Getting a Bit Overwrought Over the German ‘Crisis’

The Western allies are in danger of talking themselves into a German crisis. The disagreements that today exist between Bonn and the other Western capitals are eminently solvable, given good sense and--the missing ingredient at the moment--candor.

The West Germans put up with the maximum inconveniences of the common defense--troops on their territory, maneuvers, low-level flights, aircraft accidents. They have on German soil the last remaining allied nuclear missiles in Europe, and they know that if these should ever be fired they will go off inside West Germany. Germans understand that all this is the price of their own security as well as that of others, but it also is not unreasonable that it should cause them to feel a trifle oppressed.

Moreover, Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been talking sensibly about the need for a general reduction of troops, tanks and nuclear weapons in Europe. From the allied side the response has not been brilliant. Instead, the West Germans are being pressed to replace existing nuclear missiles with improved ones.

In these circumstances the oldest nightmare of Central European geopolitics is being revived. It is that the two Germanys unite with the benevolent encouragement of the Soviet Union, take up “neutralism”--undefined--and perform a new economic miracle by modernizing the Soviet and East European economies.

Yet who is talking about this? Chancellor Helmut Kohl has merely asked that the allies not be precipitate about nuclear “modernization” at a time when there seems to be real prospect of general arms reductions. It is the British and French, and some Americans, who are overreacting to what has happened.

Paris is always quick to see signs of a new Rapallo in any shift in West German opinion. London is suspicious of both Bonn and Paris, ready to believe that “an inner neutralization” may already have occurred in West Germany. One commentator (in the conservative Sunday Telegraph) envisaged the European Economic Community transformed, under German influence, “from being the economic basis for one end of the Atlantic alliance to being the economic basis for an East-West settlement and a neutralized Central Europe.” The lesson drawn by that writer is that Britain’s security rests with America, not Europe, which is what most of Britain’s political class would prefer to believe anyway.

All this seems a little overwrought. So was the recent American explosion of indignation over the Libyan chemical-weapons-plant affair, which took as target not individual West Germans’ greed but the West German nation itself.

Whatever may have changed recently in German public and political opinion, there is no evidence of any serious willingness to abandon the values and security of the Western alliance, or West Germany’s anchorage in the West European Community, for Eastern adventures--adventures that in the past (like the Rapallo agreement between Bolshevik Russia and Weimar Germany in 1922) led only to trouble. West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher may take a rosy view of what can be negotiated with Gorbachev, but he can also read history.

Why should West German businessmen think that the East’s markets are worth major political and security dislocations? The Soviet Union and the East Bloc nations assuredly want West German technology and consumer goods, but how are they to pay for them? West Germany has to subsidize its existing trade with the East. It does so for political reasons, but you do not stake the future of a national economy on politically subsidized trade.

West German manufacturers prosper by selling high-value-added goods to other sophisticated markets in the West that pay in hard currency. There is no money to be made selling BMWs, or nuclear plants, to the East when West Germany must also give or lend the East the money to pay. There is an economic potential in Eastern Europe, but it is a long-term one requiring transformations there much more radical than anything now in prospect.

Change is under way in Europe, certainly. A Central European settlement now at last is being discussed. Henry A. Kissinger has taken up the theme. Such a settlement offers success to the West, not a threat. Intelligently conceived, a settlement could offer liberation to Eastern Europe together with enhanced security to both the East and the West. Washington, London and Paris, as well as Bonn, should be thinking about this. The obstacle is that the West’s leaders resist bringing up the crucial issue in any settlement: What happens to the two Germanys?

Neither West nor East has an interest in German unification. That is a fact of international life, a basic one. Informed West German opinion understands this. It is time to say it. The alternatives to unification have to be examined. Instead of doing this, the allies invent nightmares of what Germany on its own might or might not do. This is dangerous nonsense.

The most useful thing that Secretary of State James A. Baker III could take back with him to Washington from this week’s visit to Europe would be a decision to order a fundamental re-examination of the political basis for European security in the 1990s. America’s security, as well as Europe’s, would be served by that.