France and the Reunification of Germany: Leadership in the Workshop of World Politics 3030807622, 9783030807627

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France and the Reunification of Germany Leadership in the Workshop of World Politics t i l o sc h a be rt Second Edition

France and the Reunification of Germany

Tilo Schabert

France and the Reunification of Germany Leadership in the Workshop of World Politics

1st edition translated from French by John Tyler Tuttle. Updated text for 2nd edition revised and established by the author. Foreword by Jean Musitelli

Tilo Schabert Professor Emeritus of Political Science University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Erlangen, Germany

1st edition: © University of Missouri Press 2009 ISBN 978-3-030-80762-7    ISBN 978-3-030-80763-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Originally published with the title: How World Politics is Made: France and the Reunification of Germany by University of Missouri Press, Columbia (MO), 2009 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

Thirty years ago a new page in European history was turned.1 The profound and totally unexpected shock caused by the Fall of the Berlin Wall during the night of 9–10 November 1989 was to lead, one year later in Paris, at the Summit of the Organization and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), to the solemn funeral of the Cold War and the end of the division of Europe, with the reunification of Germany as its most obvious symbol. Around François Mitterrand, host of the conference, thirty-three heads of state and government had gathered—among them George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher—who had been the major actors in this exceptional sequence of events. For those who, like myself, were present at the occasion, the emotional charge was palpable. All who took part expressed their hope to see a pacified and more united world born from the new conditions. Now, thirty years later, Tilo Schabert revisits this moment of history, which he knows particularly well, having scrupulously analysed the available documentation and interviewed some of the main witnesses. In the present edition of his book, he enhances his intimate knowledge of facts and persons by means of a more detached evaluation made possible by the lapse of time and new documentary evidence, with the same ambition as before to understand and explain what happened at the time. It really was a singular history, I must say, that inscribed itself during those years, a history whose scenario nobody could have foreseen. And it has to be added that this history has been considerably distorted by certain authors more motivated by short-sighted ideological considerations or polemical intentions than by the love of truth. One of the most controversial topics refers v

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to the attitude and the role played by the French President François Mitterrand, who was accused even, and most vehemently, in his own country, to have sided against the reunification of Germany. A German historian was needed to tell the French people how to read their history properly and to interpret that decisive episode of their recent past. He was to open the eyes of people blinded by political passion or common opinion, making them aware of this crucial moment in the history of Europe when everything could have collapsed into chaos. To launch into such an enterprise demanded a considerable amount of intellectual intrepidity as well as the courage to think against the grain, with the strong will “to represent things as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined”, according to the formula of Machiavelli. Tilo Schabert accepted the challenge, with perfect objectivity, without an ounce of complaisance, driven by the wish to understand and explain, motivated by the supreme disinterestedness of someone who has nothing in view but the quest for what had really happened. With Mitterrand et la réunification allemande (German edition 2002, French version 2005) he has written a key study for the understanding of the complex and intense quality of the relations between France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. Of this book, I had the chance to assist in the creation. I met Tilo Schabert for the first time on 3 December 1991, shortly after the events just mentioned. I was then government spokesman of President François Mitterrand, after I had been his diplomatic counsellor. At the Élysée, we were restlessly engaged in preparing the European Council of Maastricht, scheduled to take place a few days later. My functions obliged me to receive plenty of visitors, from France and from abroad, journalists, political scientists, historians who wrote about François Mitterrand and his political and diplomatic activities. They came to test their ideas or round off their information. Since our first meeting I realized that the project of Tilo Schabert was of a different kind, driven by a different ambition. That it was neither of an anecdotic character nor did it pursue a preconceived goal. That he was aiming at something that he had not yet fully identified, but towards which he was driven by a strong intuition. His reflection was then oriented towards issues such as the mechanism of power, the alchemy of political decision-making, the functions of the modern Prince. His approach interested me immediately, for I had always found that there was much to learn, for officials immerged in political routine, from the distant view of those who regard things from the outside, provided their attitude is neither malicious nor complaisant but

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severe and sharp-eyed. Now, the view of Professor Schabert was not only that of a well-informed observer, which would already have been something out of the ordinary. It was the view, sharp and penetrating, of a philosopher who contemplates the business of politics by means of cognitive categories generally unknown by professional commentators of political affairs. A voice whispered to me that this visitor was not uninteresting and by no means unworthy of my confidence. The latter, in my position, was crucial for everything else, especially for opening some useful doors to him. This is how the story began. From his early researches and his meetings with François Mitterrand and his close collaborators he gathered, among other things, a serious and sensible portrait of the president, published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung two days after the president’s death, with the title “The Silence in the Centre of Power”. He also wrote a penetrating short essay, “Mitterrand. A Classical Prince”. However, even more importantly, with the findings in his research the focus of his interest began to shift. By and by I saw a project of a wider reach and more urgent topicality and emerging, namely the decisive question of Mitterrand’s attitude with regard to the German unification and the lack of comprehension it met with in France. I could not but encourage the new agenda, together with Hubert Védrine, the secretary general of the Élysée. To those who saw the president at work during that period, the reproaches directed against him appeared both superficial and unjust. In an article published at the beginning of 1997 in the journal Commentaire I asked myself, perhaps in a rather rhetorical style, whether the time would not have come at last, with regard to this chapter as well as to some others, to replace polemical fury and apologetic eagerness by historical investigation. The publication, after several years of hard work, of Schabert’s book Wie Weltgeschichte gemacht wird: Frankreich und die deutsche Einheit early in 2002, exceeded all our expectations. Three years later a French translation was published, enlarged and completed by the author. What made the work so precious was not only the novelty of a thesis that went against the hackneyed clichés, but also the original manner of scrutinizing the facts as well as the singular way in which, rejecting the orthodox methods of analysis, it forged its own conceptual instruments of investigation and explanation, instruments specially adapted to the object of its research. In particular I associate terms like “atelier”, “workshop”, “scenario” and “legend” with the Schabertian hermeneutics in progress.

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The author’s tour de force consists in the feat of making the reader enter into the “workshop where world politics is made”, the place where the answer to the incredible fact of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the rush of subsequent events was being worked out. Why is the metaphor of the workshop or atelier pertinent? It is because it suggests a creative process resulting in a carefully crafted piece of work. In contrast to the ready-made solution, the standardized article that government officials and international institutions are apt to turn out. A custom-made product. Haute-­ couture. This was the point. To take the metaphor further, Tilo Schabert describes a group of grands couturiers engaged in mending the tissue of a world riven with conflict. The artists Bush, Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Kohl and Mitterrand were assisted by their ministers for foreign affairs and their collaborators. Thus under our eyes, in a collective effort a masterpiece took shape, created by strong individualities and refined day after day in an extreme dense net of communication, a constant attempt to dissolve contradictions considered insoluble only some weeks before, to reconcile the harmony of the whole with the close attention to every detail. One cannot speak highly enough of the merit of these heads of state who succeeded in creating a new type of leadership, based on the transparency of interrelations, on mutual attention and confidence in one another, on the consideration of common interests. The little tricks of classical diplomacy were left behind in favour of a coordinated quest for a general agreement that would serve the common good and at the same time satisfy particular needs. In the history of international relations one would hardly find another constellation thus finely attuned to its work. The idea of the workshop or atelier is associated with that of the “scenario”. With the totally unexpected Fall of the Wall, world politics took on the appearance of a stage where the actors were so to speak left to their own wit, deprived by the familiar repartees that they had rehearsed during forty years of Cold War. The good old clichés churned out by diplomatic routine had suddenly lost their meaning, faced by a reality that could neither be fully understood nor put into adequate words. The situation, similar to that of Pirandello’s persons in search of an author, was not without its dangers. One risked to get out of the arctic conditions of Yalta into an uncontrollable conflagration. Now, after everything has turned out well, one hardly remembers the moment of extreme tension, when everything was on the razor’s edge and the least error of judgement could have had fatal consequences. To answer this challenge, a scenario, as Tilo Schabert lucidly explains, is important even though it may be unreliable. It helps to

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control the disorder and to render a meaning and a purpose to what has happened. During the first stage of the negotiations, a plurality of scenarios, of German, French, American or Russian origin, were presented and collided with one another, until, in a process that was not free of tensions, the contradictions were be clarified and the expectations were made compatible. Tilo Schabert’s book throws a new light on the process as a whole and on the construction of the scénario français by Mitterrand, on the stages of its composition, its variant readings, its deletions. And he firmly puts the emphasis on the continuity, at the centre of Mitterrand’s reflections, of a leading idea: for him the German problem is a European problem, the unification of Germany offers a chance to strengthen the European unity (not the inverse); however, the unification has to be achieved without raising a destructive storm in the eastern part of the continent. The historian’s mission is also to deconstruct the “legends”. According to common opinion, Mitterrand wanted to rein in, if not totally prevent Germany’s reunification. “How and why do such legends come into being?” the author asks himself. They are never disinterested; in the present case they might have resulted more from the hostility towards the man than towards his politics, or from the habit of journalists to copy from one another’s writings. Anyhow, once the doxa is established, it is difficult to change the direction of the current. To find fault with legends, be they légendes noirs or légendes dorées, is not without risk for one who dares correct errors and expose fakes. Tilo Schabert learned this by experience when he became the object of jibes and digs from some who were responsible for the legends and whose comfort and interests he disturbed. But in every legend, however mystifying, is a rudiment of truth, which the author tracks down with considerable astuteness. If the position of Mitterrand has raised so many storms on the left bank of the Rhine, it was because during those years the German question was at the heart of the whole French political strategy. Never did French leaders plan an initiative without asking themselves: What will the Germans say? What will Chancellor Kohl think? It was a time when it was inconceivable for France to reflect on the future of Europe without associating Germany to the reflections. The author demonstrates, by means of a thorough analysis of Mitterrand’s declarations and actions, that nothing uncertain or improvised and even less of anti-German resentment could be detected in his position; rather, it was the result of a prolonged mediation on the fate of Europe especially in the light of his personal experience of the tragedies that had marked its history during the twentieth century. In his eyes, one had to make certain that the

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good news of the Fall of the Berlin Wall would not be thwarted by hasty initiatives. And one has to admit that Chancellor Kohl listened to the advice of his friend François and had the wisdom to concede that the reunification could not be realized against the wishes of Germany’s neighbours. To sum up, this is a book that, by the wealth of its questioning and the clearness of its presentation, by the scrupulous criticism of all available sources and the use of an analytical method which is thoroughly original and perfectly adapted to the exceptional character of the historical moment in question, leads the reader to the very heart of the decision-making process in international politics and provides him with the apt keys for its interpretation. With this work, Tilo Schabert establishes himself as one of the finest and subtlest exegetes of Mitterrand’s complex world of thought, and a sharp-sighted decoder of the relation between France and Germany in its singularity and uniqueness. Interpreting politics as a phenomenon of fluidity, Schabert offers a beautiful illustration of the art of government practised by persons who are conscious of their responsibility in the face of history. Having closely observed its functioning, he believes in the creativity of political power in an age when remote observers theorize about its dissolution. His answer to a journalist, who wanted to know how he came to roam at his will through the corridors of the Élysée and to read confidential notes, he answered: “This remains a mystery for me.” It is a mystery only for him. For those who know him, the explanation is simple: it is the confidence that he inspires in his interlocutors. If the historian’s aim is to produce true accounts of the past that all people of good will recognize as such, the goal has been reached. I cannot think of a better illustration, for all who are interested in the way how history is made and written under our eyes, than the present book, which is a unique work of reference. Paris Jean Musitelli

Note 1. Translated from the French by Ina Schabert.

Acknowledgments

I take much pleasure in expressing my sincerest gratitude to the persons who, with regard to this book, imparted their attention, support, and cooperation. I gladly acknowledge all that they lent to making this book emerge. Anne Birchley-Brun, editor for International Studies at Palgrave Macmillan, responded positively to the book project and took care of it with kindness and efficiency. I profoundly appreciate the generosity of Jean Musitelli, former diplomatic adviser and spokesman of French President François Mitterrand, who has contributed a foreword to the book. I extend my thanks to Ina Schabert, my wife, for translating the French text into English. Frédéric Douat, heritage curator at the Archives Nationales in Paris, diligently assisted me with my research at the Archives. Nina A. Dmitrieva, Professor of Philosophy in Moscow and Scientific Director of the Academia Kantiana at Kaliningrad, most kindly checked the English translations of the Russian sources to which I referred. Elisabeth Guigou, former adviser to President Mitterrand, and Joachim Bitterlich and Horst Teltschik, former advisers to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, took time to peruse parts of the book and to check my narrative with their own recollections. I thankfully recognize their discerning interest in the book. Whitsunday, 2021 Erlangen, Germany xi

Contents

1 Introduction: The Political Science of History  1 Acting out Political Creativity   1 Sources to Build a Tale on   3 It’s the Actors’ Tale   4 A Tale unto Meaning   5 What the Tale Tells Us   7 The Tale’s Teaching of Political Science   9 On the History of Our Story: Metamorphoses   9 2 Thinking at the Élysée 11 Thinking Through Dialogue  11 “Without Pretending to Have Second Sight”  13 3 In the Workshop of World Politics 21 Organizing  22 Interpreting  26 Structuring  34 4 World Politics, European Politics, and German Politics: “The Grand Strategy” 47 Principles of Foreign Policy  47 The Lucky Star  50 Three Unresolved Problems  53

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5 German Politics, European Politics, and World Politics: “Everything That Is Not Impossible Is Possible” 63 “World Balance Is Fragile”  63 “We Are Endeavoring to Remain Close to the Germans”  64 The Principle of Change: The East Changes  71 “What’s the Name of That Young Fellow?”  74 “The Soviet Empire Will Be Hit from the Inside and the Germans Will Recover All Their Chances”  82 6 The Problem of France’s Economic Sovereignty 91 “But Will That Drive Bury the Grande Nation?”  91 “You Have Chosen to Follow a Different Path” 100 “Leaving the European Monetary System Would Put Us Under the Control of the International Monetary Fund” 105 “Our Problem in Relation to Germany” 115 7 The Question of Nuclear War127 Mrs. Thatcher’s Question During the Venice Roundtable: “Would You Use Your Bombs to Protect Bonn?” 127 “Peace Is Never the Daughter of Renunciation” 135 American Uncertainties 141 When Would France Have Grounds for Starting a Nuclear War? 144 8 Germany in France’s Power Game151 “At What Point Will France Bring Everything into Play? I Don’t Know Myself” 151 “Since It’s They Who Want Something, Let’s Let the Germans Come” 161 9 The Reunification of Germany: In Quest of a Scenario183 The Problem of History and the Problem of the Scenario 183 The French Scenario 190 “A Positive Middle Line” 195 The Song of Freedom 197 At the Élysée, October 18, 1989: “The European Community Must Be the Point of Attraction” 198 Strasbourg, October 25, 1989: “Like the Great Moments of 1789”  199

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Copenhagen, November 10, 1989: “These Are Happy Events” 202 Strasbourg, November 22, 1989: “A Breach in the Wall” 203 Interview, Paris-Match, November 23, 1989: “Peace Is as Precious a Possession as Liberty” 203 Berlin, December 22, 1989: “We Would Not Want There to Be Any Contradiction Between the German Will and the European Will” 204 10 The Voice of Europe211 The Song of the Rebel, the Refrain of the Exhorter 211 The European Passion 223 11 Is Germany About to Break Loose?237 France and Germany in the Spring of 1989: The Conflict Around Economic and Monetary Union or “The Reestablishment of Parallelism Between Defense and Currency” 238 France and Germany in the Spring of 1989: François Mitterrand Speaks About The Reunification of Germany 252 12 The “Inevitable”: The Pole Star of Unity Shines over the Germans265 13 The Struggle with Chancellor Kohl: Mitterrand’s Leadership285 A Struggle with the Federal Chancellor 287 The Fall of the Wall 293 November 18: The European Council Dinner 295 The Announcement of the Ten-Point Plan 298 “The Reversal of Alliances”: Two Unambiguous Conversations, November 30 301 The Strasbourg Summit 305 14 Germany’s Reunification Is Orchestrated by the Actors in the Workshop of World Politics323 Kiev 325 “Now There Is an Alliance Doctrine” 328 The Schengen Affair 336 The Trip to the GDR: Why? 338

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The Trip to the GDR: The “Competition” 343 The Trip to the GDR: Speaking About Reunification in Berlin and Leipzig 344 Latche 347 15 Two Major Problems to Be Resolved: Germany’s Membership in NATO and the Question of Borders359 “Reunification Lies in the Facts” 361 Germany’s Membership in NATO 363 The Question of Borders 369 16 France in the Two-Plus-Four Negotiations383 France and the Concept of the Four-Plus-Two/Two-Plus-Four Negotiations 384 France in the Two-Plus-Four Negotiations 390 Interlude: “To Buy Soviet Acquiescence on Politico-Military Issues” 400 The Decisive Moment of the Negotiations 402 Negotiations Accomplished: French Prompt Appraisals 406 17 Epilogue413 It Is a New Germany That Is Reappearing 415 “It’s a Deep-Seated Legend, But Not Innocent” 416 “… But France Has Known Germany for a Thousand Years” 419 “We Must Get Used to the Idea That the World Is a Huge Disorder” 421 “Personally, I Think of the Future” 422 “They’re Learning Again, in a Clumsy, Confused Way, What a Great Power Is” 423 “It’s Still Far from Being a Veritable Unification” 424 “I Have a Great Deal of Sympathy for the Germans” 425 Bibliography429 Index of Names439 Index of Subjects447

About the Author

Tilo Schabert  Dr. phil., is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Erlangen, Germany. He taught also at the Universities of Munich, Stanford, Bochum, Trier, and Dresden. Further positions held include: Research Fellow at Stanford, Harvard, and the Australian National University; Senior Heisenberg Research Fellow, German Research Council; Visiting Professor in Lisbon, Perpignan, Paris, Rennes, Salerno, Naples and Beijing; Secretary General of the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (UNESCO; 1995–1996); and Town Councillor of Baierbrunn, County of Munich, Germany (2002–2008). He has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Perpignan and Rennes, and the 2005 German-French Parliamentary Price. In 2007 he was nominated Knight in the French Legion of Honor. Book publications in English include: Boston Politics: The Creativity of Power (1989); The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence (2015); The Eranos Movement: A Story of Hermeneutics (2016); The Figure of Modernity: On the Irregularity of an Epoch (2020); Wherefrom Does History Emerge? Inquiries in Political Cosmology (2020).

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Abbreviations

Akten. Aus. Pol. Institut für Zeitgeschichte (ed.). 2012. Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland-1981. Vol. III: 1. Oktober bis 31. Dezember 1981. Munich: Oldenbourg. AN Archives Nationales (Pierrefitte) Auss.d.E. Werner Weidenfeld (in collaboration with Peter M. Wagner and Elke Bruck), 1998. Aussenpolitik für die deutsche Einheit. Die Entscheidungsjahre 1989–1990, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. Bush Pres.Libr. George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum (Digital Collections) CDU Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe CSU Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian-Social Union) DBPO Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Patrick Salmon et al., eds. 2009/2010. Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series III, Vol. VII, German Unification, 1989–1990. London: Taylor & Francis/London-New York: Routledge Dipl.d.E. Hilger, Andreas (ed.). 2011. Diplomatie für die deutsche Einheit. Dokumente des Auswärtigen Amtes zu den deutschsowjetischen Beziehungen 1989/90, Munich: Oldenbourg. Dok. Dt.Ein. Hanns Jürgen Küsters, Daniel Hofmann (eds.). 1998. Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik. Deutsche Einheit. Sonderedition aus den Akten des Bundeskanzleramts 1989/90. Munich: Oldenbourg. ECU European Currency Unit xix

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ABBREVIATIONS

EEC EMU EP FAZ FRG GDR Gensch. Germ. Unif. Germ.vop. Gorb.a. Gorb.b. La Déc. La Dipl.fr. NYT PC PDS Pol.Dipl. SED Sowj.Dok.

