Paper Series

The Legacy of 1989

The European Question, Revisited
The vision of a continent whole and free is unfulfilled

Robert Hutchings
Princeton University

The German Question, Revisited

Why unification in 1990 created peace in Europe—
and previous attempts did not

Robert Leicht
DIE ZEIT
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 The Legacy of 1989

Brussels Forum Paper Series

March 2009

The European Question, Revisited

The vision of a continent whole and free is unfulfilled

Robert Hutchings
Princeton University

The German Question, Revisited

Why unification in 1990 created peace in Europe—and previous attempts did not

Robert Leicht
Die Zeit
 The European Question, Revisited
The vision of a conteinent whole and free is unfulfilled

Brussels Forum Paper Series

March 2009

Robert Hutchings*
Princeton University

*
Robert Hutchings is diplomat-in-residence at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he also served as assis-
tant dean. His combined academic and diplomatic career has included service as director for European affairs at the National Security Council
(1989–1992), special adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State (1992–1993), and chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
Introduction
Twenty years later, the events of 1989 have lost
none of their capacity to astonish. Indeed, for those
of us who experienced those events at close range,
as witness or participant, the enormity of what
transpired that epochal year becomes even more
amazing with the passage of time. It was as if a
generation of history had been compressed into a
few short months.
At the beginning of 1989 and as late as mid-
summer, across Eastern Europe communist
regimes were in power. Poland and Hungary
were poised on the brink of major change, but
elsewhere communist regimes were seemingly
well-entrenched. Yet, by the end of the year, all were
gone, swept away by a revolutionary tide that few
even imagined. A few months later, Germany was
reunified, ending the long division of the country
and continent. The following year, the Soviet Union
itself collapsed. Never in modern history had
changes of such magnitude occurred except as a
consequence of major war.
For political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic,
the challenge of forging a new order was complicated
by the manner in which the Cold War ended:
“Not with military victory, demobilization, and
celebration but with the unexpected capitulation
of the other side without a shot being fired…The
grand struggle had ended not with a bang but a
whimper.”1 The U.S. vision of a “Europe whole and
free” and the still more ambitious goal of a “new
world order” offer inspiring points of reference for
a stock-taking at the 20-year mark. Where does
the vision of a “Europe whole and free” stand, two
decades later, and what are the prospects for a “new
world order?”
Robert L. Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the
1
Cold War: An Insider’s Account of U.S. Policy in Europe, 1989-
1992 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 343.
The vision of a continent whole and free is unfulfilled
Central and Eastern Europe
It did not take long for the euphoria of 1989 to
give way to the sober realities of post-communist
transition. The demise of the old order, welcome
though it was, left a vacuum in its wake. Central
planning collapsed before even the rudiments
of a market-based economic system could be
put in place. Political parties, trade unions, civic
institutions, and other intermediary organizations,
all of which had been either abolished or co-opted
under communist rule, had to be created, often
out of whole cloth. Even those countries that had
a certain head start and made good and effective
early steps—notably Poland, Czechoslovakia, and
Hungary—soon faced a sharp public backlash
as the dislocations of rapid change were not
accompanied by visible improvements in living
standards.2 By the mid 1990s, with economies in
decline, political life sordid, and the prospect of
joining the European Union seemingly remote,
euphoria had given way to disillusionment.
The gravitational pull of the EU, NATO, and
other European and transatlantic institutions
was nonetheless a powerful force that helped
these countries on the path of democratic
transformation. There were enough gifted political
and economic leaders, especially in Central Europe,
but also farther south in Romania and Bulgaria,
to offset the demagogues and warmed-over
apparatchiks in keeping their countries mostly on
the right track. It was not always pretty, but it was
for the most part heading in the right direction.
The EU’s accession process, actively supported by
the United States, helped ensure a step-by-step
process of legal and regulatory harmonization. By
2004, most of the countries of Central and Eastern
Europe had joined both NATO and the European
Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New
2
York: Random House, 1990).
The European Question, Revisited 5
 Union, with the remaining ones lined up to join.
Given all the challenges this region faced in 1989,
it would have been hard then to imagine a more
successful evolution in so short a period.
The former Yugoslavia was of course a massive
exception to this happy story. U.S. and European
The German failures to deal with a collapsing federal state in
question was 1990 and 1991—particularly the failure to forge
a common and comprehensive strategy for the
never about
region as a whole—set the stage for a series of ad
unification alone
hoc solutions. Even those that helped secure a
but about fitting welcomed peace, like the Dayton Peace Accords,
a powerful had a patchwork character that failed to resolve
Germany into underlying grievances. The immediate legacy will
a stable and be that Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are likely
secure to remain international protectorates for years to
European come, with the potential for renewed inter-ethnic
order. conflict looming under the surface.
Germany
Even now, two decades later, it is hard to see how
the process of German unification could have been
handled any better, not only in securing a favorable
outcome but in assuring that all of Europe accepted
and even welcomed this outcome. Memories are
short and sometimes selective, so it is useful to
note that it might have turned out very differently.3
