by Philip Short
It is easy with hindsight to reproach Mitterrand for his lack of clairvoyance. A quarter of a century later the transcripts of the French President’s discussions in the autumn and winter of 1989 – during the crucial six to nine months when Europe was being remade – convey a refusal to believe, a denial of what was happening in plain sight, because it flew in the face of everything that half a century of history had taught him.
In July he had told Bush: ‘the USSR will never agree to lose control of Poland’. Five weeks later Poland had a non-communist Prime Minister. In January 1990 he told Thatcher that if Kohl continued pushing for reunification, the Russians ‘will do to Dresden what they did to Prague’. They did nothing of the sort. The following month he told Kohl that if the Ukraine attempted to secede, ‘it will be a case of civil war. Moscow will unleash terrible repression.’ It did not. In March, he warned of a Soviet crackdown on Lithuania after its unilateral declaration of independence. That did not happen either.
Mitterrand was not alone. None of the Western leaders measured correctly the depth of the political earthquake shaking Europe. None realised the extent or, above all, the speed of the changes with which they were being confronted. All were locked into a vision of the Soviet Union and its policies which had held good throughout their lives and which it was impossible to imagine would suddenly be overturned.
Mitterrand’s misjudgement was all the more striking because he had been among the first in Europe to recognise that German reunification was inevitable – one day. That, however, was in theory. It would probably happen before the end of the century, he had told a sceptical Helmut Schmidt, but ‘not tomorrow’.10 In practice, he argued, ‘Gorbachev will never accept a united Germany inside NATO and the Americans will never agree to Germany leaving the Alliance.’ ‘So let’s not worry,’ he told Thatcher. ‘The two superpowers will protect us from it.’ The British Prime Minister was not so sure. ‘Kohl . . . wants it and Gorbachev is weak,’ she said.
The problem for Mitterrand was not so much the principle of reunification as the practical consequences that would result. A few days after meeting Thatcher he told the Cabinet that it was necessary to ‘envisage coldly the possibility’ that it would occur. But it risked leading to ‘an economically and demographically powerful German bloc in the centre of Europe and that must be avoided’. De Gaulle, he recalled, had based French policy on François Mauriac’s epigram: ‘I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them.’ If that were no longer possible, what was the alternative?
All we can do is make the [European] Community more attractive so that an eventually reunified Germany will prefer the Community to balancing between East and West. You will say that West Germany plus East Germany plus Austria can make a formidable economic bloc. I’m going to tell you something . . . That prospect is causing great concern in Britain and Italy. History shows us that when a new force arises, it always provokes the emergence of another force to balance it. Europe has been rehearsing that old story for a thousand years.11
In public he kept repeating that the best response to Germany’s desire for unity was ‘to strengthen and accelerate the political construction of Europe’. But in private he accompanied that message with a blunt warning to Bonn. ‘We are friends and allies,’ he told the West German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher in November, shortly after the Wall fell. ‘But what you are doing is pushing us to a new Triple Alliance of France, Britain and Russia, exactly as in 1913 . . . You will be encircled and it will end in war.’
Anchoring Germany within the Community to prevent it striking out on its own and dominating Central Europe became the key to Mitterrand’s thinking. European integration must come first, reunification, second. At first, Kohl seemed prepared to go along. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chancellor’s attitude changed. On November 28, without informing even his own Cabinet, let alone Mitterrand as the Franco-German Treaty required, Kohl announced a 10-point programme for stage-by-stage unification. It would start with the ‘fundamental transformation of the political and economic system’ in East Germany, the holding of free elections and the release of political prisoners, to be followed by the creation of ‘confederal structures’ and eventually a German Federation.
Kohl set no timetable and maintained later that he had expected the European Union to be achieved long before Germany was united. But that was not how it looked to the others. A week later Mitterrand flew to Kiev to meet Gorbachev, whom he found seething over the Chancellor’s initiative:
GORBACHEV: Your friend Kohl, your partner, is a hick from the countryside. Here even the humblest politician in the provinces thinks six moves ahead. Not him . . .
