Unity Rethought but Not Reborn : Even If East Collapses, Divided Germany Will Remain Two

If the German Democratic Republic is forced into political bankruptcy, what will West Germany do?

One thing is certain: Bonn has no plan, hidden or otherwise, for dealing with a situation that has the potential to bring about the objective that West German governments have always said they wanted but have not thought about seriously for many years--unity of the Germans.

For at least two good reasons, West German politicians, officials and the public alike have for all these years averted their minds from thoughts of unity and derided foreigners’ speculations about reunification as rubbish.

Bonn knows full well that its neighbors all dread a unified Germany. It dares not be seen as actively pursuing such an aim by itself. Also, the Federal Republic’s postwar integrations with the West have brought it democracy, liberty, prosperity, security and--prized above everything else, perhaps--stability. Jeopardize all that?

West German policy has been to proclaim the unity aim ritually but to assure the world that the Federal Republic, unlike the bad Germanys of the past, would never go it alone or even do much to bring about unification.

Meanwhile, West German governments take “small steps” to alleviate the lot of their oppressed countrymen, by pursuing generous economic policies toward East Germany and by warmly welcoming and bestowing West German citizenship on all East Germans who manage to leave.

All of West Germany’s political parties deal with Erich Honecker, thus according his regime legitimacy while stabilizing and supporting the separate East German state. They share with East Berlin, with all their neighbors and allies and with the Soviet Union and the United States a common aim--keeping political change in East Germany well under control lest it shake the framework of international relationships in Europe to which we all have grown so accustomed over the last 40 years.

It is the new variable--East Germans marching in the streets and scrambling to freedom over West German embassy walls--that threatens to overturn such Realpolitik calculus.

With the situation now more fluid than it has been in years, the relationship between the two Germanys becomes far harder to predict and to keep under control. Demonstrating East Germans have brought home to their countrymen and to the world that they want changes now, both at home and possibly in their state’s relationship with the Federal Republic.

Those outside Germany who contemplate this prospect with apprehension need to keep five facts in mind:

--Going back to a centralized German national state like Bismarck’s or Hitler’s is out of the question. Reunification in that sense is not on. Germans, West and East alike, neither expect it nor want it.

--Whatever form of closer association that may develop between the two Germanys, it will be one that preserves the East German state in some form and many of its “socialist” institutions.

--The strong federal structure of West Germany is flexible enough to permit a gradation of relationships with East Germany, from economic and functional associations through confederal to federal political relationships.

--The European Community, too, is so constructed that it can accommodate such relationships. That it do so is vital to both Germanys.

--No new German-German arrangements can be arrived at without the willing involvement and agreement of the Germans’ neighbors. This particularly includes the Soviet Union, whose influence is decisive and for whom East Germany remains politically and strategically fundamental.

West Germany’s small neighbors, fearful as they are of German unity, will insist on seeing those powers involved. Politicians close to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl are already reminding the United States of its obligation to promote German unity. Fortunately there exists a tested framework for such involvement. The United States, the Soviet Union, France and Britain retain a responsibility for the two Germanys that derives from their roles as victors over the Nazis.

As recently as 1970, these countries made good use of this responsibility to negotiate, together with East and West Germany, a highly successful agreement on Berlin. The United States should turn again to that “four-power” framework and activate it on behalf of the Federal Republic and of the East Germans who are showing us in such a dramatic way that they will no longer wait for change.