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A ONE-SIDED CURTAIN

he Iron Curtain torn open', said the front page of last Friday's Times. 'The Iron Curtain is swept aside', agreed the Tele- graph. The lifting of travel restrictions on East German citizens has captured the imagination of the world: this, we are told, is the end of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, the end of Eastern Europe as we know it.

But is it? All these things may be coming to an end, but there is something very strange about the way in which the world has seized on the granting of visas to East Germans as the crucial and final proof of change. More than two years ago, travel restrictions on the citizens of Hungary were similarly lifted. This was just as much a `sweeping aside' of the Iron Curtain; but it did not earn a single banner headline in the West.

So what is different in this case? Is it that the East Germans are the last link in the chain? Obviously not. Rumania is still frozen in a nightmarish dictatorship. Alba- nia remains a tightly sealed Stalinist time- capsule. And even Yugoslavia is still an oppressive communist police-state — de- spite having lifted all travel restrictions on its citizens many years ago.

If East Germany is special, it is partly for reasons of symbolism and myth. The Ber- lin Wall is the iron curtain in the popular imagination, thanks to a succession of films and novels which have treated Berlin as the laboratory and testing-ground of the Cold War. In Berlin, and more generally in the two Germ anies, the conditions of the Cold War have been made to seem simple, diagrammatic, symmetrical. We, the Allied powers, had our zones in the West, where we created a regime in our own image; they, the Soviets, had their zone in the East, where they did likewise.

But it is for precisely this reason that the case of the two Berlins and the two Germanies offers a false and misleading framework for our thinking about the division of Europe in general. The historic- al parity between East and West in the post-war partition of Germany still seems to suggest an equality of rights, or even a moral equivalence, between the two sides. This may have been correct, in bare legal terms, 44 years ago; but the succeeding decades have shown up the 'moral equiva- lence' doctrine as a grotesque falsehood. Although the division of Berlin may have a certain symmetry on the map, there is nothing symmetrical about the purpose of the iron curtain.

The pressure for change during the past few weeks has come in one direction, and one direction only. The opening of the Berlin Wall was not a concession to the West, not a 'move' to which we are required to 'respond' by offering some concession in return. It was not, as Mrs Thatcher seems to think, a favour handed out by Mr Gorbachev, to which we must react by becoming more attentive to Soviet interests in Eastern Europe. It was a desperate expedient to appease an angry and frustrated population', a population which can see clearly the asymmetry be- tween its system of government and ours.

Old habits die hard, however, and for the last week the airwaves have been humming with statesmen and commenta- tors discussing the future of the Germanies in terms of symmetrical quid pro quos. When Mr Gerasimov, the Soviet foreign affairs spokesman, suggests that any even- tual departure of East Germany from the Warsaw Pact should be matched by the departure of West Germany from Nato, this is treated as the most natural sequence of ideas in the world. But it simply does not follow. If the people of East Germany decide to leave the Pact, they will do so because they no longer identify with the oppressive system of power which that pact defends. Hungary might make the same decision for the same reason — and no one would then require Italy, say, to leave Nato as a quid pro quo.

Of course Germany is special, for the most obvious reason of all: it is the one place where the iron curtain has cut a nation in two. But this is where the lack of symmetry should become self-evident. The German state which we recreated in the West after the war was a revival of a real country (albeit a geographically incom- plete one), with a real political will of its own. The East German state has remained an artificial creation, because its entire system of government has been a lie.

It is time, then, that we stopped thinking of the reunification of Germany as a problem, and began to consider it as a solution. A unified Germany will not he some sort of strange 'third way' experi- ment: in essence, it will be West Germany, enlarged and healed. A united Germany will be able to consider more rationally where its true interests lie; and it will clearly see that they are bound up inextric- ably with the free economies of the West.

This is already the case, and tying the German economy into a more federal Europe will not make it more so. All that the 'binding' of Germany will achieve (as advocated by Messrs Delors, Mitterrand and Heath) is a growing sense of resent- ment on the part of the Germans towards those Euro-partners whom they will in- creasingly regard — with good reason — as parasites and free-riders.

Those who propose greater federalism as a way of neutralising the effects of German economic power should be clear about what this means: the reduction of Ger- many, and of other member-countries, to the status of provinces in a single Euro- state. Nothing less than this will have the required effect.

And this will indeed be a strange pros- pect to hold out to the people of East Germany, as they dream of restoring their sense of national identity. In other parts of Eastern Europe too, people are reaching out towards two goals: a free-market eco- nomy, and national democratic institu- tions. There is nothing incompatible about these objectives, and to base 'Europe' on one but not the other will be to close our doors towards the peoples of Eastern Europe at the very moment when we should be opening them.

In September 1968, Mr Brezhnev wrote an article in Pravda which stated what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. National self-determination, he wrote, was a subordinate goal, which should always be abandoned when it seemed to conflict with the interests of the international proletar- iat. The baleful effects of this doctrine will have taken more than 21 years to wear off. By the time, the Brezhnev Doctrine is completely dead and buried, the last thing the peoples of Eastern Europe will want to see is a Delors Doctrine sitting on its grave.