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By Root 3172 0

a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification. This policy was to encourage democracy in East Germany while slowing down the country’s reunification with West Germany. With the first half of that policy no one disagrees. Nor at the time did everyone disagree with the second, to which indeed frequent lip service was paid. Most observers were unaware of the nationalist passion for German unity that burned in the East. Indeed, even the dissident leaders of the East German demonstrations that led to freedom were themselves unaware of it, being in favour of a free, reformed, independent East Germany, rather than a larger Federal Republic. And Germany’s neighbours all hoped to avoid this latter outcome because they saw it as destabilizing an already unsettled continent.

In the event, the desire for unity among Germans on both sides of the Elbe proved irresistible. So the policy failed.

But was the policy wrong? That is a more complex question requiring a more nuanced reply. Look first at the consequences of the rapid reunification as they worked themselves out. West Germany’s absorption of its next-door relation has been economically disastrous, and that disaster has spread to the rest of the European Community via the Bundesbank’s high interest rates and the ERM. We have all paid the price in unemployment and recession. East German political immaturity has affected the whole country in the form of a revived (though containable) neo-Nazi and xenophobic extremism. Internationally, it has created a German state so large and dominant that it cannot be easily fitted into the new architecture of Europe.

Look also at the incidental benefits that the policy brought about. It forced the German Government to clarify the border question with its eastern neighbours. More generally, it provided the occasion whereby the CSCE framework was established to ensure that existing borders would not be changed by unilateral action or without general agreement. It strengthened the relationship between Britain and the other countries of central and eastern Europe who now, to some extent, see us as attentive guardians of their interests. But the fundamental argument for slowing German reunification was to create a breathing space in which a new architecture of Europe could be devised where a united Germany would not be a destabilizing influence/over-mighty subject/bull in a china shop. Arriving prematurely as it did, a united Germany has tended to encourage three unwelcome developments: the rush to European federalism as a way of tying down Gulliver; the maintenance of a Franco-German bloc for the same purpose; and the gradual withdrawal of the US from Europe on the assumption that a German-led federal Europe will be both stable and capable of looking after its own defence.

I will not reiterate here all the reasons I have given earlier for believing these developments to be damaging. But I will hazard the forecast that a federal Europe would be both unstable internally and an obstacle to harmonious arrangements — in trade, politics and defence — with America externally; that the Franco-German bloc would increasingly mean a German bloc (in economics, a deutschmark bloc) with France as very much a junior partner; and that as a result America would, first bring its legions home, and subsequently find itself at odds with the new European player in world politics.

These developments are not inevitable. One revelation that emerged from the failure of Britain’s German policy was the evident anxiety of France in relation to German power and ambition. It should not be beyond the capacity of a future British prime minister to rebuild an Anglo-French entente as a counter-balance to German influence. Nor, as part of this policy, to shift the emphasis in Europe back towards the original Gaullist idea of a Europe des Patries. What these new approaches will require, however, is a recognition from the French political élite that any stable European balance of power will require the more or less permanent presence