PART FOUR
After the Fall: 1989-2005
XX. A Fissile Continent
‘I don’t have to do anything to stop it; the Soviets will do it for me. They will never allow this greater Germany just opposite them’.
‘When we started, we did not understand the depth of the problems we faced’.
‘Our country has not been lucky. It was decided to carry out this Marxist experiment on us. In the end we proved that there is no place for this idea—it has simply pushed us off the path taken by the world’s civilized countries’.
‘The existence of the Czech nation was never a certainty, and precisely this uncertainty constitutes its most striking aspect’.
Liberated from Communism, eastern Europe underwent a second and even more striking transformation. In the course of the 1990s four established states disappeared from the map of the continent and fourteen countries were born—or resuscitated. The six westernmost republics of the Soviet Union—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova—became independent states, together with Russia itself. Czechoslovakia became two separate countries—Slovakia and the Czech Republic. And Yugoslavia broke apart into its constituent units: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia-Montenegro and Macedonia.
This making and breaking of nations was comparable in scale to the impact of the Versailles treaties that followed World War One—and in certain respects more dramatic. The emergence of nation-states at Versailles was the culmination of a long drawn-out process with its roots in the mid-nineteenth century or before; it came as no surprise. But the prospect of something similar occurring in the late twentieth century was anticipated by almost no-one. Indeed, three states that were to disappear in the course of the 1990s—Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR—were themselves of post-1918 vintage.
It is not, however, a coincidence that these were the last remaining multi-ethnic, federal states in the region. The territorial fission of the Nineties accompanied the extinction of the last of Europe’s four continental empires—that of Russia. It was, in effect, a delayed epilogue to the post-imperial state-making that had followed the fall of the other three: Ottoman Turkey, Habsburg Austria and Wilhelmine Germany. But the logic of imperial break-up would not in itself have triggered the institutional re-arrangement of Eastern Europe. As so often in the past, the fate of the region was determined by events in Germany.
Credit for German re-unification—a unique case of fusion in a decade of fission—must go in the first instance to Helmut Kohl. The West German Chancellor was initially as hesitant as everyone else—on November 28th 1989 he presented to the Bundestag a
As in the 19th century, German unification was in the first instance to be achieved by a currency union; but political union inevitably followed. Talk of a ‘confederation’, which the West Germans had initially encouraged and Hans Modrow’s GDR cabinet had eagerly pursued, was precipitately dropped and in the hastily called East German elections of March 1990 Christian Democrat candidates ran on a unification ticket. Their ‘Alliance for Germany’ won 48 percent of the vote: the Social Democrats, handicapped by their well-advertised ambivalence on the subject, won just 22 percent.[313] The former Communists—now the Party of Democratic Socialism—secured a respectable 16 percent showing; but Alliance ’90, a coalition of former dissidents including Barbel Bohley’s
The first act of the new majority in the GDR Volkskammer, represented by a CDU-SPD-Liberal coalition led by Lothar de Maiziere, was to commit their country to German unity.[315] On May 18th 1990 a ‘monetary, economic and social union’ was signed between the two Germanies, and on July 1st its crucial clause—the extension of the Deutschmark to East Germany—came into force. East Germans could now exchange their virtually useless East German marks—up to the equivalent of DM 40,000—at a hugely advantageous rate of 1:1. Wages and salaries in the GDR would henceforth be paid in Deutschmarks at parity—a dramatically effective device for keeping East Germans where they were, but with grim long-term consequences for East German jobs and the West German budget.
On August 23rd, by pre-agreement with Bonn, the Volkskammer voted to accede to the Federal Republic. A week later a Treaty of Unification was signed, by which the GDR was absorbed into the FRG—as approved by its voters in the March elections and permitted under Article 23 of the 1949 Basic Law. On October 3rd the Treaty entered into force: the GDR ‘acceded’ to the Federal Republic and ceased to exist.
The division of Germany had been the work of the victors of World War Two and its reunification in 1990 would never have come about without their encouragement or consent. East Germany was a Soviet satellite state, with 360,000 Soviet troops still stationed there in 1989. West Germany, for all its independence, was not free to act autonomously on
Neither the British nor the French were in any particular hurry to see Germany reunited. To the extent that West Europeans even thought about a unified Germany they assumed—reasonably enough—that it would come at the
His Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, made no secret of her fears. In her memoirs she recalls a hastily convoked meeting with French President Mitterrand: ‘I produced from my handbag a map showing the various configurations of Germany in the past, which were not altogether reassuring about the future… [Mitterrand] said that at moments of great danger in the past France had always established special relations with Britain and he felt such a time had come again… It seemed to me that although we had not discovered the means, at least we both had the will to check the German juggernaut. That was a start.’
Mrs Thatcher—and she was not alone—was also worried that German unification might de-stabilize Mikhail Gorbachev, possibly even leading to his fall (by analogy with Nikita Khrushchev’s disgrace following his Cuban humiliation). But the British, for all their anxieties, had nothing to offer by way of an alternative to the course of events then unfolding in Germany and they duly acquiesced. Mitterrand was not so easily appeased. More than anyone else, the French were truly disturbed by the collapse of the stable and familiar arrangements in Germany and in the Communist bloc as a whole.[316]
The first reaction from Paris was to try and block any move to German unification—Mitterrand even going so far as to visit the GDR in December 1989 in a show of support for its sovereignty. He declined Helmut Kohl’s