For example, had the United States joined Britain,
France, and the Soviet Union in resisting unification,
or had the United States merely sat on the sidelines,
the Germans would have had little choice but to
cut the best deal they could with Moscow, which
held effective veto power owing to the huge Soviet
military presence in East Germany. We cannot
know exactly where this would have led, but it
3
For a counterfactual scenario of “unification gone bad,” see
Robert L. Hutchings, “The United States, German Unification,
and European Integration,” in Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey,
N. Piers Ludlow, and Leopoldo Nuti, eds., Europe and the End
of the Cold War: A Reappraisal (London: Routledge, 2008), pp.
119–132.
6 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
would probably have meant Germany’s exit from
NATO and other semi-permanent restrictions on
German sovereignty. This would not have been a
recipe for a stable and secure new European order.
Given all the possibilities of what may have gone
wrong, it seems clear that the United States was right
to attach such a high priority to its leadership role,
right to throw its full support behind unification,
right to oppose British, French, and Soviet efforts
to derail or delay the process, and right to insist
that Germany be fully sovereign from the moment
of unification, with its alliance relationships intact
and no new restrictions imposed. And the Germans
themselves were right, not only in pushing for a
rapid pace of internal unification, but also to support
an acceleration of the European project so that their
newly reunited country would find a secure place
within a more united Europe and a continued strong
transatlantic community.
For 40 years, Germans across the political spectrum
had known that the only way to achieve their
most ardent national aspiration—the reunification
of their country—was in partnership with their
European and North American allies. That situation
changed objectively on October 3, 1990, and many
wondered whether united Germany would now
choose to go it alone (Alleingang) on many issues.
Germans themselves were worried, as was revealed
in the anxious internal debate over moving the
capital from Bonn to Berlin. The worries were not
without foundation, especially in light of Germany’s
aggressive support for Croatian and Slovenian
independence over the objections of its allies, but for
the most part the Germans proved they were reliable,
responsible, and trustworthy partners.
The judgement of Henry Kissinger, former U.S.
secretary of state, that Germany was “too big for
Europe, too small for the world” remains, by most
objective measures, a simple fact. The German
question was never about unification alone but
about fitting a powerful Germany into a stable
and secure European order. That question to some
extent is still open, though Germany’s neighbors
have reason to be much more sanguine. The
temptation to go it alone on certain issues, such as
energy cooperation with Russia, will sometimes
win out in German policy, but almost surely within
an overarching European orientation—that is,
independent-mindedness within the European
Union rather than apart from it. Thus, the more
interesting question is whether Germany will
gradually discard its inhibitions about playing
an overt leadership role within the European
Union. The answer to German novelist and Nobel
Prize winner Thomas Mann’s iconic question­—A
German Europe or a European Germany?—may
turn out to be, “yes.”
Russia
Managing relations with Russia since 1989-1990 has
been a major failure, perhaps the major failure. At
the time, Western leaders said that they did not want
Russia to be disadvantaged as a result of German
unification or the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. They
may even have believed what they said. But for all
the rhetoric about not wanting to exclude or embitter
Russia, Western actions helped to do just that. Of
course, Russia’s leaders bear a large share of the
blame, but such actions as NATO’s rapid expansion
eastward and the planned installation of theater
missile defense systems along Russia’s borders
have contributed to Russia’s sense of encirclement,
exclusion, and exploitation, lending strength to the
very authoritarian, ultranationalist forces we hoped
would become part of Russia’s past, rather than the
driving forces of its future.
It was also the case that when overtures were
made in the early 1990s, Russia was too weak and
internally preoccupied to play a meaningful role,
and by the time Russia had recovered its internal
cohesion under then-Russian President Vladimir
The vision of a continent whole and free is unfulfilled
Putin, there were substantive issues such as NATO
enlargement that stood in the way. Meanwhile,
policy differences toward Russia within Europe, as
well as between Europe and the United States, made
it more difficult to bring Russia into a cooperative
international system. Creation of a NATO-Russian
Council was a compromise solution that provided
for sometimes useful consultation, but it was not For all the
a decision-making forum. For the United States rhetoric about
particularly, “consultation” usually meant informing not wanting
Russia of decisions already made rather than
to exclude or
inviting Russian participation before the fact. Seen
embitter Russia,
from Moscow’s perspective, Latvia, for example,
Western actions
had a voice in European and transatlantic decision-
making, whereas Russia did not. helped to do
just that… Seen
If rapid Western engagement of former allies in from Moscow’s
Central and Eastern Europe was an irritant, U.S. perspective,
encroachment into the territory of the former Latvia had a
Soviet Union itself evoked visceral responses. These voice in European
approaches included the U.S. pursuit of energy
and transatlantic
opportunities in the Caucasus and Central Asia,
decisionmaking,
cultivation of counter-terrorist cooperation and
whereas Russia
security partnerships with Central Asian countries,
support for the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and did not.
Georgia via official diplomacy as well as tangible
support from private American foundations, and
probes about establishing U.S. military facilities in
Georgia and elsewhere.
These legacies will be hard to overcome, but a new
approach and longer-term vision is needed. There
are many issues where cooperation with Russia is
