Diplomatie für die deutsche Einheit: Dokumente des Auswärtigen Amts zu den deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen 1989/90 ed. by Andreas Hilger (review)

In 1998, Hanns Jürgen Küsters and Daniel Hofmann published more than 1,600 pages of documents from the German Federal Chancellery pertaining to the German reunification process of 1989–1990. Now, Andreas Hilger, a leading expert on German-Soviet relations, has provided a selection of 49 documents from the West German Federal Foreign Office.

Important disagreements initially existed between Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the Christian Democrats and his coalition partner and foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher of the Free Democrats, about the future of a reunited German state. Whereas Kohl regarded membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the only possible option for a reunited Germany, Genscher was in favor of a European security system in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact would become “increasingly sidelined” and could eventually be “dissolved,” as he put it at a special meeting of the Western European Union in Luxembourg on 23 March 1990. Genscher’s approach was largely compatible with Mikhail Gorbachev’s idea of a common European home, which remained the Soviet Union’s preferred framework for the German reunification process.

Hilger’s volume does not intend to determine whether Genscher’s more cautious approach stemmed from a desire to make far-reaching concessions to Soviet sensitivities or instead mainly from his own belief in a functioning Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Hilger says in his introduction that the documents highlight the “different approaches the Foreign Office and the Federal Chancellery adopted toward their Soviet negotiating partner, but they also show that [the two German officials] did not lose sight of or detract from their common final goal—German unity” (p. 9).

In addition, the documents show how the many encounters between Genscher and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (they met thirteen times in 1990 alone) created a “positive overall atmosphere” (p. 9). In conversations with Genscher, Shevardnadze always stuck to the Soviet position that it would be “unacceptable” for a reunited German state to become a NATO member. He even warned that the consequences could be Gorbachev’s resignation and the end of perestroika. But the publication in this volume of protocols from German diplomats does not enable us to know for sure whether these warnings were simply part of the Soviet side’s negotiation strategy. Probably not—Shevardnadze knew about the importance of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for the Soviet bloc. One has to agree with Hilger when he writes that many of the documents in the book “make tangible the Soviet leaders’ primal fears about their own security and about the loss of a stable GDR as one of the cornerstones of a—from Moscow’s point of view—reliable European security structure” (p. 11).

The documents also demonstrate the helplessness of Soviet foreign policymakers: they were unable to do anything to prevent NATO membership for the reunited German state. Shevardnadze acknowledged this circumstance before Gorbachev did. On 22 March 1990, Shevardnadze already told Genscher in Windhoek that he understood “that Germany cannot leave NATO” (Doc. 23). The documents from the Federal Foreign Office also show that Western politicians definitely did not promise Moscow that NATO would not be expanded further eastward than Germany (p. 11). Hilger goes astray in arguing “that while negotiating with the USSR, Western politicians were very well aware of the explosive nature and the topicality of the eastern enlargement of NATO beyond the territory of the GDR” (p. 11). The document he cites as evidence for this proposition actually illustrates fears about the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the possible emergence of a new “cordon sanitaire” between the West and the USSR (Doc. 22), but in my view it says nothing more than that.

The documents Hilger has published do not change the basic picture we have had up to now of...