SPD SZ Teltsch. USSR Védr. WorldTrans.

European Economic Community Economic and Monetary Union Élysée Palace Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Federal Republic of Germany German Democratic Republic Hans-Dietrich Genscher. 1995. Erinnerungen. Berlin: Siedler. Zelikow, Philip, Rice, Condoleezza. 1995. Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. A Study in Statecraft. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Galkin, Aleksandr, Chernyaev, Anatolii (eds.). 2006. Mikhail Gorbachev i Germanskii vopros: sbornik dokumentov 1986–1991. Moscow: Ves’ mir. Mikhail Gorbachev. 1999. Wie es war. Die deutsche Wiedervereinigung. Berlin: Ullstein. Mikhail Gorbachev. 1993. Gipfelgespräche. Geheime Protokolle aus meiner Amtszeit. Berlin: Rowohlt. Favier, Pierre, Martin-Roland, Michel. 1990–1999. La décennie Mitterrand, 4 vols., Paris: Seuil. Vaïsse, Maurice, Wenkel, Christian (eds.). 2011. La diplomatie française face à l‘unification allemande. D’après des archives inédites. Paris: Éditions Tallendier. The New York Times. Private Collection. Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of the Democratic Socialism) Baker, James A. 1995. The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace. 1989–1992. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Union Party of Germany) Galkin, Aleksandr, Tschernjajew, Anatolij (eds.). 2011. Michael Gorbatschow und die deutsche Frage. Sowjetische Dokumente 1968–1991. German edition: ­Altrichter, Helmut, Möller, Horst, Zarusky, Jürgen (eds.). Trans. J. Glaubitz. Munich: Oldenbourg. Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social-­Democratic Party of Germany) Süddeutsche Zeitung Horst Teltschik. 1991. 329 Tage. Innenansichten der Einigung. Berlin: Siedler. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) Hubert Védrine. 1996. Les mondes de François Mitterrand. À l`Élysée (1981–1995). Paris: Fayard. George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft. 1998. A World Transformed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Political Science of History

Acting out Political Creativity A play to be performed and no script. Imagine a group of actors on a stage involved in a play. Their situation is unusual. The curtain is rising, dramatic things are going to happen on the stage and these actors know that they are to play the leading roles. Their task is momentously to perform and to have the drama shaped through their performance. Yet, in the midst of all the drama the actors discover that none of them, for their performance to enact, has seen a script. While shaping the drama through their acting they still have to write for it a scenario. And they perfectly know they must not fail. The tale presented in this book is the tale of such a group of actors: political leaders in Europe and the United States find themselves confronted on the stage of world politics with a situation like the one described. We shall speak of François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, George H.W. Bush and James A. Baker, Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, Margaret Thatcher and Douglas Hurd. We shall also speak of their advisers, who, too, were very much involved in the drama that is the subject of our tale. For good reason, as will be seen,

This introduction was written by the author, in English, for the present English edition of the book. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_1

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many other political leaders from around the world will appear in the narrative. The actors and their workshop. There was no script. There was, however, the workshop of world politics, as I have called it. The term designates the professional and interpersonal operative configuration formed by the protagonists of our tale. It is this configuration, present already for some years, that they could rely on when they had to face the revolutionary events in Europe in the years 1989–1990 and went about to find a response to them. Without the existence of their workshop they would hardly have been able to do this. The workshop is to be considered as a crucial and highly fortunate element in international politics at the time. In Chap. 3 it will be described in detail. Throughout the book it is shown how the actors put it to use. Creativity unto leadership. With the fall of the Berlin Wall—starting in the evening of November 9, 1989—everyone could see that the “order” under which Europe had existed since the end of World War II—dividing it into two antagonistic parts—was breaking down. People rejoiced. Freedom would soon reign everywhere in Europe. Would it? Upon the fall of a political order a new one by no means follows necessarily. On the contrary, chaos may set in. There were burning issues: the drive of the Germans toward unity; the future of the security structures in Europe; the renewed recognition of national borders there, among them, in particular, the German-Polish border; the precarious position of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of an empire in decay, plagued by an enormous financial and economic stress; old national prejudices weighing again on perceptions and decisions. Would indeed a new order replace the old, vanishing one? Creative efforts were called for. Leadership had to be assumed. In the workshop and through the workshop of world politics this task was taken on. In the forging furnaces of political analysis and diagnosis, of advice and reflection, the instruments of political creativity were being formed: resolve and visions, tools and plans of action, certainty of purpose and strength of character. Briefly, the will to lead. By now, in an age of international distrust, antagonism, and self-absorption one looks back to these years of concert and cooperation with nostalgia.

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Sources to Build a Tale on This book is an inquiry into the art of political leadership, and the subject matter of the inquiry is the daringly creative political action of political leaders in the historical era of 1989–1990. Fittingly, although unintentionally, the research for the book began and was to a considerable extent carried out at a site of government—the Élysée, the palace in Paris where the offices of the president of France and his staff are housed. I had been authorized, under a permission from President Mitterrand, to peruse his presidential archive.1 I did so in the years 1992–1995. While occupied with another research project, the issue of the role of France in the story of Germany’s reunification began to claim my attention. The sources I was consulting by and by made me realize that generally this role was not perceived correctly. Public opinion as well as scholars seemed to have it wrong. I concluded that I should focus my investigations in the presidential archive on the topic of “France and the reunification of Germany.” In this way I obtained the major part of the material on which this study is based. I should wish to emphasize that it was the material, not any personal or political inclination, that led me to the study’s theme. From the evidence I discovered, I came to write an alternative account of the unification process, differing in particular from prior ones offered by German historians. I was confirmed in my account by observing that it has gained increasing support in subsequent studies. A brief description of the presidential archive might be opportune. This comprehensive collection—a huge amount—consisted of: (1) notes and memos that the president received from his advisers, among them notes from his military staff; (2) the minutes of Cabinet meetings, minutes of deliberations of various councils, among them the council of defense; (3) the verbatims of the conversations between Mitterrand and other heads of state or government; (4) copies of letters written by or addressed to him; (5) letters and personal (often handwritten) notes that he received from members of his government; (6) diplomatic telegrams; (7) notes and memos from diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Quai d’Orsay), and from officials at the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Economy; (8) copies of newspaper articles and governmental documents. In the years 2015–2019, at various times, I pursued further research at the Archives Nationales (at Pierrefitte), by then the site of the archive holdings concerning the Mitterrand presidency. Besides identifying documents that I had studied at the Élysée and ascertaining their call numbers,

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I hoped to find further documentary material. In the course of a search through the Fonds Mitterrand that indeed was effective I noticed, though, that not a few of the documents that I knew were missing. Upon my inquiry, as to one particular and highly significant document, for example, I was informed that a search for it in the Archives had led to a negative result. I was informed, furthermore, that the quantity of material from Mitterrand’s military staff held in the Archives is “poor.” Apparently, not all the documents that I had formerly consulted at the Élysée had found their way to the Archives Nationales. I gather this study remains a primary source. Sources for the book also were the interviews that I could conduct with actors at the Élysée, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the federal chancellery in Bonn, and the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The interviews are listed in the bibliography at the end of the book. Over the years, a substantial number of German, British, American, Russian and Canadian governmental documents concerning the period 1989–1990 successively became accessible for consultation (see bibliography). This, of course, is a new challenge. For example, two different verbatims of the same political conversation may be available for comparison. Thus, we shall see, at this or that instance, that one verbatim includes a certain important statement that the other does not. Or we can proceed significantly with our tale, in its new form, in telling the high points of a critical report found only through perusing the whole range of sources into which the field of documentary evidence has widened. The way in which the present revised edition of our book has been taken on reflects, therefore, the attempt to respond, to a reasonable extent, to the challenge just described. The thrust of the study is still the “French” one. The field where to place it, however, is the purview of comparison.

It’s the Actors’ Tale The book aims at involving its readers in the experience of the political actors. Its purpose is to make them visualize and listen to the protagonists, who are presented, as far as possible, in terms of their own words and actions. It is their story that is told and they are the authors of all that makes up the story. For this reason a narrative form of representation has been chosen. The political actors left us a prodigious wealth of documents wherein the testimony of their doings lies, their deliberations, discussions, decisions, and deeds. There, in those documents, the tale to be told is to

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be found, in a raw way, as it were. Hence, our study closely develops along the traces drawn by the documents. The traces I am speaking of—this, I think, should be added at once, to avoid any misunderstanding—were precisely that: the evidence holding the tale. They, by themselves, were not yet the story. They had to be sifted, interpreted, compared, contextualized, in order to arrive at the story offered here. There is a method to make written representations of human thoughts and actions “speak.” It is known as the art of hermeneutics, a methodological discipline for the study and interpretation of written verbal and non-verbal communications. This method was applied to our documents. In a long process of sifting through them, they were examined and re-­ examined, compared with each other, scrutinized as to how they were phrased, analyzed as to their contents and the significance of it, sounded out for possible double meanings. Finally, all the painstaking reading process led to an increasingly plausible and comprehensive interpretation of the ensemble of the materials. The story emerged from the stories: a distinct story of things past, once represented. The actors’ tale could be rendered into the form of a scholar’s authorship.

A Tale unto Meaning Through the hermeneutical approach a particular undertaking also came to the fore that to the actors was obviously quite important: their search for meaning in view of the extraordinary events that they were facing. Would it be possible at all fully to grasp the revolutionary upheavals that took place in the European political world in the fall and winter of 1989, this “revolutionary surge in Eastern Europe” compared by the French Government’s Office of National Defense to the “wave of revolutions in 1848”?2 And to arrive at a comprehension that would allow a true governing of the events? No one could be sure, and this was an acute frightening feeling that all the actors in Moscow, Bonn Washington, London, shared. They found themselves in the situation that has been described above: in midst of a drastic political drama within which they had to act but for which they had no script. Years later, Felipe González, Spanish prime minister at the time of German reunification, used the metaphor of “history galloping like a riderless horse” to express their experience.3 What, in this situation, could be the first thing to do? Of all actors can be said that they did the same: they sought to put the historical forces that they saw were at work into a frame of interpretation.

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Mikhail Gorbachev continuously raised the theme of “time” as an elementary historical force over which one could hardly, if at all prevail. Political actors, he said, acted wisely in aligning themselves to the flow of time and its changes. He emphatically wished the policy of all actors to be adjusted to the time a settlement regarding Germany would, in his view, take. François Mitterrand, on the other hand, constantly worried about the possible disjunction of two paces: the pace of the European Community to a closer union and the pace of Germany to its unity. Both processes, Europe’s unification and Germany’s unification, should by all means be parallel developments, progressing at the same “rhythm.” If Germany’s unification will progress at a greater pace than that of Europe’s unification, there will be, he feared, an “accident.” Persistently, he pleaded with Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher wisely to measure the time of a unification of Germany.4 Kohl declared, indeed, at a meeting on December 15 with the president of the Swiss Confederation, Jean-Paul Delamuraz, that he counted on “doing everything” so that changes in Germany “not go too fast.” He asserted: “I’m trying to reduce the speed.”5 Mitterrand considered “nationalism” to be a deep and driving force in European history. It was much stronger, he thought, than any governmental structure, be it a state or an imperial entity such as the Soviet Union. Because of the pressure of nationalism, the prospects of the Soviet Union were gloomy, as he told his advisers already in 1981. The same pressure, he further noted, worked in favor of a Germany that aspired to its unity. Margaret Thatcher liked to say that she believed in national character. As to that of the Germans, she held it to be everlastingly bad. The Germans of 1989 were as arrogant, high-handed and pretentious as, in her view, those of the time of the Kaiser. Therefore, the two German states existing at the present should not be allowed to unify. Thatcher interpreted the developments in East Germany that pointed to a conjugation of the two Germanies in the light of her ideas on the German national character. Whereas others understood the rebellion of the masses of East Germans in the streets of Leipzig, Dresden, East Berlin as an onslaught that indicated a historical move toward the disappearance of East Germany as a state, her understanding of German history and the Germans’ national character urged her to oppose such a development. Eventually, Margaret Thatcher accepted Germany’s unification. However, she kept, in spite of contradicting herself, to the interpretation with which she accompanied it.

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What the Tale Tells Us For all its findings our study has to speak for itself. However, to enumerate here the major ones will presumably be appreciated. There are six of them: • For France the “German question” was always topical. President François Mitterrand held here the same views as his predecessors, especially President Charles de Gaulle. As seen from Paris, Germany remained far from having found its place in European geopolitics. How might this country succeed, this country whose partition, decided upon at Yalta, guaranteed the division of the planet that appeared to ensure world “order”? It was precisely this Yalta order with which French foreign policy clashed. President Mitterrand never missed an opportunity to condemn Yalta. Since then the world was divided, with the German question at the center of its problems, as Mitterrand explained to Mikhail Gorbachev on October 2, 1985.6 Mitterrand and his advisers (with one exception) worried not about the fact of German reunification but about how it would come to pass. If the Germans wanted it, unification would happen, but it had to follow the best path for all, Germans and Europeans alike. Such was France’s sole objective. • The imaginative and productive practice of political leadership whose story we tell culminated in three crucial moments: (a) the European Summit at Strasbourg in early December 1989, at which the European construction was significantly advanced; (b) the conceptualization of the “two-plus-four negotiations” and, then, their execution, settling in particular the issue of the German-Polish border; (c) the persuasive steering of the Soviet leadership, Mikhail Gorbachev in particular, by Western leaders, chiefly François Mitterrand, toward an acceptance of a membership of unified Germany in NATO. • In the fall of 1989 François Mitterrand expected from the Germans, in particular from Chancellor Kohl, an act of faith on behalf of Europe similar to the one that he had performed in 1983 by aligning the economy of France to the European project. Without a deepening of the European conjunction, a reunification of Germany could not be imagined. Over the years, Kohl had made Mitterrand believe in his unshakable allegiance to the European project, most recently on June 2, 1988 at Evian. But then, a year later, in June 1989, to the great concern of Mitterrand, he began sowing seeds of doubts. In a

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battle of wills that lasted until a few days before the Summit at Strasbourg, Mitterrand prevailed and extracted from Kohl, finally, the desired commitment. • In the dawning of 1989 France and the Federal Republic of Germany were caught up in a frictional relationship. For years, the government at Bonn had been feeling exceedingly uneasy as to the nuclear strategy of France. Mitterrand who, as France’s president, was the sole person to unleash the French nuclear force, was convinced that an essential part of this strategy was its vagueness. Thus the Germans did not know, whether and when the French would use their nuclear force for their defense, whereas they were perfectly aware that the French short-range nuclear missiles would destroy German cities. In spite of all pleading by Chancellor Kohl and his defense minister Manfred Wörner, Mitterrand constantly refused (and his advisers and military people followed him) to alleviate the sway France held over Germany through its nuclear force. The Federal Republic of Germany, on the other hand, had long been looming over France economically. Increasingly, France had been compelled to rely on Germany for upholding its economic and monetary sovereignty. A great irritation had grown at the Élysée as to the necessity always to request the Germans favorably to consider the economic and financial situation of France. In the spring of 1989 the friction between the two countries was grievous. • In the winter of 1989 and the spring of 1990 the economic and financial situation of the Soviet Union was dreadful. Governing the Soviet empire meant to act under a necessity of survival. The leaders in Moscow looked to the West, in particular to West Germany, for aid. The wants and needs of the Soviet Union coincided with the exigency of Germany moving toward its unity. The exchanges of the Soviet leaders with Western leaders—Mitterrand, Bush, Kohl, Thatcher—and their own wisdom, as Gorbachev demonstrated, led them to adjust. • Political leaders in the West held the epochal events in 1989–1990 to be an achievement advantageous to Western models of human political life. We are dealing with this perception and issues related to it, like the much debated enlargement of NATO, in a study in progress. In a conversation with Helmut Kohl on November 2, 1989 François Mitterrand markedly articulated the perception. In the end, he

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judged, “the further construction of Europe will bring us to the day when the division of Europe will be overcome and Germany will be reunified. The Soviet Union will have trouble understanding this evolution. It is Western civilization that will gain the upper hand and keep it.”7 The East changed, not the West.8 This was Europe’s revolution.

The Tale’s Teaching of Political Science In the preceding paragraphs a number of elementary notions and expressions—political creativity, leadership, nuclear strategy, revolutionary events, world politics, freedom, nationalism—appeared that, seen together, indicate the discipline of which our tale provides knowledge: political science. This book therefore can be read as an introduction to the study of politics. It represents, as will become obvious, a perception of politics in its truest form: in the state of its making. Through this perception, for instance, a most essential figure in political reality emerges, as embodied and, through their action, made vivid by different persons: the political leader. At an earlier time this figure was called “Prince”, and it was modelled in the form of a “Mirror of Princes.” The book contains such a “Mirror.” The elements of a paradigmatic practice of political leadership are made visible: a fluid approach to politics in correspondence to the fluidity of political realities, a recognition of the primacy of persons in the conduct of politics, an overriding interest in the character and behavior of the other actors in the common field of action, a thirst for information, a solicitation of advice and an effective as well as wise use of advice received. The science of politics, the reader will see, is a great art. Its best teachers are its practitioners.

On the History of Our Story: Metamorphoses The German original of this book appeared in 2002. In 2005 a French translation was published. In view of this translation I revised the text, added new material, and augmented the book by new parts. For an American edition this later and larger French version was, in contractual accordance with the American publisher, translated into English by John Tyler Tuttle. However, upon receipt of this translation, at the moment it was scheduled for publication, the publisher commanded that it be considerably shortened. I had to cut out substantial parts

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from the translation. The resulting edition, prepared by Barry Cooper, appeared in 2009. For the present edition now I returned to Tuttle’s comprehensive translation. I did not fully restore it, though, in order to have the possibility of adding to this edition new parts and new information gained by new research. I thoroughly reviewed and, in many instances, revised the translation as well, as to structure and style. I divided up the whole book into shorter and hence more chapters. Chapter 1 consists of an entirely new introduction that I wrote for the book. In a number of ways this edition of it represents a new book.

Notes 1. For further information see the Foreword by Jean Musitelli and the article of Hubert Védrine “Contribution à un recueil des textes sur Tilo Schabert” https://www.hubertvedrine.net/contribution-a-un-recueil-de-textessur-tilo-schabert/ (accessed April 10, 2021). 2. Secrétariat Général de la Défense Nationale, Note, November 10, 1989. 3. See below, p. 207, note 4. 4. See below, p. 301ff. 5. See below, p. 335. 6. See below, p. 59. 7. Dok. Dt.Ein., 473. 8. See the section below: “The Principle of Change: The East Changes,” p. 71ff.

