to be hashed out in some further negotiation.

After all, when Gorbachev saw Baker and Kohl (on February 9 and 10), Gorbachev and Modrow had just developed and publicly presented their alternative vision of how the German question was to be solved. Modrow had announced it on February 1, to worldwide notice. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze vigorously defended the Modrow alternative.

They also knew that even this stance was considered far too soft by some in the Soviet government. Germany was exhibit A in an attack that had just been launched against Gorbachev from the right wing of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, led by Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, who pleaded with the Soviet leader “to prevent a prewar Munich.” Or, as Ligachev put it in an emotional confidential letter sent to Gorbachev the next month, “The socialist commonwealth is falling apart, NATO is gaining strength. The German question has become of primary importance.”¹³⁸

The Soviet government was not tempted at this point to abandon the plan they had just so painstakingly developed with their ally. Gorbachev had no intention of dismantling the Warsaw Pact. The notion of Poland or Hungary or any member of the still-extant alliance joining NATO was not yet on the table.

What did impress Gorbachev was Baker’s argument about the danger of a situation in which Germany was neutral, outside of any alliance system. Gorbachev added that he could see advantages to having American troops in Germany. “The approach you have outlined is a very possible one. We don’t really want to see a replay of [the aftermath of] Versailles, where the Germans were able to arm themselves,” he said.

“The best way to constrain that process is to ensure that Germany is contained within European structures. What you have said to me about your approach and your preference is very realistic,” he added. “So, let’s think about that. But don’t ask me to give you a bottom line right now.”¹³⁹

While Baker was traveling, Scowcroft worried that the Genscher formula might cause trouble. While Baker was still in Moscow, Scowcroft explained the matter to Bush. Bush then sent his message to Kohl, cc’ing Baker, that we described above.

Baker, who had already been struggling to explain the position, realized the distinction. As soon as he digested Bush’s letter (on February 9, a week after his press conference with Genscher, and just after his meeting with Gorbachev), he snapped into line.

Bush had explained that a former GDR would have a “special military status” to be negotiated. Working on Bush’s letter, Zelikow had borrowed the particular phrase “special military status” from a suggestion offered by NATO’s secretary-general, former West German defense minister and Bush friend Manfred Wörner. Other officials in other governments, like the British, arrived at the same formula. The specifics of that would be left to another day.

Baker made no commitments about a future in which there would be no Soviet Union and no Warsaw Pact—only NATO and new democracies in Eastern Europe clamoring to get in. In the first half of February 1990, that future was not yet what leaders were discussing.

The day after he wrote to Kohl, Bush met with Wörner.¹⁴⁰ In his different jobs, as a West German defense minister and now as NATO’s secretary-general, Wörner had gained a broad perspective on European security. The Bush-Wörner relationship was important to both men. Wörner was one of those who helped persuade Bush to view the European Community as a partner, not a rival.

Wörner took care to explain why the term “special military status” was important. It meant that all of the German armed forces could remain part of NATO’s military command. Having such a command made European defense a multinational effort rather than a national one, and German participation was what made it credible. A special military status for the former GDR did not mean demilitarizing eastern Germany.

Wörner was adamant about the need to keep a united Germany firmly in the NATO alliance. Otherwise, he warned, “the old Pandora’s box of competition and rivalry in Europe would be reopened.” Neutrality was dangerous, for Germany and for Europe. In that situation, eventual German acquisition of nuclear weapons was quite possible.

To Wörner, a demilitarized Germany was also unacceptable. A neutral or disaffected Germany would be tempted to float freely and bargain with both East and West. Nothing could replace NATO as the only stable security structure.

It was Bush’s “historic task,” Wörner argued, that he should protect the Germans from temptation, save the new Europe from instability, and safeguard those who had made a new Europe possible. It would assuage the fears of other countries in Western Europe too.

On the NATO specifics, Kohl did not yet agree either with Bush or with Wörner. He stuck with Genscher’s vague formula.