neither likely nor necessary. But there remain other
issues where a U.S.-European-Russian partnership
is both desirable and possible. It will require from
the United States and Europe a systematic effort
to remove some of the needless irritants in the
relationship and, from Russia, an awareness that
being a reliable energy provider and an active
collaborator on nuclear non-proliferation is in its
interests, too.
The European Question, Revisited 7
 European Union
In 1989, the European Community—consisting then
of 12 members—faced the enormous challenges of
simultaneous deepening and widening: deepening its
cooperation to complete the single European market
by 1992, a promise made under the Single European
Americans were Act, and widening its membership to accept new
loath to give up countries that had hardly begun the process of post-
communist transition. With the end of the Cold War
the mantle of
and the advent of a united Germany, the European
allied leadership,
Community, soon to be the Union, needed also to
and Europeans build closer political union and the capacity to work
were ill prepared together (if not necessarily singly) as a global actor.
to seize it. A new
transatlantic Along the way, it was easy to chronicle the failures:
bargain was the disappointing summits at Amsterdam in 1997
needed. and Nice in 2000, the French and Dutch referenda
rejecting the European Constitution in 2005,
Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008,
and repeated failure to streamline governance or
strengthen foreign and security policy cooperation.
Yet, taking the longer view, the two-decade record
of achievement after 1989 is stunning: creation of
economic and monetary union, establishment of
the Euro as a common currency, and European
enlargement from 12 to 15 to 25 to 27 members,
all accomplished without diluting the fundamental
democratic ethos or functional benefits of the
European project.
What of the Cold War’s legacy that remains
problematic? It was American power—via NATO,
chiefly—that shielded Western Europe in the
early Cold War and thereby facilitated European
integration. It also allowed Europeans to accentuate
economic and civilian power, relying on the United
States to shoulder the greater defense burden.
The external circumstances that gave rise to this
unnatural arrangement—the “Yalta system,” as
the French saw it—changed dramatically with
the end of the Cold War, but the institutions and
habits remained. American military dominance
8 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
had translated into an unwelcome level of political
dominance as well, and European security
capacities and foreign policy cooperation had failed
to keep up. Americans were loath to give up the
mantle of allied leadership, and Europeans were
ill prepared to seize it. A new transatlantic bargain
was needed.
The Atlantic alliance
At its summit in the spring of 1989, NATO rightly
put Eastern Europe at the top of its agenda and so
lent Western support to democratic change in the
region. A year later, with German unification well
advanced and the burden on NATO to demonstrate
to Soviet leaders that a united Germany remaining
in NATO would pose no threat to them, allied
leaders proclaimed “a transformed North Atlantic
Alliance.” The July 1990 London Summit achieved
its immediate objective of securing Soviet consent to
unification, but it failed to herald the fundamental
transformation that history demanded.
After the end of the Cold War, NATO needed to
undertake three inter-related transformations:
externally, by opening its membership to the
emerging democracies farther east; internally,
by fashioning a new balance whereby Europeans
assumed a greater role; and existentially, by moving
from collective defense to collective security and
preparing the alliance for a new range of security
challenges, most of them originating outside
the traditional NATO area. Yet only the first of
these—enlargement—was pursued with any degree
of urgency, while the other two were confined
mainly to the high-sounding words of NATO
communiqués and documents purporting to
advance a “new strategic concept.”
Even enlargement, important though it was
for democratic consolidation in Central and
Eastern Europe, was handled badly. The first
wave—bringing in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech
Republic in 1990—made sense, for these countries
were reasonably secure democracies that could
contribute substantially to the alliance’s mission,
and they were military defensible. The following
wave, however, brought in seven additional
countries that were democratically dubious,
militarily insignificant, or indefensible, particularly
inasmuch as their accession was accompanied by a
radical reduction of U.S. military forces in Europe.
Worse, this breakneck expansion was accompanied
by no parallel process for involving Russia in a
cooperative security relationship beyond the rather
meager consultation offered via the NATO-Russia
Council. It was not enlargement per se that was the
problem, but NATO’s failure to undertake the other,
more difficult steps to transform the alliance and
prepare it for the 21st century.
As a consequence, NATO enlargement raised as
many questions as it answered about the future
of European security, particularly when NATO
leaders, pushed by the United States, decided in
2008 to begin accession negotiations with Ukraine
and Georgia, even as NATO was planning missile
defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic.
From the beginning, allied leaders insisted that they
did not want to “draw new dividing lines” in Europe,
but the process of NATO enlargement and the
new plans for theater missile defense seemed, from
Moscow’s perspective, to be doing precisely that.
As it prepared for its 60th anniversary in 2009,
NATO had already established itself as the most
enduring military alliance in modern history. Yet
its future was in doubt. Its continued relevance
hinged on successfully completing the post-Cold
War transformation toward a more balanced
transatlantic relationship that recognized the
growing role of the European Union, forging a new
cooperative partnership with Russia (though it was
likely to be difficult), and fashioning a “new strategic
concept” that provided a compelling rationale for a
continued transatlantic security community.
The vision of a continent whole and free is unfulfilled