MITTERRAND: Between 1913 and 1989, we’ve seen a lot of things happen which weren’t very happy. We must not start again.
[In] Germany . . . we are facing a contradiction. It’s difficult not to take account of the strong political wishes of a people . . . On the other hand no one wants to see major changes in Europe as a result of German reunification without other measures being taken first . . . We need to work out agreements together on how Europe should evolve . . . so that the German problem is just one among many and not the most important one either. We must make progress in building the European Community so that the German problem is minimised . . . Achieving a balance in Germany cannot come before a balance in Europe . . .
The Europeans [are in agreement] that the German problem has been raised too quickly . . . Kohl’s speech turned the order of things upside down and that was wrong . . .
GORBACHEV: I entirely agree . . . The 10-point plan was [like] a bull in a china shop . . . Help me to avoid German reunification! If you don’t I will be replaced by a military [regime]. [Then] you will bear the responsibility for a war. Is that in the West’s interest?. . . I told Genscher yesterday that Kohl’s 10 points . . . amount to a political diktat . . . Shevardnadze [the Soviet Foreign Minister] told him: ‘Even Hitler never used that kind of language!’12
Efforts to strengthen European unity had been underway since 1986, when the Twelve approved the Single European Act, committing themselves to increased political cooperation and to a single market by the end of 1992. Two years later West Germany proposed what it called ‘a European monetary space’, meaning a single currency. Britain, backed by the Netherlands, Portugal and Denmark, was hostile. The British government, Thatcher told Rocard that summer, ‘neither wishes nor thinks possible the creation of a single currency and a central bank, even in the very long term’. But as the political landscape in Europe changed, British opposition diminished while it was the turn of the Germans to have second thoughts. Matters came to a head at the European summit at Strasbourg, on December 8 1989, two days after Mitterrand’s meeting with Gorbachev in Kiev. After blowing hot and cold for a week, Kohl finally told his partners that Germany agreed to an intergovernmental conference on monetary union before the end of 1990. But in return he asked for a statement from the Twelve approving unification.
Thatcher, speaking for all of them, said Britain would refuse unless Kohl recognised the post-war border between East Germany and Poland, known as the Oder–Neisse line. For domestic political reasons, the Chancellor was determined to avoid that. Accordingly the Twelve approved a compromise. ‘The German people,’ they declared, ‘will recover their unity by a process of free self-determination . . . with due respect for agreements and treaties and all the principles of [the] Helsinki [Conference] . . . and in the context of European integration.’
For the French President what mattered was that Kohl had committed himself to monetary union. It meant that he had chosen Europe, just as Mitterrand himself had done in 1983 by deciding that France would remain within the EMS. For Thatcher it was more difficult. She found herself between a rock and a hard place. Like Mitterrand, she was haunted by memories of the war – in her case as a teenager during the Blitz; in his through captivity and the Resistance. But where Mitterrand was convinced that the only way to ensure th
at Germany would never again seek to dominate its neighbours, as it had in 1914 and again in 1939, was through European integration, Thatcher saw that as jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
The result was an extraordinary conversation in the margins of the summit, in which both of them let down their guard and spoke frankly of their fears:
THATCHER: Kohl has no idea of the sensitivity towards reunification that prevails in Europe. Germany is divided because it was the Germans who imposed on us the most terrible of wars. Day by day, Germany is becoming more dominant . . .
MITTERRAND: Kohl is speculating on the natural impulses of the German people. He wants to be the one who encouraged that. Are there many Germans with the character to resist those urges? They have never fixed their borders . . .
THATCHER [taking out of her handbag a map of Germany’s pre-war borders and pointing to East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia]: They’ll take all that and Czechoslovakia.
MITTERRAND: The way this is all speeding up is indeed very dangerous.