CHAPTER 2

Thinking at the Élysée

Thinking Through Dialogue In politics, creative power is silent, for it is, above all, thought. And thought begins in silence, in the dialogue that he who reflects carries on with himself, in the noiseless world of his mind. We grasp thoughts once they have been verified and reflected upon and, not, contrary to others, dismissed or rejected. We decide on the fate of thoughts that have been preserved and the way in which to use them. We can pass over them all in silence but we can also express them all. We can communicate only some of them and put the rest aside. The expression of thoughts can take place immediately or later on, all of a sudden or bit by bit. It can unfold in such a way that transmitted thoughts be perceived by only one person, by a small number, or by many. These can be integrated into the evaluation of reflections and become sensors in a test allowing for measuring their virtual impact. We may choose the circumstances that lend themselves best to the expression of thoughts, and we can, regardless of the thought, choose the most favorable period for revealing it. All that unfolds in the course of the silent dialogue that the thinking person carries on with himself as soon as he1 wonders how he can handle his ideas, to what procedures he must subject them, and what he must do with them. And yet, many events occur at that moment: you verify, you evaluate, you reflect, and you choose, the mind working according to its

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_2

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most specific manner of functioning, and according to your own capacities for conceiving intentions and anticipating future consequences. And all occurs noiselessly. Thoughts are integrated by the imagination into the play of their externalization. Thought is put on stage. Starting from the dialogue that the thinking person establishes with himself, the power takes shape allowing the thinking person to become a figure of power himself, in the face of his thinking: henceforth, it is he who rules. The thinking person stages the representation of his thoughts, presenting, for others, thoughts stemming from his thinking. Thought is represented in the mode of its externalization. It appears to be performed. Someone acts out the play of his thinking on the stage that the perception of others offers him. They see his thinking in the style he gives it. No one totally masters his or her creative power. Political power is essentially its spectacle, the representation of political power. First of all, it is thought—thinking about power—but to exercise it, one has to begin by staging it. If one wishes to exercise political power, above all, one must think. One thereby weaves the fabric from which the raiment of power will be cut, but the dressing of power is an invention, a representation of the appearance of power. There is no power if one does not invent one’s own specific style. Power does not belong to the person who “has it” if that person does not provide the creative thinking that goes along with it: the invention of the staging. Political power is entirely and, on principle, creative power. It requires the strength of creation. What preparations are necessary for the spectacle of power, what gestures, what speeches, what arrangements are indispensable? François Mitterrand committed himself—himself and others—to thinking in the form of dialogues. At the Élysée, he presented a president of France who thought on his own and did so preferably in company. He withdrew to think, establishing a physical and intellectual distance with others to do so. “I keep my distance,” he told me during an interview I had with him. And when I asked him, then, where he would be while keeping his distance, he explained: “I reflect, I read, I take a walk.”2 The physical distance could in fact be topographical or else take the form of body language that created the distance even in the presence of others.3 Yet, he also invited others to act out his thinking with them. He sought to have clear ideas on his thinking by staging it in the presence of others. Thought in the form of conversation, thought in motion. A staging of the power to be exhibited, of the figure of the powerful man, of the government that already begins with thinking, progresses with thinking and

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occurs in the form of thinking. This procedure is not unknown: the path that consists of taking, in the realm of thought, the starting point for what must be thought about, discerning the social order of all thought therein and then choosing for one’s thought the form of thinking through dialogue. It is associated with Plato’s name. One day, at the end of an interview, the journalist asked Mitterrand: “Did a philosophical book stimulate or help you to think about all that lately?” He answered: “Several, but I find Plato is still a good teacher.”4 Mitterrand’s advisers rarely saw him, and it was even rarer for him to converse on the telephone with them. Only his innermost circle, a handful at best, had more or less daily contact with him, but never did anyone go to see him on their own initiative. The president remained at a distance, in a sphere that he occupied by himself, and it was there that he decided himself whom to see, at what time and under what circumstances. Yet Mitterrand’s collaborators were “closely” linked, provided him with productive counseling and had possibilities of communicating effectively with him. In the “distance” orchestrated by the president, they allied themselves with him to develop joint political thinking and undertake the ensuing political work together.5

“Without Pretending to Have Second Sight” The proverb says: “One is always more clever afterward.” And it thereby gives two different points of view to universal wisdom: one on the future, the other on the past. No one really knows today what will happen tomorrow. And it is easy to explain things once they have occurred. The future is never anything but likely and can take a very different turn from what was imagined. The past, on the other hand, no longer changes; one can only explain it. Premonitions are not truer than what preceded them, but in that earlier history is found the standard by which they must be measured. Pre-history then turns into history; a premonition is fulfilled on the basis of the past—which is precisely the past of that premonition—and only this past makes the premonition real. It can no longer be transformed: it becomes history. We know afterward how to explain the events that occurred, but did we previously know what we might expect? “Yes, I knew,” Mitterrand said, during a press gathering with representatives of European newspapers in May 1994. One of them had questioned him about the upheavals that had occurred since their last meeting, using them as a pretext to cast doubt on the notion that political power

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had sway over historical events: “Our last meeting, Mr. President, dates from July, 1989, i.e., before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and German unification. No one had foreseen or, it would seem, could foresee what was going to happen. Shouldn’t this degree of unpredictability in history fill not only observers and strategists but also heads of state with humility? What becomes of the reality of the power of a President of the Republic when the supposed control of events eludes him to such an extent?”6 The president did not let himself be “thrown” by this questioning of his power’s reality—on the contrary, he answered with the greatest steadiness. He himself had predicted something and was not at all mistaken about the content; he had merely made a slight error in evaluating the calendar: Without pretending to have second sight, I had accepted the hypothesis of the disappearance of the Soviet Union, from which all stemmed, and first of all, German unification. Since my election in 1981, I had told my collaborators, especially Pierre Bérégovoy, then secretary general of the presidency, “Start with the idea that the Soviet Union will have exploded by the end of the century.” I was off by ten years.7

This is the response of a man sure of himself. But who is speaking here: Mitterrand, the political prophet? The French president, who had foreseen the unification of Germany? Or the statesman who, at the Élysée, was counting on the disintegration of the Soviet empire? Mitterrand would surely have objected to this term “political prophet” and not only because it implied inappropriate pretension but because he liked ambiguity—in fact, liked it very much indeed. This is the reason he always avoided formulations, remarks or notions that were so clear and distinct that they left not the slightest gray area. It is not by chance that one finds, in the above quote, the formulation “I had accepted the hypothesis.” “I had accepted” is something certain, but there is nothing definite about what is accepted— it is a “hypothesis.” “I had accepted the hypothesis.” What then did Mitterrand say to the members of his government and his advisers at the Elysée? What then did he say in the years leading up to 1989? That the Soviet Union was going to collapse and that Germany would be unified? “Start with the idea ….” That is what Mitterrand said at the time, and in those terms he quoted himself in 1994. With this second formulation, was he thereby abandoning the ambivalence that characterized his

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language? Was he coming back to a more affirmative statement that was not too far from a prediction? Whether a matter of prediction or “prophecy,” Mitterrand claimed to have a not-insignificant amount of knowledge to which was attached the quality of “visionary.” Several years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, he asked in the Élysée to “start with the idea” that both would in fact come about. It was easy, in 1994, to proclaim oneself a visionary regarding history that had already taken place, but what in fact had Mitterrand said before 1989, that he could not turn in one sense or another, no longer eliminate or supplement, since not only had he said it but his remarks had also been recorded and archived? What were those reflections and decisions that he expressed to his inner circle, to the witnesses and immediate participants in the exercise of power, of which written traces were kept? A “common opinion” developed long ago concerning Mitterrand and France’s role in the reunification process of Germany, an opinion heard on all sides: Mitterrand and his government had come down against unification or at least tried everything to oppose it.8 Really? We wish to note as precisely as possible what the reality in fact was and recount what François Mitterrand and others who, at the time, were speaking and acting with him in the name of France, thought, did, planned, and provoked; what their perceptions were, what judgments they made, and the ideas they formulated. We wish to let a past explain itself starting from these records, which, being behind us and therefore inalterable, connect us all objectively: not only they who left those records but also they who are following them today. We wish to understand the reproach that Mitterrand expressed on August 19, 1992 at a Cabinet meeting: “Even at that time, France’s position concerning the unification of Germany was caricatured.”9 Mitterrand obviously saw himself “from the inside” and not with our observers’ gaze. He had known for quite some time what we are only now beginning to discover: what was said about Germany in the thinking conversations he had with other members of the French government. And Germany indeed occupied such a place in Mitterrand’s conversations that he could say, in 1994: “Yes, I knew something.” For he had understood that France was forced to think about Germany when thinking about itself. He continually expressed his ideas on the issue in one form or another, and when France thought about Germany, it was forced to think about all the rest: Europe, the Soviet Union, the United States. Mitterrand established a close intellectual connection between the affirmation of

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France by itself and the German question. He linked this with the problem of balance of power in Europe, a problem for which, he readily admitted, France had no truly satisfactory answer to give to Germany. Consequently, he deduced that Germany was asking itself even more the question about its security and, he concluded, would seek an answer elsewhere, insofar as it had no certainty about France’s attitude. In a few sentences, he inferred that Germany was a subject of debate for France, almost, indeed, an obsessive subject. When Mitterrand broached the topic of Germany at a Cabinet meeting on May 29, 1985, he suddenly interrupted himself and, through the prism of this problem, directed his gaze toward a future that was as yet invisible: “Moreover, what will happen in the next twenty years? What will have become of the Soviet empire in Europe? What revolts will have occurred in the countries of central Europe?” And he added enigmatically, as if wishing to further widen the angle of his vision: “I tried to encourage Chancellor Kohl to a certain autonomy.”10 A year later, on July 18, 1986, he made a similar remark to the German minister of foreign affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, during a conversation at the Élysée: “I am personally convinced that this empire will collapse, but not next year.”11 And, a bit later, on July 20, 1988, he made this passing remark during a meeting of the Defense Council: “There is a risk of disorder in Soviet Europe. I believe that, on the scale of a generation, disintegration is inevitable.” And he went on to bring up a geostrategic problem of greater scope that was attached to it: “For us, disorder is probably not preferable to the order that has reigned up until now.”12 Mitterrand always formulated refined geopolitical thinking in discursive contexts, and this thinking is illustrated by the preceding quote: it is directed entirely toward the necessity of obtaining and preserving something to which the name “order” might be given but which he himself also designated by other equivalent notions. He also spoke of “balance” and thus, at a Cabinet meeting on October 26, 1983, formulated this fundamental geopolitical principle: “French policy is coherent. Wherever there is a risk of slipping into war, balances must be maintained.”13 And as always, he immediately explained what he meant: “It must be understood that we are not in Lebanon for vainglory [in the autumn of 1983, when was civil war raging there] … Over there, we are soldiers of equilibrium … In the same way, when necessary, we are firmly telling the Russians no.” France also had to tell Poland that it was wrong when it pursued “certain” wishes (namely greater independence from the Soviet Union). Poland had

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to understand, Mitterrand observed, that a “reality” existed in Eastern Europe since 1945 and that if one wanted to oppose it, it was back then that it should have been done. One did not have the right to try to abolish “Yalta” without running the risk of a world war.14 When surrounded by his ministers, Mitterrand carried out high-level thinking, here laying out the ideal of “equilibrium,” there the foil of “world war.” Then, like an unavoidable fact, Germany appeared on the horizon of his ideas: “The way Germany reacts in the coming years can destroy the foundations of balance and provoke war.”15 What a staggering sentence! It reveals the reality of the German problem in Mitterrand’s thoughts. Germany is much more than a German question: it is also an ineluctable question for other States. For Germany can be the source of events that would inevitably involve France as well as other countries, and all those concerned by this possibility thus have to ask themselves: How do we behave faced with the possibility of such an evolution, which touches us directly—that is, facing Germany? If it wants to find itself, Europe must overcome a series of considerable obstacles stemming from the last world war, Mitterrand explained shortly afterward in a televised interview on November 16, 1983. For him, the first of those obstacles was—and it should hardly surprise anyone—the special status of Germany. A second obstacle was the necessity of escaping from “Yalta.”16 There again his reflections went beyond the European “order” that came out of World War II.  In his geopolitical reflections, Mitterrand certainly did not want to get away from that order without another form of process, for it was still preferable to the “disorder” that was to be feared more than anything. But, on the other hand, he concluded that this order was itself the cause of disorder and should be replaced by a Europe endowed with a completely different make-up. On the one hand, he sought the tranquility of a balance of power while trying to apprehend the movements that defined it. His thinking was twofold: on Europe in the “Yalta” framework, and on post-“Yalta” Europe. In his thinking, this dual perception also applied to Germany. On the one hand, he integrated it into an almost brutal realism of power and took inspiration from elements originating in historical experience and geographical observation, deducing, as regards Germany, laws that were, in a way, immutable in the interplay of powers. This was the Germany he presented on July 7, 1983, in remarks made at the Cabinet meeting on the European Community’s joint agricultural policy. This subject clearly had nothing ordinary in his view, for on this occasion, Mitterrand uttered

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harsh words about Germany, drawn from the language of unvarnished power, drawn from distortions stemming from the arsenal of prejudices borrowed from rudimentary, not to say racist, ethnic theories. Fully acknowledging that we were no longer in the time of Charles V, he nonetheless evoked the idea of France being “encircled”: “We are victims of a sort of encirclement between Spain, Germany and England, even though this is no longer the era of Charles V.” Certainly, Mitterrand continued, the balance of power was changing but did not affect the imagination, the movement of peoples, or the shape of history. And he became concrete: the Germans, said he, “have always had their eye on Russia, which is the only place they can expand.” As for the Russians, they were certainly not an expansionist people but lacked access to the sea. These were “constants that had lasted for several centuries,” he asserted, and, to a certain degree, they were immutable.17 Words uttered in 1983 … Concerning those Germans who have always had their eye on Russia, which is the only place they can expand … Opposite them, we find the other words, words totally different that Mitterrand used of Germany and the Germans, which he did on many occasions even before being head of state, and then especially in that role. For Germany, he found words of gratitude and sympathy, of understanding and advice, words revealing his benevolence. “Germans,” he wrote in 1976, “do not have to draw the argument from the past that any reservation regarding their system of government is a way of arousing Europe’s wariness of them, as if they had to exculpate themselves perpetually from an original sin. Given the qualities of their people and their democratic choice, they deserve to be treated honorably.”18 France had to act intelligently toward Germany, and it was this recommendation of principle that Mitterrand made on January 16, 1985 at the Cabinet meeting when they were deliberating on the ceremonies for the fortieth anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany—imminent ceremonies, planned for the following May 8. On that occasion, he said, it would be especially important to be vigilant as to the way in which one spoke of Germany in the course of this anniversary. “If he [President Mitterrand] must say something, he will indicate that that German democracy and newfound peace prevail over all the rest.”19 Somewhat later, in a letter to Chancellor Kohl, dated February 13, 1985 and posted the 15th, Mitterrand repeated his advice in even more insistent terms, doing so in a final personal act before the letter was sent.20 A letter, already written and dated February 13, was ready for the

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president’s signature; and he had only to sign it. The last paragraph was as follows: On another level, I have seen to it that the French ceremonies for the celebration of May 8 be limited to the strict necessary. I myself intend to participate only in the traditional ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and perhaps a visit to a monument for the Deportation. I have asked the Government to limit all other official events. Finally, I decided that the French authorities will take part in no particular ceremony on German soil.21

And then comes the traditional form of closing, typed in advance: “Croyez, Monsieur le Chancelier et cher ami, à l’expression de mes sentiments de haute considération et bien cordiaux.” But the president did not sign the letter, as expected. On the contrary, he changed the text by hand. In place of the polite formula, he crossed out the last part, “et bien cordiaux,” and added another phrase, which expressed his real concern: “It is appropriate that the lessons of the past serve for better understanding our common interests and that of peace—in short, to prepare the future rather than reawakening the memory of rifts.”22 The other words, uttered in 1985: We must show intelligence in regard to Germany, that is, place before the memory of rifts the lessons of the past that allow for understanding common interests. Mitterrand’s Germany was not one Germany: it was both the one Germany and the other. It was also France’s Germany, this totally different country and yet, too, France itself. It was something totally foreign and something perfectly well known.

Notes 1. Throughout the book, if not a real person is spoken about, “he” or “she,” if used, are meant to signify “human person.” 2. Interview with François Mitterrand, June 15, 1993. For the text of the interview see: Schabert, Von der Natur der Politik, 403–408. 3. See the beginning of that interview, ibid., 404. 4. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, le Président de la République, à Paris-Match, May 7, 1992, 12. 5. During the interview Mitterrand expounded his manner of governing— see as well: Schabert, A Classical Prince. 6. Entretien accordé par Monsieur François Mitterrand, le Président de la République, à The Independent, El Pais, La Repubblica, Sueddeutsche Zeitung et au Nouvel Observateur, May 26, 1994, 1.

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7. Ibid. 8. On this “common opinion” see Teltsch., 47, 76, 96; Schneider, Les dernières années, 63–82; Germ.Unif., 97–98, 116–117, 137–138, 146–147; Giesbert, Mitterrand, 586ff.; Elbe, Kiessler, A round table, 59–61; Biermann, Zwischen Kreml, 396ff.; Hutchings, American Diplomacy, 96; Auss.d.E., 370ff., 494ff., 624–625. One finds a more balanced image in: La Déc. 3, 159–262; Duhamel, Mitterrand, 258–262. Hans-Dietrich Genscher spoke out against the widespread opinion (Gensch., 664: “At no moment did I have reason to doubt France’s support in the unification of Germany.”). And to rectify this image: Védr., chapter XIII “De la chute du Mur au traité de Maastricht” (in particular, 453, 455); Lacouture, Mitterrand, 2, 359–388. 9. CM, August 19, 1992. 10. CM, May 29, 1985. 11. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting, July 18, 1986 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 12. CD, July 20, 1988. 13. CM, October 26, 1983. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. L’heure de vérité, Antenne 2, November 16, 1983. 17. CM, July 7, 1983. 18. L’Unité, June 4, 1976. 19. CM, January 16, 1985. 20. Letter from François Mitterrand to Helmut Kohl, February 14, 1985. The letter was sent on February 15 from the Élysée, as indicated by the handwritten note on the original: “Letter delivered by JL Bianco to Schreckenberger [Chief officer of the chancellery at the time], 15 II – HV [Hubert Védrine].” 21. Letter from François Mitterrand to Helmut Kohl in the version of February 13, 1985. 22. Letter from François Mitterrand to Helmut Kohl, February 14, 1985.

CHAPTER 3

In the Workshop of World Politics

Humans are creatures endowed with speech. By speaking with each other, being attentive to one another, they create and shape the social nature of their existence, life in political society. It is by speaking that they form a community, shape it, and attend to its existence. From the words they exchange originates the political work that is the condition of their life. As with other forms of human activity, there are also workshops for creative work to which we give the name “politics.” Insofar as this is a creative activity in language, these workshops have a linguistic dimension: they take the form of conversations, discussions, or, in the event of geographic distance, words exchanged in one form or another. Modern technics has made immediate understanding possible, or at least has facilitated it considerably. The telephone alone has enabled constructing a “workshop” in the modern governmental universe in the form of an intensive, ongoing conversation between leaders. A large part of the creative process of government takes place here. A German chancellor and a French president no longer need an “ambassador” or any other kind of intermediary in order to understand one another: they can quite simply pick up the telephone. To proceed that way has become a routine, just like the practice of direct personal conversation at numerous meetings in the course of which the chancellor and president meet—to stick with our example—or in which both participate. To perceive the process of government, we have to imagine ourselves inside the world of government: there, the “workshop” (as a universal phenomenon taking the most diverse concrete forms) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_3

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is to be found—the creative mode of conversation and exchange. Here, in their specific universe, governments produce the type of power that governs us; it is that sphere that we must observe if we wish to know what the princes of this world do.

