TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100890/1008006.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13.2 KB | 276 lines

                                  
                                            WORLD, Page 56

GERMANY

And Now There Is One


Unification is a fact at last, but Europe's new power faces
years of labor to make the merger work for Germans and
non-Germans alike

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by Daniel Benjamin/Berlin and
William Rademaekers/Bonn


    In their rush toward unification over the past 11 months,
East and West Germany struck down the barriers between them like
so many tenpins. The most unforgettable and heart-quickening
breakthrough was the first, the fall of the Berlin Wall last
Nov. 9. Then came free elections in the East on March 18,
economic union on July 1, and the Sept. 12 agreement of the four
World War II Allies to end their remaining occupation rights in
Berlin.

    Any of those could be taken as the date on which
unification became inevitable. But the date that will be
celebrated in the future Germany comes this week, Oct. 3, when
the Freedom Bell in West Berlin's Schoneberg city hall tolls and
the flag of the Federal Republic of Germany is raised in front
of the 96-year-old Reichstag building. At that moment, the
German Democratic Republic, a relic of Stalin's postwar empire,
ceases to exist.

    The new Germany, a nation of 77.4 million people, faces an
era of formidable reconstruction. It will take years of effort
to repair the damage caused by division and, in the East, by
four decades of communism. It will mean putting the East's
downtrodden economy into working order and soothing worries on
both sides of the old Iron Curtain: those of West Germans about
paying for unity's immense costs and those of former Easterners
about being second-class citizens in the united country.

    Germans will face demands from their allies and neighbors
that they prove themselves democratic and peace loving while
fulfilling the international obligations that come with the
status of a major power -- obligations that include a continuing
push for European integration and, in the short run at least,
a major contribution to the multilateral buildup in the Persian
Gulf. Germany does not seek the "leading role in Europe,"
Chancellor Helmut Kohl vowed last week, but its people will
"live up to our responsibility in Europe and the world."

    To many people who were West Germans until this week, the
main responsibility seems to lie in paying bills. East Germany
is bankrupt. Most of its 8,000 decrepit enterprises are on the
verge of failure, and unemployment is heading toward 2 million
out of a work force of 8.9 million. Since economic and monetary
union in July, the East's economy has been running mainly on
subsidies from Bonn.

    "The East," predicts Claus Schnabel of the German Economic
Institute in Cologne, "will eventually become as technically
advanced as the West and in some cases even more so, since it
will be getting the very latest in equipment." But no one knows
how long that will take or how much it will cost. Building or
upgrading plant and equipment, constructing roads, establishing
communications networks and cleaning up industrial pollution are
expected to cost more than $455 billion. This year alone, East
is costing West more than $60 billion. In the long run, says
Finance Minister Theo Waigel, "no one can put a figure on what
is coming at us." Estimates run as high as $775 billion over ten
years. Retail sales and tax revenues from the East will put some
money back into federal coffers, of course, but nothing close
to the outlays.

    Where will all that money come from? The government intends
to tap private investments, sell "unity bonds" and let the
federal budget deficit grow (current annual shortfall: $44.5
billion) -- a scheme that is supposed to produce $64 billion
annually for the next five years. With national elections
scheduled for Dec. 2, the government is trying to avoid talking
about potential tax increases, but Kohl concedes that "we will
do what is required."

    Nor can unification's cost be measured in deutsche marks
alone. The politico-economic divide between East and West is
paralleled by a psychological separation known as "die Mauer im
Kopf," or the wall in the mind, a split that may not be overcome
for a generation or more. West German politicians always talked
as if the two Germanys were essentially one. But they were not:
after a grinding period of intensive rebuilding, the West
thrived, while the East lived under 57 years of uninterrupted
totalitarian dictatorship, first under the Nazis, then under the
communists.

    East Germans increasingly complain about the all-pervasive
influence of the Federal Republic. "Some elements of our
constitution, like women's rights and social guarantees, could
have been adopted in the new Germany," argues Angela Breitner,
an East Berlin librarian. "But nothing from here is considered
any good." There are complaints about prices too, high by old
East German standards, though such items as clothing and
household goods are cheaper than they used to be.

    Griping in the West focuses on Eastern attitudes toward
social benefits and work habits. Says Bavarian businessman Anton
Enders, just back from Dresden: "There are a lot of false
assumptions about those people. Just because they're German
doesn't mean they are going to start working, not after 40
years. They expect to have it handed to them on a platter."

    This cold war of perceptions -- Westerners as hard-boiled
exploiters, Easterners as spoiled children of a socialist system
that guaranteed lifetime employment and cradle-to-grave welfare
benefits -- could last for years, even decades. The relationship
will normalize, says novelist Monika Maron, who left the East
for the West in 1988, only "when the G.D.R. is not considered
a place, but rather a time, a very bad time."

    Legally, the Federal Republic has been sovereign since
1955, but in terms of policy independence, unification marks a
significant change. The postwar division of Europe is gone; the
burdens it imposed on the two Germanys have been lifted. But
full freedom to choose can be unnerving, and the idea of
independent action is almost taboo.

    Most Germans of late have been so preoccupied with the
problems of unification that they have not paid much attention
to foreign affairs. "We are just starting to think about our
role in a future evolving Europe," says Karsten Voigt, a Social
Democratic member of the Bundestag and foreign affairs spokesman
for the parliamentary party. Yet the world, thanks mainly to the
crisis in the gulf, is banging on the door. Voigt and many of
his countrymen are struck by the irony. "The states that are
urging the Germans to participate in the gulf," he says, "are
the same ones that said a few weeks ago Germany should not
become a new military power."

