TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/121889/12188900.041

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 4KB | 65 lines

WORLD, Page 20

America Abroad

Braking the Juggernaut

By Strobe Talbott


    After last week's meeting in the Med, Secretary of State James
Baker proclaimed, "We are moving into the post-postwar era." The
postwar period began with the division of Europe after World War
II; the stage of history now beginning is "post-post" insofar as
that division is ending. The phrase, with its catchy double prefix,
is well on its way to becoming a cliche on the op-ed pages and
airwaves of the West. It helps experts who are groping for sound
bites more erudite than "Wow!" as they ruminate about the
astonishing pace of change in Europe.

    Yet in a crucial respect, the Malta meeting did not represent
the inauguration of a new world order at all but a holding action
on behalf of the old one. George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev have
a shared interest in slowing down the rush of events, particularly
the juggernaut of German reunification. Consummate Atlanticist that
he is, Bush is sensitive to West European anxiety about the
disproportionate strength of a single Germany.

    But there is more to the famous and no longer hypothetical
"German question" than that. Neither the population nor the size
of a united Germany would necessarily result in instability; it is
not as though the two countries would attain critical mass if they
were fused. Rather, the X factor in the debate, largely
unmentionable among statesmen but deeply felt among their
constituents, concerns the crimes and punishment of the German
nation. Many Europeans, including most Soviets, would prefer to let
the next generation, or even the one after that, test fully the
proposition that 70 years of German expansionism, culminating in
the horrors of Hitler, was an aberration.

    Gorbachev has his own reason for believing that one Germany is
an idea whose time should not come again soon. Reunification is a
euphemism for East Germany's voluntary annexation by West Germany.
If the G.D.R. merges with the Federal Republic, the Soviet Union
could see an ally not only leave the Warsaw Pact but defect to
NATO. Estimates on how long Gorbachev would survive the wrath of
his comrades range from 20 minutes to 48 hours.

    If Bush had to choose between the success of Gorbachev's
program to reform the Soviet Union and the fulfillment of West
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's plan to create a German
"federation," the President would almost certainly pick
perestroika, since that is what is driving the new Soviet foreign
policy. On this issue, Malta was an exercise in private
commiseration and public obfuscation. With Bush at his side at
their joint press conference, Gorbachev said that "history" should
be allowed to determine the status of the two Germanys, and he
warned against any "artificial acceleration" of the "process of
change." It was a telling caution coming from the Great Accelerator
himself. Bush then flew off to Brussels, where he enunciated a
masterpiece of gobbledygook, intended to sound receptive to German
reunification someday far in the future. There was a similar
better-later-than-soon tone to the endorsement that Kohl received
over the weekend from the leaders of the European Community.

    The whole matter is heavy with irony. First Germany brought
World War II to Europe. Then its defeat led to 44 years of postwar
tension. Now events in that same nation are complicating the effort
to end the division of the Continent as a whole. Because of the
German question, the world is stuck in the pre-post-postwar era,
which is neither a felicitous phrase nor a welcome state of
affairs.