Importance of Being Rich : Kohl, on a Roll, Advances German Reunification in a Major Deal

Europe would appear to be on the least turbulent course to the future that anyone could imagine, thanks to two country boys whose political lives depended on making what just a few weeks ago seemed a very unlikely deal.

The West has said all along that membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would bind a unified Germany to Europe and make war on the Continent less likely. The Soviet Union never agreed publicly, but the West also argued that the arrangement would protect Moscow as much as it would Europe.

What had NATO holding its breath were doubts that Moscow would ever agree to let Germany decide for itself whether it wanted to join NATO or the collapsing Soviet-sponsored Warsaw Pact or both or neither. Historians made a case that joining neither would leave Germany adrift on the Continent just as it was in 1914 and in 1939.

Suddenly Moscow has signaled that it will go along. And measured against the changes sweeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the decision probably is no more startling than, say, church bells ringing in Kiev or a huge anti-Communist rally just outside the Kremlin.

Accounts of a joint press conference with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at which Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev announced his agreement noted reluctance. “We were realists,” he said at the end of a weekend with Kohl in Stavropol, a farming town in the eastern foothills of the Caucasus where Gorbachev grew up. “We assessed the direction of change,” he said, which translates fairly effortlessly into going with the flow.

The agreement is hedged but not evasive. Germany’s membership will come “eventually,” but apparently not before the three or four years it will take to move 350,000 Soviet troops out of East Germany. There will be some haggling over the acceptable limit NATO imposes on total troop strength of a unified Germany. Kohl is said to accept a ceiling of 370,000 Germans in the new army. But it seemed solid enough for President Bush to congratulate Gorbachev for statesmanship.

Monday’s deal makes it possible for Germany to stay on its unification schedule. That’s good for Kohl, who always seems in the opinion polls to be hanging by his thumbs. Staying on schedule improves his chances for reelection as chancellor not only of West Germany but of the reunited country.

As for Gorbachev, bowing to the inevitable probably gives the Soviet Union its best chance to share in the prosperity Europe expects after its national economies merge in 1992. The deal will also make Germans feel a whole lot better about parting with the billions in aid Kohl proposes. In a nation of bare shelves and shoddy goods, absolutely nothing is more important to Gorbachev’s constituents.