By Victor Gray. A Senior Foreign Service officer currently teaching at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Victor Gray spent a dozen years working on Central Europe and served five years in Germany.

Little more than a year after unification, we are beginning to see stories in the Washington Post and on NBC Nightly News about American concerns over Germany's "role." The whiff of Germany bashing is in the air. One has to wonder whether those concerns relate to current policies or whether they derive from deeper-seated anxieties about the past.

I suspect the latter, for many non-Germans consider Germans inherently evil and aggressive, subject to neither repentance nor redemption; they are, as one professor recently quipped, the "Klingons of history," and possess "a record rather than a history." This belief in a uniquely and fatally flawed German character is at the heart of what these non-Germans would call the "German Problem." It is also, I believe, at the heart of Washington's "concerns" and Britain's "apprehensiveness" about German "assertiveness."

Germans, too, have unspoken anxieties that could color perceptions about current policies. These derive from history, and, in particular, geography--neither of which Germany seems able to shake. Taken together, they shape what is to Germans the "German Question;" that is, "Where is Germany?" (Or, put another way: "What is Germany?") The answer should describe Germany's role in the newly reunited Europe.

Some plain talk is in order about our "German Problem" and their "German Question," if we are to avoid talking past each other on the policy issues about which we should be on the same wavelength--be it on trade, aid to the East, or European integration. We are beginning a new relationship with a united, more confident and, yes, more powerful and assertive Germany. If we are to avoid unnecessary complications in what will be a defining relationship for Europe and the world, we must clear the air about the past.

OUR "GERMAN PROBLEM"

That dark, 12-year chapter of German history gives rise to questions: Are Germans unique? Can they change? In a January 23 editorial entitled "Germany's Memories," the Washington Post opined that German society "finds itself uncomfortable and strained at the imperative to confront and deal with the past" and that "in recent months there have been hints of reduced enthusiasm for this struggle." Yes, Germans are discomfited and strained to look at the crimes of the Nazizeit. But they have looked at them directly, long, and hard, for most Germans recognize, as the late Ambassador Arthur Burns put it after four years in Germany, that they "cannot both be proud of Beethoven and forget Hitler's crimes against humanity."

The result is a healthy, restrained patriotism grounded on Thomas Mann's preference for a "European Germany" rather than a "German Europe"--a preference that has provided continuity to German foreign policy for four decades.

To be sure, there have been failures--the unreconstructed Nazis of the old generation and the neo-Nazi skinheads of the new. But the violent xenophobia of the skinheads is paralleled in kind and in scope in countries such as France and Belgium. And the United States, too, had its own dark chapter of slavery and still regularly coughs up the likes of an Aryan Nation or a David Duke. Although the unparalleled scope and method of the Holocaust might illegitimize any analogy, still, these recent phenomena suggest an important lesson for all of us. We, too, should constantly remember the Holocaust and beware the "heart of darkness" that lies in us all. Perhaps, as Professor David Calleo suggested, the proper conclusion to draw from the Holocaust is "not so much that civilization was uniquely weak in Germany, but that it is fragile everywhere."

THEIR "GERMAN QUESTION"

Geographically and demographically Germany and Japan share two characteristics that got them and the rest of the world into deep trouble in the 1930s. They both have large populations on a small land area, and they are both highly dependent on imported raw materials, particularly oil. But they are not alone in possessing these characteristics. Britain and, at least before the First World War, France faced similar conditions and reacted with their own forms of expansionism by staking out 19th-century colonial empires. Expansionism is not always and everywhere the solution to the problems of overpopulation and paucity of resources, however. Immigration and trade come quickly to mind. So, too, does birth control. As a matter of fact, Germans have been so efficient in controlling their birth rate that--at least prior to reunification--their new fear was that there wouldn't be enough of them to go around in the future. Indeed, it was the chronic post-war labor shortage that caused Germany and France to open their doors to millions of "guest workers."

