Our Interest in Unwrapping Bonn’s Cocoon

The Atlantic Alliance is embroiled in the latest of many disputes about nuclear weapons and arms control. This dispute unfortunately has obscured what, from the U.S. perspective, is the real argument with West Germany.

This argument is not about technical questions of defense and arms control. The persistent disagreements in this area are merely symptoms of far more profound divergences of perceived interest. The real argument with West Germany is about the implications of its re-emergence as a great European power, about Bonn’s long-term policies in Eastern (more properly, Central) Europe, about German reunification and about the role and aims of the Soviet Union in the Gorbachev era.

If we do not bring these questions into the open, but rather force the Germans into agreeing to positions they no longer believe in, we are not merely storing up resentment for the future; we are jeopardizing the future of Western security itself.

The debate is urgent because a revolution is occurring in German and European elite opinion about East-West relations, the dimensions of which are hardly realized on this side of the Atlantic. Virtually without exception, Europeans believe that the Cold War--and with it, the Soviet military threat--is over. Furthermore, they believe that Western Europe can and should take a leading role in overcoming the division of Europe, and that it is far better qualified politically and morally to do so than the United States. So far, the Bush Administration has done nothing to disprove that belief.

What is happening on the threshold of the 1990s is that West Germany, for long Europe’s economic superpower, is becoming its political superpower as well. This development has three epoch-making implications. First, even almost two full generations after World War II, Germans remain remarkably unwilling to acknowledge their status openly. This means that they still feel obliged to describe their international political goal of expanding West German power and influence in Central Europe in moralistic terms as an altruistic peace policy that in no way reflects crude national and material interests. These pretenses cause far more harm than good. They oblige the West Germans to pretend to be everybody’s friend at all times, thereby leading Washington, as we have seen, into entirely unrealistic assumptions about what security policies Bonn will accept.

The second effect of West Germany’s new status is that the left-right split on security and foreign policy that divided the country in the 1980s has disappeared. In its place we have a near-total consensus that West Germany can, should and will use its economic and political power to promote liberalization and pluralism in Central Europe.

The final, and most remarkable, implication of Bonn’s growing power is that it is welcomed, not feared, by West Germany’s European neighbors, both East and West. This fact alone should encourage West German leaders and elites to be more honest about their interests. It also should encourage the United States to stop playing catchup with European opinion about West Germany’s role or about East-West relations. Washington has every reason to take the lead in encouraging West Germany to take full responsibility for its actions as a great power. That way, the Germans will face the risks, rather that merely enjoying the gains, of their detente policies.

The same goes for the U.S. position on German reunification. The West German government decided in the mid-1960s that the West had no chance of forcing a withdrawal of communist power from East Germany. For the past 25 years, the question of reunification has vanished completely from the U.S. policy agenda, though not from West Germany’s. Forward-looking Germans speak now in terms of association or federation of the two Germanys, not reunification, but the goal is the same: national self-determination. Washington has much to gain, and nothing to lose, by publicly stating its full moral and political support for Bonn’s endeavors to achieve this goal.

Bonn’s national self-assertion is not free of illusions, though those illusions would carry much less danger for the West as a whole if both we and the Germans were more honest about where our national interests coincide and where they diverge. On modernizing Central Europe and on German self-determination, they clearly coincide. On wholesale aid to the Gorbachev regime, perhaps they do not. I say perhaps because I think that honest West German appraisal of its great-power interests leads to the conclusion that lowering one’s guard while helping to revitalize a still-powerful Soviet empire is a dangerous policy. As long as we allow the Germans to conceal their power policies in a moralistic cocoon, however, no German will be forced to make such an honest appraisal.

Russia entered the arena of European power policies in the 18th Century as Prussia’s enemy. Ever since then, the German eagle and the Russian bear have contested the political and cultural hegemony in Central Europe. After almost half a century of abnormal conditions, the old struggle is re-emerging in what one hopes is a peaceful form. It cannot fail to have intimate implications for American foreign policy and America’s own shaky status as a great power. It is high time we started talking about it.