The Two Germanys Are Facts of Life, but Reunification Isn’t

HAMBURG, West Germany —  There is too much talk about German reunification these days, both here and abroad. Even the U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic has now declared that he believes the two Germanies will be reunited in the near future. And conservative German politicians who for years have chanted the reunification song without much confidence are doing it now with with increased gusto.

But let us rub our eyes and take another look. Has the wall of slab concrete and barbed wire that separates East from West Germany come down? It has not. Has the East German regime lost its power? It is still in the saddle and, while it has lost credibility at home and abroad, is still in control of the economy, the army and the police. Has the Warsaw Pact broken up? No: All East European performers emphasize that the military organization that links all Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union will be maintained. Have Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his colleagues in the Soviet Politburo given any indication that they are willing to release East Germany--or any other East European country--from the Socialist empire? They have done nothing of the kind.

And are the Germans themselves more insistent on national reunification today than they have been in the past? Again, it pays to take a closer look. People are leaving East Germany in large numbers; they are not, on the whole, illegal refugees who sneak across the border by night, but emigres who have been granted exit visas. Rather than calling for the reunification of the two separate German states, they leave the East for the West because their own state no longer offers them much of a perspective for the future.

For West Germany, 40 years as a separate entity closely integrated with the West have practically created a new German nation: 60 million people who identify, in the large majority, not with the German Reich of the past, but with the Federal Republic of the present, and this identification grows with every new generation. After all, this is the community in which they live and work, in which they raise their children, in which they plan their future.

Significantly, most West Germans use the word Germany when they talk about the Federal Republic. The thousands who arrive from the East are, it is true, officially labeled compatriots. But here they are regarded instinctively (and they regard themselves) as immigrants from another country. Revealingly, the supporters of the most nationalistic political group in the Federal Republic, the right-wing Republican Party, also are the most strongly opposed to the influx because they fear the competition for jobs and housing.

So, neither has the basic structure of the European division changed nor are the Germans themselves calling seriously into question the existence of two German states. Why, then, all this sudden talk about reunification?

The answer is both sad and, one hopes, sobering, for this is thoughtless and dangerous talk. The only justification is a flimsy one: The Gorbachev revolution has brought so much change to the European scene that nothing can be excluded and anything is possible. But that is scarcely a basis for clear political analysis. What, after all, can be totally excluded on this Earth? And what is possible is neither necessarily inevitable nor, indeed, desirable.

It is the task of politicians to tear through the tide, not just to drift with it. This is particularly so because drifting with the tide is a highly dangerous policy in Europe today. Change in Eastern Europe is dramatic, the tide is running high, and it could break the dams that separate change from chaos, reform from revolt, civil rights from civil war. East Germany remains the linchpin of the Soviet Union’s strategic position in Europe. Any attempt to pull it out would throw the Gorbachev reform into its deepest and possibly terminal crisis. And any German attempt to ride on the wave of political liberalization in Eastern Europe in order to “liberate” East Germany or encourage an outright merger would be fatal for the reformers in Moscow, Warsaw and Budapest. The process of change in the Soviet empire is still precarious and uncertain. To indulge in a facile “everything is possible” is to shirk the responsibility for managing change, which Western governments, too, have to bear.

There is nothing that could help to stabilize the political flux in Eastern Europe in a more constructive manner than a formal West German commitment to forgo reunification with East Germany. Short of that, Western governments (and their ambassadors) should realize three basic points. First, the loosening up of Soviet control in Eastern Europe does not give politics a free ride; it does not permit irresponsibility, but demands statesmanship. Second, change is both slower and more brittle than it appears; witness the fact that, four years into Gorbachev’s reforms, their changes look increasingly uncertain. Finally, history never repeats itself. The past cannot be reconstructed. To pretend otherwise means to fool oneself and endanger others.