When Kohl met Gorbachev, the atmosphere was friendly. Gorbachev told Kohl that it was up to the Germans to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to unify. It was also up to them to choose their form of government, the pace of unification, and the conditions under which it would occur.

Kohl and Gorbachev reached agreement on the Two Plus Four process. Gorbachev was persuaded that the CSCE was too unwieldy to be a useful forum for discussing the German question. The Two Plus Four would also elevate the Soviet role.

Kohl, filled with emotion, assured Gorbachev that nothing but peace would ever rise out of German soil. He silently gestured to Teltschik to make sure he was copying all of this down, word for word. Teltschik was jubilant inside. “That is the breakthrough!” he noted in his diary.

Kohl, at Teltschik’s urging, portrayed the February 10 meeting with Gorbachev as a historic event. He wanted the German people to know that the Soviet leader had given him the “green light.”

Genscher and his aides were appalled. They considered such crowing about a “breakthrough” very risky. They scorned Teltschik as a foreign policy “amateur.”¹⁴¹

Gorbachev did not believe he had made any great new concession. He saw his position as consistent with the German unification plan he had just agreed to with Modrow, announced on February 1. Modrow was about to undertake another round of his key negotiations with Kohl in Bonn, right after Kohl returned from Moscow. It is thus an error to claim, as some scholars have, that in exchange for Kohl’s reiteration of Genscher’s NATO proposal, Gorbachev publicly offered agreement to Kohl’s plan for unification, or to Kohl’s particular plan for economic and monetary union.¹⁴²

Gorbachev and Modrow had just worked out a plan they had presented as an alternative, better form of “unification.” Modrow, with Soviet support, had already been advocating another form of economic and monetary union with the FRG, in a confederation. It was not the form of union that Kohl’s government wanted. Only eight days earlier, Gorbachev had personally urged Kohl, Bush, Mitterrand, and others to accept the new Modrow plan.

But in crowing about the “green light,” Kohl was playing to the crowd: the audience of East (and West) German voters. He was trying to make his cause look realistic and attainable to them, the Germans who would be going to the polls in a little more than a month.

Soviet officials of course understood Kohl’s political game. As Genscher and his aides had feared, the Soviets hastily, and angrily, took pains to contradict Kohl’s glowing portrait of the decisions made in Moscow. As for Genscher’s Tutzing formula, the Soviets claimed that their leaders “couldn’t understand such a scheme.”¹⁴³

The plan Gorbachev had just worked out with Modrow was still quite plausible. It appeared at the time to have strong support in both East and West Germany. Gorbachev immediately debriefed Modrow on his meetings with Baker and Kohl. Modrow, about to meet with Kohl on the economic issues, pleaded for Gorbachev to press Kohl for help in getting the FRG to immediately transfer billions of marks in emergency aid to the GDR. On that one, Gorbachev did not feel able to help.¹⁴⁴

Just a day after Kohl returned from Moscow to West Germany, Modrow arrived in Bonn to talk with Kohl about currency, aid, and models of economic union. These were the discussions we mentioned earlier, the meetings that became so acrimonious once the West Germans seemed to refuse emergency help and insisted on a monetary takeover.

Gorbachev then himself detailed his views on Germany on the front page of Pravda. Perhaps, he suggested, “history has started working in an unexpectedly rapid way.” But that was just “one side of the matter.” The other side was that unification concerned “not only the Germans.” There needed to be a peace treaty with Germany, he said. “It is this agreement that can finally determine Germany’s status in the European structure in terms of international law.”

This treaty, Gorbachev explained, would maintain the role of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Any change in the “military-strategic balance” between these two organizations was “impermissible.”¹⁴⁵

When Kohl returned to Bonn, he first had his difficult clashes with Modrow. Then he faced another political battle, this one inside his own government.

Kohl’s defense minister firmly opposed the Genscher “no extension eastward” NATO formula. Genscher brusquely maintained that only his formula was “realistic.”