Europe, the United States, and the world
Twenty years following the collapse of the Warsaw
Pact, the U.S.-European relationship remains a
work in progress. The early hope in November
1990, as expressed in the speeches of U.S. President
George H.W. Bush in Prague and Paris, was that the
end of the Cold War would create the conditions
As it prepared
not only for a continued transatlantic partnership
for its 60th
but a stronger and more natural one, freed from the
unnatural imbalance of roles and responsibilities anniversary in
that the Cold War had imposed.4 The U.S.- 2009, NATO
European partnership was to be the driving force had already
behind a “new world order.” established itself
as the most
Yet, the loss of the West’s Cold War adversary enduring military
weakened the sense of common purpose on
alliance in modern
both sides of the Atlantic. As Georgi Arbatov,
history. Yet its
the founder and long-time director of Moscow’s
future was in
Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, famously
warned at the end of the Cold War: “We are going doubt.
to do something terrible to you. We are going
to deprive you of an enemy.” Absent a common
external threat, European and U.S. security
perspectives were diverging steadily in the 1990s,
yet because there was no issue to bring these
differences to a head, they tended to be obscured by
the sugar-coated rhetoric of NATO communiqués.
All that changed one bright September morning in
2001. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States
evoked immediate expressions of sympathy and
support from Europe (and elsewhere), but they did
not translate into a shared perspective on the threat
posed by international terrorism. For Europeans,
9/11 represented a dangerous but manageable threat,
to be handled chiefly as a matter of domestic security
and law enforcement, whereas Americans tended to
4
Hutchings, American Diplomacy, pp. 143-65; Robert Hutch-
ings, “Transatlantic Relations since the End of the Cold War:
Permanent Alliance or Partnership in Peril?” in A Companion to
Europe since 1945, ed. Klaus Larres (London: Blackwell, 2009),
pp. 231-48.
The European Question, Revisited 9
 see it—and were led to see it by their government—as
an existential threat that called for an all-consuming
“global war on terror.” Thus, 9/11 tended more to
divide than to unite Europeans and Americans,
particularly after the U.S. invasion and occupation
of Iraq, undertaken over the strenuous opposition of
France, Germany, and much of the rest of the world.
September 11
tended more to The unprecedented breakdown of U.S.-European
solidarity over such a critical security issue
divide than to
produced shock waves on both sides of the Atlantic,
unite Europeans
some proclaiming “the end of the West.”5 Yet
and Americans… differences over Iraq policy were only the proximate
The United States cause of a longer-term erosion of transatlantic
and Europe had solidarity. Iraq simply brought these differences
an indispensable into full view. If the split had not occurred as a
role to play in result of Iraq, it would have come over something
fashioning a else. The underlying divergences remain, even after
“global grand European and American leaders have moved into
bargain” that a more productive and cooperative phase of their
relationship, in particular following the election of
integrated the
Barack Obama as the new U.S. president.
rising global
powers… while After 9/11, some commentators contrasted the
preserving… American preoccupation with that date with the
the basic liberal greater significance Europeans attached to 11/9,
values that had the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
undergirded Yet this clever juxtaposition told but part of the
the Western-led story, for there were equally profound global
international changes underway that were only indirectly
system. related to the Cold War or the terrorist attacks
on the United States. Above all, the accelerating
process of globalization was rendering obsolete
the old dividing lines—East-West, North-South,
5
Francis Fukuyama, “Das Ende des Westens,” Die Welt, Septem-
ber 3, 2002; Charles Kupchan, “The End of the West,” The At-
lantic Online, November 2002. Among European commentators,
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida published joint editorials
in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and La Libération, May 31,
2003, calling on Europeans to “counterbalance the hegemonic
unilateralism of the United States.”
10 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
developed-undeveloped, aligned-nonaligned—that
had helped define the transatlantic relationship.
There was a new agenda of intractable challenges—
not only the immediate crises in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Palestine, but also more systemic
ones that would in the long run prove more
significant. These included the rebuilding of the
international financial architecture after the global
crisis of 2008–2009, strengthening a global trading
system that was being undermined by an anti-
globalization backlash, enhancing energy security,
developing a post-Kyoto environmental framework
to begin reducing carbon emissions, building
a viable nuclear nonproliferation regime, and
refashioning global institutions to accommodate
rising powers led by China and India. Not since
the creation of the Western alliance system had the
world been in such a state of flux.
The existing global system, fashioned for the world
of the mid-20th century, was not very relevant to
this new global agenda. Nor would the emerging
distribution of global power and influence,
characterized by a dramatic shift of power roughly
from West to East, permit a new global order to be
managed by a U.S.-European condominium. Yet,
the United States and Europe had an indispensable
role to play in fashioning a “global grand bargain”6
that integrated the rising global powers and
accommodated their interests, while at the same
time preserving and extending the basic liberal
values that had undergirded the Western-led
international system.
6
Robert Hutchings and Frederick Kempe, “The Global Grand
Bargain,” Foreign Policy Online, November 2008; Robert Hutch-
ings, “A Global Grand Bargain,” Washington Post, November 17,
2008, p. A19.
 The German Question, Revisited
Why unification in 1990 created peace in Europe—
and previous attempts did not

