Germany's neighbors try to redeem their 1989 negativity

Mallaby's use of the word "Allies" shows how dominant the consciousness of World War II still was in 1989. The Allied military presence in respective sectors gave West Berlin the feel of an occupied zone well into the 1980's. "Western soldiers were customers in shops, in hairdressers. They were part of everyday life," reminds Nolte.

Reunification was not only a domestic problem

"It was not just a German problem - something that was split up that had to be reunified - but the whole history of World War II hung over it. The international legal situation still had to be cleared up, as the Two-Plus-Four negotiations of 1990 showed," Nolte says. The Two-Plus-Four agreement, signed in Moscow in September 1990 between the two Germanys and the four occupying powers, sealed the final international acceptance of reunification.

Before then, a veritable tug-of-war developed between Thatcher and her representatives. Diplomats like ambassador Mallaby were eager to put Britain in a more favorable position once something that now seemed inevitable was accomplished.

The new files show Thatcher's Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd giving her some blunt advice in a meeting January 1990. "If the people of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic decide freely and democratically in favor of unity, there is no way of stopping that, short of military action," he told her.

The timing of the release of such documents - a full decade before British law required it - shows that the British Foreign Office apparently felt that its diplomatic reputation needed a little rehabilitation.

This is somewhat surprising to Roedder. "The British and the French apparently have a significant need to explain themselves. I don't really understand it," he told Deutsche Welle. "I can see that the British and French governments, in a new unified Europe, see their own attitudes in a bad light. It's also curious that the French are celebrating the 20th anniversary on the Champs-Élysées. But the fact that a lot of British and French people weren't exactly overjoyed at the thought of a reunified Germany, is completely understandable. It changed the power balance in Europe."

Twin fears

Thatcher had two main fears that were feeding each other in the fraught year between the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification - a united Germany would be able to strengthen the European Community, and a stronger EC would in turn increase Germany's power. Thatcher's position was in fact not far from the more hysterical right-wing body of opinion in Britain, expressed by backbench MPs, that Germany planned to use the European Community to dominate the continent.

"How could anyone have been against it?"

While she aired her suspicions publicly, Mitterand kept his misgivings private. The French president was committed to the European project, and in exchange for his blessing for a unified Germany, was able to extract from Kohl his commitment to European Economic and Monetary Union. This was exactly what Thatcher feared. "The problems will not be overcome by strengthening the EC. Germany’s ambitions would then become the dominant and active factor," Thatcher was quoted as saying in February 1990.

The result was that Britain's diplomacy became crippled in Europe and elsewhere. The German press seized on Britain's perceived negativity and magnified it, until it damaged Britain's relationship with the US, a nation that remained enthusiastic about reunification throughout.

The fears of Foreign Office official Sir John Fretwell, expressed with some foresight late in 1989, came true: "If we tried to stand against this tide, we should enter into fundamental political conflict with the Federal Republic of Germany and with many of our allies, including the United States." If Britain did not begin to convey the impression that it shared the vision of a united Europe, he said later, the Germans "will be tempted increasingly to move ahead without us on these fundamental issues of European policy."

When Thatcher was finally brought down by her own party, in part because of her recalcitrance on European policy, the significance was not lost on those Germans.


Author: Ben Knight

Editor: Rob Mudge