The battle spilled into public view. With the East German elections now only a few weeks away, Kohl chose solidarity with Genscher. His defense minister had to back down. It now seemed that there was a real difference between the United States and the West German positions on the NATO question.¹⁴⁶

Kohl then traveled to Washington. “The time has come,” Bush’s staff told him, “for an honest and unadorned talk with Kohl about his bottom-line on security issues, despite the difficulty in pinning the Chancellor down.”

Kohl met with Bush at Camp David (without Genscher being present, by Kohl’s design). The presidential retreat was a pleasant setting for Kohl and Bush to review plans for the months ahead. The Germans were flattered by the invitation; no chancellor had ever before been a guest there. The weather was cold, but a fire was burning in the hearth, and the lodgings were unpretentious but very comfortable.

Both Kohl and Bush were accompanied by their wives, and other members of Bush’s family joined them at lunch. The Germans could tell that the atmosphere would be relaxed when Baker greeted the chancellor’s party at Dulles International Airport wearing a red flannel shirt and cowboy boots.

Bush’s staff had emphasized that the Camp David meetings would be the crucial occasion for settling West German agreement on the external aspects of unification. Kohl was driving the internal agenda and the United States was backing him fully. It was time “to cement a historic bargain: Kohl’s pledge not to alter the form and substance of Germany’s security commitments to NATO in exchange for a U.S. promise that the Two Plus Four process will not interfere with German unity.” The Camp David sessions, on February 24–25, sealed these bargains on all counts.¹⁴⁷

Kohl was in good form, thoughtful and prepared. He told Bush that he wanted America in Europe, not just for its soldiers, but also to prevent the construction of rival trade blocs, pitting the United States against a Fortress Europe.

Both leaders also agreed that after staying for some limited time, all Soviet troops should leave the territory of a united Germany. The status of American forces would not be equated with the position of the Soviets. You must stay, Kohl told the Americans, even if the Soviets leave Germany.

Bush repeatedly stressed the need to clarify a future Germany’s status in NATO. It must have full membership in the alliance.

Kohl wondered aloud if Germany could be handled the way France was handled. France was a member of the alliance but, in 1966, it had withdrawn from NATO’s military organizations and command structure. That was when NATO headquarters had left Paris and moved to Brussels.¹⁴⁸

Bush said that he hated to think of another France in NATO. Germany ought to be a full participant.

Kohl then raised the specific question of NATO’s presence in former East German territory. He said that NATO units, including German forces dedicated to NATO, could not be stationed on East German soil.

The U.S. side was determined to persuade Kohl to reverse the position he had just taken in Bonn. Teltschik (who had sympathized with the defense minister) had worked on the matter with Blackwill. They drafted a press statement that would publicly show a common line.

Teltschik urged everyone to agree that the limits would apply only to NATO “forces,” but that NATO “jurisdiction” would indeed extend to all of the former GDR.

Baker said Teltschik was right. He admitted that he had used the term only before he realized how it would affect the application of the North Atlantic Treaty to the defense of all of Germany. Kohl and Bush agreed.

As the meeting ended, Bush turned to Kohl. They had come a long way together, but this was now a crucial moment. “We are about to have a press conference,” Bush reminded the German leader. “I need you to say that a unified Germany will be in NATO.” With Kohl’s agreement, Bush afterward told the press, with Kohl beside him, “We share a common belief that a unified Germany should remain a full member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including participation in its military structure.”

Immediately after the Bush-Kohl meeting, Baker wrote to Genscher to tell him of the agreement that “all of the territory of a united Germany would benefit from the security guarantee provided by the Alliance.” Just to be clear, he added that references to limiting NATO jurisdiction were “creating some confusion” and should be avoided.¹⁴⁹

Kohl’s task had been made easier by Bush’s earlier willingness to demonstrate—not just talk about—a different NATO through further arms reductions. Adding to his earlier proposal in 1989, Bush had announced a plan to drop the ceiling of U.S. and Soviet stationed troops in Europe even lower. The cuts would eliminate at least a quarter of remaining American troop strength and the large majority of Soviet deployments outside of the USSR.¹⁵⁰