But geography has also treated Germany and Japan very differently. Living on an island far off the beaten track of great power rivalries, the Japanese have been afforded the luxury of being able to choose when they want to mix in those rivalries. Germany, on the other hand, sits smack in the center of Europe, surrounded by traditional powers--Britain, France, and Russia--which once sought to play off each other through a balance of power to which the greatest threat was a strong Germany. In the German view, according to Calleo, "preserving the European balance, while extra-European giants formed all around, meant condemning Germany to mediocrity, all of Europe to external domination." That, he added, was the "German Problem as the Germans saw it." Not surprisingly, they saw themselves more often than not as victims rather than aggressors, a perception that, in light of the Holocaust, probably shocks most Americans.

The bipolar balance of the Cold War also dealt more harshly with Germany than with Japan. With the exception of the Kuriles, Japan was kept intact physically. Germany, on the other hand, was torn asunder both physically and psychologically. The old gods were dead and, in their "Year Zero," Germans were called upon to make themselves over from scratch. It was a painful fate--one they had brought upon themselves. But, for the Germans, faced with the need for a more irrevocable break with their recent past, all things were possible. And, thanks particularly to a few surviving "good Germans" like Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, they made, I would argue, the best of those possibilities.

LIFE AT GROUND ZERO

For much of the Cold War, however, it must have seemed to many Germans, including those in the West who are truly thankful for their freedom and prosperity, that their aspirations were again being sacrificed on the altar of a balance of power. This is not only because of the physical division of the country, forcing 16 million East Germans to live under a totalitarian regime. It is also because of the psychological pain of living on the front line, the ground zero of the nuclear age. Imagine living in an Oregon-sized country with more than 300,000 friendly but foreign soldiers and several thousand nuclear weapons. Is it any wonder that Germans questioned the wisdom of some nuclear weapons systems, the range of which limited their use to German soil? Is it any wonder that Germans placed a greater stock in detente than we did? And is it any wonder that pacifism became a commonplace in German politics? What is a wonder is that we, who now profess "concern" about German "assertiveness," so recently viewed that pacifism as dangerous.

Where do we go from here, now that the Cold War is over and those nuclear weapons are being removed from Germany? First, we have to recognize that there has been a sea change in German-American relations--a change so rapid that neither country has had time to prepare for it. Only now are we groping to adjust to Germany's new and still evolving role. Germany is no longer the same. Neither is Europe. And the changes in each are interacting in a dynamic, synergistic fashion.

CENTRAL EUROPE REBORN

The ongoing Revolution of 1989 has set in motion both old forces, frozen in place for half a century by the Cold War, and new forces, the power and direction of which remain difficult to gauge. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War must top the list of unexpected events with unpredictable consequences. Concomitants of that collapse are, of course, new freedom and instability in Central and Eastern Europe. What we so recently called simply Eastern Europe no longer exists; instead we have seen the reemergence of what the Germans call Mitteleuropa, that area of common culture encompassing Germany, Austria, Switzerland (at least the German-speaking cantons), Hungary, the Czech lands, southern and western Poland, and, yes, Slovenia and Croatia. To the East lies the true Eastern Europe of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia and northeastern Poland. To the south lie the Balkans, once again living up to their reputation as a powderkeg.

The unification of Germany itself, that 329-day fast-forward of history, brought economic and social consequences that Germans East and West will have to grapple with over the next decade. In European terms, however, the consequences may be even more important, for Germany is no longer the eastern frontier of the West but rather back in the center of a suddenly reunited continent. That, in turn, is leading to yet another shift of seismic proportions--a rapid broadening to the east and north of the European Community. It is an opening that the Germans, in particular, are intent on pushing for their own pragmatic reasons--principally, stability in the East.

The European Community is also the locus for another monumental change that has been in train for nearly a decade but largely overshadowed by the Revolution of 1989 in the East. I am speaking, of course, of the EC '92 process. It was the "deepening" that was posited by the advocates of "Little Europe" as a step that had to be completed before there could be a further "widening" of the Community. Under the pressure of events, however, including the growing assertiveness of a reinvigorated Franco-German axis, the dividing line between widening and deepening has been dramatically eroded. Perhaps more importantly, the process has been transformed into increasingly rapid movement--still resisted by the British and Dutch--toward political union, the centerpiece of which will be a common foreign and security policy.

