GERMANY

Brandt looks east

Malcolm RUTHERFORD

Bonn—For a man who keeps stressing that his is a government of internal reform, Herr Willy Brandt spends a lot of time on foreign policy. Last week he prefaced his report on the state of the nation with a warning that he knew perfectly well that it was by its per- formance on such homely things as prices and incomes that his government will fall or stand. yet devoted practically the whole of his speech to the German question. In other words Herr Brandt is not just playing foreign policy for the votes in it. He does not think there are any. He does it because he believes in it.

His standpoint was made clearer in the peroration to his speech last week. Having outlined the efforts his government is making for negotiations with the East, and admitted the possibility of failure, Herr Brandt asked the question 'but what, actually, do we get in exchange?' And he answered his own question: `to make peace more secure for our entire people—is that nothing?' There, in that simple 'is that nothing?', lies much of the clue to what he is doing.

As Chancellor Herr Brandt is playing for very high stakes, and by rules which some of his allies have either forgotten or do not understand. His achievement so far has been to present issues much more clearly than his predecessors, and more clearly perhaps than is convenient for either his friends or his enemies. Before Brandt European attitudes to the division of the continent had become hidebound. Privately, Western policy amounted to the preservation of the status quo (although publicly officials would admit no such thing). It was to await the dismantle- ment of the Soviet empire, while doing nothing actively to help bring it about. It was to support the reunification of Germany in principle, but to oppose it in practice. All this is now under challenge.

Take reunification. Herr Brandt has not dropped the reunification issue; on the con- trary, as his enemy Herr Ulbricht pointed out in his press conference in East Berlin on Monday, he has revived it. What he has done is to acknowledge publicly that the old allied

approach to reunification was a deception • and a contradiction. The allies were prepared to pay lip service to it because they believed there was no chance of it coming about. Herr Brandt is prepared to make concessions to the East in the hope of bringing reunifica- tion a little nearer, and of making human relations between the present two German states a little more tolerable.

Such concession could well be unilateral and made in advance of any return from the east. This was made unmistakably clear in a little-noticed passage towards the end of his state of the nation report, when Herr Brandt said: 'There has been a time in the Federal Re- public when substantial German advance concessions towards the west were considered proof of particular statesmanship and fore- sight. It can indeed be clearly seen that these concessions brought ample reward to the Federal Republic in the trust that we have gained, in equality and in non-discrimina- tion.'

He indicated that the same method might be used in negotiating with the East. This is a radically different formulation from his predecessor's and may not yet have been clearly understood in the rest of western Europe.

Again, it was customarily assumed in the past that any European peace settlement re- quired a prior liberalisation of the regimes in eastern Europe. This applied particularly to any improvement in relations between the two parts of Germany: it would be de- pendent at least on the removal of the Berlin wall. Herr Brandt has abandoned all this: he has recognised that the East German regime cannot afford to take the wall down, yet at the same time that the regime is unlikely to be overthrown and replaced by a bunch of 'liberals' through an internal revolution. Herr Brandt would probably settle in the first instance for some very minimal but attainable concession, such as the right of West Berliners to visit the East, if he believed that this would contribute to the long-term interests of European security.

But what is European security? It is prob- ably to Herr Brandt's greatest credit that he has-become the first major western leader to attempt to find out if there is a new answer in place of the old one that European security was, and would remain for the fore- seeable future, dependent on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The Russians say they want a European security conference—surely, taken on the face of it, not necessarily a bad idea. Herr Brandt has set out to discover precisely what they mean. In the past the leading Western powers were privately glad that the Russians kept their suggestions vague. Now Herr Ulbricht has supplied the answer. He said on Monday that one of the first purposes of a security conference would be to legalise the status quo.

This pinpoints the western dilemma. The West realises that there is nothing it can or is willing to do to change the status quo in eastern Europe, but it doesn't like to sky so in public. Herr Brandt, in effect, is saying 'let us abandon the pretence. In this way we could get down to the bare essentials, and see if there are subjects on which East and West should negotiate in the interests of

peace.' For what it is worth, we now have the East's word for it that one of the last remaining obstacles to such discusiions is Herr Brandt's own refusal to grant full dip- lomatic recognition to East Germany. But Herr Brandt has already gone so far to meet Herr Ulbricht that even this could possibly come—at the right moment.

It would only be a logical extension of what he has done already. He has said the Russians say they want a conference to deal with the German question, and this could best be prepared by talks between the two German states. Therefore it is up to the Russians to see that such talks can take place. If Soviet pressure was applied, Herr Ulbricht had already succumbed to it by the time he appeared before the Western press on Monday. Despite the dogma, he was clearly signalling that East-West German talks should go ahead.

They will probably start quite soon, just as Bonn's talks with Moscow have already begun and talks with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary don't seem to be far off. They may lead nowhere, and they may even lead to a situation more dangerous than the

present, because negotiations may only show how far East and West remain apart. That is _ what Herr Brandt meant when he talked about acknowledging the possibility of failure. There is also the chance, though an unlikely one, that they will lead to Herr Brandt getting totally out of his depth and making concessions for which he will get no return whatever.

The point is, however, that there are cer- tain things about Communist intentions which are unknown, and which can be better discovered through talks. Are the Russians and their allies, for example, really happy to accept the present status quo? Do they really regard West Germany as a per- manent threat to peace? Are they prepared to discuss balanced regimes and forces?

This is not intended to be an optimistic report. But Herr Brandt has raised a question, and because he intends to pursue it, for better or worse, there is a new situa- tion in Europe. Perhaps because they believe it can be exploited to their advantage, the eastern countries appear to have recognised this. But it is still not clear how far the change has been recognised in the West.