Bush brought Kohl along, who loved the idea. Thatcher was less enthusiastic. Bush sent Eagleburger and Gates back out to Europe to talk about it some more, and reassure, and he also presented the proposal to Gorbachev on the same day he announced it in his State of the Union message to Congress, on January 31. Two weeks later, Baker and Shevardnadze hammered out a compromise to set such reduced ceilings.¹⁵¹

But many Europeans believed these planned troop cuts were just a first stage in the departure of all the foreign-deployed U.S. and Soviet forces. When Bush had talked through his troop plan with Mitterrand, the French president had been cool to the idea. He said he was worried about a slide to German neutrality.

Bush endeavored to reassure Mitterrand that his goal was just the opposite. He wanted to set a floor, not just a ceiling.

Mitterrand made it clear to Bush, clearer than he had before, that he hoped American forces would stay in place between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Internally, Mitterrand and his staff believed the phase of foreign forces being stationed in Germany might be coming to an end. He told Bush he was making his own plans to pull French forces in Germany back to France.

Privately, Mitterrand expected all the Americans to leave too. He did not necessarily want that. He just thought that phase of history was coming to an end. Europe, he felt, would be back on its own.

By mid-February, in his public musings, Mitterrand seemed philosophical. The FRG would do as it pleased, he said. France, after all, had nuclear weapons and Germany did not.

“The main thing, for me,” he said, “is for Europe to take up its true place in the world again after the self-destruction of two world wars. In short, I expect Europeans to keep in mind, as I do, a paraphrase of that well-known expression, ‘Let Europe take care of itself.’”¹⁵²

In mid-February, with the European transformation accelerating, foreign ministers from every NATO and Warsaw Pact country gathered in Ottawa, Canada. The Ottawa meeting had originally been scheduled to begin serious negotiation of an agreement on Open Skies, the initiative Bush had relaunched in May 1989. That subject for the gathering was now eclipsed, however, by the diplomacy swirling around questions of Germany’s and Europe’s future.

Baker persuaded his colleagues to accept his conditions for holding a CSCE summit, in Paris, hopefully later that year. The conventional forces agreement (CFE) was no longer simply an arms control negotiation. Now, with the rapidly changing situation in Europe, it would also speak volumes about the underlying political situation.

Dumas of France pushed back. He argued that a CSCE summit might need to be held in Paris, regardless of progress on CFE, in order to deal with the German issues.

Genscher and Baker presented a united front against this argument. Baker stated unequivocally that the United States would not attend a summit unless a CFE treaty was done, ready for President Bush’s signature.¹⁵³

The Two Plus Four design was not just about the number of participants. That had occurred to others too. The other half of the design was agreement that this forum was not meant to obstruct but was instead to facilitate “the establishment of German unity.”¹⁵⁴

For the Americans and West Germans, the Two Plus Four announcement was aimed squarely at public opinion in East and West Germany. They eagerly publicized the Ottawa announcement’s vivid acceptance “of the establishment of German unity,” to help reinforce the impression that the international problems, so often mentioned in the press, were manageable, and were being managed.

At Ottawa, other members of the Western alliance had felt left out. Italian foreign minister Gianni De Michelis was especially unhappy. “We have worked together within the Alliance for 40 years,” he complained.

The Americans, British, French, and West Germans all tried to be conciliatory. Baker pledged to consult others about the activities in this new forum.

Finally, however, after De Michelis repeated his concerns, Genscher lost his patience. He turned to the Italian and said sharply, “You are not part of the game.” In the stunned pause that followed that remark, the Canadian chairman gaveled the meeting to a close.¹⁵⁵

The German Election

The Soviets and East Germans hoped to channel unification into a more gradual process. Their hopes rested on a leftist victory in the March 18 GDR elections. This was the outcome that most observers expected.