These trends within the EC have inevitably led to new tensions within the trans-Atlantic alliance and the already noted uneasiness in Washington. But another change has greatly diminished Washington's ability to influence events in Europe, namely, the worsened domestic economic situation in the United States. To be sure, we won the Cold War and emerged as the sole nuclear superpower. But, as Deputy Secretary of State Larry Eagleburger so poignantly put it, we crossed the finish line in that contest just steps ahead of the Soviets and, economically, nearly as exhausted. Thus we find ourselves, for example, struggling to meet the economic assistance needs of the Central and Eastern Europeans and the former Soviet Union and criticized by the Europeans for not doing enough. More importantly, the American people are turning inward and are less inclined to bear the burdens of international leadership. The uncertainty about American intentions and reliability tends to fuel the desire of Europeans for an independent security identity. In sum, if we are not careful, we and the Europeans could find ourselves caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy of estrangement.

TIES THAT BIND

In this vastly changed situation, German and American interests cross in ways that suggest no estrangement but cooperation. First, Europe remains extremely important to the United States despite the virtual disappearance of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact threat. We will want to remain engaged. This desire is reciprocated by the Europeans, in general, and the Germans, in particular, who recognize the new potential for instability to their east. They recognize, too, that the European security identity, still embryonic, is nowhere near being able to handle the most likely consequences of that instability. If anyone needed proof, Yugoslavia is there for all to see.

The Post recently cited Germany's "forcing" of EC recognition for Croatia and Slovenia and its "uncontested extension of economic influence over Eastern Europe" as causes for concern. Granted Germany's handling of recognition probably showed that it needed some lessons in "leadership etiquette," but need we really be concerned that Germany harbors great power ambitions in the Balkans? Hardly! Germany's motives in this case relate to much more recent relationships--the fact that the second largest guestworker population in Germany is Croatian and Slovenian, numbering in the hundreds of thousands and growing by more than 10,000 asylum-seekers a month. Indeed, Germany, with some of the most liberal asylum legislation in the world, has taken in more than 600,000 asylum-seekers in the past four years, 200,000 of them last year alone.

It is the fear of an even greater wave of refugees that is at the root of German efforts to stabilize the East through aid and investment. But far from seeking to extend its influence uncontested, Germany is seeking desperately to multilateralize economic assistance to the East. It has its hands full with the economic consequences of unification--including the need to raise interest rates to the detriment of recovering economies like ours. Pointing out again and again that it is the European Community and not the West European Community, Foreign Minister Genscher has been in the forefront of efforts to push the EC toward granting associate and eventually full membership to Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. If ever our interests coincided, this is it! We should applaud German leadership on this score, and American businesses should go a step further. They should invest in those countries and, indeed, in East Germany itself. Opportunities abound, and Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks might welcome an alternative to the Germans.

HARMONY IN TRADE

In trade as well as investment the shared interests of the United States and Germany have led to a reasonably harmonious bilateral relationship. Our bilateral relationship is very much in balance but not without its problems, all of which should prove manageable. At the end of 1988, for example, U.S. investment in Germany, most of it in the automotive industry, totaled $20 billion, while German investment in the United States was about $27 billion. With new investment opportunities in East Germany and higher German interest rates in the past year, those figures should now be in even closer balance; the downside of this trend, as critics of the higher German interest rates are quick to point out, is that we can no longer expect the German economy to be the "locomotive" for weaker economies such as ours--at least not until the economic problems of unification have been overcome.

