SURVIVING THE NEW GERMANY
On the eve of the EEC the Anglo-German relationship
A FEW years ago it became the fashion in the Foreign Office to require departments in London and embassies abroad to submit an annual statement of their Objectives. So every post would take a blank sheet of paper and reshuffle some well-known cards. Depending on the current vogue, `To maintain and increase the British share of the Ruritanian market,' might figure above or below, 'To secure a radical improvement in the Ruritanian perform- ance in the field of Human Rights'. But there was some genuine mind-searching too, and some useful identification of goals specific to the country concerned, even if it was only, 'To achieve a settlement of our long-standing claim in respect of the tin mines at Surangoduri.'
In Bonn, or so it seemed to me, the main British objectives were two: to keep the Federal Republic a full-hearted member of the Atlantic Alliance and the European Community; and to manage our affairs in such a way that when 'the German ques- tion' became active Britain would be so placed as to be able to influence events and protect her own interests. I always thought that this chance would come one day, though I did not foresee that it would happen so soon.
Well, that day has now come. How is Britain faring as regards the two objec- tives? Our national talent is more for substance than for presentation, and we were right to say that German unification would be a complicated business involving many others beside the Germans them- selves, though we could have found more gracious ways of saying so. But the two objectives have converged, because it is especially in Nato and the EEC that the process of German unification raises issues which affect the British national interest.
Take Nato first. Bonn's position is plain,
'De mortuis nil nisi bunkum.' though not yet stated in so many words. Membership of Nato is not negotiable, but almost everything else is, including the strength, location and nationality of any forces on German soil, and the nature of their weapons. The deal should emerge from the Vienna talks on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) rather than from the Two Plus Four' meetings on the external aspects of unification, so as to make it plain that what we have here is not the victorious powers of 1945 sitting down to decide what is safe for Germany in 1990, but a new Concert of Europe, with Ger- many as a full member, meeting to shape the outlines of our continent for the Gorbachev and post-Gorbachev era. Either way, it comes down to this: having waited 45 years for a chance of unification, the Germans are determined not to let this one slip through their fingers, and 'mem- bership of Nato' for them does not neces- sarily mean membership of the Nato we know.
Hence the talk of a 'more political' Nato, of a 'co-operative' relationship with the East, of the CSCE process (Helsinki and all that) setting up pan-European institu- tions for everything from telecommunica- tions to the peaceful settlement of dis- putes, of 'over-arching structures' growing ultimately into 'collective security'.
If this line of thinking does not involve a fundamental British interest, I do not know what does. Is Herr Genscher hoping to replace peace based on mutual deterr- ence by peace based on mutual trust, as President Gorbachev has sometimes seemed to be hinting? Is it being suggested that all will be able to feel safe when everybody is committed by treaty to pro- tecting everybody against everybody else? This is not quite the basic idea of Locarno, but it is not far from it, and as Whitsun holiday reading I recommend a dip into that particular treaty, into Austen Cham- berlain's euphoric reports from the little Swiss lakeside resort — and into the subsequent events which were soon to expose Locarno's impotence. When the Nato summit comes along, its conclusion may have to be that if we needed our Alliance when we knew what the threat was, we need it all the more now that we don't. The point may be more obvious to the British with their global traditions than to Germans emerging from four decades under an Iron Curtain that is now falling to pieces.
The issues which arise in the European Community are simpler in outline, even if complex in detail, and they ought not to dominate the EEC summit meeting in Dublin this weekend. It is a question of fixing a timetable for the extension of the rights and responsibilities of membership of the EEC to the territory of what is now the GDR and the people who live there, and of deciding where the various costs of the operation should fall. This kind of terrain is as familiar to the gnomes of Brussels, and to the watchdogs in the 12 capitals, as the Luneburg Heath is to a British cavalry regiment. One sees fright- ening figures for the likely cost of bringing East German conditions into line with West German standards: DM 100 billion for the railway system, DM 850 billion for housing, and so forth. But bills of these dimensions are not going to be dropping through the letter-box in Brussels. The EEC's funds these days tend to be capped and means-tested, and by far the largest net contributor during and after German unification will still be Germany itself. What the Community is being asked to absorb is after all only another 5 per cent of population, fewer than live in North-Rhine Westphalia, the largest of the West Ger- man Lander, and with a much smaller GDP. Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues in Dublin can afford to leave most of this to subordinates and concentrate on strategy and priorities for the Community as well.
But one unmistakable new phenomenon is taking shape under our noses, and that is a German state with frontiers roughly coterminous with those of the German nation, a state one third larger in popula- tion than Britain, France or Italy, a Feder- al Republic of Germany with nearly 80 million people.
If I were composing a set of British objectives today for my successor in Bonn, I should include as one of the first, `To live amicably and successfully alongside the new German state.' Not directly down- stream like the Dutch or downwind of it like the Poles and Czechs, but still close enough to feel its hot breath in the market place. As a competitor the existing Federal Republic itself is formidable enough. In 1989, with a population only 7 per cent greater than that of Britain, it had a GDP 57 per cent higher, with inflation at 1.4 per cent and a balance of trade surplus of £44 billion, roughly double the size of the British deficit. The Anglo-German trade statistics make the same point even more graphically. It will not take long for the GDR to change from a burden to an asset, and I see nothing and nobody to prevent the new German state from becoming the paramount power in Central Europe.
Need this prospect worry us? It worries some German Liberals, which is why they are pleading for Bonn to be kept as the capital even when unification is complete. Bonn, they argue, symbolises the only period in recent history when nobody in Europe had cause to be frightened of Germany, whereas Berlin stands both for the Prussian tradition and for the pull of the East. In the last two centuries the German-Russian relationship has alter- nated between bouts of combat and longer spells of collaboration, the switches from one to the other often being rather sudden (Tauroggen, Rapallo, the Ribbentrop- Molotov Pact). If such manoeuvres today look unlikely — I would say impossible it is because of those two organisations in which the feet of all their members are embedded: Nato, which some think out- dated, and the European Community, which some would like to see transmuted into something called 'a wider Europe'. The two together offer a solid reassurance, both to Germany and against it, which might not be so easily built on phrases such as 'collective security' and a 'wider Europe'.
Sir Julian Bullard was British Ambassa- dor in Bonn from 1984 to 1988.
alma 4,0-y 5-14..ppiVt 54-e4r DI/GK la y t
Previous page