Organizing They proceed methodically, working not in isolation but in connection with others. They collect knowledge and inform one another—between selected partners and to different degrees. They interpret the attitude of people, events and developments and accompany the exercise of their power with exercises in political hermeneutics. They insert a geometry of positions, axes and figures into international relations, thereby structuring their field of political action. They create the workshop of world politics and shape international relations therein. There we find conversations dating from the eighties dealing with the question of Germany and, more particularly, about Germany in French and international politics. On this subject, it is necessary to emphasize an important point at the outset, not only for our subsequent analytical reflections on these conversations but also, and even more so, for the remarks that will be made later on in this book on the issue of the reunification of Germany. When I speak of conversations “dealing with the question of Germany,” that does not mean that Germany was the sole subject. It is one topic among others, and some of them sometimes give the impression that they concern Germany only from afar or not at all. The conversations are built on several levels of discussion, which were taken up in turn but sometimes also overlapped one another. Sometimes they concerned only a single theme, then brought together several in a complex set of themes. The participants were not only the various interlocutors actually present but other persons as well who were not physically “present” but whose voices were nevertheless clearly heard in the conversation. In the workshop of those conversations relevant to our subject, “Germany,” strategies concerning world politics were elaborated, discussed and agreed on. Like any workshop in politics, this one was organized in keeping with specific rules that are, as we have shown, complex. In the form of thematically intertwining problems of politics, the workshop formed, on the one hand, a hermeneutic network in which these problems could be “captured” to a degree; and on the other hand, in the form of a configurative field of creative movements, it constituted a

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coherent group of persons exercising power (i.e., preeminent representatives of certain nations), from which it was possible to develop initiatives that could be efficiently implemented in the field of international politics. In speaking of Germany in the workshop of world politics, it will be essential to understand the dual role that “Germany” played in it. On the one hand, it was a “topic” among others, even if it was preferably associated with others. But, moreover, it (the “Germany” of the Federal Republic) was a participant in the workshop, one of the partners leading the conversation on world politics and shaping it in view of making strategic decisions. Germany (i.e., West Germany) itself created—with others— the workshop of world politics taking Germany as a subject. It is indispensable to understand all that if one wishes to draw up the decisive question that was asked in the course of the evolution leading to the reunification of Germany: What should the country’s specific position be in this process? When President Mitterrand and Chancellor Schmidt met on October 7, 1981 at Latche, these were two statesmen getting together to carry on a dialogue about world politics. With their professional know-how, they easily entered into a conversation that Mitterrand opened with this question: “What subjects do you want us to bring up?”1 And he immediately suggested they not go into detail on all the topics they might discuss; otherwise, he explained, “we would need a week.” Let us limit ourselves, said he, to the “essential points” and not forget, in so doing, our mutual relations. These phrases opened up the conversation at the same time as organizing it. Mitterrand always proceeded that way: for him, the order of things began by an order of the words with which one spoke. Schmidt immediately replied to his proposal and indicated his choice; from it, Mitterrand drew the topic of East-West relations and began discussing them. Before entering into the workshop of world politics, let us stay on the threshold for another moment in order to study its arrangement, the outline of the organization of meetings of which it is made up. At the center, we find the dialogue between two heads of state or government; around them are grouped the voices of others taking part in the meeting, exercising different duties in it: ministers, ambassadors, close collaborators, special envoys as well as—and especially—politicians who, even if they no longer occupy their position, remain appreciated interlocutors. All together, they constitute a configuration that gives the meetings their structure, which can be clearly perceived if one is sufficiently attentive to

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following its variable forms, for, of course, in a meeting, all the contributors do not speak at the same time. Only some of them are listened to, and the voices of certain people also come from areas outside the workshop but in a way that they might be heard. In the general arrangement of meetings, there are smaller conversation groups in which others, who do not participate, readily listen as much as they can. However, some of these groups also exchange the latest information amongst themselves, sometimes in a thoroughly formal manner. Everything in the workshop aims at the conveying of information. Nothing of what is said is neglected (or at least such is the intention), and concentrated attention sometimes results in discoveries that would do honor to an intelligence service. The curiosity that dominates here concerns everything. Thus, our glance into the workshop also takes in its furnishing, that is, topics from all over the world. The voices we hear and which we are at present about to join are deep into a comprehensive meeting. In the period under consideration, the 1980s, this concerns the situation of King Hussein in Jordan; the evolution in Nicaragua and other Latin-American countries as well as in Japan or the Near East; and the situation in Somalia. There is talk about the influence of Europeans in the Third World; of the membership of Spain and Portugal in the European Community; change in China; and the Soviet Union’s military involvement in Afghanistan. Yet other subjects of discussion are the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE); England’s policy in Europe; Turkey; and the insurrectional events in Poland and their possible repercussions. The exchange is particularly intense and detailed when it comes to American domestic and foreign policy; the state of the Soviet Union and its government; the German question and the sensibility of the Germans; the problem of nuclear armament and negotiations underway between East and West for its limitation. None of these subjects is broached singly: on the contrary, they are dealt with like a bundle in which the particular elements have defined contours only in relation to the whole. And from all the communiqués, discussions and agreements emerges a lasting interest in the people and their relationships. Above all, politics is understood by the individuals who make it. In the workshop, one also practices character studies and proceeds according to the idea that a person’s nature allows for explaining the nature of his or her acts; that the personality of the powerful sheds light on their wielding of power. Elsewhere I have described in more detail this practice of “political characterology.”2

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Let us consider the letter that Chancellor Schmidt sent to President Mitterrand on August 15, 1982.3 As he says in his preamble, Schmidt wished to inform Mitterrand of meetings he had had shortly beforehand, during his trip to America. He begins by bringing up the question of the American economy, about which all his interlocutors, with the exception of George Shultz, expressed their skepticism. He stresses his own worries for the winter of 1982–1983 and for the first half of 1983, and says that he reminded his American interlocutors of the negative but decisive role of American economic policy. Moreover, he mentioned East-West relations with Shultz and summed up for the French president the considerations that were expressed on that occasion. He did not forget to point out that he had informed Schultz of the intention of “my government” to maintain contacts with the Soviet leadership. He then told Mitterrand what Shultz had said to him about the United States’ attitude regarding Poland’s indebtedness. He laid out in detail the interest stirred in the West by the process of the CSCE, the participation of the United States and Canada in this process, and the measures that this conference could take in all of Europe in order to establish confidence. He did express criticisms regarding America’s behavior in relation to East-­ West cooperation in the energy sector. In the meantime, he told the French president, Schultz had written him about this, clarifying certain elements. The chancellor then broached the issue of nuclear armament and the negotiations underway and Germany’s particular situation in this area. Then he explained his discussion with Shultz regarding Turkey (and questions raised about human rights there), Turkish-Greek relations and the issue of Cyprus. By the nature of his remarks, one clearly understands that, as a representative of a partner country of NATO, he felt as responsible for this complex set of themes as the government of the United States. This is also seen in the fact that he was able to speak to Shultz, as he mentioned to Mitterrand, about the discreet contacts he himself had established, through an intermediary, between the Greek prime minister and the Turkish leaders. Schmidt wrote that Shultz found all his thoughts on this group of issues quite interesting. His narrative went on to tell about a discussion on the GATT and the difficulties effecting trade relations between Europe and America. Towards the end of this final third of his report, the chancellor informed Mitterrand of the essentials of two other meetings he had had during his trip. The first took place in California with the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, in the presence of Shultz and Henry Kissinger (whom we

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shall encounter again on several occasions, in the extraordinary role of a “private” citizen who nevertheless remained the interlocutor of high-­ ranking politicians);4 the other took place in Ottawa with the Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. The prime minister of Singapore painted an “impressive picture of the situation in Asia,” and Schmidt repeated for the French president the interpretation that Lee Kuan Yew gave of the situation of China, its political activeness in the world and especially in Asia. Next, in Ottawa, he also informed Trudeau of the impressions he had had in California. Thus took shape, at the end of the chancellor’s letter, the image of a workshop of world politics: the cohesion of a conversation of global scope concerning the topics discussed as well as the figures who gathered for this discussion. In the configuration made up of Mitterrand and Schmidt, Shultz and Kissinger, Lee Kuan Yew and Pierre Trudeau, the governments of France, Germany, America, Singapore, and Canada constituted a workshop meant to bring up current world problems. In the case in point, the German chancellor was the voice that orchestrated and individually captured the other voices, blending them with his own to reconstruct them together. The French president apparently remained “mute” but, of course, was anything but absent in the course of this meeting. It was to him that Schmidt’s letter was addressed and the chancellor alone knew in advance that he would inform Mitterrand of the discussions that unfolded in a configurative field of persons of which the French president was a constituent element, even though not always immediately visible or audible— like each of the other persons making it up.

Interpreting On October 7, 1981, Mitterrand and Schmidt began their Latche meeting with the topic of East-West relations. Their first thought was for the workshop. They established the scope of their discussion together. “Like me, you must have had a letter from President Reagan on the American arms program. I also received a copy of the letter from Reagan to Brezhnev— like you, I suppose—that envisages ‘conditional’ negotiations.”5 Schmidt did not contradict him, and after Mitterrand had thereby defined the field of the conversation with him, he went straight to the other point that seemed important to him: “Today we are in a new situation. We were in agreement that the Americans make a military decision to regain a position of force in a few years. But we were also in agreement

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that, starting from this decision, negotiations begin. The United States should accept that. Now the Soviet Union knows that the United States has decided on this course. Reagan talked about it. The Soviets are clearly informed. The United States must now agree to sit down around the table.” The United States should—or better, must. But would they? Of course, Schmidt and Mitterrand wanted to know, but all their familiarity with their American partner did not allow them to get to the bottom of the arcana imperii of the United States. The “must” was thus incumbent upon them at the outset insofar as there remained nothing else to do but clarify and interpret as far as possible the inside of the American governmental universe and search for the various motivations therein. That called for a good dose of political hermeneutics. Chancellor Schmidt was the first to get down to the task, in a fairly long contribution to the debate in which he linked interpretations of individuals to interpretations of the situations and political behavior. In this part of the meeting and in those coming afterwards, he followed two closely connected lines. Sometimes he would analyze human processes, sometimes interpret political situations and developments. From the outside, it is necessary to look at the inside and interpret, or rather read the other(s), to perceive their position, approach, and motives. We are going to see immediately how Mitterrand and Schmidt used this procedure. The chancellor then explained that, in the course of his six years in the ministry of defense, he had met all the Americans in charge of that portfolio: McNamara, Laird, Schlesinger, Brown and Weinberger. In twenty years, the United States had gone from one extreme to the other, which was, in his opinion, extraordinarily dangerous for the cohesion of their foreign policy. On several occasions, said Schmidt, the United States had contended that they found themselves in a position of inferiority and that, for them, this constituted a motive for rearming. Then, conversely, the United States had deemed their effort was disproportionate and that they would therefore do better to withdraw their troops from Europe. The stakes were considerable but, he deplored, “American behavior [was] difficult to interpret.” Brezhnev was “quite troubled” by it and, he added, “I must say that I am, too.”6 Schmidt’s personal observations did not make Mitterrand more optimistic and hardly reassured him. He told the French president that, in his opinion, the American government understood nothing of East-West relations nor of its central aspect, security policy. The sole exception, he

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specified, was General Haig, certainly because he had formerly been posted in Europe. Reagan wanted to understand. And barely having mentioned the American president’s name, Schmidt sketched—in one or two strokes—an interpretative portrait into which he immediately integrated general considerations of a political-anthropological and political-­ psychological order: Reagan, said he, is “a simple man, but I have confidence in him; moreover, I prefer simple people where you know what they’re thinking. Our intellectuals are complicated and unpredictable. But this American desire for superiority can have very serious psychological repercussions on public opinions.”7 Mitterrand readily joined Schmidt in these exercises of political hermeneutics which both needed. In turn practicing his art of the interpretation-­ portrait of colleagues in the workshop context, he said: “I have the same idea about Reagan. He’s a man who has no overall idea, no general culture. He is, of course, a sort of conservative but, underneath that crust, you’ll find a man who is not dumb, who has great common sense and who is profoundly benevolent. What he doesn’t perceive through his intelligence he gets to by his nature.” And Schmidt agreed immediately, remarking: “He’s a reliable man, a predictable man.”8 One cannot help but feel a certain astonishment in seeing this gallery of portraits of our princes by our princes. They very confidently interpret the nature of the other and give him the stature of a person in whom they read—apparently without the slightest doubt—who he is and what he is, as if a man were never this mystery that he himself barely succeeds in understanding better than others. But in the workshop of world politics, there is no room for permanent doubt. It is where it is necessary to choose, where one must decide and do so without delay, just as government activity requires. “Where is the United States headed?” “Complicated, unpredictable intellectuals”—to take up Schmidt’s formula conversely—can reflect on this endlessly and forget that the essential thing is the answer. When a West German chancellor asks the question, which Helmut Kohl did on October 30, 1984 during his Bad Kreuznach meeting with Mitterrand,9 the question is less important in his eyes than the answer. He must know what the United States is doing, and that means he would like to know what the American government is doing. Which in turn means that he wants to know what the other members of the American government are doing, who they are and what they think. “But we can’t let ourselves be dragged into just any California fantasy by the decision of people who would be incapable of

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distinguishing between the Palatinate and Lorraine,” said Mitterrand to Kohl on October 22, 1982.10 And he stressed: “We are part of an alliance, we are loyal allies.” However, there were issues, the kind about which one can truly say they were matters of life and death. Among them were the problem of Germany’s security, as Mitterrand said forcefully to the chancellor, who “thanked him no end.” And then, he went on, it was heard said, regarding America, that, in case of military aggression in Europe, in no way was an automatic American entry into the conflict envisaged. Might Germany’s security be only the concern of France? The question was not asked, but Mitterrand pushed his analysis (not devoid of polemic) to the point where it almost seemed that it was truly he, the president of France, to whom this responsibility fell. “So imagine the dramatic and necessary nature of my situation,” he said.11 “We can’t let ourselves be dragged into just any California fantasy”— no, and that is the reason why Kohl (like Schmidt before him) and Mitterrand believed they had, through interpretation, detected the inner universe of the American government. “What authority does Reagan really have over his government?” Mitterrand asked himself this question—and also asked it of his guest Helmut Schmidt at their October 7, 1981 meeting at Latche. But this was not enough: he also wanted to know the specific roles played by Reagan’s various White House collaborators (he mentioned Allen, Mease, and Haig).12 The reading of others, the interpretation of their political universe, was an endless task that was consequently pursued from one conversation to the next. On November 7, 1985, in Bonn, Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand thus brought up—as in practically all of their meetings—East-West relations. When Reagan’s name was uttered, the chancellor stopped and, to broaden his political knowledge along with Mitterrand’s, offered these personal observations: “I’m not sure that he will carry out his full term. Nancy Reagan is very influential. He writes his notes himself.”13 Reagan, besides, kept his diary in which on June 26, 1984 he put down workshop news that Mitterrand had communicated to him: “I forgot yesterday to note that I called Pres. Mitterrand about his trip to Moscow. Very interesting. He said Chernenko gives evidence of not being well & doesn’t say a word without a script in front of him. He believes the Polit Bureau is kind of a collective in charge.”14 On February 5, 1987, ex-Chancellor Schmidt received a delegation of Mitterrand’s collaborators and advisors in Hamburg for a frank discussion bearing on security issues in the context of Franco-German relations and

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East-West relations.15 The former head of the Federal German government spoke, tracing the major historical outlines, which he backed up with unambiguous views concerning the political players of that period. And once again, he followed the procedure in the political workshop we are considering here and interpreted political life, commenting on the persons who conduct it: “There were two years when France and Great Britain were leaders. Then there was a phase of decline with Carter and Brzezinski, then further decline with Reagan. The man is crazy. No, in fact, he’s not really crazy; moreover, he’s a good man, but he is no more capable than Carter—one is as much of a nonentity as the other. Then there was the Mitterrand-Mauroy period, which assumed the heritage of Gaullism. François Mitterrand, for example, believes in the autonomy of French strategy.”16 One might describe in further detail this hermeneutical work in the workshop of world politics, but we may pause for a moment and observe the portraits that were painted. This moment is however indispensable for, up until now, we have certainly visited the west wing of our princes’ portrait gallery but not the east wing. It is time for us to go there and listen to the presentation: One cannot imagine a more Russian character than Brezhnev. He is a figure out of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. He is both extremely distrustful regarding everything foreign and quite cordial, capable of great hospitality. He is an emotional, enthusiastic character and, at the same time, highly disciplined. One thing is certain: he truly suffered from the war. Today, he is a worn-out man. He came to Bonn for the last time three years ago and is now quite weak. He seems older than his 74 years and must rest three hours at noontime. He cannot work more than six hours a day and no longer really commands—his collaborators have their hands free. He is a sort of primus inter pares, but they still need him to be able to show a single symbol to the outside. I don’t know the others as well. Kitonov, Gromyko, who will play an important role as long as he lives, Ustinov, Defense minister whose role was certainly essential in all the major strategic decisions, especially on Afghanistan, and whose role will be essential on Poland, and Suslov, of course. I think that Brezhnev and Kitonov are the most pacifistic. Brezhnev certainly wants to negotiate seriously, but all that depends on how long he lives. I have confidence in Brezhnev on a personal level. I wonder,  if our homologue in the future were to be Suslov... (Schmidt to Mitterrand, ­ October 7, 1981)17

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I met Brezhnev once. At the end of that first conversation during which he had spoken a great deal about his love of peace, he abruptly asked me, “Do you believe me?” It was a bit difficult to form a sure idea on the conditions of someone in a single meeting, but as I wanted to be courteous, I told him: “I want to believe you.” At that moment, he stood and, grabbing his suspenders in one hand and pretending to cut them with two fingers of the other, he told me—this must be a Russian folk expression—“You only want to believe me. You don’t really believe me, so it’s as if you were cutting my s suspenders!” This is only an anecdote, but, like you, I think that if the United States affirmed wanting to discuss seriously, the Russians would say yes, and if the United States doesn’t, it is the Russians who will be right in the public opinion. (Mitterrand to Schmidt, October 7, 1981).18 There are two styles with the Soviets: the cold apparatchik kind and the warm, jovial kind, sometimes to excess, moreover. That was Khrushchev, Brezhnev. Mind you, both do the same thing, but the style is different. Chernenko seemed a tired man to me but amiable all the same. He doesn’t have much freedom of expression. In the course of political meetings, his contributions were always read. It was only in tête-à-tête conversations that he began to speak more freely. We spent an hour and a half together with only the two interpreters, and he seemed more relaxed—he joked and was more conciliatory. But he was a very tired man and always had someone with him to support him or help him down steps. After a half-hour he began to cough. That said, he was very much there, all of which goes to show that there is a real leadership collective of which Chernenko expresses the desires. But he is not for all that a robot. He doubtless does not have a very strong personality but it exists. Gromyko is surely quite important. He had gained a great deal of importance at the end of the Brezhnev era then lost some under Andropov. Now he certainly has a lot. You sense that he’s a liberated man. He’s very close to the power. Gorbachev and Alyev are men of great merit. Gorbachev has a thoroughly western style. He doesn’t think twice about criticizing the administration, saying, for example, “Here’s another planning mistake. You’ve got to admit that it’s stupid, wanting to plan this way!” Perhaps he does not fully believe what he says, but it’s interesting that he says it. He’s the first Soviet that I’ve seen who really has a western-type “manager” style. I don’t think he’s currently number two. The second position is perhaps shared by Ustinov and Gromyko. Alyev is also a man of very great worth but, being Muslim, he will never be able to take over. (Mitterrand to Kissinger, June 28, 1984)19

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Let us return once again to the west wing and stroll around the German and English room: FM [= Mitterrand] Kohl is a good man. He’s a disciple of Adenauer’s. It’s not certain that he has all the authority necessary, all the more so given that the situation isn’t good for him at the moment… HK [= Henry Kissinger]. Kohl would need a certain orientation. FM As I told you, he really venerates Adenauer and, in a way, that stands in the stead of a doctrine for him. In his home, there are portraits and statuettes of Adenauer. Kohl would like to be considered the continuer of his works. He is profoundly European. HK In any case, he’s trying to oppose the neutralist, nationalist movements… FM [Franz Josef] Strauss is an intelligent man who can negotiate very well with the GDR and who’s favorable to the European Community. HK On condition that he always finds his identity. Basically, Strauss has problems with himself above all. FM As for Mrs. Thatcher, she only speaks in figures! She has a strong personality but not many long-term views. Since she is intelligent, that hasn’t worked too badly for her, but she’s not used to encountering resistance. I told her in Stuttgart20 that she would not always have Argentines or Labour in front of her. She is wrong to consider any offer of compromise a sign of weakness. (Conversation between Mitterrand and Kissinger, June 28, 1984)21

