Germany: The surprising foes of reunification

“History looks far less heroic when you find out how it happens,” said Michael Binyon in the London Times. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we now know that some Western leaders tried to prevent it. Documents revealed last week show that in 1989, Britain’s then–Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a personal appeal to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, entreating him not to let communist East Germany, part of the Soviet bloc, reunite with democratic West Germany. Thatcher traveled to the Kremlin, asked Gorby “to stop the tape recorders and the note takers,” and proceeded to pour out her fears that a united Germany would “undermine the stability of the whole international situation” and could even endanger British security. Pay no attention to what we Western leaders say in public, she told him. In private, she was perfectly happy to let the Soviets maintain their domination of Eastern Europe. Thatcher, you see, may have been “all for freedom,” but she liked order and predictability even more.

Not all Brits were so shortsighted, said Barbara Klimke in Germany’s Berliner Zeitung. British documents from that time show that most diplomats in the Foreign Office were thrilled at the pro-democracy demonstrations in East Berlin. The British ambassador to Germany urged Thatcher to make a strong statement in support of the German people’s longing for freedom. But the Iron Lady wouldn’t budge. In her view, Germans were responsible for two world wars because of their “unpredictable national character that lurched back and forth between aggression and insecurity.” The prudent thing, then, was to “ensure that Germany remained weak” by keeping it split in two. Even after the wall came down, in November 1989, it took Thatcher’s ministers months to convince her that German reunification was now unstoppable, and that if London opposed it, Britain would look mean-spirited and hypocritical.

But Thatcher wasn’t the only world leader who harbored such fears, said Raniah Salloum in the Financial Times Deutschland. French President François Mitterrand was even more horrified than Thatcher at the prospect of a united Germany. The documents show that

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two months after the wall came down, Mitterrand warned Thatcher that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was riding such a surge of popularity that he could do anything he wanted. The Germans under Kohl, he said, could “conquer more land than under Hitler.” Still, Mitterrand was much quicker than Thatcher to realize that there were better ways to restrain the German people than by denying them their democratic will. He turned his attention to binding Germany tightly to European institutions, strengthening the European Community and laying the groundwork for the European Union.

With hindsight, it is clear that “the concerns of Western statesmen 20 years ago were unfounded,” said the London Times in an editorial. Reunification was hard on both East and West Germans. The Westerners had to pay high taxes to finance the rebuilding of the crumbled, post-communist East, while the Easterners chafed at the unexpectedly slow rise in their standard of living. But the country managed those tensions, while remaining “a reliable and honest ally for its EU and NATO partners.” Germany now inhabits an “unshakable place within the Western family of democratic nations.”