Germanys: Toward a new transoceanic partnership creating <i> one </i> Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, respecting security concerns of all nations.

We Germans are aware there is concern among our neighbors in Europe and the United States with German unification. What do the Germans want? What are the implications for Europe and the world if nearly 80 million Germans live together again in one state?

Considering all that has been done in the name of Germany, I can understand these questions. The joy we feel at the ending of a decades-long separation will neither extinguish nor conceal our memory of the suffering brought especially upon the Jewish people by Hitler in the name of Germany. We Germans desire no more than to live in freedom and democracy and at peace with all our neighbors.

We live in the heart of Europe. Our history, as President Richard Von Weizsacker said, has never belonged to us alone. Developments in our country have a far greater effect on the whole of Europe than developments in other parts of the continent. This does not increase our power, but it adds to our responsibility. Power politics are to us a thing of the past. Our policy today is motivated by a sense of responsibility.

Together with our Western partners, we in the Federal Republic of Germany have entered into the deepest commitment possible for a state: that based on common values and convictions. We entered into this commitment through our membership in the Atlantic Alliance, the alliance of the North American and European democracies and through our membership in the European Community.

Our alliance has guaranteed our freedom and security for decades and has enabled us to seek detente, cooperation and disarmament with the East without prejudicing our security. As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit conference of June, 1989, confirmed, the alliance has proved that it is capable of adapting to new developments. That will continue to be necessary; the role of the alliance will change.

The alliance will become more political; it will play a major role in the context of disarmament, verification and confidence-building. It will continue to exist as a manifestation of transatlantic partnership, and it will assume new responsibilities in connection with the development of cooperative security structures in Europe. It is a reflection of political developments that the alliances are moving from confrontation to cooperation.

The community of 12 European democracies is the surest sign that these European nations have learned the lessons of history and see their future in European union. The European Community is already an element of a peaceful order, and is now moving toward political union through ever closer integration. An intergovernmental conference due to be held at the end of this year will establish economic and monetary union.

Now we must shape Europe’s relationship with the United States and Canada. How can we together cope with the global challenges confronting the world’s industrial nations?

With the European Community acquiring a new identity as a political union, the time has come to establish a new quality of cooperation based on partnership. Europe is again taking its fate into its own hands. But we don’t want this to widen the Atlantic--as friends we do not wish to become estranged but to come closer together.

I call upon the North American democracies and the members of the European Community to issue a joint declaration heralding a new Atlantic partnership, a declaration encompassing all the political, economic, technological and cultural aspects of our relationship and capable of meeting the challenges confronting mankind.

Such a partnership would not only be beneficial to the members of the European Community and the North Atlantic democracies, but would also help to overcome the division of Europe and to create one Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. It would involve the United States in the building of the common European house.

Such a Europe is outlined in the Final Act of Helsinki, that bold blueprint of 1975 that makes human rights and human dignity the basis of cooperation in Europe and prescribes cooperation for the sake of peaceful relations between West and East in Europe.

The Final Act also charted the course for the establishment of a lasting and equitable peaceful order from the Atlantic to the Urals, which the Atlantic Alliance had already advocated in the report of a 1967 commission headed by former Belgian Prime Minister Pierre Harmel.

Even then, overcoming the division of Germany was considered the precondition for such a peaceful order. Today we are heading for that goal, and we have reason to be confident for the whole of Europe.

I strongly believe that the unity and cohesion of the Western Alliance ultimately led the Soviet Union to abandon the expansionist foreign policy that had ushered in the Cold War and sparked the arms race between West and East.

In 1985 Mikhail S. Gorbachev initiated a revolutionary transformation of the Soviet Union. Without his historic achievement, the fundamental changes of recent years in Europe and throughout the world would not have been possible. A development of historic significance had begun, and it is in our own interest that it should prove successful.

President Bush has declared global cooperation on the basis of partnership between the two superpowers in the multipolar, interdependent world of tomorrow an aim of American foreign and security policy. The forthcoming U.S.-Soviet summit should confirm this statesmanly perspective.

The Soviet Union must not be excluded from that Europe; it belongs to it. Poland’s eastern border is the beginning of Eastern Europe--not Western Asia. And the United States and Canada must participate, since they are indispensable partners for Europe and therefore also signatories of the Helsinki Final Act.

Farsighted policies will no longer be dominated by the confrontation between West and East, but by the determination to overcome it, by the will to create the one Europe in which many forms of coexistence are possible, but coexistence based on freedom, human rights and democracy.

The aim is a bold design for the future of Europe as a whole. The only element binding the whole of Europe at present is the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (which includes Canada, the United States and all European nations except Albania). The efforts to intensify that process and to render it more permanent by creating new, pan-European institutions are indispensable contributions to stability in Europe.

The central issue in the context of European and German unification is arms control and disarmament. The crucial question for the future is whether we can succeed in reducing the huge military arsenals. The mission and doctrine of the alliances must keep pace with political developments. If not, they will lose their stabilizing effect.

The democratization process in Central and Eastern Europe means additional security for the West, which makes a resolute disarmament policy even more urgent. The Soviet Union, too, has recognized that the West, as an alliance of democracies, neither has the intention nor is capable of attacking the East.

Thus Gorbachev’s far-reaching disarmament policy is by no means motivated by economic constraints only, as is often assumed in the West, but by a realistic analysis of Western arms and possibilities. This reflects a new Soviet policy based on cooperation.

Transparency, openness and the ability to make correct judgements of one another are just as important as the reduction of forces and weapons. The more we reduce the military elements of the West-East relationship, the easier it will be to overcome the division of Europe.

What, then, is the Germans’ role in this process? It must be clear, unequivocal and calculable. We Germans are members the Western communities, the European Community and the NATO alliance, and that is what we intend to be as a united Germany as well.

We don’t want Germany to pursue unity alone. We don’t want the country to be neutralized but to be tied to Europe’s fate. We wish to dominate no one. Our aim, as Thomas Mann wrote as early as 1952, is to create not a German Europe, but a European Germany.

Both German states are therefore called upon to provide not only a German but a European answer as they pursue national unity. That answer must dovetail with the future architecture of Europe. We Germans, like all Europeans, want to see more, not less, security and stability established. We do not want unity at the expense of others.

We want German unity as a member of NATO, in the context of the integration of the European Community and in the CSCE process. We want it as a contribution to the development of a partnership between West and East based on stability, to the construction of the common European house and to the establishment of the peaceful order spanning the whole of Europe.

We do not wish to pursue this goal alone, nor to follow a special German route. We want to follow the European course. We want the unification of the two German states to enhance stability in Europe. What we want to be unified--within the present borders--is the Federal Republic of Germany, the GDR and the whole of Berlin--nothing less, but nothing more either.

Another point about which there is no doubt as far as we are concerned is that the unification of Germany will have to take into account the security interests of all nations in Europe, including the Soviet Union.

It will be a major contribution to peace in Europe if both German states solemnly declare that they renounce for all time the use of force in the pursuit of political aims. Both German states can reaffirm jointly that they renounce the manufacture and possession of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

In the same century in which the most horrifying wars in human history have taken place, in which the most ghastly crimes against humanity have been perpetrated, we now have the opportunity, in the final decade, to create for Europe and the whole world new and durable foundations for international cooperation and peace.

West and East have found common starting points from which to shape the future. We must now fit together the components for the next decades; we must chart the course into the next millennium.