Hermeneutical work in the workshop of world politics not only gives birth to a gallery of portraits of our princes by our princes; nations, whose mutual relations constitute the object of strategic meetings carried out in the workshop, are also a subject of interpretation therein. They are the meaning for all work in the workshop, which exists only for them. It is a political configuration aimed at preserving their existence, that of each nation in itself as well as in its relations with others. The voices making up the workshop bring out characters involved in meetings: these are the nations for which—or about which—the voices speak in order to understand, in view of their interactions, what each of them is for itself as for others, and what it wants for itself and others. But the matter is not quite that simple. Here we see to what degree hermeneutics is also like a mirror. Like all hermeneutics, it has a tendency to get tangled up in its own nets. Thus will one hear of Soviet Russia that above all a “problem of dignity” arose in the issue of disarmament negotiations and that it was necessary to leave it time to acquire the prestige to

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which it aspired. The Russians’ pride must be taken into account, it is said, and therefore it should not be forgotten that they still have a siege mentality. To handle them cleverly, it is necessary to avoid humiliating them.22 A reader of Flaubert would speak of idées reçues, when a certain interpretation is overused and integrated into one’s views. Then, the pure existence of Germany allegedly provokes a contradictory feelings in Russia, ranging from attraction to aversion.23 One cannot be surprised either to learn the Germans are deemed overly romantic, and that they never did anything but prove their economic competence and political stupidity.24 The Americans, to prolong the presentation of this world of the imaginary a bit, are also apprehended in terms that we believe we know. Thus, it is said that their mentality is “marked by a combination of Calvinism and pioneer spirit”; in all things, Americans respect only “output” and “success.”25 England is considered a far-off land; conventionally attributed national traits are taken up again: the insular egocentrism, the imperial nostalgia, the inflexible tenacity. And then the following conclusion: “Don’t ever forget that, for the English, we are ‘overseas’ [In English in the text].”26—“Only a hundred years ago, one still spoke of the Empress of India.” “But one must never underestimate Great Britain. We Germans saw that quite clearly from 1940 to 1945.”27 It is unnecessary here to dwell on the problem posed by this type of interpretative images. Our goal is to describe what is done in the world politics workshop and not what is omitted; but to do so, it was necessary to bring out this group of standard ideas for they alone show the extraordinary significance of the process used in the workshop, which we are now going to describe. Every time the interlocutors bring their personal considerations and experiences into their observations, their remarks are striking because they are concrete and have a strong evocative value on the point that is being negotiated. On first impression, one might suppose they are conceived as anecdotal asides whose sole aim is to relieve and illustrate the conversation, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Granted, the passages in question sound like anecdotes, and their construction, plastic and narrative, would also allow most of them to be considered as such, but in the thread of the conversation, they fulfill a completely different function. At the heart of the discussion, where one necessarily proceeds by overall views and generalizations, their strategic objective is to lay out a tangible, concrete, eloquent point of view, one that is, above all, laden with striking, perceptible content that makes it decisive. The partners in the discussion use a personal observation or experience to

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pierce the ordinary interpretation (or, in its most stubborn version, the group of conventional ideas) and apply another, often new, version of interpretation to the realities that must be understood. François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl both applied this procedure extremely well, using their personal outlook to prepare themselves for a creative shift in views. That explains, among other things, the capacity of both men to take original initiatives as well as the extraordinary understanding that grew up between them. They discovered each other in the same creative light under the brightness of which they no longer saw many others besides themselves. To illustrate let us consider two meetings between Mitterrand and Kohl. In the first, in November 1985, from a specific, concrete situation, Mitterrand drew far-reaching intellectual conclusions on the source of the Soviet empire’s military force—and therefore on its vitality: “I received a very interesting letter two days ago from our ambassador in Kabul. This highly observant adviser sent me fifteen pages on what he sees there every day. The building where he works is next to the Soviet headquarters. He has the feeling of a highly undisciplined, untidy, poorly-dressed army that does not respect schedules, does not pay in stores and commits robbery on farms to bring food back to the barracks. It’s under-equipped. It’s a weak army that would not be up to facing a modern crisis. The army is bored. There are desertions. This is a note on the atmosphere in the only place where the USSR has its army at war. The Russian people rediscover their military virtues only in defending their own territory.”28 The second meeting took place on October 21, 1982. Here, Helmut Kohl illustrates the conflicts provoked by the “Polish virus” in the part of Europe dominated by the Soviets: “The GDR is afraid of the Polish virus. That’s why we’re again seeing the spread of anti-Polish propaganda that does not think twice about taking up arguments used by the Nazis: the Poles are presented as lazy and dirty. I recently met some young people who had sent private trucks of aid to the Poles—they were insulted as they crossed the GDR.”29

Structuring It is amazing, but it is not as if we did not know it: only individuals—each by himself as well as with others—give reality to things political. Politics appears only in individuals and their concrete, personal creativity. Within the fictive realities of which the political world of humans is made any

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search for the “figure” that would allow for apprehending the political (and the power it confers) ends with the one individual or several (sometimes many) who then appear together as individuals. After all the fictions—the offices in governmental buildings, the series of offices of bureaucracy—we find the individual, concrete persons that are the “final element.” Having arrived at this point, one goes no farther and then observes (if not having already done so) that it is also from there that everything starts. Individuals, whom one meets concretely by the presence of their body, make political reality present. Through them political reality emerges, appears, and becomes increasingly fictive as the complexity of the appearance grows. The “political” means physical movements of these people, the movement between, for, towards human beings, that brings politics to them. This is life stemming from the creative energy of politics. Our princes in their workshops know best. They cannot fail to discover, if they didn’t already know, that there is no one behind them, that it is they who must capture the movements of politics, direct, orchestrate and guide them—in short, they must govern. They are concrete persons present as individuals to make politics appear: the presence of politics in its physical, personal representation. That explains—let us emphasize once again—why our princes attach such importance to the sense of the “anecdotal” vision, this look at detail, the particular impression in which is condensed everything they would like to discuss. That also explains quite well why our princes feel such a lasting, obsessive and insatiable interest in their counterparts in the workshop. What kind of man (or woman) is he (or she)? Who is he (she)? Obviously, the question concerns the concrete person, and they hope that this person will appear through the desired answers. But when one wonders about the human person, one is asking above all another question, the real question: what is important about this person? What is the political element that mobilizes and directs this person, giving them their capacities, making them, in one way or another, a figure in the universe of power? Who is Reagan? Who is Gorbachev? Of course, one would like to know who they are as men, but one would especially like to know what the man Reagan or the man Gorbachev understands and says about power, abilities, influence, knowledge, ideas of culture and experience in human things, the inner attitudes that condition his behavior. Every human character exerts a political influence in his or her own way, the question is thus also to know their qualities: Imperious? Peaceful? Tolerant? Fair? Brave? Wise?

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Yes, just what is it exactly? And who provides the answer? They who ask the question have the best view. A glance bearing a diagnosis, worthy of that of a doctor or a secret agent, enables them to draw out the most concrete details from the concrete person who has become the object of their concern. But however close they get to a response (as in the portraits we have already sketched), they are always the ones who ask the questions. That does not, however, constitute the whole structure of the question asked and the answer. Here again is something amazing: one wonders who the other is, the partner in the workshop. Who is he (she)? Who is Margaret Thatcher? Who is Helmut Kohl? Who is Mikhail Gorbachev? This is what is amazing: it is Gorbachev himself (for example) who reveals himself and, without anyone having asked him, gives an answer to the question that was not (of course) asked of him in this form: Who is Gorbachev? As we have said, everything that is political takes on a reality in the physical and personal representation given by concrete and private persons. When one wants to bring out one’s own political dimension, one does so by representing oneself. Gorbachev says or shows or illustrates: Here is “Gorbachev”; and he says, shows or illustrates: Here is what is politically real in Gorbachev. I shall give three examples by way of illustration. This choice was made in keeping with persons who play essential roles in this book. In the first example, it is Gorbachev who shows himself; in the second, it is Mitterrand; and in the third and most detailed, it is a German chancellor and a French president, Kohl and Mitterrand who introduce themselves to the other: that moment is the beginning of this personal relationship that will have extraordinary creative power for Germany, for France and for Europe. On July 18, 1986, François Mitterrand tells his guest Hans-Dietrich Genscher: Gorbachev’s human behavior is also quite different. We were together in a car in Moscow, and he stopped not far from the University and told me: “That’s where I met my wife. It was fantastic! We got married after a year, obviously without telling my parents.” His temperament contrasts sharply with those we knew. You have the feeling of having a modern man across from you, someone you might have met in Washington, London or Tokyo.30

During their meeting on June 28, 1984, in the middle of a discussion on security issues, Henry Kissinger asked his host, François Mitterrand, about his personal library in Latche. Mitterrand readily agreed to discuss the

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subject and explained the relationship that the politician “Mitterrand” had with his books: FM It’s certain that in Los Angeles the complexity of Europe is not always fully understood: national pride. HK “There’s not just that! I remember having seen your library in Latche; it was quite well stocked, and the books looked like they’d been read! I don’t believe this is the case with a lot of current leaders. FM I can’t say I’ve read them all: I’ve read quite a few of them … And when I buy a book, even when I can’t read it immediately, I touch it, leaf through it and have the impression of knowing it a bit. At the moment, I’m rereading Zola.31

On October 4, 1982, three days after having been elected federal chancellor, Helmut Kohl went to Paris to see Mitterrand. During their conversation both spoke a great deal about themselves: Kohl to Mitterrand: I reiterate my thanks to you for receiving me on such short notice: if I was anxious to come, it was to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind as to the importance I attach to Franco-German relations, as much from the personal point of view as from the political. But first, if you will permit me, I should like to situate myself a bit: I am Palatine, from Ludwigshafen, 25 minutes by car from the French border, and I have personal experience in Franco-German relations. I can give you an example: when I was 13 or 14, I found myself in Neustadt-on the-Weinstrasse. There, in a Catholic convent, was an internment center for French politicians, and a monk pointed someone out to me, explaining it was Robert Schuman. And a few years later, in 1950, after I had finished high school, thanks to Adenauer with whom I’ve always been quite close even though I later had differences with him in the context of the Party, I obtained an appointment with this same Robert Schuman. That was a typical experience for a German. I was 15 in 1945, so I knew the war and the Nazi period. Moreover, at the time, my parents’ situation was not exactly flourishing. But as a citizen of the Palatinate, I am a Francophile in the best sense of the term. Furthermore, our dialect includes numerous French words. And we were a French département for ten years, up until 1815. My wife is from Leipzig, but she is quite familiar with the French language and culture as she often comes to France. Mitterrand to Kohl: You are indeed the first “post-war” chancellor, and you come from a Catholic background. That is my case, too, or at least, I

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was raised in those surroundings and have remained faithful to what is most profound in them. But you spoke of Robert Schuman. You know I had personal ties with him: he chose me as a junior minister, and Schuman and Mendès-France both played an important role in my life; I was their collaborator. Then I was in the opposition for 26 years. You were in it only 13 years. I was young in my political beginnings: I was 30 and, after seven years, I left the government for a quarter-century. It was an experience that allowed me to distance myself from events and see historical reality more clearly, not getting lost in political details. I often tell how the first time I found myself in Germany it was as a prisoner of war. I tried to escape but failed. Then I succeeded, so I was, so to speak, doubly a prisoner. I failed twice but succeeded the third time […] I must say that, personally, I rather liked Germany. Neither I nor my little group ever ran into a brutal or even exaggeratedly repressive German. My “first Germans” were those I met in 1941–42, and I am still in touch with them.32 Then there was the Résistance and the Occupation, with all the dramas that those imply. But I always kept the same idea and, in ’45, I was amongst the first French members of parliament to participate in a congress in The Hague with German members of parliament, two years after the war. In fact, I am quite sensitive to what Germany represents, its culture. You are young. This is only a stage in your life. But we can both serve our countries. Kohl to Mitterrand: I’d like to speak to you very openly, as a young man can to an older man whom he trusts. You are a man of history and literature, as am I. And I believe that in history there are several periods: periods when decisions mature, periods when they are made, and periods when they have their repercussions.33 If I’m not mistaken, it seems that the coming years will be years when decisions must be made, especially in the area of foreign policy and security. I hope that Geneva will speed up disarmament because if there are no results this autumn, we are absolutely decided to install missiles, regardless of the resistance we encounter. We know the value of peace. I said so to Brezhnev when I saw him last fall. I want to tell you something: my grandfather had a son who died in the Great War; his other son, my father, named his eldest son after him, and my elder brother died in World War II. My son has the same name as my brother and is just beginning his military service. He knows full well what freedom is, and we want to take up the challenge that consists of preserving both freedom and peace.34

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Hannah Arendt wrote that the common space of politics is established between men only at the moment when they reveal themselves to each other.35 In the configurative context of strategic conversations, here called the “workshop of world politics,” precisely such moments create a space of political creativity. The partners of these workshop conversations reveal themselves; they appear to one another: Gorbachev shows who Gorbachev is; Mitterrand discovers how Kohl sees himself; the French president opens up to a German chancellor and talks about the sympathy he felt for Germany when he was being held as a prisoner of war there. It is not by coincidence that the partners speak so often about the confidence and trust they grant the other, their interlocutor in the strategic conversation. A sphere of confidence has to be created so that Gorbachev (or Kohl or Mitterrand) reach that point and then show in joint meetings who “Gorbachev,” “Kohl,” “Mitterrand” is.36 But, of course, no one here thinks of presenting his own person for the sole pleasure of showing it. This portrayal of one’s individuality must, on the contrary, bring out the political element that one embodies. One makes political use of the trust that has been established; the meeting between persons is a meeting aimed at political power and the business of government. One appears in the workshop in order to act through the workshop. What happens between partners in the workshop creates a basis beyond the workshop on which they can consequently act. The unfolding of an interpersonal space enables the unfolding of a space of political creativity. “Interest in forming personal bonds,” Douglas Brinkley writes of Ronald Reagan, “was especially distinct in his meetings with world leaders.”37 The process of reflections, negotiations and decisions that eventually led to the reunification of Germany was extraordinary for it had to capture revolutionary mutations with far-reaching effects and open onto new political forms. The art of politics was challenged to the utmost and had to muster all the creative energy and imagination of which it was capable. Who should give form to what and how? Such was the first and seemingly overwhelming question which the events raised. The answer was no easier to come up with since it was necessary to admit that politics was involved in a truly historic competition with revolutionary upheavals. It was by no means certain—this was the decisive political question throughout the entire process—that politics would succeed at the heart of “anarchistic” changes which threatened to elude it, to provide enough creative energy to capture these transformations and convert them into a figuration of

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“order.” To put it in theatrical terms: the actors were discovering themselves within a play in which they were acting but of which none had seen a script to which they would have to conform. It was still up to them to write the play that they were already performing, inventing the lines as they went along. They had to work, during the performance, on the staging they were presenting to the world. The “German unity play” was indeed written, and herein the decisive players were creative indeed. They knew each other, having worked in the workshop and, having shared this experience and trained themselves in political creativity, knew how they could work together on the extraordinary play they had to write. We shall have the occasion to see this in detail. To conclude our general observations on the workshop of world politics, let us again survey some of the modes by which creative politics is formed, that is, as “craftsmanship.” The actors in the workshop are aware of this and talk about it. In the aforementioned meeting between the former West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, and his visitors from the Élysée on February 5, 1987, he reminded them who was the author of the new structures for a Europe under construction. It was, he said, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president of France at the time, who was the first to talk about a “two-speed Europe,” followed by Pierre Mauroy, prime minister of the first Mitterrand government.38 But others were also working in the field of conceptualizing Europe. The notion of a “two-speed Europe” could please Mauroy, but not his president, François Mitterrand. To this mechanistic conception he preferred a geometrical conception, which, in his opinion, was much more adequate to reality. And Mitterrand was, of course, aware of the fact that the name given to something contributes to shaping it. “Thirty years ago,” he said to Schmidt on October 8, 1981 at Latche, “the problem of Europe was not knowing whether it was going to be made by eight, six or thirteen [countries]. It was a matter of establishing an absolutely solid relationship between France and Germany and building a ring of countries around it.” He preferred another notion to the idea of a “two-speed Europe,” one used by Jacques Delors, both of whom found it more suitable, for the European evolution, to speak of a “Europe at a variable geometry” (meaning different degrees of unification among European states)39 At the meeting with Schmidt that took place the evening before, Mitterrand had himself, however, relativized his own taste for geometrical concepts. Crafting political concepts that work is clearly difficult. In the case of Franco-German relations, Mitterrand explained, he wanted nothing like a “Paris-Bonn axis,” instead proposing the formula of a “special

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friendship between our two countries,” which was however so inelegant that it subsequently turned out impossible to apply.40 In the workshop, it is known: work on concepts is nothing less than work on the forms of political reality within which and towards which this work is leading. Concepts give shape, language creates reality. In his conversation with President Mitterrand in Bonn, on October 22, 1982, Chancellor Kohl expressed concern—approximately midway through the meeting—about the press conference that was to follow and the agreement that still had to be negotiated on the linguistic presentation of what had been discussed between France and Germany (by Mitterrand and himself). He stressed that “our thinking regarding [military] security” was a particularly delicate point. The word “cooperation,” Kohl noted, “poses problems because it immediately suggests the prospect of a nuclear cooperation. In German, we must instead use the word Abstimmung (consultation).”41 Out of concern for the world situation (and the objectives that had to be defended and imposed there), one works meticulously in the workshop, the large-scale creative work consisting of small, craft-like details upon which very great care is lavished. During their October 21st meeting in Bonn, Kohl and Mitterrand spent a good while discussing the seemingly simple—one might even say “banal”—question of setting the date for the next G7 economic summit. In fact, it turned out that this choice of date, beyond its formal aspect—at least from Mitterrand’s point of view, which Kohl shared—, was also the fundamental question of the way in which one organized oneself both in the workshop and in the surrounding field of politics. In the workshop, people intervene but represent nations. The persons who organize themselves in the workshop must therefore think that it is nations and not individuals who are getting together, for between nations there is a thoroughly determined type of relations from which one does not stray. Mitterrand thus showed himself to be implacable on the question of the date, which was “seemingly” a detail: The Chancellor: I would now like to speak to you about the date of the economic summit. The President: The month of June poses problems for me. I would have preferred July. President Reagan did not deal with my response and has just set the date for the month of June. The Chancellor: I even think it’s the month of May—May 28 to 30. The President: Yes, but he set that date without taking my opinion into consideration, so this summit will take place without me.

