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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 22KB | 411 lines

<text> <title> Coming to Terms With a United Europe </title> <article> <hdr> Foreign Service Journal, April 1991 New German Politics, Old U.S. Perceptions: Coming to Terms With a United Europe </hdr> <body> 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 w