“This
9 November is an historic day. The GDR has announced, starting immediately, its
borders are open to everyone. The gates in the wall stand wide open”.
Joachim
Friedrichs, ARD Tagesthemen, 2300 hours, November 9, 1989
Berlin, Germany. November
7. Tears rolled down my cheeks. The sight of people power pulling apart
parapets of the Berlin Wall thirty years ago this week was history in (e)motion.
The true end of World War Two was happening before my eyes at a speed no-one
had believed possible. With each epoch-ending strike of each pick-axe Ossis and Wessis sent a hot, sharp knife through the crime that was the 1945
Yalta Agreement under which peoples and lands had been handed over from Nazi to
Soviet. My tears were tears of hope.
Here in Berlin thirty
years later that grandest of grand moments has seemingly been replaced with something
all the more stodgy: the Stollen cake parochialism of a Germany that is so much
less than the parts of a hoped for greatness. Mired in endless petty
politicking Berlin stumbles from one infighting crisis to another. The one-time
‘imperial’ capital of a once-future German Europe? Not even close. The real
question is more whether a German Berlin or a Berliner’s Germany?
Europe’s 911 was not just
a moment of hope. The prospect of a united Germany filled some with dread –
France’s Francois Mitterrand and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher to the fore. Not
for the first time it was the leadership of a US President, George H. W. Bush,
who reassured Germany’s allies by re-committing the US to the balance of Europe
in a balanced Europe. Helped, in no small measure, by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s
commitment to a single European currency – the then soon-to-be Euro – to ease
French fears that Europe would be ‘crushed’ under the weight of the mighty
Deutschemark. What few realised at the time was that the cost of Ossis to
Wessis made any such threat a chimera of fear over reality.
Strange then that German
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas this week went out of his clumsy way to thank
everyone else for Germany’s peaceful reunification but the Americans who had
guaranteed it, or the British who in 1954 committed its forces at great cost to
the permanent defence of the Federal Republic, and in so doing opened the way
for one-time foe to join NATO, and fostered Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s dream
of a ‘normal’ Germany. Critically, a France that overcame its historic fears to
turn enmity into a partnership that with the 1962 Elysee Treaty became the
bedrock upon which ‘Europe’ built its own edifice of freedom. Herr Maas also slapped down an idea from his
colleague, Defence Minister Anna Kramp-Karrenbauer, for a European Security
Force in Syria to which Germany would contribute. German strategic responsibility?
Don’t hold your breath.
My reason for being in
Berlin was a meeting of The Alphen Group (TAG),
the network of high-level, senior analysts and practitioners that I have the
honour to chair. Our speaker for the day was one of the most senior
insider-observer Germans. A man who knows and understands the very highest
levels of this most late Roman of new Berlins. His message was stark: Germany
is in a “period of funk”, drifting from stability to stagnation to stasis. The
coming domestic crisis will emasculate German foreign policy, much of it caused
by the endless Berlin political crisis of grand coalitions going towards a
grand nowhere, other than sustaining their grand denizens in grand office. Indeed, the 'groko' is a bit like the massive Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland, ninety percent of which is simply there to hold the edifice up, whilst only ten percent is devoted to undertaking purpose.
A
consequent ‘reformstau’ which blocks all efforts to modernise an economy and
society steadily losing the global competitive race of the twenty-first
century. A Germany which simply occupies a map with no particular foreign
policy and no particular view of towards Russia, China, the US and/or Brexit,
and which lacks the sense of solidarity to have a vision for Europe. Worse, if
Americans try to force Berlin to choose between Washington and Beijing the
leader of the West might be surprised by Germany’s answer. It is an answer
already implicit in the even more implicit Realpolitik
of Heiko Maas’s “Union of Multilateralism”. Whither NATO?
What pains this Oxford
historian, long a friendly, constructive but critical believer in this Germany,
is the failure of vision of a Berlin that talks endlessly of little else. When
all that really defines German foreign engagement is ‘wherever the money is, at
whatever the strategic and political cost’ mercantilism, allied to a peculiarly
German form of vacuous ‘do as we say, but not what we dare do’
internationalism. The fall of the ‘Wall’ was not simply about a glorious dawn
in that dark, dank November Berlin night. It was about a Germany that finally
been offered the chance to take its rightful, peaceful place at the heart of
Europe’s eternally fractious story that it had for so long craved. A place that
others guaranteed would not be threatened.
The importance of that
moment cannot be over-stated. On three separate violent occasions Germans had
tried to impose their place in Europe on Europeans. The Franco-Prussian War of
1870-71, the Great European War of 1914-1918, and the real World War of
1939-1945. The ghosts of those wars can never by laid completely to rest, and
the millions of ghosts of murdered Nazi victims can never rest, something of
which, legions of decent Germans are acutely aware. That night in 1989 also led to something that
would have been impossible even thirty years prior - a gift of trust in a
future Germany Americans and other Europeans. A real gift of trust from those
who had really won Germany’s right to be whole once again; Poles, Czechs and
those millions of Europeans whose families had been scorch-earthed by past
German power and its ambitions.
In return, Germany was
asked to pay only the most reasonable of costs.
A truly western Germany would enshrine freedom at its core. And, any
return of German power from provincial Bonn to once-imperial Berlin be paid for
by German political and actual investment in the two institutions in which the
gift was embodied – the EU and NATO. Thirty years on that gift, the promise it
contained, and the institutions it served are being broken on the rock of
Berlin’s visionless political parochialism and the strategic vacuum that too
many German leaders confuse with strategic patience.
My tears now, as with so
much today, are virtual tears. Odes to joy? No. Rather a sense of a grand European
chance missed by a wannabe great country, led by a once (and future) grand city
the parochialism of which is failing the test of power, too often of principle,
and most certainly of leadership. In so
doing, THIS Germany has failed the hope of that wonderful Berlin night thirty
years ago. A Germany that is also failing its own sternest of tests – Germany’s
own history, and Europe’s possible future.
Why does Berlin matter?
Neither Germany nor Europe can be secure until and unless Berlin’s political
dragons of today finally get a grip of the demons of Germany’s past and set
fair a course for a fair Europe with a fair Germany at its heart. In other
words, if Europe and the transatlantic relationship really are as important to
Berlin as it claims Germans need to start matching deeds to words.
Berlin Wall 30 and the
fall of Germany.
Julian Lindley-French
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