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The Chancellor: That’s not possible. There must be a solution. The President: It could take place in July as was the case in Ottawa. That would be completely natural. But there was no proper discussion. Under those conditions, it will be the Prime Minister. The Chancellor: In that case, it won’t be a summit. The President: Almost.42

Since they were already on the theme of summit meetings, Mitterrand continued and, prompted by constructive exasperation, delivered a fundamental critique of the workshop in its current form: Moreover, the summits cannot continue to take place like the last two, in Ottawa and Versailles. They end up turning into a propaganda office. While discussions are going on, one member of the delegation that made concessions goes into an adjoining room to see journalists and declare that “the concessions we have made are of no importance”. Serious problems arise after the summit. In Ottawa, President Reagan wanted to show that he was the world heavyweight champion. There were some thirty French journalists and more than two hundred Americans. As I said, that turned into a propaganda office.43

Mitterrand had another idea of what the workshop was. He wanted personal conversations and nothing else. And indeed, all creative activity in the workshop begins with this stage. The conversations from which it emerges must be started in such a way that they truly are conversations: I want to point out to you,” he explained to Kohl, “what my conception of a summit is. It should bring together eight or nine leaders behind closed doors, in a few rooms surrounded by a beautiful garden. No contact should take place with the press until the press conference that should occur at the end. I was doubtless wrong in doing at Versailles what was done in Ottawa, but I did not have the experience. At Versailles we were three per country; three times seven equals twenty-one, plus the representatives of the Community, makes twenty-four, surrounded by two hundred functionaries. It turned into negotiations and no longer had the nature of summit conversations. If it is a matter of conducting negotiations, we have ministers for that. Since the Rambouillet summit, where Mr. Giscard d’Estaing had brought together four or five participants, there has been a prejudicial distortion. These summits have become spectacles. I’m not criticizing, I’m observing. And what is needed are direct conversations.44

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Notes 1. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 7, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). —The German report on the meeting can be found in: Akten. Aus. Pol., 1536–1544. 2. See Schabert, The German Question is a European Question, 176-–178. 3. This letter is quoted below, after the French version of the telegraph communicated to Mitterrand on August 19, 1982 by West Germany’s chargé d’affaires in Paris, Ewald Mühlen, via the Élysée chief of staff, Jean-Louis Bianco. After reading it, the President returned this version of the letter to Bianco, having noted on it “for answer.” 4. Shortly after taking office, Mitterrand had his first conversation with Kissinger as president of France. For him, it was of such importance that he spoke about it at the August 5, 1981 Cabinet meeting. Kissinger, said he, was a “man who remains important and in a position to inform Reagan” (CM, August 5, 1981). At the Élysée, Kissinger’s visits to Mitterrand were counted; October 17, 1986 was the seventh since 1982. 5. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting in Latche, October 7, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Bad Kreuznach, October 30, 1984 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 10. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Bonn, October 22, 1982 (AGAN/5(4)/CD/72). 11. Ibid. 12. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 7, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 13. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Bonn, November 7, 1985 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/72). 14. The Reagan Diaries, 250. 15. A report of this conversation was made by the French party: Voyage à Hambourg (5 février 1987). Audience accordée par Helmut Schmidt à Régis Debray, Élisabeth Guigou et Hubert Védrine. 16. Ibid. 17. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 7, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 18. Ibid. 19. Report of the Mitterrand-Kissinger meeting in Paris, June 28, 1984 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/74).

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20. Mitterrand is referring to the European Council meeting in Stuttgart, June 17 and 19, 1983. 21. Report of the Mitterrand-Kissinger meeting in Paris, June 28, 1984 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/74). 22. Ibid. 23. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting in Paris, July 18, 1986 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 24. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at the Château de Chambord, March 28, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73 Dossier 1). 25. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bad Kreuznach, October 30, 1984 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 26. Ibid. 27. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 21, 1982 (AGAN/5(4)/CD/72). 28. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, November 7, 1985 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/72).—See the studies subsequently published on this subject that confirm the remarks of Mitterrand’s embassy advisor: Odom, The Collapse; Barylski, The Soldier. 29. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 21, 1982 (AGAN/5(4)/CD/72). 30. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting in Paris, July 18, 1986 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 31. Report of the Mitterrand-Kissinger meeting in Paris, June 28, 1984 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/74). 32. Concerning Mitterrand’s period as prisoner of war, Giesbert, Mitterrand, 43–47; Védr., 123–125; Legrand, Chroniques, 40–46; Harpprecht, Im Kanzleramt, 534 (François Mitterrand’s narrative to Willy Brandt on his experience as a prisoner of war in Germany). 33. Helmut Kohl made the same distinction, “based on the philosophy of history,” in his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev on October 24, 1988. See Gorb.a., 74. 34. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Paris, October 4, 1982. 35. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chap. V, §§ 24, 28, 29. 36. Mikhail Gorbachev speaks in his Memoirs (671) about the “good political and personal rapport” he had with Helmut Kohl, as in his book Wie es war, 75. George H.  W. Bush speaks of his special relationship with François Mitterrand in World.Trans. (76). On the friendly and productive relationship in the Franco-German workshop, see Gensch., 379ff. 37. The Reagan Diaries, XI–XII. 38. Voyage à Hambourg (5 février 1987). Audience accordée par Helmut Schmidt à Régis Debray, Élisabeth Guigou et Hubert Védrine.

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39. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 8, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 40. Ibid. 41. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 22, 1982 (AGAN/5(4)/CD/72). 42. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 21, 1982 (AGAN/5(4)/CD/72). The economic summit was finally held on May 29 and 30  in Williamsburg, Virginia with the participation of François Mitterrand. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.

CHAPTER 4

World Politics, European Politics, and German Politics: “The Grand Strategy”

Principles of Foreign Policy Mitterrand knew what he wanted for France in terms of foreign policy. He had very precise ideas on the objectives that his country’s foreign policy should follow and established priorities among these objectives, spreading them out, lining them up, and regrouping them according to their importance and urgency. At the Élysée, the head of state was perfectly aware of what France had to be, do, and achieve in the world. When he felt like it (which was not always the case), he presented in clear, resolute terms his thinking in the sphere of foreign policy—and above all, security policy— through which he managed to apprehend his thoughts on the issue with great conceptual coherence. He could also subsequently rise to the rank of representative of the political projects that he laid out and speak with the voice of a visionary. But he was not a visionary. His were practical virtues, those “hard” qualities that are indispensable for imposing something in the political world: obstinacy which makes time an ally; perseverance, which gradually paralyzes the energies of the resistance; constancy in principles, which also ends up by impressing the adversary and creates a community between the partners of an alliance that nurtures it. From Mitterrand’s point of view these virtues, isolated or combined, serve no purpose if another practical quality is not added to them: the intellectual virtue of being so consistent in the coherence of his own thinking that when the going gets tough, he does not think twice about continuing or © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_4

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straying from the path, moved by a desire not to bruise others. One remains “firm,” and this constancy can, of course, sometimes be seen and considered, when so wished, as a mark of faithfulness and reliability, sometimes, when it is painful, as a sign of inflexibility or even the expression of an implacable character. The internal cohesion of Mitterrand’s foreign policy would remain concealed were this particular “virtue”—the virtue of constancy—not seen in his foreign policy behavior. Or else it would not really be understood. In these pages we will constantly keep this in mind when necessary, especially when speaking of conditions that had to be negotiated around the external aspects of German unity. For in the course of these negotiations, and especially on the issue of the Oder-Neisse border, Mitterrand, Germany’s reliable friend, proved implacable. Was that contradictory? Or difficult to comprehend? Or horrendously complex? One or the other is possible, but his behavior in the sphere of foreign policy cannot simply be deciphered, classified, and filed away as if it were solely a matter of methodically tackling the external impressions he left in order to study and explain them from top to bottom. For a standard treatment of this type Mitterrand’s behavior in foreign policy is indeed too many-sided, extended, able to be read on many levels, much too marked by movement, change of perspectives, diversity of presentation. Might it therefore be useless to seek a key that would grant access to this behavior? No, for that key exists, and on the label attached to it, so that it might be found again, we read the word “principles.” Mitterrand followed a foreign policy based on principles, letting himself be guided by a few of them that were, for him, established in a clear, lasting way. Two of them have already been presented here: the principle of a balance of power in relations between states (or groups of states) and the principle of a freedom that had to be placed above all else—but to which its “order” had to be brought. We shall soon present and study in greater detail two other principles but first, it is necessary to underline and exclude a possibly fatal misunderstanding. The principles, once converted into the acts and the objectives of Mitterrand’s foreign policy, constituted a coherent, in no way hermetic, system; on the contrary, they rubbed shoulders, certainly not in a totally disjointed way but in such a way that they might be shifted in relation to each other and put into a different outline in different ways, without necessarily nullifying the former outline. They were thus elements of a highly complex structure endowed with a dual mobility: on the one hand, in the variable arrangement of principles

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in relation to one another, and on the other, in the simultaneous regrouping of different arrangements of this type. Such a structure, owing to its flexibility, does not constitute a system but sometimes contains flagrant contradictions. That did not bother Mitterrand—quite the opposite. He wanted to stick to his foreign policy principles and remain attached to his objectives. Yet a more solid structure and a fortiori a system defining these objectives would have hindered him, forcing him to constantly bend, adapt and neglect (or betray?) some of them. Consequently, he accepted the contractions, and they proved the clarity of his perception of the world. On June 13, 1981, King Khaled of Saudi Arabia was received at the Élysée, the first visit of a foreign head of state to the newly elected president of the French Republic. In his welcoming speech, Mitterrand hailed this visit as it deserved: this meeting with the king had a “highly symbolic signification in the troubled period that the world was going through.” After thanking the president for the welcome, the king read a brief text written in advance on Franco-Arab relations and the situation in the Middle East. He then asked the French president to lay out for him “his ideas on the major problems of the moment.”1 Mitterrand did not begin with that but first brought up the whole new situation in France. The change of power that had occurred in his country, he explained to the king, had to be described as “proof of maturity and democratic vitality”—this was the first thing he pointed out to his visitor. But then he responded to the latter’s request and launched into a discourse of nearly a half-hour in which, as was later noted, he “drew up for his guest the chart of our country’s foreign relations.”2 It might be said that this was the new president’s first summit meeting with an interlocutor from another civilization who above all wanted to hear Mitterrand speak about the major problem in his region: the Arab-­ Israeli conflict. Mitterrand also spoke about the Near East, but only after having broached other topics. He was manifestly following a certain idea of the way he ought to depict his country’s foreign relations. Franco-­ American relations were already appearing as the second priority in French foreign policy, followed immediately by France’s relations with the Soviet Union. In the following priority, the fourth, the president mentioned the presence of France in the Mediterranean world, next going on to the Middle East, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and, to finish, the Third World. But, just before, he had obviously outlined the first priority, for an Arab guest who certainly had other priorities. And what did one see in this first diplomatic

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outline that Mitterrand drew in presenting his foreign policy? Europe and … Germany.

The Lucky Star “France,” as the recently elected president explained to the king of Saudi Arabia, “is resolved to carry out an active, firmly European policy within the EEC, while preserving the autonomy of its decisions. Its relations with the Federal Republic of Germany, which constitute a keystone of Europe, will remain good as they traditionally have been.”3 Concise, unambiguous words. The French president had formulated two other guiding lines of his foreign policy: Europe, and Germany. The two names symbolized a fundamental orientation of France’s action in foreign policy, and Mitterrand, who knew the importance of language, expressed it with the words he had chosen: “France is resolved to carry out an active, firmly European policy.” And he used still other words, concepts and formulas to express these two orientations. Let us listen successively to the way in which he spoke of the “Europe” objective and the “Germany” orientation that he implied: Europe must wake up (François Mitterrand to the Portuguese president, António Eanes, July 29, 1981)4 It comes down to the renaissance of the European spirit (François Mitterrand to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, October 8, 1981)5 Historically, the necessity of Europe is obvious (François Mitterrand to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, October 21, 1982)6 As regards the Russians, we want to have a positive attitude but do not, for all that, wish to abandon our European projects. There is a slight contradiction here, but we will always give priority to Europe, to Western Europe. (François Mitterrand to Henry Kissinger, June 28, 1984)7

These were penetrating phrases, and it was not coincidental, for Europe, according to Mitterrand, still largely eluded Europeans. “Europe has been at a standstill for years”: this was the observation he made in July 1981, a few months after taking power, to the Portuguese head of state, António Ramalho Eanes.8 During a meeting with President Ronald Reagan, in

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March 1984, he admitted that “Europe [did not have] its identity.”9 And in his long discussions with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, on October 7–8, 1981, at Latche, Mitterrand spoke of gaps in the political substance of the European construction, as it had been built up until then. The European Community was no longer inspired by a “great thought.” Henceforth, however, there were numerous important political problems concerning which it would be easy to establish a common European policy. He mentioned Afghanistan, Poland, Africa, Latin America, Namibia … Even in the case of the Middle East, he thought, this would be possible with a few adaptations. “If we increase this kind of stance, Europe will at last have political thinking,” explained the French president to his German guest. But what good did this appeal to European inspiration, this visionary flight of thought do? Schmidt had no trouble bringing the “philosopher-­ president” back to the reality of the quarrels of European shopkeepers. “But what does Mrs. Thatcher think of all that?” And Mitterrand had to admit: “She is quite remote from all that. Europe’s originality is not perceptible to her.”10 It is no less true that the prime minister’s Anglo-centric obstinacy was greeted by this French president with his own personal obstinacy, and with an irony that often made Margaret Thatcher’s verbal political blows subside, and often went over her head. Mitterrand quite obviously cared deeply about the principle of Europe. In a world dominated by power, a balance of power had to reign between the dominant powers—this was, for him, the “central principle,”11 the “golden rule,”12 and it was this that gave Europe its meaning in world policy. So he explained it on June 16, 1986, to the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Hua Guofeng: “Europe is a factor of balance in the world.”13 Directing his Chinese guest’s gaze toward Europe, Mitterrand explained: in France’s eyes, he said, Europe was essentially, albeit not exclusively, structured around the European Community. Europe had set for itself the ambitious creation of a single market between then and 1992 and, said he, “in this Europe, the relationship with Germany is essential.”14 France and Germany constituted a pair, and for Mitterrand it was not possible to continue advancing on the road to European unity if one did not advance on Germany’s. In other words, insofar as Germany and France were placed under the sign of “Europe,” each saw the other in the same picture. It showed them as they had not known each other very long. But it also showed them in such a way that they no longer wanted to know each other otherwise. Europe had made each of the countries the lucky

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star of the other. How true it was—and how unusual. Both countries could only repeat to one another: may the Franco-German constellation shine in the European sky. This was the case on June 25, 1984, at Fontainebleau, where the heads of state and government of the European Community had gathered in the European Council. François Mitterrand related the trip he had made shortly before to Moscow,15 his meetings with members of the Soviet government, a rather gloomy state banquet—if we are to believe the term he used for describing it16 —and a military ceremony in Volgograd (the former Stalingrad).17 From the Russian point of view, this ceremony celebrated the decisive victory of the Soviet Army over the Wehrmacht, but what had he perceived, what had he said, participating in it? Mitterrand was able to surprise his listeners, that eminent collegial public of the European Council, with his affirmations—in the same way that he was able to have surprised his Soviet guests with certain elements of the speech he gave in Volgograd.18 For he revealed to them a sensitive, clairvoyant mind that projected itself in history, perceived an overturning of historic symbols and did not think twice about discussing them publicly and asking in what gallery of the future one would rethink the hanging of History’s pictures. (Mitterrand would accomplish an analogous act eleven years later in Berlin, in May 1995.)19 In Volgograd, he explained, “we celebrated a military event. I commented that it was quite far off, that the world had changed. The enemy countries of Europe would be called to build, with the others, Europe and peace. That was in stark contrast to the usual comments.”20 Mitterrand continued to recount, fully finding the style of one who manages governmental affairs as a professional. Next it was Helmut Kohl’s turn to speak. The chancellor had obviously heard Mitterrand’s remarks, which were addressed to Europeans and among them, of course, to Germans. Above all, he corrected an idea that was held about Germans in the midst of Europeans. The world had changed. Stalingrad, the symbol of the war, should now be the symbol of peace, of a Europe in peace. Kohl had understood this, all the more so in that he knew the content of Mitterrand’s speech in Volgograd and therefore did not immediately adopt, for his part, the professional tone of this meeting. On the contrary, he addressed himself to Mitterrand and, in the framework of the European Council, expressed his thanks for “what you said about German soldiers in Stalingrad. Your remarks are inspired by the

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Europe of today. It is also a matter of Franco-German relations, and that will have a tremendous effect.”21 That could indeed be the case. With the advantage consisting of knowing more about today about “the tremendous effect,” one might say, with a bit less distance, that that might be the case. France and Germany constituted a pair for the Europe of the future at the time when, first François Mitterrand and Helmut Schmidt, then François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, were pleading in favor of this pair. Certainly. And the Franco-­ German star shone in the European firmament. Without a doubt—and they said it to each other so as not to forget it: Europe had made both those countries the lucky star of the other. How true it was. And how exceptional.

Three Unresolved Problems And yet there remained three unresolved problems. It seemed that the first would be quite difficult to resolve if it ever could be someday; the second might never be at all; and the third might perhaps find a solution but only in a distant future. The awareness of this reality subjected this extraordinary friendship to a tension that was equally extraordinary. A couple at ease? No, a couple prey to worry inspired by the idea that each was made for the other but that, nonetheless, were separated by events; a couple that would have liked to understand what separated it and did not see how to go about it; that could have imagined solutions and, on the path leading to them, discovered seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Would that not make them lose courage? Would they abandon the awareness of the fact that they could still gather their forces so that the couple become increasingly solid and someday indissociable? Would they not have good grounds for giving up or, worse, despairing, believing they are in the falseness of a hypocritical gesture, telling each other that Franco-­ German relations could exert a “tremendous effect”? But there was this singular familiarity between them that pleaded on their behalf—an interweaving in the dialogue that created indissociable bonds without which they could not carry on the debate on problems that could provoke dislocation. We see that none of these three problems could distance France and Germany far from the other—neither the economic imbalance between the two countries, nor the issue of nuclear war, nor the “German problem,” the question of divided Germany at the center of

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Europe. Dialogue was stronger, giving substance to a power more formative than that of the political realities that always dominated. To weave other links into this narrative, let us come back to the February 5, 1987 meeting in Hamburg, at which Helmut Schmidt had received three of Mitterrand’s collaborators—Régis Debray, Élisabeth Guigou, and Hubert Védrine—and, more specifically, to the passage already noted above, in which the former chancellor presented his interpretation of the French strategy, that is, France’s security policy. Mitterrand, he was saying, believed in the autonomy of French strategic deterrent and, judging from his tone of voice, this met with his total approval. His next remark, which began with a term expressing his objection, appeared all the more critical: “But he remains quite cautious in terms of Europe, as if he wanted to do nothing that might give others the impression of French or even FrancoGerman leadership.”22 Such modesty, commented the former chancellor to his visitors from Paris, was not in keeping with the image France was giving of itself. As if wanting to hold up a mirror before them in which they might see themselves and their own country, he added: “It is necessary to understand what the profound desire of the French is, what idea they themselves have of France. First of all, they want to be respected as one of the leading nations, spiritually and culturally, of the world. OK, no problem up to there.”23 Up to there. For elsewhere, there was a problem: a Franco-German problem that fundamentally upset the strategic debate. France could certainly be a nuclear power and, in that sense, largely superior to Germany on the world stage. But from the point of view of world economy, it was a weak country and, in comparison, weaker than West Germany. Two primordial material conditions of the Franco-German relationship apparently gave it a fundamental distortion. How could France and Germany still be partners, that is, approximately equal as regards their rank? Or else, in one way or another, how could one manage this inequality in the relationship? Was it possible to speak about dealing with this question without coming up with practical arrangements to get through it pragmatically? Let us begin with Helmut Schmidt describing the problem bluntly: But they would always want to be a world power; well there, it has to be understood, 56 million Frenchmen, even with nuclear weapons, it’s really too small for that. France would like to be Number 3 after the United States and the USSR, but there is China, so France can reasonably aspire only to fourth place. And it will increasingly have to reckon with the rising forces

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such as Japan on the economic level, for instance. One of France’s problems is its financial capacities. France’s weight in the world market is quite weak, the result presenting a great danger: the rise in France of a feeling of envy towards Germany; and this from a feeling of arrogance that I have already been able to witness. Before, it might have been believed that France’s hope was to catch up with the German economy; now, one has the impression that, in this regard, France is giving up.24

