Germany Reconsiders Using Military Muscle--and No One Blinks : Diplomacy: After World War II, Europe was happy that Germany never wanted to send troops outside its borders. But now things are changing.

Now that the United Nations has authorized military force to protect aid deliveries into Bosnia-Herzegovina and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is drawing up operational plans, pressures are growing on Germany to participate in its first military mission outside its borders since World War II. The crisis in the Balkans, as Washington insisted from the moment Yugoslavia began to disintegrate more than a year ago, is a European problem that requires a coordinated European response.

Germany, by far the most powerful nation on the Continent, is being called on to show leadership. In these circumstances, it cannot refuse to play an active role--as it did during the Gulf War. Ten days ago, Chancellor Helmut Kohl described his nation’s inability to match its power with military action as “pitiful.”

Germany has long been reluctant to use troops for political purposes. From the founding of West Germany in 1949 to unification in 1990, Germany exercised self-restraint internationally. It avoided taking responsibility abroad if use of military force might be involved. Germany’s leaders would cite Adolf Hitler’s black record of aggression, constitutional prohibitions or the need for a consensus within NATO or the European Community before Germany could act militarily.

During the Gulf War, the Germans could still say to the United States and its other allies: “Go ahead, we support you, we will help cover the costs, but we cannot send troops.” Their reluctance earned the Germans criticism and contempt in Washington. But such a “without us” policy is indefensible this time--for many reasons.

Germany is the staunchest advocate of common European action and a common European “security” policy. It cannot, therefore, allow young French draftees to risk their lives on mountain roads between the Adriatic and Sarajevo while Bundeswehr conscripts stay at home.

Bonn’s allies remember, too, that Germany’s premature diplomatic recognition of Croatia last winter accelerated the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and, as U.S. officials warned Germany at the time, helped create ethnic strife in Bosnia-Herzegovina. More than a million South Slavs, including 215,000 refugees from Croatia and Bosnia, live in Germany.

Kohl has called for “the toughest” measures against Serb “genocide.” He must realize that the nature of Germany’s response will define its role in post-Cold War Europe.

Two energetic new political leaders, Klaus Kinkel, who succeeded veteran Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher only three months ago, and Volker Ruhe, who came in as the new defense minister last winter, have teamed up to stiffen the foreign policy of united Germany.

After being shamed during the Gulf War by accusations of cravenness from U.S. congressmen and British newspapers, Germany began to end its shirking. When the war was over, five German naval ships sailed into the Persian Gulf to sweep for mines. Shortly after, 750 Bundeswehr medical corpsmen, engineers and helicopter personnel shuttled to Iran to assist Kurdish refugees. This spring, Ruhe sent an army medical detachment to Cambodia for the U.N. peacekeeping operation. Then, three weeks ago, German transporters began flying relief sorties to Sarajevo.

These were all described as “humanitarian” missions. In the Yugoslav crisis, Germany has already gone beyond the humanitarian. Kinkel in particular has declared Germany cannot stand aside, that the Serbs should be “forced to their knees,” and air strikes against Serbian positions should not be ruled out.

Last month, Germany sent a frigate and three naval reconnaissance aircraft to the Adriatic to join the international surveillance mission commanded by NATO and the Western European Union, the European defense grouping.

The German government originally decided on the Adriatic mission without consulting Parliament. Only after the opposition Social Democrats objected loudly, forcing a special one-day session in mid-July, did the government’s Bundestag majority approve the mission--against the SPD’s votes.

Kinkel and Ruhe must move carefully because of widespread pacifist sentiment among Germans and also because of supposed constitutional inhibitions.

For more than a decade, Genscher insisted that Germany’s constitution forbids any military deployments other than directly for the country’s defense within the NATO treaty area--though the constitution contains no such explicit prohibition and almost all constitutional law experts agree it should not be interpreted as if it did.

In a search for clarity, both government and SPD opposition have for months been talking about constitutional amendments that would specify the kinds of missions the Bundeswehr may undertake abroad. Irate at the way the Adriatic mission came to pass, the SPD now wants to test its constitutionality before Germany’s supreme court.

Germans have been appalled by the carnage and atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia, which they have seen nightly on their TV screens for more than a year. They surprised even their own government in their willingness to accept Croatian and Bosnian refugees--far more than any other Western European country.

Yet it will not be easy to generate public support for missions involving fighting. No German soldier has died in combat since 1945. How will Germans react when coffins come home, even if draped in a U.N. as well as a German flag?

Although Kinkel and Ruhe are only 10 years younger than Genscher and Kohl, it is a decisive 10 years: The two new men lack any adult experience of World War II. They say Hitler’s criminal aggressions in the 1930s and 1940s need not prevent the Germany of today from acting like France, Britain or the United States in using the threat of military force to back up the country’s foreign policy.

As Germany’s new, tougher foreign policy unfolds, those who are uneasy when they think back on Hitler’s aggression should remember two crucial points.

First, it is a fully democratic Germany which now is facing the predicament that power brings, one where public opinion and a strong opposition will require the government--with greater care than it has exercised so far in the Yugoslav crisis--to obtain advance parliamentary approval for expanding the military component in Germany foreign policy.

And second, any missions abroad by the Bundeswehr will surely take place only under mandates from the United Nations, NATO or the Western European Union. There will be no German unilateralism.

So far, Bonn’s Cabinet has agreed only that German involvement will consist of supplying logistical support and equipment--as in the Persian Gulf.

This self-limitation will not be sustainable if NATO and the WEU develop a credible course of military action. German destroyers in a naval blockading force and German aircraft in strikes on the Serbs are the minimum Germany’s allies will then ask of it. If alliance loyalty, the heart of the country’s foreign policy for four decades, is to have meaning, Germany must undertake at least this much.