THATCHER: Kohl is going to encourage it. He’s going to add fuel to the flames. We must put the Germans in a framework where it’s kept under control. [As things stand now] they can make Berlin their capital again whenever they like.
MITTERRAND: Yes, and Gorbachev can’t stop them any more . . .
THATCHER: The Americans don’t even want to stop them. There’s a strong pro-German lobby in America . . .
MITTERRAND: We no longer have the means to use force against Germany. We are in the position the leaders of France and Britain were in before the war, when they did not react to anything. We mustn’t find ourselves in the same situation as at Munich! . . .
THATCHER: When East Germany has been a democracy for fifteen years, that will be the time to talk about reunification.
MITTERRAND: We should re-establish the entente between France and Britain, as in 1913 and 1938 . . .
THATCHER: The USSR has to change. It’s now the only country in the East which doesn’t have a multi-party system . . . Too many things are happening at the same time! [Imagine] if Germany takes power in Eastern Europe, as Japan did in the Pacific! . . . The rest of us must form an alliance to prevent that.13
The transcript of their discussion offers a rare glimpse of two of the world’s most powerful leaders grappling with a problem, the solution of which escaped them and, uttering, in private, truths very far removed from the reassuring statements they were both making in public.
Mitterrand’s fear that, by failing to take a stand against reunification, he would go down in history as having connived, like Chamberlain and Daladier, in the re-emergence of a German behemoth in Europe, was not feigned. Like Thatcher, he was worried about how far Germany’s ambitions might go. Hence his constant demands that winter and the following spring, to the Chancellor’s exasperation, that Germany commit itself irrevocably to its post-war frontiers. Kohl, he complained, always spoke of ‘the unity of the German people’ rather than reunification. ‘What does that mean, “unity of the German people”?’ he asked Attali. ‘Does Kohl include in that the Germans in Polish Silesia or in the Czech Sudetenland?’
Shevardnadze, in talks with Dumas, expressed similar concerns. ‘Kohl does not seek war,’ he said, but ‘the spirit of revenge lives on’.
Mitterrand’s complicity with Thatcher proved short-lived. She soon realised that while the French President shared her anxiety, he considered reunification unstoppable. The only question was how long it would take. He no longer spoke of ten years. Vernon Walters, who had become Bush’s Ambassador to Bonn, had suggested five years. Mitterrand now thought in those terms too.
In this uncertain context, five days before Christmas 1989, Mitterrand set out for East Berlin. The visit was a mistake. Most of his advisers had recommended that he call it off.14 He persisted, partly out of curiosity to see for himself what East Germany was like and partly in a misguided attempt to slow the rush to reunification by showing that the moribund communist regime might still have a role to play.15 If he gained anything from the visit, it was the realisation that East Germany was ‘falling apart much more quickly than anyone had imagined’. Kohl, who had gone to Dresden the day before Mitterrand’s arrival, had come away with a similar impression.
But between the French and West German leaders, relations had soured.
When the Chancellor proposed that Mitterrand join him for a symbolic crossing from East to West Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate, the President refused. Officially it was because he felt it was a German occasion and he would be out of place. In private he vituperated against Kohl’s trickiness. ‘He did not warn me about his 10-point plan. He refuses to recognise the Oder–Neisse line. And now he wants me to come and legitimise his grabbing East Germany. It’s too crude. He can’t really think I’ll fall into a trap like that.’
At Latche at the beginning of January 1990, they held a dialogue of the deaf. Kohl assured his host that ‘anchoring Germany in the European Community’ was a ‘prerequisite’ for reunification – which in any case, he said, would probably take years. ‘If I were German,’ Mitterrand responded drily, ‘I would be for reunification too . . . But being French, I don’t feel the same passion.’