Schmidt was pouring salt into a Franco-German wound, and his guests doubtless did not take much consolation from the fact that he added, as if to soothe the pain, that by the standard of the real balance of power in the contemporary world, Germany was no more than 23rd among the political powers. He had openly stated the problem that tormented him and had done so with his customary tendency of not mincing words: in the economic sphere, there was a gap between Germany and France that humbled France in relation to Germany. In France, this was experienced as a painful reality and intolerable for relations between the two countries. What was to be done? France fought—or at least tried to—but in a completely different sphere than the economic one, having an antidote of which it could make perfectly effective use: before 1989, it had indeed managed to use it, to a not-inconsiderable degree, to compensate for this economic gap in relation to Germany. This was its nuclear force. But it was also the cause of the second, even weightier, problem effecting Franco-German relations. At the time, we may recall, what a divided Germany needed most was protection against the absolute threat, the terrifying effect exerted by the idea of Armageddon: Germany would disappear in a nuclear war. Thus, its survival depended on others; its security was on loan. No other issue in Germany was more urgent than its existence, and in no area did Germany have less freedom to decide the issue. Others—including France—held the full power to maintain a state of peace in Germany; Germany (in its two halves) was prisoner to the threat hanging over its existence, hostage to the question of nuclear war. But let us return to the Hamburg meeting: who began the conversation and on what? The question is interesting for its answer, which is quite remarkable in our context: It was one of the visitors, Régis Debray, who opened the conversation, and the first subject he brought up was France’s nuclear protection from which Germany could benefit. He began by asking Schmidt in what concrete form he might imagine “the extension of a

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French nuclear guarantee to Germany,” taking into account the well-­ known constraints imposed by nuclear weapons.25 It was the explosive question, the question in Franco-German relations to which, since it had been asked, France had never given anything but evasive responses. Germany, which needed protection, was trapped by the prospect of rescue, but then left hanging. With his coded language, Debray once again showed that nothing was being proposed. On the contrary, there was a proposal to renege on an offer that had already been made. According to French nuclear doctrine there was the possibility of exerting quite extraordinary political influence on Germany. France could, in a way, “play” with Germany as long as the latter continued to fear for its existence. This certainly did not simplify relations between the two nations, but that was not all: a completely different problem was posed alongside the question of knowing whether France would also ensure Germany’s security with its nuclear weapon. In the French arsenal were tactical nuclear weapons, which, if used, would perhaps hit the enemy that they were aimed at but assuredly would hit Germany. Launched from France, their range did not go beyond German soil. “You speak of your pre-strategic weapons,” Helmut Schmidt said brusquely to his guests. “What is this language? For you, the PLUTON weapon is strategic because it explodes on our soil.”26 The French were well familiar with this German position—under borrowed protection, they were first of all victims. When, at the Cabinet meeting on July 23, 1981, Mitterrand related the G7 summit that had just taken place in Ottawa, he still appeared impressed, before the members of the French government assembled around him, by the performance of Helmut Schmidt who, in an exchange of remarks with Ronald Reagan on security policy, had understood that, regardless of his efforts, he would obtain nothing from the American president and, at the end of his patience, had finally protested, according to Mitterrand, hurling these words at Reagan: “We are full of explosives, we can blow up—it’s the others who decide for us!”27 During their meeting at Latche on October 7, 1981, the German chancellor again drew the French president’s attention to the fact that the “German territory has become a veritable American arsenal.” “There are six thousand nuclear sites in Germany at the disposal of the American government.”28 And, a year later, on October 22, 1982, the new chancellor facing Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, once more stressed the particular situation of Germany, which was not participating in the decision-making on

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nuclear war. But it had to be clear that Germany could not be the battlefield.29 Mitterrand understood all that quite well. In his London meeting with President Eanes of Portugal, on July 29, 1981, he said, “The Federal Republic of Germany depends on the United States for its security and no longer wants to be the principal battle site.”30 Germany was living under someone else’s protection and did not want to be the first victim of its defense. But he naturally knew, speaking this way, that France’s tactical nuclear weapons would not hit “only” Germany. A while later, at Eanes’ instigation,31 he asked the decisive, the foremost question regarding Germany’s security: “If the Soviets entered the Federal Republic of Germany by conventional means, no one would be able to stop them up to the French border. Would the United States start a war? No one can say.”32 With borrowed protection, the Germans were on their own, and Mitterrand understood that extraordinarily well. Or to put it more precisely: the Germans were counting emotionally on a security that from a military point of view did not exist for them. François Mitterrand knew it (and said so during the workshop meetings); Helmut Schmidt knew it (and expressed it in the workshop). During the Hamburg conversation, the latter replied to Debray’s question (quoted above), saying that the real problem was that of “credibility” regarding the Germans, and this problem, Schmidt explained, was psychological. France thus has to show, he added a bit later in this meeting (and without abandoning hope), “that it understands the Germans and their anxiety and has to give us the feeling that it is ready to share our fate.” The military strategy was only one element in a whole which he himself called the “grand strategy.”33 The grand strategy. Quite obviously, nothing less was possible. Anguish and dissuasion, feelings and nuclear missiles necessarily had to be connected to each other. It was precisely about this kind of system—which recalls the classic conceptions of checks and balances of political powers— that Mitterrand was thinking when, regarding the security issue—that is, nuclear war—he laid out his reflections on a “balance.” He knew of a “grand strategy” (his own), without ever having formulated it as a systematic scientific whole. This strategy was in the course of conversations and meetings. We shall present it below. Mitterrand understood Germany’s situation perfectly—it was the most committed player and the weakest. He had nothing to object to the fact that Germany was “weak” and depended on the protection of others; to

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deny it, he would have had to neglect France’s interest in remaining present, with its influence, in Germany’s worrying about itself. On the other hand, he did not overcome the difficulty that, in his political thinking, sometimes irritated him, sometimes stimulated him: calculations for the sought-after balance were never made without considering Germany, which constituted the central problem. Above all, the grand strategy had to resolve the German problem. From Mitterrand’s and France’s point of view, Germany’s internal and external situation appeared anything but safe. Inside, forces tended toward imbalance in the same way that outside the country they aimed at balance. Or else, to assume the point of view of Mitterrand’s France: when wanting to resolve the nuclear war issue, it was necessary to want to resolve the German issue. What a conclusion! For is that exactly what France wanted? German unity? Really? And yet, what other intention did it have? What was the consequence of its own political logic, if not German unity? On October 2, 1985, the new secretary general of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev, went to France for his first official visit to a Western country. Upon arriving in Paris, Mitterrand went to fetch him and, about 5:30 pm, at the Élysée, the two leaders launched into a conversation that would last more than two hours. They spent almost all this time discussing the nuclear arms race between East and West, the resultant risk of nuclear war, and, from this extraordinarily disturbing observation, the fact that, as Mitterrand termed it, “one talks about disarmament and one does nothing but stockpile weapons.”34 Gorbachev and Mitterrand exchanged their views on ways of finding greater security in this situation. The French president presented his strategic ideas straightforwardly, knowing answers to the problems brought up—against America and for Europe; against the Soviet SS 20s and for balance; for a strong Europe and an entente with Russia. There was only one problem for which he had no sure answer and that was, he said, the central problem: the German problem. Faced with it, he explained, France and its president were divided, having not one but two answers to the German problem, and those did not really agree. Hence the third problem—the one that will concern us throughout this book—Franco-German relations. Thus Mitterrand said to Gorbachev: I am open-minded on every issue. I am the ally of the United States and, given the current balance of power in the world, I think that things must

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remain as they are. But we do not accept all the initiatives of our partners. I have criticized American policy in Central America before the United States Congress. I have, in the past, criticized the American intervention in Vietnam. I disapprove of what is going on in southern Africa. I am not enthusiastic about armament in space. And I say all that because I think it. I’m obviously not looking for tension with the United States but I have a straightforward opinion on each problem as soon as it relates to peace or war. I am in the same state of mind as concerns you. You are the leader of the opposite bloc but you are not my enemy. We are two sovereign countries. As concerns disarmament, I shall tell you the reasons for my hostility to the SS 20s, which was not hostility towards the Soviet Union itself. I make up my mind in the interests of France and shall speak to you about this in depth. Everything stems from a central principle: the balance of power in the world as in Europe. Anything that aggravates the imbalance is bad. I’m the ally of the United States, but that is a current political reality rather than a perspective. I want to reinforce Western Europe, and that is a prospect, but it must not be perceived by the USSR as regrettable. I don’t want a Europe that is the auxiliary of an offensive United States; I would not agree. If new possibilities of modus vivendi with the USSR open up, that would be a good thing. Naturally, at the center of all that is the German problem, which is quite difficult to grasp, and over which we are divided in France. My very mind is divided. On the one side, I wish nothing other than getting along fraternally with the Germans. Moreover, I do not want the restoration of a dominant pole at the center of Europe. In all that, you’ll see that I’m not speaking as a partisan. I was raised in history and I learned that, since the 16th century, these two countries, France and Russia, at the opposite ends of Europe, had almost continually been allies and friends. History and geography dictate constants. On the other hand, between these two countries, in the rest of Europe, things often occurred that were hostile to us.35

Notes 1. Report of the Mitterrand-Khaled meeting in Paris, June 13, 1981 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/66). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Report of the Mitterrand-Eanes meeting in London, July 29, 1981 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/66). A few lines after this, Mitterrand personally involved himself, saying: “I would like to awaken Europe.”

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5. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 8, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 6. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 21, 1982 (AG-­ AN/5(4)/CD/72). 7. Report of the Mitterrand-Kissinger meeting in Paris, June 28, 1984 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/74). 8. Report of the Mitterrand-Eanes meeting in London, July 29, 1981 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/66). 9. Report of the Mitterrand-Reagan meeting in Washington, March 22, 1984. 10. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 8, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 11. Mitterrand used this expression in a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at the Elysée on October 2, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/76, Dossier 2). 12. And this one in a conversation—his first—with the USSR’s ambassador to France, Stepan Chervonenko, which took place on July 31, 1981 at the Élysée. 13. Report of the Mitterrand-Hua Guofeng meeting in Paris, June 16, 1986 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/66). 14. Ibid. 15. The trip took place from June 20 to 23, 1984. 16. That also stemmed from the fact that Mitterrand spoke during this banquet about freedom, making specific allusions to Russian dissidents, and in particular sided with Andrei Sakharov: “In the evening, at dinner,” Mitterrand related at Fontainebleau, “it was tighter. Ivan the Terrible plus holy pictures … I made the decision to speak as clearly as possible. But an agreement binds us, that of Helsinki, in which the three baskets are interconnected [the “third basket” being that of human rights]. Remarks that would seem normal everywhere, but there, it is not customary. There was a shock. It was considered something not to be said. It all ended cordially … The next day, with Gromyko, we had very easy conversations, so it was erased, at least from the diplomatic standpoint.” (Report of the European Council meeting at Fontainebleau, July 25, 1984.) In his meeting with Henry Kissinger on June 28, 1984, Mitterrand gave the following version of it: “HK [Kissinger]: ‘It’s striking that it was you who, in Moscow, used the most critical language and it is certainly you who aroused the most respect on their side.’ FM: ‘The evening of my declaration, they were furious—not the five or six leaders, Chernenko, Gromyko, Ustinov, Gorbachev, Alyev … but all the others. The leaders were even quite cordial the next morning.’” (Report of the Mitterrand-Kissinger meeting in Paris, June 28, 1984/AN-AG/5(4)/CD/74). 17. The military ceremony in Volgograd took place the last day, Saturday, June 23, with Mitterrand giving a speech there.

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18. Report of the European Council meeting at Fontainebleau, July 25, 1984. 19. On May 8, 1995, François Mitterrand gave a speech in Berlin on the occasion of the 50th anniversary commemoration of the end of the war in Europe. This was one of his farewell speeches, before the end of his second seven-year term. It aroused a good deal of attention—and the aversion of some—owing to these phrases spoken toward the end of his speech: “I did not come to accentuate the defeat, because I knew what was strong in the German people, its virtues, its courage, and the uniform is of little importance to me, or even the ideas in the minds of those soldiers who were going to die in such great numbers. They were courageous. They accepted the loss of their life. For a bad cause, but their gesture had nothing to do with that. They loved their fatherland.” (Allocation prononcée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, à l’occasion des cérémonies commémoratives du cinquantième anniversaire de la fin de la guerre en Europe.) 20. Report of the European Council meeting at Fontainebleau, July 25, 1984. 21. Ibid. In his Volgograd speech, Mitterrand had praised the “bravery and recognized military valor” of the German soldiers who had to “give in before the determination and abnegation of the Soviet peoples.” And after having recalled the Soviet dead and paid them honor, he continued in these terms: “but I shall not forget the soldiers who found themselves facing each other at the time—Germans, Rumanians, Italians, Hungarians— who suffered and fell on this land far from their homes and their country, absurd victims of a suicidal system and madness. Sons of noble peoples, they have a full place or should have it in the construction of the world in which we are ourselves involved. Today’s reconciliations will overcome the old splits. This is what my country is trying to do.” (Allocation prononcée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, devant la «tombe commune des défenseurs de Stalingrad», Volgograd, June 23, 1984.) A year later, in his conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev on October 2, 1985, Mitterrand explained: “We do not forget your millions of dead to whom we owe a large share of our freedom, nor the defenders of Volgograd to whom I was anxious to pay homage during my trip.” (Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting, October. 2, 1985/AN-AG/5(4)/CD 76.Dossier 3.) 22. Voyage à Hambourg (5 février 1987). Audience accordée par Helmut Schmidt à Régis Debray, Élisabeth Guigou et Hubert Védrine. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.

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26. Ibid. See on this subject: Andrets, Les relations franco-allemandes, 649–664; Yost, France’s Deterrent Posture; Tiberghen, Puissance, 15; Boniface, La dissuasion nucléaire, 19–25. 27. CM, July 23, 1981. 28. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 7, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 29. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 22, 1982 (AGAN/5(4)/CD/72). In the aforementioned conversation of October 24, 1988, Helmut Kohl similarly said to Mikhail Gorbachev: “We do not want weapons accumulating on our territory … our ambition is not to sit on mountains of weapons” (Gorb.a., 73). See also Pond, Beyond the Wall, Chapter 4 “Nuclear Angst and Reassurance,” which gives a good insight into the problem if one is not interested in the French part, on which no information is given and about which no French book is mentioned in the long bibliographic essay. The opposite may be said of Alain Duhamel and his François Mitterrand. Portrait d’un artiste in which the French defense doctrine is presented in a thoroughly Franco-centric way, with no reference whatsoever to non-French thinking or studies. 30. Report of the Mitterrand-Eanes meeting in London, July 29, 1981 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/66). 31. More precisely, by this observation of Eanes’: “As concerns the German position on the Pershings, it may be explained by the fact that these missiles would be under American control whereas, paradoxically, Europe could not automatically count on them in the case of aggression. Seen from the East, the NATO strategy is to no longer automatically involve the United States in the event of attack.” 32. Report of the Mitterrand-Eanes meeting in London, July 29, 1981 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/66). 33. Voyage à Hambourg (5 février 1987). Audience accordée par Helmut Schmidt à Régis Debray, Élisabeth Guigou et Hubert Védrine. 34. Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting in Paris, October 2, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/76. Dossier 3). Mitterrand’s remark—“Naturally, at the center of all that lies the German problem”—is almost identical to a phrase that Charles de Gaulle formulated in his Memoirs, speaking about the situation of Europe and foreign policy in this area, when he was president of the Fifth Republic. He wrote: “At the heart of the problem, and in the center of Europe, lies Germany” (De Gaulle, Mémoires d’Espoir, 182). 35. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5

German Politics, European Politics, and World Politics: “Everything That Is Not Impossible Is Possible”

“World Balance Is Fragile” Mitterrand saw too many things and understood the phenomena of the world too well. That posed no problem for Mitterrand the person, who, on the contrary, drew from it his intellectual perspective and clear-sighted realism. For President Mitterrand, on the other hand, that could only become a problem—and an insoluble one to boot. As a person, François Mitterrand could assimilate political perceptions as they presented themselves, and raise them—not without a certain intellectual pleasure—to a level of critical clarity where they remained as they arrived, reported by a critical awareness that let itself be shaped by them rather than deforming them through haste. But as president, François Mitterrand, in this way, was not free from incoherence and indecision in his political thought and behavior; on the contrary, he was politically difficult and sometimes even incomprehensible. Thus, what distinguished Mitterrand the person and his extraordinary authenticity was not without negative consequences for Mitterrand the president. Politics, always pitiless in its demands—“Act! Make a decision! Choose from all the possibilities!”—did not tolerate the contradictions that he, Mitterrand—if not the president—would have tolerated with imperturbable calm. Such pathos is expressed in the words he found for the Germans: he wished nothing more than to get along with them © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_5

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fraternally. But how cold and clear were his own geopolitical positions on Germany, to the point that he adjusted Germany’s power in the space of Europe according to determined balances of power; he could not wish for the restoration of a dominant pole in the center of Europe. The two hopes contradicted each other, and he knew it. He was aware of the divided feelings that the German problem triggered in him. He undertook nothing against this contradiction, not attempting, for instance, to dismiss and isolate it. No, he did the opposite: not only did he go no further than his contradiction, in a way sticking with the heart of it, but he accentuated it again and again, always expressing it more clearly, commenting on it with greater élan, sometimes emphasizing one side, sometimes the other. More than anyone else, Mitterrand, in his reflections on the situation in Europe and especially on the crisis of the Soviet Union, integrated what he considered the natural desire of the Germans: overcoming their division into two states. And rare were those who, conversely, worried more than he about the order totally opposed to a reunification of Germany, the “Yalta” order as he called it, the lesser evil—that is how he viewed it—in relation to the much greater risk of seeing it collapse. He integrated the agitation caused by the unanswered German question into his calculation and accepted it as a historical force, prompting a change in Europe’s balance of power structure. But he also wanted, precisely, to use this structure in order to preserve an “order” for which any arousing of German worry was only a threat. He kept in mind the idea of a Europe in freedom. He never let that vision get away from a language of order. On October 2, 1985, he expressed himself quite clearly on that point to Gorbachev: “Note, I don’t approve of what has happened in Tehran. There, Stalin showed himself to be much cleverer than Roosevelt or Churchill. They shouldn’t have accepted all that. But this is 1985. World balance is fragile, boundaries are boundaries. They must not be touched.”1

“We Are Endeavoring to Remain Close to the Germans” But here’s the rub: politics is movement in all things. Duration exists only insofar as it succeeds in preserving in its movement and with this movement a mobility that allows for the subsistence of the movement(s) one wants to endure. In politics, “It must not be touched” meant it is necessary to use politics to preserve the pace of politics itself that must not

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disappear. Here, in Mitterrand’s words (to which Gorbachev reacted in a thoroughly positive manner), it would be the borders born of the Tehran and Yalta conferences in Europe. In 1985 too, for Mitterrand, “Tehran” and “Yalta,” with the geopolitical results they produced (even though negative), represented a situation that had to be preserved. This is the reason why he expressed himself as he did to his guest from Moscow and the reason why the latter was delighted by the considerable similarity of points of view between Mitterrand and himself.2 One made policy together, meaning that one mutually verified that there was a political intention on both sides to act so that nothing change in a given configuration of political facts—the “order” established in Europe after World War II. Protective movements—of policy in politics—had to maintain borders that, in Europe in 1985, “were the borders.” Of course, for these borders were the expression of a political order that a persistent movement of European and world policy tended to perpetuate and which also concealed within it real movements. Even though of a totally different intensity, these movements were however already underway. The postwar European order preserved the German problem. In both ways, the language we have just used appears in a highly ambiguous form. There is no doubt that the movement hidden by the German problem— better, the urgent force that encouraged thinking beyond existent political realities in Europe—had stopped to a certain degree. The problem associated with Germany was preserved in the system of power that inscribed a partition of Germany within the partition of Europe, in the name of the peace of this balance. In truth, it was so well preserved that this system of power dominating Europe attracted apologists owing solely to the fact that it kept the two German states distinct from “Germany.” Rather than being in a state of unrest, Germany was in neutral, captive to realities that forced it to recognize itself in those realities. But, of course, that also implied that the German problem was not resolved or, in a way, disposed of by the political world but, precisely, just preserved. Integrated into the given realities, which it faced day after day, what was this country located on the dividing line? The Germany of each of the two camps? Germany between the two camps? The Germany of the two camps, related to one or the other? Even in immobility, Germany remained a question without an answer, and the unanswered question created a movement, whatever the realities of this preserved German problem. The French governments during Mitterrand’s terms of office—like the previous ones—perceived this