Amid all his own concerns, about to be voted the Soviet Union’s first “president,” Gorbachev kept working with Modrow and his noncommunist East German coalition partners. They met in Moscow on March 5–6. The Soviet government turned up the volume, also trying to help their side in the upcoming East German elections. In Ottawa, Shevardnadze had complained in a speech to the Canadian parliament about “politicians… who want to play a game of political speed chess with a time limit of five minutes.”¹⁵⁶

Moscow denounced the annexation/takeover path to unity as unacceptable, even “illegal.” Gorbachev said any form of participation in NATO by a unified Germany “is absolutely out of the question.” There must instead be stages, tied to the CSCE, as they articulated an ultimate vision practically identical to Genscher’s. He scorned those who did not treat such questions seriously.¹⁵⁷

West Germans rushed to assure the USSR—and the German public—that no harm would come to Soviet interests. In doing this, Genscher announced again that he thought “the alliances will increasingly become elements of cooperative security structures in which they can ultimately be absorbed.”

The last phrase brought Genscher close to the position of centrist SPD experts who believed Germany’s membership in NATO would be temporary, since the alliance would dissolve within a year or two. More radical thinkers in the SPD were flatly opposed to German membership in NATO at all.¹⁵⁸

The SPD-East and the SPD-West had also issued a joint foreign policy statement announcing that “a future united Germany should belong neither to NATO nor to the Warsaw Pact.”¹⁵⁹ The idea of German membership in NATO was not terribly popular. A February 15 poll showed that an astonishing 58 percent of West Germans wanted a united Germany that was neutral, outside both alliances.

At this time, no senior officials in either Washington or Bonn thought the Soviet and East German positions were hopeless. They knew the USSR still had significant leverage over events in Central Europe. Moscow could force the German people to choose between unification and membership in NATO, channeling the surging tide for unity against the supporters of the alliance.

Moscow could also force the German people to choose between respecting the Soviets’ wishes or precipitating a major international crisis. The U.S. government knew that, especially in an election year, Kohl and the West German voters had little stomach for a major international confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev, a man so widely admired in the FRG.

In Bonn, Kohl’s mood had been shooting up and down. He had gone to the GDR and campaigned directly for the CDU alliance, encountering huge, cheering crowds. In six appearances he had spoken before about a million people, almost 10 percent of the electorate.

Yet the stress was tremendous. He had undertaken an extraordinary gambit by publicly announcing the annexation/takeover plan for the GDR. His coalition partner, Genscher, had forced him into a difficult confrontation with Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg. The mood in the FRG was uncertain and anxious. So much hinged on the election in the GDR.

On March 13, at a rally in Cottbus, Kohl went further. He promised East German voters that after the West German takeover, their ostmarks could be exchanged for the prized deutschmarks at a one-to-one rate. The economic logic of this flowed from the annexation plan, but it was a staggering (and enticing) promise. Economists in both German states (and internationally as well) thought it was also a flawed, financially unsound idea.

But Kohl believed that politics trumped economics at this moment: History’s call was too strong and would judge timidity as unwise. The Alliance for Germany had to win. This was the best chance that it would. He had simplified the question for the East German voter: After more than forty years of communist rule, do you want to try new social experiments or join a proven and prosperous democratic state?

The SPD had declared repeatedly for the negotiated merger plan, one that took into account the specific characteristics of the GDR. Its position on alliances clearly now differed from Kohl’s.

Most analysts in early March, including the American embassy in East Berlin, thought that the Social Democrats, the SPD-East, were likely to win the March election. The odds seemed long and bleak for Kohl, the CDU, and the Alliance for Germany. Teltschik remembered Kohl feeling so weary and depressed that he wondered aloud whether he could just give up and go home.¹⁶⁰

Kohl had always seemed to have a “common touch.” His political instincts—not his ability to mobilize through great rhetoric—had always served him well. On this fateful choice, those instincts came through for him again. In the first free election to be held in eastern Germany since 1932, the voters chose absorption into the more prosperous West. They voted decisively for Kohl’s path to unity.

The turnout was over 93 percent of the electorate. The margin of victory was clear. The Alliance for Germany won more than 48 percent of the electorate, the SPD about 22 percent. The former Communist Party, the PDS, held some 16 percent of the voters, many in Berlin. The dissidents of 1989, New Forum and the like, running as Alliance ’90, mustered less than 3 percent of the vote.