Brussels Forum Paper Series

March 2009

Robert Leicht*
DIE ZEIT

*
Robert Leicht is a political correspondent for DIE ZEIT in Hamburg, Germany. Previously, he was the newspaper’s editor-in-chief from
1992-1997. He also teaches at the University of Erfurt and serves as president of the Protestant Academy in Berlin, Germany.
 What does the ancient Greek historian Thucydides
have to do with the reunification of Germany
in 1989-1990? Everything is just a matter of
perspective! It is from Thucydides that we first
learned of the significance of perspective in
considering history. His prominent opus on the
Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) was innovative
The first German because it attempted to give us, for the first time
nation-state was in known historiography, an empirically verified
born of three description of the course of an event. However,
wars and became Thucydides was also innovative because he both
understood and presented the course of different,
the cause of a
new war. The internally connected, chronologically subsequent
events by means of “writing together”—that is, in
second German
an intellectual and narrative synthesis. It was only
unification was
through Thucydides’s empirical-synthesizing efforts
completely that the three phases of the conflict between Athens
different. It only and Sparta, Archiadamus’s War (431–421 BC),
became possible followed by the “foul” Peace of Nicias (421–413 BC),
due to a declared and finally the Decelean-Ionean War (413–404 BC)
renunciation became known to posterity as a single event called
of the use of the Peloponnesian War.
force and was a
In the recent past, a number of historians “wrote
contribution to a
together” World War I (1914–1918) and World
peaceful European
War II (1939–1945), as well as the “foul” peace
structure. between them, the period of the precarious
Weimar Republic, under the rubric of the “second
Thirty Years War.” This pointed emphasis was
subjected to some considerable criticism, above
all due to the (implied) relativization of the “issue
of war guilt.” First, Adolf Hitler’s criminal war of
aggression and destruction was not simply the
continuation of World War I. Second, World War I,
notwithstanding the condemnation of the German
policies that also helped lead to that war, was not a
prequel to the Nazi’s war crimes or even to making
that war a crime in and of itself. Nevertheless, the
“writing together” of separate and, in a certain
sense, disparate events is a worthwhile exercise.
There were two overriding questions from 1914–
1945: what position and what role is appropriate
12 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
for the German nation in Europe, and under what
conditions is Germany as a nation-state tolerable
to and controllable by Europe? These questions
were directed to the Germans themselves. And the
Germans themselves examined and questioned
the policies of the German nation-state that was
created in 1871. These questions were also relevant
for Germany’s neighbors, and German politics
contributed toward making these two questions
ever more critical.
Seen from a purely methodological perspective,
the phrase “second Thirty Years War” has a certain
value in considering issues of German history.
However, the specified period to be studied is too
short. Perhaps the temptation of a comparison
to the 30 years of war following 1618 was simply
too great. Above all, the roughly 30 years between
August 1914 and May 1945 in no way settled the
German question. Indeed, the capitulation of the
German Reich on May 8, 1945, the occupation, the
division, and, above all, the construction of the wall
through Berlin and the middle of Germany made
certain that Germany would not be in a position to
undertake a violent revision of the war’s outcome.
But the question of whether (and how) a unified
Germany could ever assume a role in Europe that
would promote peace was not answered before
1989–1990. The question was not actually properly
posed until the fall of the wall.
When German history is being “written together,”
the phase that is looked at should start earlier and
end later: specifically, the period from the first
German unification into a nation-state in 1871 to the
completion of the second unification and the final
definition of the German nation in Europe—namely
peace, freedom, and sovereignty in 1990. Although
we consider ourselves to be good Thucydides
students, in this paper we will not subscribe to his
method in total, in describing the path from the
first to the second German unification year after
year, military campaign after military campaign,
and speech after speech. It is more appropriate to
present a comparison of the initial environment with
the final result—that is, to contrast the first German
unification with the second.
The first German nation-state was born of
wars (1864, 1866, and 1871) and became the
cause of a new war (1914). At the time, both
Germany and its neighbors were acutely aware
of the risks a new nation-state presented. The
German Reich was simultaneously too strong
to be dominated by Europe and too weak to
dominate Europe. Statesman and chancellor of
Germany’s first unification, Otto von Bismarck,
was able to maintain the balance of powers in this
precarious situation—although only for a time.
The second German unification (1989–1990) was
completely different. While the first unification
