German Reunification

For upwards of seventy years , it was the central issue of European politics, and therefore even of world politics. For another forty years, it was the issue that dared not speak its name. For a few years, it became mentionable, as something that might happen "someday." Then, with breathtaking suddenness, in the course of a single year it happened. And life went on.

"It" was German Reunification. This writer remembers the day, just after formal reunification, when a TV news business reporter began to say "the West German Deutschmark" and had to correct himself oncamera to simply "German Deutschmark." For a few days, the fact of German unification dominated the headlines. But soon it was driven almost off the front page by the Persian Gulf crisis. The "special relationship" between the U.S. and united Germany, so lately proclaimed by George Bush and Helmut Kohl, vanished almost immediately in the face of German lack of enthusiasm for active military participation in the Gulf. Most recently, Germans have begun to discover, awkwardly, that there may now be just one German state, but there are still in many ways two German peoples.1 The euphoria of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the swift reunification has faded. The new single Germany, in a new Europe, is only just beginning to emerge. But it can fairly be said that the story of German unification is, in many ways, the story of the twentieth century.

Romantics began to dream of a united Ge

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not without reason. Yet, a peaceful "GermanyinEurope" can readily shade off into a new German localism, as the easing of national borders returns significance to smaller units. Paradoxically, while France and other European states have some fear of loss of outliers Brittany, Wales, the Basque country the German fate might be a peaceful devolution of the whole. We may now turn from reunification in the broader context of German history to the problem of reunification in the context of the European international order as it operated in the postwar era. The system of relationships which operated in Europe roughly from the admission of West Germany to NATO in 1955 until the emergence of Gorbachev in 1985 may be called the Cold War system. The basis of the system was the Iron Curtain division of Europe, with Eastern Europe under Soviet domination and Western Europe under a much looser sort of U.S. hegemony. "Central Europe" vanished as a generallyrecognized geographical region and conceptual entity under the Cold War system, since it was split between the two spheres: West Germany and Austria on one side, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland on the other. Interestingly enough, "Central Europ

Category: History - G