-
2 The Demilitarization of Germany, 1945–2010
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 The Demilitarization of Germany, 1945–2010 jay lockenour The demilitarization of Germany, one of the two stated goals of Allied occupation policy in 1945, has usually been viewed as a “phase” between the end of World War II and the outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula in the summer of 1950 that brought to a head the rising tensions of the Cold War. According to this view, the noble effort to eradicate National Socialism and the seemingly innate militarism of Germans evidenced in two world wars evaporated in the face of the cynical competition for power and security among two superpowers and the desire of German politicians for the measure of sovereignty guaranteed by possessing armed forces. By 1955 both the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) fielded new armies, facing each other across a heavily defended , hostile, and increasingly permanent border. But the history of all three German states (West, East, and unified) suggests that the process of demilitarization continued in some ways even after the creation of new German armies in the mid-1950s. It is therefore possible to challenge Gordon Craig’s pessimistic thesis that European nations sought to expand military power after 1945 in order to overcome domestic crises and “fragile national systems of authority.”1 Rather, some of those very crises of domestic and international order masked the atrophy of German military power and a change in mainstream conceptions of the role of military force. The process was uneven, episodic, and even occasionally fraught with danger , but today’s unified Germany is one of the least militarized nations in the developed world. For the last ten or fifteen years, scholars have debated the existence of a “peace culture” in Germany and elsewhere, and I place myself on the side 38 . germany of the (skeptical) believers. The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines a peace culture as one of “social interaction, based on the principles of freedom, justice and democracy, tolerance and solidarity, and respect for all human rights; a culture that rejects violence and, instead, seeks a solution to problems through dialogue and negotiation; a culture of prevention that endeavours to detect the sources of conflicts at their very roots, so as to deal with them more effectively and, as far as practicable, to avoid them.”2 To me, that describes the Federal Republic as it has developed over the last sixty-plus years both in terms of its foreign policy (often described as “restrained”) and its domestic culture.3 For forty-five years after World War II, there were, of course, two Germanys . The history of the German Democratic Republic and its role in defining the nature of Germany today presents a challenge to this study of German demilitarization.4 The Berlin Republic is the heir of the Bonn Republic, and its security institutions and elites have been overwhelmingly shaped by the actions and legacies of West German experience. But it would be naïve to suggest that the German Democratic Republic is irrelevant to the discussion. The GDR was a Stalinist dictatorship whose international influence and domestic stability depended on its slavish loyalty to the Soviet Union (USSR). The goose-stepping parades and Wehrmacht-style uniforms of the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army, or NVA) seemed to preserve the worst forms of German militarism, earning them the moniker “Red Prussians.”5 The criminal violence of the border police and the state security apparatus created in East Germany a palpable atmosphere of terror based ultimately on military or quasi-military force. And yet even that regime encountered significant obstacles to using force, even to preserve its own existence. In 1989 East German military and police units demonstrated remarkable, even unbelievable, restraint in the face of peaceful demonstrations in Leipzig, Dresden, and elsewhere that ultimately toppled the regime. Having lost the backing of their Soviet ally, the leadership of the GDR considered and explicitly rejected a “Tiananmen solution.”6 The NVA disbanded in 1990 and the Cold War ended the following year without a shot being fired. Wolfram Wette put it mildly when he wrote that “in retrospect, the rejection by the Germans of . . . the belief that war is a law of nature that man must fatalistically accept is a huge step forward.”7 He subsequently cautions that the path to a true culture of peace remains a long one, but as the famed proverb teaches, a journey of a thousand miles begins with...