By Philip Alexander
German reunification is Kohl’s legacy. But Germany’s chancellor also played a leading role in integrating the
former Soviet bloc with the rest of the continent.
His critics sometimes derided him as ponderous and undiplomatic, but German voters turned to chancellor Helmut Kohl time and again for the sense of security he delivered during a turbulent period for central Europe. His interaction with emerging Europe followed a similar course: after some false starts, his patience and unswerving focus on stability eventually allowed him to play a leading role in efforts to reintegrate the former Soviet bloc with the rest of the continent. Combined with his crucial backing for strong European economic institutions and the birth of the euro, Kohl’s legacy is arguably central to the reshaping of the European economy in the past two decades.
He assumed office in 1982 at an inauspicious moment, when tensions between Nato and the Warsaw Pact nations had rarely been higher, following the brutal suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland a year earlier. This clampdown obliged Leszek Balcerowicz, who went on to lead Poland’s trail-blazing economic transition in 1989, to abandon his hopes for a market economy temporarily, opting instead for what he termed “market socialism”. “It was not because I was fond of socialism, but because it seemed that the third way was the best option, given the existing geopolitical prospects... Nobody dreamed that the Soviet Union would disappear,” recalls Balcerowicz in an interview.
If at first...
Kohl nonetheless hoped to strengthen ties with the countries beyond Germany’s eastern borders, but his early attempts met with unedifying failure. Horst Teltschik, the chancellor’s national security adviser and close confidante from 1982 to 1990, remembers how the Warsaw Pact leaders were invited to attend a summit in Bonn in 1983. Moscow intervened, forbidding the governments of its client states from attending the summit. Embarrassingly, only Romania’s leader Nicolae Ceausescu showed up, the most unreconstructed dictator of the whole region.
Consequently, says Teltschik, the West German government realized that “as long as the big powers were not ready to undergo dialogue and cooperate, there was no room for manoeuvre for their smaller allies in western Europe and in central Europe”. To break this log jam, Kohl initially turned his focus on the US, becoming the first foreign leader to visit Ronald Reagan after his re-election as president in November 1984. Crucially, Kohl persuaded the American administration to start its new term by signing a joint communique pledging to offer the Soviets the chance to reopen bilateral summits on such subjects as arms control and reduction.
The timing proved apposite, as Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the Soviet Union in March 1985. US secretary of state George Shultz met with his Soviet counterpart in 1985, reviving bilateral relations, but Teltschik points out that it was not until 1987-88 that cracks began to appear in the Warsaw Pact. “Our policy from then was clear-cut: to support all the movements, mainly in Poland and Hungary. The philosophy was to offer any support that would strengthen these changes,” he tells Emerging Markets.
Kohl sent Teltschik to negotiate secretly with the governments of Gyorgy Lazar and Karoly Grosz in Hungary in 1987, and later more openly with the Polish administration formed after the “Round Table” talks in 1989 that brought Balcerowicz to the finance ministry.The chancellor’s primary motive in influencing the developments in these two countries, Teltschik acknowledges, was to bring about German reunification, by increasing the pressure on the East German communist regime. “If the GDR began political and economic reforms, as Poland and Hungary had, it would not survive. If GDR did not start these reforms, it would isolate itself from the rest of the Warsaw Pact, and in the end, again, it would not survive,” he says.
Balkan fears
Kohl’s critics abroad sometimes claimed he was insensitive to the fears provoked by the historical significance of German reunification, but the chancellor deeply felt the moral dilemmas when Yugoslavia began to unravel from 1991. According to Joachim Bitterlich, his foreign and security adviser from 1993 to1998, Kohl was initially appalled when the Papacy urged Germany to back Croatian independence, because of the parallels with the Second World War Axis. As the violent nature of Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslav government became clear, however, Kohl accepted Croatian independence, and Bitterlich believes this was instrumental in swinging European opinion against Milosevic.
The instability in the Balkans also prompted Kohl’s focus on Nato and EU enlargement, which would become the anchor for a decade of economic, legal and political reforms in central and eastern Europe. Even in Poland, where Balcerowicz began rapid economic transition well before accession was on the agenda, the association agreement with the EU in 1991 was of vital assistance. “Not just because it held promise of future accession, but because it opened up new markets. In the Soviet era, we had only had access on the eastern side, which was not good for technology transfer,” Balcerowicz observes.
Finally, just as his focus on German reunification led Kohl to bolster other countries’ efforts to escape Soviet rule, so his pursuit of German economic priorities coincidentally conferred on Europe another source of stability. In negotiations over the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, he argued, in the teeth of French opposition, for a single European currency area that would be based on strong fiscal rules and a fiercely independent European Central Bank.
The arrival of the euro in 1999 permanently altered the balance of the global economy and financial system. For Balcerowicz, who was president of the Polish central bank from 2000 to 2006 as the country steered a course for EU membership, the “German model” has been a key component of the Eurozone’s success. “[The European Central Bank (ECB)] inherited the best traditions of the Bundesbank both in terms of independence and in terms of performance, and it should stay like that.”