Helmut Kohl's Legacy for Germany

Children and adults in Euroland, a space constituted by the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), have discovered an exciting new hobby: collecting the new currency—euros and eurocent coins from the 12 EMU nations. Whereas the front side is the same on all the coins, the back depicts a motif of the nation that minted it. The circulation of these variants is underway, and this year's summer holiday season has accelerated it. The face of Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg has already shown up in Athens and Helsinki. The well-fed German eagle, irreverently known as the fat hen, reportedly flew to the Balearic Islands. One can admire the Irish harp in Paris, Lisbon, and The Hague.

Statisticians predict that, in a few years, the purse of a Euroland citizen might roughly consist of 33 percent German euros and eurocents; some 15 percent each from France, Italy, and Spain; and so on, down to 0.2 percent from Luxembourg. ¹ Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden have not yet joined the minted portraits, but that is a different story.

Because spending foreign cash at home and domestic cash abroad are no different, concepts such as "foreign" and "domestic" or "at home" and "abroad" no longer have much meaning. Furthermore, what is true for everyday experience also holds true for politics: the traditional distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is dissolving in Europe. This European traitis the central legacy of Helmut Kohl, twentieth-century Germany's longest-serving chancellor, who held office from 1982 until 1998.

One of Kohl's major arguments for the euro was that it would imbue people, particularly young people, with a new sense of belonging to the greater community called "Europe." For Kohl, the single currency symbolized much more than buying power. He liked to quote a passage from Winston Churchill's famous speech to students in Zurich on September 19, 1946, that in a free and united Europe, "small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honor by their contribution to the common cause." ² The equal value of all the euro coins—whether they were minted for 80 million Germans or 450,000 Luxembourgers—illustrates the harmonization of diversity and equality among European nations.

Also symbolically, no Euroland country has a majority holding in the common currency. Even Germany, the demographic and economic heavyweight, is in a minority position; and the more members the EMU gains, the smaller each national share of the monetary pie will become. Nothing could better illustrate the essence of European integration: stable supranational institutions are replacing the unstable balance-of-power system that was always threatened by hegemonic aspirations of individual nations and by the dynamics of ever-changing coalitions. Granted, Frankfurt am Main became the seat of the European Central Bank, but nobody in truth complains any longer about what used to be called the monetary hegemony of the Bundesbank (that is, the German Federal Reserve Bank).

About two-thirds of Germans disliked the idea of relinquishing their beloved deutsche mark for the sake of Europe. ³ The mark had been a symbol of West Germany's economic and political success, and it embodied the German abhorrence of instability and their quest for continuity. The German hyperinflation of 1923, with its devastating consequences for the country's social and political stability, was a traumatic experience that has remained deeply fixed in the collective German memory and has shaped much of the German structural conservativism—a way of thinking that even to this day has prevented the country from sufficiently adjusting its economic legislation, labor market regulations, political decisionmaking procedures, university system, and other domestic institutions to the changes of the post-Cold War era. The mark even became an all-German symbol in 1990 when monetary union between East and West Germany preceded national reunification.

Now that the turbulence of the German Christian Democrats...