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he faced and argued that if conditions in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had really changed, there must surely be scope for the West to cut its defence spending. I said that there would always remain the unknown threat which must be guarded against. Defence spending was like home insurance in this respect. You did not stop paying the premiums because your street was free from burglaries for a time. I thought that the US defence budget should be driven not by Mr Gorbachev and his initiatives but by the United States’ defence interests. Perhaps I was insensitive to his difficulties with Congress. In any case, the atmosphere did not improve as a result of our discussions.

Shortly after my return to Britain I learned that without any previous consultation with his allies and in clear breach of at least the spirit of the Paris summit Chancellor Kohl had set out in a speech to the Bundestag a ‘ten-point’ plan about Germany’s future. The fifth point was the proposal of the development of ‘confederative structures between the two states in Germany with the goal of creating a federation’. The tenth point was that his Government was working towards ‘unity, reunification, the reattainment of German state unity’.

The real question now was how the Americans would react. I did not have to wait long to find out. In a press conference briefing Jim Baker spelt out the American approach to German reunification which, he said, would be based on four principles. Self-determination would be pursued ‘without prejudice to its outcome’. Another element was that Germany should not only remain in NATO — with which I heartily agreed — but that it should be part of ‘an increasingly integrated European Community’ — with which I did not. The third point was that moves to unification should be peaceful, gradual and part of a step-by-step process, which was fair enough. I entirely agreed with the final point — that the principles of the Helsinki Final Act particularly as they related to borders must be supported. What remained to be seen, however, was whether the Americans were going to give most weight to the notion of Germany’s future in an ‘integrated’ Europe or to the thought that reunification must only come about slowly and gradually.

It was left to President Bush himself to provide the answer in his speech at the NATO heads of government meeting staged at Brussels in early December to hear his report on his talks with Mr Gorbachev in Malta. He made an obviously carefully prepared statement on Europe’s ‘future architecture’, calling for a ‘new, more mature relationship’ with Europe. He also restated the principles Jim Baker had laid out as regards reunification. But the fact that the President placed such emphasis on ‘European integration’ at a predominantly European meeting in Brussels was immediately taken as a signal — which was perhaps not far from the truth — that he was aligning America with the federalist rather than my ‘Bruges’ goal of European development. There was no reason for journalists, who knew perfectly well of the direction of State Department background briefing, to take the President’s remarks otherwise. The President telephoned me to explain his remarks and say that they just related to the Single Market rather than wider political integration. I hoped that they did — or that at least from now on they would. The fact remained that there was nothing I could expect from the Americans as regards slowing down German reunification — and possibly much I would wish to avoid as regards the drive towards European unity.

AN ANGLO-FRENCH AXIS?

If there was any hope now of stopping or slowing down reunification it would only come from an Anglo-French initiative. Yet even were President Mitterrand to try to give practical effect to what I knew were his secret fears, we would not find many ways open to us. Once it was decided that East Germany could join the European Community without detailed negotiations — and I was resisting for my own reasons treaty amendment and any European Community aid — there was little we could do to slow