Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 3, 1990 TAG: 9006040189
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES W. SYDNOR JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Its sudden onset, rapid pace and enlarging scope stunned the governments and peoples of Europe which it engulfed like a tidal wave. The ease with which it shattered the established order of an anxious and divided continent electrified the world. The enormous steel and concrete border fortifications that snaked for hundreds of miles through Europe to ensure the postwar ideological and military truce were breached in days by the rush of events.
Overnight, a new European order with Germany at its center emerged from the rubble of a collapsed political system that had seemed invincible.
With this realization, Germans by the hundreds of thousands swarmed into the streets of Berlin, Leipzing and Dresden to celebrate a triumph few had thought possible in their lifetimes.
One might see in the above paragraphs an account of all that has happened in the two Germanys and Eastern Europe since November 1989.
They were written, however, to describe the equally astounding events in the Europe of a half-century ago: the German conquest of France, Belgium and Holland in May and June of 1940.
There are uncanny similarities in the circumstance that took place then and what is happening now, beyond the obvious analogy of the fall of the Berlin Wall just six months in the past, and the hapless obsolescence of the Maginot line 50 years ago.
Who could have imagined a year ago that the grim Stalinist tyranny of East Germany's Erich Honecker would today be a multiparty state, poised for full political and economic unification with the West German Federal Republic this summer?
But then, no military analyst in the winter of 1939 would have believed that German tanks would traverse the Ardennes Forest, cross the canals and rivers of Belgium and France and reach the English Channel in a mere 10 days, sealing Europe's fate and dooming the Allied campaign in the West.
In the current climate, no serious student of European affairs can question the progressive change that the reunification of the two Germanys will bring to the future of the continent and its people. Reunification will happen because the logic of democratic freedom and national self-determination mandate it.
But there are troublesome issues and closeted ghosts that must be dealt with before the rush to a united Germany becomes reality. Such matters point to yet another powerful parallel between the German experience of these two summers 50 years apart.
Hitler's achievement of forcing the collapse of the West by military might in 1940 will be dwarfed by the West German economic blitzkrieg set to roll through a financially enfeebled Eastern Europe in 1990. In the ironies of the modern German past, history may not necessarily repeat itself, but it sure does hang around.
We ought to take note of this in our as-yet unsuccessful attempts to formulate a coherent and historically consistent German policy.
Gen. George C. Marshall, the greatest soldier-statesman of modern times and the architect of the postwar European Relief and Recovery Program, saw clearly the necessary steps leading to Germany's integration in Europe's future. He advocated the political and economic rehabilitation of Germany as the key to the rebuilding of European life.
Marshall was right.
He also believed that the realities of German history would require limits and restraints on Germany's role in Europe in order to assure the future of peace and security on the continent.
In that, Marshall was also right, and never more so than today.
All of the issues on both counts - economic and political - must be settled by treaties binding both German states to their European neighbors, the United States and Soviet Union, as preconditions to further progress toward reunification.
The German-Polish border question is the most painfully obvious and potentially dangerous example. This border is the border and should remain so. Period.
Not once but twice did the Germans start and lose wars in this region of Eastern Europe, and as bad as the deal was that Stalin dealt them in 1945, they should simply accept it and live with it.
The reason for this is obvious. If reunification precedes treaty guarantees settling the border issue, what leverage would be left to the Poles with which to negotiate?
Economically, Poland is in a much weaker position now vis-a-vis a unified Germany than it was militarily when it faced Hitler's armies in the summer of 1939. The same is true for the other Eastern European states, which the Germans will dominate by economic muscle in the '90s even more rapidly and thoroughly than they did with military might in 1940.
While West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl insists that the military issues affecting the status of the occupying powers be settled prior to reunification, he is equally adamant that border questions be negotiated by the elected government of a single Germany, after the fact.
What, then, is to prevent that government from applying pressure on the neighboring Czechs to "negotiate" on the same issue? Or will the new German government be tempted, as was its remote predecessor 50 years earlier, to raise a whole series of questions for "negotiation" about the ethnic German minorities still residing in other Eastern neighbors such as Hungary and Romania?
Even more important, and potentially unsettling, is the question of what amount of leverage the remaining Great Powers will have to apply on their new partner. For in terms of sheer economic power and national cohesion, reunification reverses at a stroke the German-Russian balance of power in Europe that has existed since 1945.
The potential for checks and balances through the application of Soviet power is already a dead option. Mikhail Gorbachev is in an infinitely weaker position to deal with Kohl in 1990 than was Stalin in coping with Hitler in 1940.
Gorbachev faces the real prospect that the reversal of Stalin's geopolitical brutality - witness the Baltic test of wills - may weaken beyond recovery the Soviet Union's capacity to play any significant role as a great power in Europe. This comes at the very moment in history when the future of European economic and political stability most urgently require that.
If Germany has, indeed, learned from the past (as Kohl repeatedly reassures all who will listen), then the ghosts that unleashed two wars on the continent should finally and formally be buried in the presence of the entire European community.
This will be done only by comprehensive treaty guarantees that settle the lingering issues of history before the reality of German reunification becomes the future.
by CNB