It is probably in trade, however, where our economic relations with Germany differ so markedly from those of either country with Japan. German-American trade is essentially in balance not only quantitatively, with German exports to the U.S. totaling $25 billion and U.S. exports to Germany totaling $20 billion in 1988, but also qualitatively, with both countries exporting primarily manufactured products. Again, short-term trends, notably a weakened dollar and diminished consumer confidence in the United States, are acting further to balance trade. With about a third of its production going abroad each year, Germany must be counted among the true believers in free trade and, with the notable exception of agriculture, should be an ally within the EC and among the three trading blocs in opposing artificially high barriers. Like ourselves, the Germans also face an increasing challenge from the Japanese.

`EUROPEANIZING' SECURITY

The Germans are pursuing three tracks in security, none of which need run counter to our interests. First, with the French, they are pushing for a merger of the EC and Western European Union (WEU) into a more or less independent European pillar of the NATO alliance. Second, they are seeking to strengthen the Conference on European Security and Cooperation (CSCE) with an eye to filling the security vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe and perhaps eventually creating a pan-European security system. Third, not wanting to create a security vacuum in the West or fuel desires among the American public to "bring the boys back home," they seek to maintain U.S. engagement in Europe through NATO.

We, too, should have an interest in "Europeanizing" German security policy. The fact that it is already a shared Franco-German goal should comfort Germany's neighbors and increase stability on the Continent. Indeed, having absorbed well their history and geography lessons, Germans have made this Europeanization policy a linchpin of their foreign policy since the days of Monnet and Adenauer. And, at least rhetorically, it has also been a linchpin of American foreign policy since the days of George Ball's "dumbbell theory." Why, as we are about to achieve it, would we want to turn away from a united Europe? Additionally, the WEU is better positioned to undertake the sorts of "out-of-area" commitments of force we have sought from our European allies for decades.

With regard to the possible transformation of the CSCE into some sort of security structure, perhaps linked to NATO or the WEU, we Americans have displayed the same standoffish attitude we did toward the convening of the Helsinki Conference in 1975. The CSCE is the only European existing organization that includes all countries--48 at last count. Particularly important to us, it is also an organization in which the United States is a member. We are, of course, also a signatory of the CSCE-sponsored 23-nation Agreement on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE). Would it not make eminent good sense to try to universalize the provisions of CFE by seeking adherence to the agreement by current non-signatories such as Ukraine? Would it not also make good sense to try to expand and codify the work the CSCE has already done in the area of Confidence and Security Building Measures? I think so and agree with Ambassador James Goodby, who negotiated so many of those Confidence and Security-Building Measures, that "used in full recognition of its limits, but also its possibilities," the CSCE can "really help to lay to rest the bitter legacies of the past and create conditions for a Europe--and a Germany--whole and free." It is clear that Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher agrees. Writing in the October/November edition of European Affairs, he had the following to say:

"They [the United States] are tied to us through NATO, and they are represented at the Conference on European Security and Cooperation in Europe. The CSCE will gain even greater importance in view of the current developments in the Soviet Union, and its organs will have to be strengthened. Its present function is as a conflict-avoidance center and an emergency mechanism, but it ought to develop into a kind of European Security Council."

We can probably expect Genscher and others, notably the Eastern Europeans, to advance such motions at the CSCE review meeting in Helsinki March 24. Speaking at the January 30 CSCE foreign ministers meeting in Prague, for example, Genscher and Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel decried the "continuing structural weaknesses" of the organization and called on the CSCE to "create the opportunity for CSCE blue-and-green helmet missions to keep the peace and protect our foundations of life." In the more distant future, it is even possible to envisage a coalescence of seemingly disparate organizations such as the CSCE, NATO, the EC and WEU into a UN-recognized regional organization that is both pan-European and trans-Atlantic. Would that be so bad for us or the Germans?

There has been a healthy continuity in German foreign policy for the past four decades. That continuity--centered on the idea of a "European Germany"--has survived unification and a Europe-wide revolution. It is Germany's best hope of liberating itself from the negative consequences of its history and geography. It would be ironic in the extreme if we allowed ourselves to let the emotionalism of that past cloud a sober assessment of the breadth and depth of our shared body of interests, a recognition of which should lead to greater cooperation in building a new Europe, a new world. That task is too important to allow the rise of petulant Germany-bashing.

(The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.)