Kristina Spohr - Post Wall, Post Square - Rebuilding the World after 1989

Genscher tried to calm her down by refocusing on the topic of conventional arms-reduction talks to stabilise the heart of Europe. He, of course, wanted to persuade the Soviets to withdraw their troops from eastern Germany. But Thatcher jumped on that. She didn’t want Soviet troop withdrawals if that meant the Americans would pull out as well. For her, it was not just a question of strategic balance or European security, the troop question was also about keeping the Germans under control. [123]

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd sat in on the whole meeting, but hardly said a word. He had little opportunity whenever Thatcher went on the rampage. But the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was genuinely concerned about the line Thatcher was taking. [124]An internal FCO memo on the day of Genscher’s visit acknowledged that Germans ‘see our position as being outside the mainstream’. As indeed did Washington: the president was ‘taking his distance from us on the Warsaw Pact and on German reunification’. As for Thatcher’s obsession with Gorbachev’s political fragility, the FCO considered this greatly exaggerated because Gorbachev himself was ‘not intervening to stop communism being swept away in Eastern Europe’. So there was a real danger that ‘we are being plus royaliste que le roi ’. And they warned against a status quo policy and being left behind by not being seen to share Bush’s vision of a Europe ‘whole and free’. If, in extremis , the PM decided to block German unification by asserting Britain’s position as one of the four victor powers, ‘we should not count on carrying anyone else with us’. [125]

Thatcher was simply not on the same page as her diplomats. Not only was she blunt with Genscher, she did not hesitate to speak out against Kohl, whom she disliked personally – a fat, sausage-munching, Teutonic stereotype – as well as resenting him as the embodiment of the colossus of Europe. [126]

The British prime minister was the most outspoken Western critic of the Ten Points but Genscher also had difficulties with the French president. Mitterrand was shocked at being left in the dark by Kohl – especially after their intense discussions throughout November, in Bonn, Paris and Strasbourg. Kohl had even written to him at length on the 27th about the future of economic and monetary union without dropping a hint of what he would announce next day about unification. Nevertheless, biting his tongue, Mitterrand told the press in Athens where he was on a state visit, that although he expected the Four Powers to be kept in the loop by Bonn, the German desire for unity was ‘legitimate’ and that he had no intention of opposing their aspirations. What’s more, he said, he trusted the Germans to make sure that the other European peoples would not be confronted by German faits accomplis made in secret. [127]

When Mitterrand met Genscher in the Elysée Palace, their forty-five-minute encounter was polite but rather distant. Invited to speak first, Genscher highlighted his credentials as a European. He insisted that the FRG was fully committed to EC integration and willing to engage with the East. He believed that the destiny of Germany must be tied to the destiny of Europe. European reunification could not happen without German reunification. Nor did he want the dynamism of the EC’s integration process to be left behind because of the energy devoted to reshaping East–West relations. And NATO, too, should get engaged – not least because America’s presence in Europe and on German soil was an ‘existential necessity’. [128]

Mitterrand heard him out but then delivered his own lecture, expressed with mounting intensity, as he reflected on his personal odyssey through two world wars. Born in 1916 – the year of the Franco-German slaughterhouse at Verdun – Mitterrand was himself a veteran of 1940. Like any patriotic Frenchman, he had historical obsessions about Germany. But, like most of France’s post-war leadership, especially since the Adenauer–de Gaulle entente of 1963, he was deeply committed to Franco-German reconciliation, to fostering the ‘special relationship’ between Paris and Bonn and to the leading role of their two countries in European integration. [129]Although a socialist and therefore ideologically at odds with the Christian Democrat chancellor, he and Kohl had become good friends – famously standing hand in hand in 1984 at the Verdun memorial. Despite such public displays of friendship, however, Mitterrand remained ambivalent about the German state. [130]

German unity looked fine as long as it remained a distant prospect. Mitterrand had told Thatcher in September that he was less alarmed than she, not only because he believed that the EC, and specifically the single currency, would act as a restraint, but also because he did not envisage German unification happening quickly. Gorbachev, he told her confidently, would never accept a united Germany in NATO and Washington would never tolerate the FRG leaving the Alliance: ‘ Alors, ne nous inquiétons pas: disons qu’elle se fera quand les Allemands le décideront, mais en sachant que les deux Grands nous en protégeront ’ (‘So let’s not worry: let’s say it will happen when the Germans decide, but in the knowledge that the two superpowers will protect us from them’). [131]

But now, Mitterrand told Genscher, things had clearly moved on. With Europe in flux, old territorial questions had been awakened. One could not even rule out a return to 1913, and a world on the brink of war. It was imperative that unification, whenever it occurred, should be caught in the safety net of an even more consolidated European Community. If that integration process was disrupted he feared that the continent might return to days of alliance politics. And he made clear to Genscher that he saw Kohl as being disruptive, acting as the ‘brake’ on EMU. Up to now, he added, the Federal Republic had always been a motor in the European unification project. Now it was stalling. And if Germany and France did not see eye to eye at the Strasbourg summit in December, others would profit. Thatcher would not only block any progress on Europe but would also gang up with others against German unity.

Unlike Thatcher, Mitterrand accepted that German unity was unstoppable and, indeed, justifiable. But he insisted that this unstoppable process must be properly integrated within the EC project. ‘Europe’ not only helped absorb his ingrained suspicions of the Germans, he also felt it gave him leverage over Bonn: that was the benefit of subsuming the Deutschmark in the single currency. Whereas Thatcher, who was far more Germanophobe, had no such weapons in her armoury: she loathed the European project and abhorred a single currency. Indeed she was increasingly on the margins of European politics. Not that this worried the British prime minister. Indeed she seemed to love it when she was in a minority, convinced of her own rectitude. [132]

‘Helmut! Can we start?’ – ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’: Priorities at the European Council in Strasbourg

This was the atmosphere in which the EC leaders gathered in Strasbourg on 8–9 December. Now Kohl, not Genscher, had to face the music – and he didn’t enjoy it. As he wrote later in his memoirs, he could not remember such a ‘tense’ and ‘unfriendly’ meeting. It was like being in court. [133]Unification was on everyone’s mind. Long-standing colleagues who had appeared so trusting of the FRG’s European-ness, now seemed terrified that Bonn would go its own way – like a train that was suddenly moving faster and faster and might go in a totally different direction from what anyone had expected. Kohl felt that the room was full of questions: was he still trustworthy? Was the FRG still a reliable partner? Would the Germans remain loyal to the West? Only the leaders of Spain and Ireland embraced the idea of German unification wholeheartedly. Kohl felt Belgium and Luxembourg would not cause problems. But everyone else had their fears and did not conceal them. Giulio Andreotti of Italy openly warned of ‘pan-Germanism’; even Kohl’s fellow Christian Democrat, Ruud Lubbers of the Netherlands, could not hide his distaste for Germany’s unification ambitions. [134]