was forcibly attained through warfare (and well-
disposed to war), the second unification only
became possible due to a declared renunciation
of the use of force and was, in and of itself, a
fundamental contribution to a final, stable,
peaceful European structure. Therefore, we can
now justifiably say that the Germans, for the
first time in their entire history, not only live
within one country, but also that their country’s
neighbors are all friendly or even allied countries.
All the economic and social problems as well as the
regional-structural divides arising from the time of
German reunification, notwithstanding their own
gravity, pale to insignificance in comparison to the
historically sensational benefit of being peaceably
integrated into the European environment. The
second German unification is an almost logical
continuation of the trend toward the development
of a German nation-state and is similar to the first
in that sense. However, the preconditions and
results are fundamentally different. How could
such a change come to pass?
Why unification in 1990 created peace in Europe—and previous attempts did not
First, the conditions for peace specified in the
Treaty of Versailles after the defeat of the German
Reich in 1918 were so severe that they left room
for resentment and revanchism. The defeat, despite
its severity and the socially as well as economically
difficult times that followed, was nevertheless an
incomplete defeat. Only 15 years later, following the
National Socialist “seizure of power,” the German It was through
Reich was in a position to take on a gigantic Thucydides that
armaments program, the planning of which had
the three phases
already been secretly thought through by the
of the conflict
Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr. The German Reich’s
between Athens
unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945 and the
and Sparta
subsequent occupation (that is, the nullification
of its sovereignty) and, finally, its division by the became known
Cold War’s frontlines nipped even any subliminal as a single
revanchist intention in the bud. event called the
Peloponnesian
Second, at the end of World War I the military War. A number of
leadership (after having recognized the inevitability historians “wrote
of defeat) succeeded in placing the responsibility
together” World
for the war and the defeat onto the Democrats,
War I and World
whom they despised. The change in Germany’s
War II, as well as
political leadership was used to allow the armistice,
which the monarchy and its military elite the “foul” peace
wanted, to be signed by the new, still completely between them,
inexperienced and unstable Republic. The lying under the rubric of
slogans about a German Reich that was “undefeated the “second Thirty
on the battlefield” and the “legend of the stab in Years War.”
the back,” according to which it was not the foreign
enemy that had achieved a victory but the domestic
enemy (read: the nascent democracy) that had
wanted the defeat, contaminated the core of the
Weimar Republic with a deadly poison from the
hour of its birth. In addition, it fed the illusion,
which found a consensus among all governing
elites, that the war’s outcome could be altered, in
the East at a minimum. Even the extraordinarily
competent German foreign minister, Gustav
Stresemann, was only able to achieve—and actually
only wanted—a reconciliation with France, but
The German Question, Revisited 13
 not with Germany’s eastern neighbors. The
“republic without republicans” owed this cardinal
birth defect to the old hard-core elites,—and the
remaining elites were unable to intellectually cope
with the constitutional change from monarchy to
democracy. In addition, there were the economic
and social burdens that came from two periods
One would have to of inflation and a world economic crisis that the
be blind to history masses of unemployed could not cope with and as a
result could not move the country in the direction
to reduce the
of stable democracy. Under these conditions, the
various collective
establishment of a self-confident democratic society
mentalities of
Germans in 1871, (and a broad elite) that had the wherewithal to
lead the first German nation-state, which had been
1914, 1933,
forcibly created through three wars, into a peaceful
1949, 1989,
and stable future would perhaps have been a miracle.
and, finally, 2009 All of this would have to be done following a
to the common demoralizing defeat in war and a “regime change”
denominator that had been imposed from outside.
“Once a German,
always a German.” In contrast, when Hitler’s Germany had to sign the
unconditional surrender of May 8, 1945, “total war”
had been followed by more than total defeat. The
whole world could clearly see that the war had been
lost by those political forces that had intentionally
started it after having, even though most Germans
did not greatly regret it, violently overthrown the
weak German democracy. There would have been
no future in an attempt to spin that into slogans
about “undefeated on the battlefield” or start a new
“legend of the stab in the back” about treason by
supporters of democracy.
In addition, the Nazi war of aggression, conquest,
and destruction was not only morally reprehensible
in and of itself, but it was also the basis of and the
cover for the destruction of the European Jews.
War as a “normal” instrument of German national