De Maizière and his Alliance for Germany colleagues formed a grand coalition in mid-April. They included the SPD as a junior partner in order to have a comfortable two-thirds majority to effect constitutional changes and command a government with the appearance of consensus support. Young Dr. Merkel was doing what she could to help.

If there was a consensus, though, it was not for de Maizière. It was for Helmut Kohl’s plan, his promises, and his vision for Germany.¹⁶¹

Shaken by the election results in the GDR, the Soviet Union still stood its ground. Shevardnadze, Baker, Genscher, and other dignitaries gathered in Windhoek, Namibia, on March 20–22 to celebrate the independence of this new southern African state. Shevardnadze’s position was unchanged. He was convinced that the matter would ultimately have to be resolved, somehow, “at the highest levels.” Baker noticed that Soviet positions on arms control topics were hardening too. The Soviet military appeared to be exerting more influence.

Baker reported to Bush that Shevardnadze’s mood, shadowed by developments in Germany and in Lithuania, “was more pensive than I have seen before.” He and Gorbachev “seem to be genuinely wrestling with these problems, but have yet to fashion a coherent or confident response. They also have yet to shape their bottom lines.” The Americans, Baker concluded, should therefore “not underestimate our ability to affect their choices and perhaps even the formulation of some of their options.”¹⁶²

Nearly a month earlier, at Camp David, Bush and Kohl had mused about how to persuade the Soviets to go along. His competitive spirit surging, Bush had said the Soviets were not in a position to dictate Germany’s relationship with NATO. “To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.”

But then they got serious. Kohl thought the Americans would have to carry the burden of persuading the Soviets.

Bush, Baker, and Kohl thought that in the end, Gorbachev would probably accept German membership in NATO. The Soviets should understand that the United States and the FRG were in total agreement. The time for games had passed.

But, Kohl said, Gorbachev would probably make this concession directly with the U.S. president. The Soviets might then name their real price for agreement. He wondered aloud if their compliance might just be a matter of money.

Bush wryly observed, “You’ve got deep pockets.”

The economic issues would be important. But all of them recognized that Soviet security concerns mattered too, a lot. They would have to be addressed seriously.

For Gorbachev to concede, Baker thought Gorbachev would need to see, on the one hand, that the Germans were unshakably behind full NATO membership. But they would also have to see that the West was willing to take legitimate Soviet security concerns into account.¹⁶³

That, Bush commented, was why the United States and Germany ought to have the closest possible consultation. We are going to win the game, he said, projecting an air of confidence. But we must be clever while we are doing it.

The U.S. government was now balancing its ambitious objectives for Germany and Europe with its parallel objectives for the future of the Soviet Union. On that vector the United States was still trying to balance large, rapid achievements in arms reductions and limits with an agenda to help Gorbachev succeed.

The West German–American agenda for Germany was in plain tension with their common hopes to help Gorbachev. Awareness of this tension was something that Baker and Genscher very much had in common. The French and the British were even more worried about Gorbachev’s future.

The West was trying to achieve, in peace, a reversal of fortunes for Soviet power in Europe not unlike the results of a catastrophic defeat in a war, without the bloodshed. The United States had decided to try to achieve the unification of Germany unequivocally on Western terms.

It was a bitter pill for Moscow when the East Germans made their choice to throw their lot in with the stronger and more powerful FRG. An East German intellectual had been prescient when he questioned Gorbachev’s ideological pronouncement that the international system was no longer governed by class struggle. “If there is no longer class struggle as an organizing principle,” he asked, “what is the argument for two Germanys?”

It turns out there was no argument. There would be one Germany—the Federal Republic of Germany, integrated in NATO and the European Community. Now it was up to America, the allies, and Helmut Kohl to deliver that vision. They wanted desperately to do it in a way that brought Moscow along without bitterness and, perhaps, without an end to Gorbachev and Soviet reform.