German Unification and World Peace

Could it be that the rush for consensus between the Soviet Union and America over German unification portends a greater threat to world peace than politicians are willing to concede? Sure, the potential savings in troop budgets can help stem the red ink in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Certainly, too, West Germany is now well schooled in democracy and is showing itself ready to teach its Eastern brethren. But these are hardly reasons to believe that united Germans will not destabilize world peace and prosperity.

The strengths of democracies rest in their functioning differently in different cultural environments to express their peoples’ genuine desires. This cannot mean that democracies do absolute “good”; rather, if they are true democracies they follow their peoples’ ideas, whether for “good” or “evil” in the rest of the world. It’s not the governmental form that contributes to world peace; it’s the content. Hitler, after all, manipulated the democratic German state by appealing to German cultural norms which had wide support in pre-World War II Germany and he achieved pre-eminence constitutionally.

Hitler’s “evil” was no more (nor less) than the realization through the state of his vulgar expression of German “greatness,” “racial exclusivity,” “manifest destiny,” and “cultural imperialism”--themes developed from great German artists and thinkers such as Nietzsche and Wagner--and themes which had, and have, a wide following in the Germanys. As artistic or philosophic themes they can enliven and expand cultural surroundings; but, as exploited by popular politics, they can only refer back to Hitler’s actions. The refrains of the militaristic “ Deutschland Uber Alles “ in the East and the West thus ominously reaffirm popular cultural ideas in the political arena.

Read in this larger context, the growing electoral power of right-wing parties in democratic West Germany over the past decade argues strongly against uniting Germans still holding notions of cultural supremacy. And, the sporadic violence against Jews and non-Germans (particularly Turks and Italians) which has peppered German society recently shouts that unification now would be a terrible mistake for Germany as well as the world.

This is not the time to rush to consensus for the politically expeditious reasons obvious in the U.S. and Soviet accords. Rather, it is time to listen closely to the Europeans’ judgments of the German popular cultural environment, which in the immediate past countenanced atrocities against them, and not to promote the threat to peace in German unification until they are satisfied that a united German democracy will express the positive aspects of the German cultural environment.

ROBERT L. WOODS JR.

Claremont