DIPLOMACY : Western Germans Waking Up to Need to Sacrifice for Unity

The day after German reunification in October, 1990, a reporter taking an informal poll asked residents of Bonn how unity would alter their lives.

Most were nonplussed. For them, nothing was new. The currency, government, laws, free-market economy, even the country’s name--all of which easterners were struggling to digest anew--remained unchanged in the western region.

Although easterners quickly discovered that the pain of unification would likely last generations, westerners clung persistently to the idea that life--with all its velvet-lined affluence--could go on as usual.

Now, more than 2 1/2 years later, there are indications that western Germans are finally beginning to accept that unity means change and sacrifice for them too.

“The first signs are beginning to show,” said Peter Weilemann, deputy director of research at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank near Bonn financed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats. “For two years, we talked about kick-starting the eastern economy as if it wasn’t attached to us. Now it’s dawning that we’re all in the same boat and if they (in the east) are in trouble, so are we.”

Kohl drove the point home in a parliamentary speech Thursday, in a message that seemed to be aimed mainly at western Germans. “We are a land whose pensioners are growing ever younger and whose students are becoming ever older,” he said. “With ever shorter working lives, ever shorter working weeks and ever longer vacations, our competitiveness is in danger. A successful industrial nation . . . can’t organize itself as a collective amusement park.

“We’ve got to set new priorities, change our habits and lower our expectations,” he added.

Kohl’s comments were a dramatic reversal of his initial post-unification assurances to all Germans that life for all would only get better.

However obvious such realities might appear to outsiders, the shift in western German thinking is an important development. Indeed, many of Germany’s problems since unity have been generated by the belief among western Germans, who make up 80% of the total population, that change wasn’t part of the unity deal.

Such a mind-set helps explain, at least in part, the tortuous, 2-year-old debate on a constitutional amendment that would permit the deployment of German military forces outside Atlantic Alliance countries. The lack of progress in resolving the issue isolated Germany from its main allies during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and threatens to do so again if the West undertakes military action in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Kohl’s 1990 election campaign pledge of “no new taxes” was also predicated on the idea that westerners would not have to sacrifice because of unification.

Kohl, much like former President George Bush, was forced to break that pledge by implementing a modest, yearlong tax surcharge, which ended last June. But to contain the political damage that more taxes would bring, he borrowed heavily--a strategy that has kept interest rates high and economies under pressure throughout Western Europe.

In another area, foot-dragging on moving the seat of government from sleepy, idyllic Bonn (in the country’s far west) back to Berlin has left a majority of the nation’s lawmakers badly out of touch with the massive problems percolating to the east.

A public mood reconciled with the need for change is likely to play a positive role in breaking these and other political logjams.

An important contributing factor to this mood shift was agreement earlier this month among all major political parties on a formula for financing the eastern revival over the medium term--a formula dubbed the Solidarity Pact. It is dominated by a system of more tax increases, which Kohl had hoped to avoid but which are deemed vital to sustain the massive transfers of funds from west to east at an annual rate of $65 billion beyond 1995.