policy had become historically unacceptable. In
any case there was no longer any future that the
Germans could have conquered by force of arms.
The fact the German nation-state was then divided
14 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
along the European frontline of the Cold War
made more plainly clear to Germans than to any
other peoples that war was simply beyond the pale.
The potential for nuclear warfare on German soil
certainly unleashed immense fear.
For these reasons the policy of nonviolence that
was tentatively initiated by the grand coalition of
1966-1969, and that blossomed after the Socialist
Party/Liberal Party coalition led by Brandt and
Scheel came to power in 1969, was necessary for
two reasons: first, to integrate the Federal Republic
into the great powers’ detente policy and, second,
to further reduce the risk of a war that would have
harmed no nation more than the two divided halves
of the German nation. Without detente (albeit
while deterrence was maintained) and without the
renunciation of violence, the division would hardly
have been bearable over time. At the same time,
it must have been crystal clear to anyone who still
had some remaining hope for reunification that
such a miracle could only come about by peaceful
means and without any revision of Germany’s
external borders. Even dreams have prerequisites
in reality. Thucydides’s method sheds light on
these prerequisites. This broad perspective also
shows what unexpected good fortune came to the
Germans after their crimes and defeats in war.
If Germany’s neighbors did not immediately—and
sometimes perhaps not even today—recognize
this good fortune for the Germans to be their own
good fortune, then it is because they were not only
students of recent history but also Thucydides’s
disciples. His writing of history drew its deeper
meaning from the discovery of the constants in
humanity’s social and political history, as he explains
in the twenty-second chapter of his first book:
“The absence of romance in my history will,
I fear, detract somewhat from its interest;
but if it be judged useful by those inquirers
 who desire an exact knowledge of the past
as an aid to the understanding of the future,
which in the course of human things must
resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be
content. In fine, I have written my work, not
as an essay which is to win the applause of
the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
Some of the fears felt by Germany’s neighbors
seemed, in 1989–1990, to have been incited by
Thucydides’s assumption about the constancy of
human nature or, in any case, the German national
character. Whether it was the Irish journalist
and ex-diplomat Connor Cruise O’Brien seeing
a “Fourth Reich” rising on the historical horizon
or British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
inserting her aversion against the Germans and
their reunification into the discussion at the famous
Chequers Seminar at the end of March 1990,
Thucydides’s assumption that a peoples’ behavior
throughout history would always remain the same
was constantly in the background of that and
similar thinking. Or, to quote Margaret Thatcher,
“Once a German, always a German—you cannot
trust them.”
As a German, one should not be amazed by
such fears and aversions—even many Germans
(or at least West Germans) shared them. Many
intellectuals and journalists believed that the
division of Germany was to be accepted as a just
punishment for German crimes. Some were of the
opinion that, for political and strategic reasons,
any attempt to end the division would present a
grave danger not only to European stability but also
to the stability between East and West and must
therefore not be attempted. The novelist Günter
Grass even went so far as to claim that reunification
must not be allowed because of “Auschwitz.” The
philosopher Jürgen Habermas feared “Deutsche
Mark nationalism” and a loosening of the
Why unification in 1990 created peace in Europe—and previous attempts did not
laboriously attained and civilizing ties to the West.1
From today’s perspective one can ridicule these
fears, but only a few Germans would have been free
of the underlying guiding theme: “Once a German,
always a German…” Can they, can we, be trusted?
Or would one rather say, “Two Germanys are better
than one; we’ve experienced one Germany and look
what it got us?” Even those against whom national But the question
and cultural stereotypes are directed are not entirely of whether (and
free of them.
how) a unified
The West Germans had certainly benefitted from Germany could
their adaptation to a parliamentary democracy ever assume a
and an open civil society. That was a maturation role in Europe that
process of no less moment than the economic would promote
miracle. The fact that the West Germans enjoyed an peace was not
advantage over their countrymen in the East based answered before
on their location is obvious; however, that was not 1989–1990. The
something they earned. Furthermore, their mature question was not
insight had been forced upon them and had been actually properly
positively influenced by hard reality. Nevertheless,
posed until the fall
one would have to be blind to history and also
of the wall.
sociologically and psychologically unenlightened
to reduce the various collective mentalities of
Germans in 1871, 1914, 1933, 1949, 1989, and,
finally, 2009 to the common denominator “Once a