In East Germany that weekend hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in favour of unity. ‘Kohl’s behind that,’ Mitterrand fumed. ‘He tells me that he hasn’t done anything, but behind my back he’s speeding things up.’ The East Berlin regime was collapsing hour by hour. ‘Three months ago,’ he told the French Defence Council in mid-January, ‘the great Soviet Union only had to frown and everyone bowed down. Now the Germans are starting to realise that the Soviet threat no longer exists.’ A few days later, when Margaret Thatcher came to Paris to try to persuade him to join her in an attempt to slow the momentum, he told her it would be ‘stupid and unrealistic to try to do so . . . No force in Europe seems able to prevent it.’ In her memoirs she grumbled that he had ‘a tendency to schizophrenia’, saying one thing in public and another in private, but she admitted that on the fundamentals he had been right: the Germans were going to be reunited no matter what anyone did.
Over the next six months the remaining problems were ironed out.
After an icy two-week stand-off in March, when France joined forces with Poland to denounce Kohl’s ‘silence, heavy with ambiguities’ on the recognition of the East German–Polish border and called for ‘a legally binding commitment to be negotiated . . . before reunification’, the Chancellor backed down. Mitterrand said later that it was ‘the one disagreement which tested the two countries’ friendship’ over that period. Objectively, he maintained, French pressure had helped Kohl resist the irredentist demands of his more extreme supporters. Kohl felt that Mitterrand had underestimated his difficulties during what he called ‘the most delicate time in my political career’.16
After the border issue was solved, the rift between them quickly healed.
In July Gorbachev removed the last obstacle by agreeing that the new unified Germany could remain in NATO if it wished, with the sole proviso that other NATO nations should not station troops on former East German territory after the withdrawal of Soviet forces. A month later the two states signed a treaty of reunification and on 3 October 1990, German unity was proclaimed officially in Berlin.
To Helmut Kohl, the provincial lawyer from Bavaria, it was the realisation of an impossible dream.
The rest of Europe had very mixed feelings. Britain was hostile. Poland and Russia were viscerally opposed – ‘It’s in their genes,’ Mitterrand told Thatcher. ‘There’s nothing you can do about that’ – but powerless to intervene. So was France. The problem was not Kohl, Mitterrand said later, it was Germany: Kohl was not eternal; Germany would be there for ever. The day the Chancellor and Gorbachev reached agreement, Roland Dumas drafted a statement declaring that France was ‘delighted’ that there was no longer any obstacle to a united Germany ‘with full rights and sovereignty’. That, Mitterrand accepted. But another sentence
in the draft, stating that ‘France regards this accord as a fortunate act for all Europeans’, he crossed out.
For more than a year, the major powers had been struggling to find a framework within which to contain the political changes occurring within the Soviet bloc. The Cold War was not yet over, but everyone knew that its end was approaching. In the summer of 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev had spoken of ‘a Common European Home’, which he defined as ‘a commonwealth of sovereign and economically interdependent nations’ covering both the eastern and western halves of Europe. It was an attempt to preserve a semblance of Moscow’s influence over its former satellites at a time when they were all adopting what one of Gorbachev’s aides jokingly called ‘the Sinatra doctrine’, a reference to the words of the song, ‘My Way’.17
Six months later, the Americans came up with an alternative. During a visit to Berlin in December, the US Secretary of State, James Baker, called for ‘a new European architecture’. NATO, he proposed, should play an increased political role in relations with Eastern Europe and the USSR; the US and the European Community should strengthen their ties; and the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) should expand its activities across the whole of the emerging pan-European area. By then the Soviet Union’s six Warsaw Pact partners had all, except East Germany, installed independent, non-communist governments.
To Mitterrand the common thread of Baker’s proposals was the maintenance of American influence – or, as the State Department preferred to call it, ‘leadership’ – in Europe after the military threat from the Warsaw Pact had ceased.18
The French President had other ideas. Like Baker, he realised that if the Warsaw Pact disappeared, the role of NATO would have to change, if, indeed, it would still be needed at all.19 But to him that meant it was time for the Europeans to start organising their own affairs. Accordingly, on December 31 1989, in a message of New Year greetings to the French people, he proposed a new political structure to bring together the European Community and the former communist states in the East: