From the beginning the United States was Bonn’s most important ally. American and West German interests complemented one another during the Cold War and as the US tried to retain its influence over western Europe and keep the Soviets at bay, the Federal Republic worked hard to be accepted into the western community and became a loyal member of NATO in 1955. Germany also joined that other child of the Cold War, the Western European Union, which was based from the beginning on the relationship between France and Germany – and in particular on the remarkable friendship between General de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. It too was a symbiotic relationship. France’s military contribution to the Second World War was minimal; even so it was given a chunk of territory to administer, including a slice of Berlin. It became wealthy in part by hitching itself to the German economic boom, but although its status in Europe was maintained it had become increasingly dependent on Germany. In the 1980s France chose to socialize further rather than introducing difficult reforms, leaving it economically vulnerable. This would have mattered less had borders remained as they were. But in 1989 the Europe it had known for nearly half a century melted away.
When the Berlin Wall fell all the assumptions of the previous forty years were thrown into confusion. The Soviets’ loss of control over central Europe saw the end of the clearly defined bloc around which West German and western European foreign policy had revolved, and free countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Ukraine and others emerged from the once homogeneous Soviet zone, all with diverse interests and all at different stages of economic and political development. Suddenly everything was much more complicated, and much more volatile. West German foreign policy based on Ostpolitik, which had so gently prodded at the Russian bear for a few foreign policy scraps, and Genscherism, which had so carefully balanced West Germany between the superpowers, suddenly lost its raison d’être.
France was worried about German unity. It feared, as one French talk-show host put it, that the ‘uncontrollable German totalitarian tendency’ might yet rear its ugly head: ‘the shadow of Faust darkens the old continent again’.35 Worse still, far from having a European alliance based on a Franco-German partnership it looked increasingly as if Germany would look to the east. André François-Poncet’s quip was repeated frequently: ‘We all know that the Germans, whenever they join forces with the Russians, are soon afterwards on the outskirts of Paris.’36 The answer was the Maastricht Treaty, the treaty meant to tie Germany to France before it could look elsewhere. In the words of one French newspaper Maastricht was ‘the Treaty of Versailles without war’ whose foremost aim was ‘to get rid of the German mark’.37
The French had reason to be nervous. The newly unified Germany was daunting. In a matter of months quiet West Germany had become a nation of 80 million people, the biggest and most powerful in the European Union and, despite its somewhat sclerotic and over-regulated economy, one of the wealthiest and most influential in the world. France had to face the fact that it was, and would always remain, less influential in Europe than a united Germany. It was only the Maastricht Treaty which made the new order bearable for France: the expansion of German interests to the east was to be exchanged for one thing – the adoption of the single European currency and the demise of the Deutschmark.38
As long as Helmut Kohl remains Chancellor it is likely that the German – French relationship will go on much as before even after the move to Berlin. Both countries seem to be willing to overcome all obstacles to achieve their goals; in 1997 Helmut Kohl even tried to fudge the value of Germany’s gold reserves in order to meet the Maastricht criteria. In any other country the idea of performing such financial gymnastics to give away one’s own extraordinary currency would be unthinkable but it is likely that by 1999 the new capital of Berlin will be part of a different European monetary system. The reasons for this also lie in a kind of mutual blackmail: if France needs Germany, Germany also needs France.
‘Germany is our Fatherland,’ goes Helmut Kohl’s slogan, ‘but Europe is our future.’39 The phrase is loaded with meaning. Whatever claims they may make about the ‘grace of late birth’ separating them from the Nazi past Helmut Kohl and his generation are very much products of the Second World War and their thinking is shaped both by the conflict and by the shattered world which they grew up in after 1945. Kohl – who first saw decimated Berlin in 1947 at the age of seventeen – genuinely believes that the European Union will stifle aggressive nationalism and will prevent another war. He is also aware that Germany’s membership in the European Union helps to quell fears about German nationalism while at the same time disguising Germany’s own ambitions under the colours of the blue star-spangled flag. There is no doubt that it was useful for Germany to be able to refer to the European Union when it struggled to unify after November 1989, particularly when articles began to appear in the foreign press accusing Germany of trying to create a ‘Fourth Reich’.40 The Germans do not want to lose their ‘European identity’ – at least not yet – because they are unsure of their own national identity and because they are too insecure to voice their own national ambitions. That is why the endless pictures of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate that appeared after unification showed it topped by the European, not the German flag. But in a way the French were right. If the move to Berlin symbolizes anything it is Germany’s shift to the east.
Berlin’s location alone will not determine its future foreign policy, but it will play a role. The old cultural and economic ties which made Bonn so accessible to Paris are already working in reverse for Berlin. In the old West Germany the only eastern city which mattered was Moscow. The smaller Warsaw Pact countries were all but ignored and even the GDR was pressured into German – German agreements via Moscow. All that changed in 1989. Suddenly ‘the east’ was on the doorstep: the Czech Republic is a mere two-hour drive from Berlin; Poland is less than an hour away.
Unlike Bonn Berlin has few historic ties with the west but has traditionally always looked to the east, either for commerce or for conquest. Its ancestral hinterland was in Pomerania and Silesia and East Prussia, and Berlin itself was built up largely by labourers from East Elbian regions – in 1911 1,046,162 people moved there from German lands (including German-held Poland) and 97,683 from the Russian empire; in the same year only 11,070 came from France. Trade links with the east have always been strong: by the early 1930s 30 per cent of both Hungarian and Czech trade was with Germany.41 Even before the collapse of the Wall West Germany had been trading with eastern bloc countries; after 1989 it signed bilateral trade agreements with most east and central European countries and quickly established Goethe Institutes throughout the region. True, the West Germans initially treated the three key central European states as little more than a ‘threefold cordon sanitaire’, a ‘buffer zone’ against surprise attacks from Russia, against Chernobyl-like disasters, and above all against economic migrants from the former USSR.42 But that view has already changed. Today airports, hotels and business centres in Budapest or Gdansk or Prague are packed with German businessmen making deals and discussing strategies for the future; the roads in the Mark Brandenburg are filled with Polish cars heading to and from the border and Polish highways are in turn populated by speedy Germans in their Mercedes and Porsches heading to Poznan or Cracow or Warsaw. According to Bundesbank figures of June 1996 Germany’s trade with central Europe has overtaken trade with the United States and has already reached 80 per cent of its total trade with France. And attitudes between the once hostile nations are changing too. In 1995 Václav Havel called Germany ‘a part of our destiny, our inspiration as well as our pain … some regard Germany as our greatest hope, others as our greatest peril’, but despite deep misgivings on both sides the Czechs and Germans signed a treaty of reconciliation in January 1997.43 But the most extraordinary change has taken place between Poland and Germany. Thanks to the work of people like the ex-Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Senator Stanislaw Stomma and ex-Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who is a friend of Helmut Kohl, these once implacable enemies have begun to heal the terrible scars not only of the Second World War, but of centuries of hostility. Cultural events like the 1997 exhibition outlining the historic links between Poland and Saxony organized by the erudite head of Warsaw Castle, Andrzej Rottermund, and held both in Germany and Poland would have been unthinkable a decade ago.44 In a 1997 survey the pollster Lena Kolarska-Bobinska