German, always a German.”
Fortunately one does not have to rely solely on
re-educating individuals to transform underlings
1
The author confesses that he believed in 1981 that the Germans
must be prepared to continue to live in two Germanys within a
framework of a German-German “community of responsibil-
ity” provided that the gap in freedom and prosperity between
the two Germanys would be overcome. Even from today’s
perspective the author does not consider his position at the time
as worthy of condemnation, but rather that his assumption was
erroneous according to which a second Germany could have any
reason to exist after the gap in freedom and prosperity had been
overcome. Communist Party (SED) ideologue Otto Reinhold, of
the GDR’s Academy of Sciences, stated this insight (of course not
until August 1989) using the following words: “The GDR can
only be justified as an anti-fascist, socialist alternative to the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany...What justification for its existence
would a capitalist GDR next to a capitalist Federal Republic
have? None, of course.”
The German Question, Revisited 15
 to citizens. Precisely for the purpose of preventing
a repetition of history, effective structures that
supported peace, order, and security in a heretofore
unknown manner were created in Europe after
1945, notwithstanding all differences between an
allegedly “old” and “new” Europe.
The development of peace-securing structures
There are more
began with the founding of the European Coal
than enough
and Steel Community, which “communalized”
opportunities for the key resources for armaments and the conduct
criticism of the of war, namely coal and steel. At least in Western
EU. But it would Europe, NATO and the military organization of
be dangerous not NATO “collectivized” the main instrument for
to recognize the waging war against one another, the military. Since
immense gain in that time, all of Germany’s non-neutral neighbor
security, peace countries have become members of both NATO
and freedom that and the European Union—and all have subjected
these structures— themselves to the judicature of the European
as ever still Convention on Human Rights. Furthermore, the
traditional main sources of national rivalry and of
imperfect—
one-sided national sovereignty—the military, trade
achieved in a
and, even currency—have been taken away from
historically
nation states. They, too, were “collectivized” at the
unique manner. European level. It is easy to see what a common
currency means economically and politically in
the current world financial crisis. If there were
no Euro, the currencies of numerous small- and
mid-sized European countries not only would
have been drawn into dangerous speculation
spirals. Moreover, the German Federal Reserve
(“Bundesbank”) would for all practical purposes
still be the “single guardian of monetary stability”
and the dominating regulator of currency terms of
trade in Europe. In the current situation it would
have become the focus of resentment in the rest of
Europe—a psychological and political burden not
easily to be carried by Germany.
One could occasionally ridicule or even despise
the European Union’s current state; one could
deplore the Union’s having too hastily expanded its
16 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
membership before an appropriate deepening of
the ties among its older members and suspect that
this all too hurried expansion is a subtle sabotage of
the entire project—especially when the expansion
was supposed to have reached beyond Europe’s
geographic limits. There are more than enough
opportunities for criticism. But one would have to
be dangerously blind to history not to recognize the
immense gain in security, peace and freedom that
these structures—as ever still imperfect—achieved
in a historically unique manner. This is, by the
way, one of the reasons why the expansion of the
European Union should not be pushed so far that
it risks this gain in internal stability and burdens
the Union by internalizing conflicts that have, for
good reason, stayed beyond its borders to date.
Everybody knows that never before in its history
has the old continent experienced 64 years of peace
(a period twice as long as the Thirty Years War), a
German nation-state that was created by consensus
and is surrounded only by friends and allies, and 25
countries that can endanger each other with neither
hot or cold wars nor with trade wars. Europe now
exists within structures that will ensure continuity.
Thucydides has taught us to understand history by
writing it “together.” Only by looking at the period
of 1871 to 1990 do the connections between the first
and second German unification and the substantial
differences between the two become evident: in
one case there were three wars before and two wars
thereafter, and in the other there is a stable peace.
But Thucydides was also wrong: even if human
nature only changes minimally, the historical
conditions of humanity’s political socialization and
the totality of its capacity for insight and consequent
collective behavior do indeed change. Above all,
national and transnational political structures that
nullify the old cyclical theory of history, according
to which history cannot do anything but endlessly
repeat itself, can be built based on increased capacity
for insight.
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