    The voters will need to be convinced. A recent poll by the
Allensbach Institute, the country's leading opinion-research
organization, indicated that only 32% of West Germans were in
favor of rewriting the constitution so that troops could be sent
to crisis areas like the gulf.

    As it is, the process of unification has increased German
involvement abroad. Beyond funding the withdrawal and the
resettlement in the U.S.S.R. of Soviet troops now based in East
Germany, a new friendship and cooperation treaty gives Germany
the closest ties of any Western country with Moscow.

    Integration of the former East Germany automatically
introduces a special set of relationships with Eastern
neighbors. "The cultural and economic links brought by the
G.D.R. require Germany to develop a policy for Eastern Europe,"
says law professor Rupert Scholz, a former West German Defense
Minister. That need is being accelerated by apprehension about
instability and political fragility in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe. "I am very much concerned at the shaky situation
there," says Horst Teltschik, Kohl's top foreign policy adviser.
"There is no stabilized democracy. They are in bad economic
shape, and different ethnic groups are fighting again. What will
we do when there are civil wars breaking out?"

    If there is one area of real, deeply felt consensus among
German political parties and voters, it is on a foreign policy
that is resolutely moderate and unadventurous. "With our greater
weight we will not seek more power," insists Foreign Minister
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, "but we will act in awareness of the
added responsibility it imposes on us." No sooner had he signed
the friendship treaty with Moscow, for example, than he was
balancing it with a call for "a transatlantic declaration
between the European Community and the North American
democracies."

    Two recent steps highlight the course Genscher is charting.
First, to reassure the Soviets and the world that it truly
disdains the use of force, Bonn agreed to reduce the combined
German armed forces from 590,000 to 370,000 over the next four
years. Second, at the U.N. last week, Genscher set out his hopes
for the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in
Europe. He predicted that the CSCE would soon create new
institutions, including "regular meetings of heads of state and
government, a center for conflict prevention and a secretariat."
Together, he said, they would provide the multilateral
foundation "for a lasting peaceful order throughout Europe."

    One of Bonn's partners in the E.C. and NATO, Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, is the head of Britain's
bothered-about-Germany group, which includes politicians like
former Trade Minister Nicholas Ridley and a tabloid-fed,
anti-German segment of the public. "Their specific fears are
hard to pin down," says Adrian Hyde-Price, a specialist on
Germany at Southampton University. "It's not about Germans
pulling on their jackboots and marching into Poland. It's fear
about a tendency toward neutralism, and that with its enormous
economic power, Germany will assert itself and be less willing
to defer to its neighbors."

    Outside Britain there is still some worry about German
ambitions. Poland and Czechoslovakia are anxious; France, the
Netherlands and others are uneasy. The more realistic concern is
that Bonn's agenda may be so filled with intra-German and East
European issues that Germany will lose some of its eagerness for
economic and political integration in the E.C. Jacques Delors,
the Community's chief executive, is challenging Germany to prove
that it is still determined to go forward. "Are the Germans
truly interested in economic and monetary union?" he asked last
week. "We need clear, unambiguous political commitments." The
time has come, he said, to "fix the dates."

    Though the Germans go to great lengths to reaffirm the
strength and durability of the Bonn-Paris axis, France is
fretting about the possibility of a Europe dominated by Germany.
"What worries the French," says Gerald Long, former managing
director of Reuters, "is the success of their own policy of
locking Germany firmly into the European Community." It is not
admitted publicly in Paris, but French officials shudder at the
numbers: unified Germany's gross national product is $1.1
trillion, France's $762 billion. Almost 70% -- or $62 billion
-- of the Federal Republic's trade surplus of $90 billion is
with members  of the E.C., an imbalance that is likely to
increase.

    Until this year, it was the Soviet Union that most opposed
German unification; now Moscow sees Germany as an economic life
raft. Actually, says Vladimir Shenayev, deputy director of the
Soviet Institute of Europe, "we understood that solving this
question was in our interest long before we made it public."
According to Shenayev, Moscow wanted to get out from under the
cost of maintaining its army in East Germany but had to figure a
way to get the Western allies to withdraw as well.

    Unlike Moscow's policy, Washington's never wavered. From
Nov. 9, 1989, Kohl's strongest ally in the drive for unity was
George Bush. Kohl last week expressed "deep gratitude" for the
President's support and added, "I want to single out in
particular the contribution made by the U.S." One risk is that
Washington might press too hard for German repayment -- in the
gulf, in NATO, at the U.N. But Germany will be preoccupied with
German and European tasks for years to come, and putting forward
new demands could create unnecessary tensions.

    A great many West Germans of the postwar generation feel
real regret at the passing of the Federal Republic in which they
grew up -- a prosperous demistate, secure, moderate, perhaps
even a bit dull. That sort of constructive nostalgia will color
the new Germany and probably should be encouraged -- even by
friendly countries like the U.S. and the European neighbors, all
of whom hope for great deeds from the new power.


____________________________________________________________
ESTIMATED COST OF UNIFICATION OVER 10 YEARS

[Figures in billions.]


        $160  Infastructure repairs and projects         $155
New plant and equipment         $140  Pollution cleanup  $5-$22
 Privatization funding     $50-$100  Unemployment payments
    $4.1  University upgrading          $20 Telecommunications
modernization        $8.3  Soviet troop withdrawal