Kohl Tries to Calm Fears of United Germany

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sought Sunday to reassure Europe and Western allies that a reunified Germany will not be a threat to peace, but he made clear that the pace of reunification will be decided by the Germans themselves, not by outsiders.

“This is not 1945; this is 1990,” Kohl said at one point during a joint press conference with President Bush after two days of meetings between the two men at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland north of Washington. “The question of German unity is a question of the right of self-determination.”

Political leaders from Moscow to London increasingly have been raising anxious questions about future German strength and intentions. Bush and his advisers, however, have been focusing their attention in a different direction. They have been emphasizing a need to maintain warm ties with Germany and to support Kohl at every turn in an attempt to head off any German move toward neutrality and the removal of U.S. troops.

That aspect of the talks appears to have been successful. The two leaders agreed, Bush said, that Germany should remain within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its unified military command structure.

Soviet troops, Kohl said, could remain on the soil of what is now East Germany during an undefined “transitional period,” but in the long run, “a united Germany cannot belong to two different pact systems.” East Germany belongs to the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact alliance.

“Neutralism,” said Kohl, “would be a very false illusion for us.” Germany, he added, must be “ever more embedded” in a unified European structure “so nobody needs to be afraid.”

For now, however, many of Germany’s neighbors, having lost millions of people in the two world wars in which Germany was the aggressor, have been frightened by the prospect of a reunited German state.

Administration officials had hoped that Kohl would use the Camp David meeting to offer new statements to quell those fears. But at the press conference, held at Camp Greentop, a national park facility near Camp David, Kohl moved little beyond previous public statements.

In particular, the West German leader, whose domestic political base includes a powerful nationalist wing, remained carefully ambiguous on two of the most vexing questions--Germany’s future borders and the size of the country’s army once the two German states become one.

“We must understand that there are certain fears on the part of our neighbors,” Kohl said. He noted that many of those fears are serious although some are “pretended fears” on the part of people whose real concern is German economic power.

“We have a certain history,” Kohl said. “I think we have learned lessons, and we do not want to repeat the errors of history.”

But, showing the sensitivity that many Germans feel about the mistrust others still hold toward them, Kohl defended his country’s postwar record.

“In the course of 40 years,” he said, West Germany has been “a loyal and reliable partner in human rights and the defense of freedom.”

“Nobody has to tell me,” he added, “what a reliable partner is.”

Bush, for his part, said that although he understands the concerns others have, he does not share them. “The U.S. position is that we welcome unification,” he said. “Clearly, that would not be the position if we held the fears” expressed elsewhere.

The fear expressed most often concerns Germany’s eastern boundary. After World War II, the Soviet Union took over a large portion of eastern Poland, and Poland, in turn, took over a large chunk of what had been eastern Germany.

A sizable minority within Germany would like to see those territories returned, and the Poles, with growing intensity, have expressed their worry that a newly reunified Germany might refuse to recognize the current border, which runs along the Oder and Niesse rivers.

The United States recognizes the Oder-Niesse border as permanent, a point that Bush repeated Sunday. But Kohl, who faces strong competition from his Social Democratic rivals in elections scheduled for December, fears losing the votes of nationalists.

Kohl, therefore, has avoided making an unequivocal statement on the issue. Any final decision must await “a freely elected all-German Parliament government,” he said Sunday, repeating his standard line on the issue. “Nobody has any intention of linking the question of national unity with changes of existing borders.”

Both men made clear that in the next round of talks over Germany’s future--the so-called two-plus-four talks among East and West Germany and the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France, the four victors of World War II--Poland would not be directly represented.

But “no agreement would ever be reached that affects the Polish borders without Polish involvement,” Bush said. “There will be a lot of consultative mechanisms.”

Another issue moving toward the forefront is the future size and role of Germany’s armed forces. Since the early 1950s, the United States has urged Germany to build up its army, which has served as a major part of NATO’s shield against the Soviets. East Germany, meanwhile, constructed a powerful army of its own.

Together, the two German states have more than 750,000 soldiers, which, if combined, would be the second-largest European army after that of the Soviet Union. Germany has accepted some limits on those armed forces. Asked, for example, if Germany would ever seek to develop nuclear weapons, Kohl responded with a flat “no.”

But asked about the broader question of German troop strength, Kohl demurred. “I do hope that we Germans will profit” by the future development of European arms-limitation talks, he said.

What size army a future German state might want to keep, “I cannot tell you at all,” Kohl added.

Bush repeated his past declarations that U.S. troops will remain in Germany even if the Soviets withdraw all of their forces. The Soviet threat may have receded, he said, but now “the enemy is instability.”