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question with acuity and followed it vigilantly. Whereas, on the one side, France’s cooperation with Germany—as it happens, the Federal Republic— had a thoroughly public form, in Paris, all changes linked to the German problem were noted. It had to be taken because it had not been resolved. Mitterrand and his advisers obstinately stuck to this line, working with the Federal Republic of Germany and thinking about Germany. And the Germany—or even the German problem—that they perceived gave them sufficient opportunities for thought. For example, the summit meetings between the two Germanies, for which Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic Erich Honecker met from December 11 to 13, 1981  in East Germany. A few days earlier, on December 8, Mitterrand’s diplomatic adviser, Hubert Védrine, was already writing a note in which he stressed the importance of the meeting between Schmidt and Honecker and evaluated its possible consequences. For the time being, he explained, the results of this meeting would doubtless be limited; in the long term, however, they would be tremendous. The process of a rapprochement between the two countries would be maintained and, he concluded, the German question would remain open.3 Shortly thereafter, on January 12, 1982, he wrote another memo in which he analyzed the relations between West Germany and East Germany and the other Eastern European countries. Therein he again stressed a certain tendency on the part of the two German states to be drawing closer to each other politically. The Ostpolitik (Védrine used the German term) was henceforth “irreversible”: Chancellor Schmidt had said that his meetings with Honecker were, in his own terms, “the most detailed that he had ever had with a statesman”; and, in the course of a meeting with François Mitterrand, West Germany’s ambassador in Paris had not hesitated in asserting that “his country’s policy was ‘mortgaged’ by its links with the East and, in particular, with the other Germany.”4 As things were viewed from Paris, there was an open German question, and France had to be careful; but it was also understood that care was not enough. France could not turn Germany over to itself.5 It shared the concern aroused by the German problem and had to act, but how? Mitterrand had an answer and mentioned it in the meeting he had with Ronald Reagan on March 12, 1982 in Washington. Reagan had not prevaricated for long and opened this discussion with remarks on the topic of Germany. Relations between “East” and “West” were extraordinarily strained, and facing the threat represented by the Soviet SS 20s, which it considered

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extreme, NATO had announced that it would deploy new atomic weapons, and this deployment would occur chiefly in Germany. Reagan said it clearly: “For the United States, the priority issue is Germany. This country is fragile, in bad shape and preoccupies Washington considerably.”6 What did Mitterrand answer? He agreed with Reagan and went deeper into the subject. In the Germans’ protest against the planned stationing of Pershing missiles in Federal Germany, he distinguished deeper shifts in society that referred to what was, in reality, without an answer: the German question. France, he said, was not neglecting all that and was also endeavoring to act. How? At the end of his analysis, Mitterrand’s response settled on Germany a mantle of protective words: “Admittedly, Germany poses a problem. Public opinion there is troubled by the problem of the missiles, the spread of pacifism and also a renewal of nationalism. These problems are also directly related to the issue of relations between the two Germanies. We are quite aware of this development; Chancellor Schmidt also seems uneasy about it. We are therefore endeavoring to carry on a dialogue with the Germans and remain close to them. You have doubtless noted, in this regard, the vigor of the Franco-German declaration.”7 Mitterrand’s response could not be more pertinent: We are endeavoring to remain close to the Germans. Germany is a source of worry in face of which Germany must not be left alone. We therefore remain close to the Germans—with their German question; with their public opinion in turmoil; with pacifism; with the resurrection of nationalism among them. We maintain in dialogue with them and we forcefully tie the movement in which the Germans find themselves to the close relations that exist between them and us. Yet this response was not purely French—it was also a German response, and Mitterrand knew it. By expressing himself in this manner, he was going entirely in the Germans’ direction. In a letter dated August 15, 1982, Chancellor Schmidt had forcefully drawn Mitterrand’s attention to the risk of seeing Germany (through West Germany) finding itself in an undesirable position on the missile question if the implementation began solely in West Germany. He insisted on this point with the Americans and henceforth sought support from Mitterrand so that the planned installation of the Pershing missiles in the Federal Republic take place at the same time as the stationing of cruise missiles in other countries. The German chancellor was asking his allies not to make Germany a chosen country, not to place it in a position that it alone would occupy. “The Federal Republic of Germany,” Schmidt wrote to Mitterrand, “must not be

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singled out on this essential issue, even temporarily.”8 Over the coming years, and especially during the period of the reunification process, the Germans continued to express this request not to be singled out. During a discussion with Mitterrand on October 20, 1987, the foreign minister, Hans-­Dietrich Genscher, expressed it in a classically polished phrase: “You must not leave Germany by itself.”9 Regardless of what France did, regardless of its decisions or what it was prepared to do, the German problem did not go away and also occupied other countries. To see this, let us again listen to the workshop of world politics and a few discussions that took place there during the 1980s. “We are going to go through a few turbulent months,” said François Mitterrand at his meeting with Margaret Thatcher in London on October 20, 1983. Why did he express himself in that way? The reply he received from the British prime minister provides the answer: “There is indeed the problem of the deployment of the Euromissiles and pacifism.”10 The Pershings were to be deployed in Europe but—Mrs. Thatcher and Mitterrand were in agreement on this point, even though they could no longer prevent the installation of the missiles themselves—the Soviets would attempt to postpone the date. What was the best way to achieve that? Pacifism, thought the two political leaders, and in particular, the one spreading in Germany. “I think,” Mitterrand reasoned with Thatcher’s approval, “that the Russians are resigned to the installation of the Pershing IIs. … First of all, they can still play on the idea of delaying this installation … but any delay would be their victory, and they must not count on it—that would be a miscalculation. Secondly, they can also play on the shifts in public opinion in order to modify the political majorities by creating problems in public opinion as in the Federal Republic … Finally, they can play on a certain resurgence of nationalism.” With this last remark, he was thinking in particular of what he considered specifically German nationalism for, he said, there were not one but several German pacifisms. First of all, one found “the pacifists of good faith, idealists”; then those “who are Communists or else quite submissive to the influence of the Soviet Union”; and last, those “who henceforth refuse that Germany’s sovereignty be limited.” And the latter “would want a reunification of Germany in agreement with the USSR.”11 Here again, the concern for Germany returns in its concrete form that Mitterrand always had in mind: the risk that the Germans not sate their natural need for unity in a solitary march with the Soviet Union. A few months after this discussion, Franco-American governmental meetings took place at the highest level on March 22, 1984 in Washington

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with, on the French side, besides President Mitterrand, the French foreign minister, Claude Cheysson, Jean-Louis Bianco, Jacques Attali and Hubert Védrine, as well as the French ambassador to Washington, Bernard Vernier-­ Palliez. Present on the American side, along with President Reagan, were Vice-President George Bush, Secretary of State George Schulz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Robert McFarlane from the White House staff, Richard Burt and General Vernon Walters from the State Department. The discussion focused exclusively on relations between the West and the Soviet Union and more particularly on an issue that was by no means academic but, on the contrary played a vital role: Was the Soviet Union making more than a threat of war? In other words, did it really risk triggering an armed conflict? Mitterrand and Reagan were in total agreement as to the importance of the subject, but their points of view diverged in the evaluation of “Russian bellicosity” (the expression was Mitterrand’s). The French president proved less combative, adopting a more analytical tone. He thought he discerned the true aim of Soviet policy: by brandishing the threat of war (and the states of “preliminary” tension that accompanied it), the Soviet leaders were seeking to confuse the issue. Personally, explained Mitterrand, he was confident. France was independent and had its own diplomacy, but it was also loyal, as President Reagan (whom he was addressing) had seen and could still observe. But for Mitterrand, there was more to say. He wished to remind Reagan of a very particular problem of course: “There is naturally also a German problem that has not been resolved.”12 According to him, the Soviet Union had a primordial interest in European politics, and that stemmed from Germany, explained Mitterrand a while later, at a session of the European Council, on June 25, 1984 at Fontainebleau. During a visit to Moscow shortly before, he had noted the uneasiness with which the Russian leaders observed the future military evolution of Western Europe. This worry especially concerned Germany. It was certainly not couched in those terms, but he had understood the Soviets’ wish: “The less things change, the better it will be.”13 Three days later, on June 28, he received Henry Kissinger at the Élysée, and launched their discussion in speaking about Germany. “Germany concerns the Soviets a great deal; they want to be able to control that country but know that, in the final analysis, Germany is not militarily independent of the United States.” And a bit later in the conversation, Mitterrand once again mentioned what this time he called the fears of the Soviet leaders as regards Europe. They feared “an alliance between France and Germany

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that was, in their eyes, too close,” he told Kissinger. “They are willing for us to be friends, but not too much.” Kissinger, always and everywhere assiduous in the workshop of world politics, agreed with Mitterrand, drawing a conclusion that, in his words, appeared definitive: “In a certain way, our positions converge. No one wants a unified, neutralist, nationalist Germany.” Perhaps. But perhaps it was also otherwise if one were subtle enough to make a fine distinction between the lines of the political landscape. Mitterrand gently corrected his guest and removed from under his “no one” a part of the pedestal on which he had been raised: “They think they can prevent it. It must be said that my predecessor encouraged them in this, indicating that we were of course speaking with the Germans, but we would always side with the Russians if the Germans tried to go too far.”14 France remained focused on the German problem. During General Jaruzelski’s December 4, 1985 visit to the French president at the Élysée, the Polish leader explained to his host his view on the domestic and foreign situation of his country. He talked about the December 1981 proclamation of a state of emergency in Poland, and about Poland’s wish to live and shape a foreign policy that had become quite difficult, in particular with the western world. Jaruzelski complained: everything they had been doing in Poland since 1981 was perceived abroad through a “distorting mirror.” Moreover, Poland was suffering considerably from American policy. “The United States treats us instrumentally.” And Poland was preoccupied by the German problem. “We are vigilant concerning any process that can occur and involving the Germans. Anything negative that might occur in Germany would be very bad for Poland, as it would be for France. I do not think that this threat is immediate or that it is taking extreme forms. But this growing potential, at the center of Europe, cannot help but be a problem. Without going so far as bringing up the dramas of the Forties, we must talk about it between Poles and French.” In the remainder of their conversation, the Polish leader and French president considered other topics, but General Jaruzelski never lost sight of the topic of Germany. The meeting was drawing to a close, and words of conclusion were being exchanged when Jaruzelski started up again: “I would not want to leave you without reminding you of the German problem.”15 We are endeavoring to remain close to the Germans. That was France’s solution, at least for the time being, but the Germans were divided. France should therefore not only be close to the Germans of the Federal Republic but also to seek closeness with the Germans represented by the German

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Democratic Republic. The world balance was fragile, depending in particular on the German question. When Mitterrand met at the Élysée with the East German foreign minister, Oskar Fischer, on January 30, 1987, they spent their whole conversation on this question: How can we get away from our over-armed world and into a world of balance, abandoning the dangerous uncertainty of the one for the true stability of the other? The French president and East German foreign minister delved into the technical details connected to armament and security, informing each other that, on both sides, peace was the goal of all efforts. But where to begin? Mitterrand told him, preceding his remarks with an introduction typical of his personality: indicating the starting point was easy. The primary principal, which went before all others, he explained, was “the balance between the two Germanies.”16 Really?

The Principle of Change: The East Changes Yes, really, if one was thinking only of the Yalta order. If one had no other model to propose in its place or the idea of having any and if no one said anything of his ideas on this matter. As it happens, of course, such was not the case: Mitterrand knew a counter-model that, for him, constituted the other possible model: the freedom of Europe. It was not only on one part of the continent but on all of Europe that the sun of freedom had to shine. Such was his counter-vision to the Yalta order. He could certainly draw from it the point of view by which it was a matter of order, which was always better than the simple alternative of its collapse, but in his mind, he also had the vision of a free Europe, and, for him, that vision blew up the Yalta order. He limited himself to the realities in Europe and rebelled against them. “I want Europe to escape from the division called ‘Yalta.’”17 Mitterrand expressed this position between realism and rebellion clearly in the words with which he commented on the proclamation of a state of war in Poland on December 13, 1981, at Cabinet meetings in the following days and weeks. At the December 16 meeting, he began by asking all the ministers present to express themselves on the events in Poland and, after most of them had done so, spoke in turn. In a vast survey, he mentioned the events themselves as well as the reactions they had aroused in French public opinion, where a stormy debate was being conducted to know what could be done by the West and, in particular, by France. Like an orator addressing the people from the tribune, the French president

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brought up the atmosphere that he saw spreading in his country and gave it the form of questions: “Are they expecting words? Supplies? Weapons? What could we do? Are we going to send weapons? Are we going to send soldiers? It’s being implied that we could stop the repression in Warsaw but we’re not doing so, so it’s Munich!” Naturally, those were realistic questions and they were at the service of Mitterrand the realist. He then changed voices and said: “Nonetheless, we must not forget the division of the world between two superpowers that, in the end, are careful not to put themselves out when serious events occur. That’s the reality in which we are living, admittedly with regret— but in which we are living. Are those times over? One carefully chooses to overlook it.” And as he continued to comment on this irrefutable fact, his tone became even more regretful facing the members of the French government gathered around him: “So we have only words and food: accept this way of thinking.” But here, too, as concerned the words, and in spite of all the regrets, arose the voice of the man of experience who had to tell his government that, even in this area—or rather: precisely in this area—it was better that they remain reserved: “Nothing would be worse than words that were not be followed up and that could not be followed by acts.” Mitterrand the realist was hard; even the bitterest considerations— to the point of being painful—were not to his mind reason to hope solely in the name of hope, or act uniquely because of a need to act. Yet that did not signify that he was resigned in the face of “realities.” He was realistic and rebellious, the one throwing down challenges by proclamation, the other remained reserved and took the rebel under control of the thoughtful realist: “We’re not abandoning the Poles but it is not in our power to save them.”18 With this phrase, François Mitterrand concluded his commentary at the December 16, 1981 Cabinet meeting on the proclamation of the state of war in Poland, but this was not his final word on the issue. The events in Poland were again brought up at the Cabinet meeting a week later, and there again, he commented on them in detail. That day, he also spoke with both the voice of the realist and that of the rebel, but this time, the realist showed himself to be more argumentative and therefore less inaccessible in his words. As for the rebel, he uttered words that were not obstinate so much as analytical and thoroughly lent themselves to backing up his attitude. “All those who mean to snatch Poland from the USSR are mistaken!” explained the realist. “Those who march, demanding it, are running the risk of war. No state has signed on; no volunteer has yet risked

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his life! The USSR will do everything except give up its influence over Poland.” On the other hand, stressed the rebel: “The Poland affair now signifies that peoples need liberty, and that someday this liberty will come.”19 The rebel drew his inspiration from realism, looking toward a period that would correspond to his ideas, but he did not leave it at that. Mitterrand, the French president with a rebellious tendency, who appealed to the wind of freedom, stood up and defended his vision of a free Europe, publicly and in front of those concerned by it. He did it at the Kremlin, he did it at the German Bundestag, and he also did it in face of the hegemonic ambitions of the United States. He constructed barriers made of words and nothing else, and yet those barriers also stood fast and kept away from Europe that against which Mitterrand was rising up in the name of Europe. During the Fontainebleau meeting of the European Council on June 25, 1984, Chancellor Helmut Kohl noted not only the success obtained by the French president in this area; he also attributed it to the strategy from which they benefited: “President Mitterrand’s visit [to Moscow, June 20-23, 1984] and his speech [at the Kremlin] contributed to the Soviets’ not finding a way out of the stalemate on our side. But they are seeking dialogue.”20 The realities in Europe were quite bogged down, and Mitterrand continuously and obstinately recalled that fact. On the other hand, yes, the West, as can be seen in the strategic meetings mentioned here, intended to initiate a new movement in the rigid European situation—the Yalta order—and in such a way that movement be accomplished not in the West but in the East. That was doubtless the reason for which Kohl stressed Mitterrand’s strategic successes so much. The latter had, moreover, sent the Soviets back to themselves, in this impasse where we saw them, and pushed them toward this way out that they had to find and understand in the logic of western strategy: that the opening they were creating was in their own camp. Mitterrand the rebel had worked with the firmness of Mitterrand the realist. Within the person of the French president, realist and rebel had followed a determined principle and imperturbably defended it; it was a strategic principle, which might be defined precisely as it did not remain tacit. The German Foreign Minister Genscher formulated it with a kind of classic Prägnanz during a meeting with Mitterrand on October 20, 1987: “In the East-West relationship, it is necessary to see that everything that is being done between East and West obliges the East to change, not the West.”21

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“What’s the Name of That Young Fellow?” The West was waiting for the East to change. We have shown above that only individuals give a reality to all things political, and that politics appear solely through individuals and their personal, concrete creativity. Individuals make political reality actual. Through them the political reality taking shape appears which is then expressed in political movements—this meaning in particular: in physical movements—of those people, the movement between people, for people and toward people that brings politics to the citizens: life stemming from the creative energy of politics. That also explains why the actors in the workshop of world politics have as lasting, obsessive and insatiable an interest in each other, in the one who stands up to them in the workshop, such an incessant interest in him who already belongs, as attentive an interest in him who is in the process of becoming a member. What kind of man (or woman) is this? Who is (s)he? What matters about this person? What is the political element that drives and guides him, giving him his capacities, making him, in one way or another, a personage in the world of power? Who is Reagan? Who is Gorbachev? it was asked, for example, in order to illustrate the dominant interest in the physical and personal representation of the politician by a concrete individual. Who is Gorbachev? The West was waiting for the East to change, and its representatives in the workshop were becoming increasingly interested by the question. It was the major question, the one that would perhaps bring about the awaited overthrow, and thus imposed itself on them. They were wondering about it even before Gorbachev’s election to the position of secretary general of the CPSU on March 10, 1985, and they later asked it again with, as one might suspect, great intensity. Who is Gorbachev? President Mitterrand had met him on June 21, 1984, in the course of his state visit to Moscow, and had spoken with him that evening, during the banquet we have already discussed. On the basis of this banquet he formed the judgment he pronounced a few days later at the European Council meeting at Fontainebleau: “Gorbachev is quite a remarkable man.”22 His style, he said three days later to Henry Kissinger, was thoroughly western: Gorbachev did not hesitate to criticize the management of the Soviet Union and, in particular, its planning system. That was not all: during their meeting at the Kremlin banquet, Gorbachev had spoken in Mitterrand’s presence about the Soviet Union’s economy with a freedom of thought that had thoroughly astonished and deeply impressed the

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French president. Subsequently, he often repeated what he had heard. To Hans-Jochen Vogel, leader of the German Social-Democrats, he told the story in these terms, on October 20, 1987: “I met Gorbachev at the dinner [at the Kremlin, June 21, 1984]. Chernenko to Gorbachev: ‘How goes the harvest?’ G: ‘Very badly!’ C: ‘Why?’ G: ‘Gosplan is too centralized—more initiative is needed.’ C: ‘How long has it been going badly?’ G: ‘Since 1917!’”23 The man was indeed remarkable if he belonged to the Soviet leadership and uttered words like that. But what was to be made of those remarks and especially of the man himself? In his meeting with Kissinger, Mitterrand again considered that when Gorbachev was talking about the stupidity with which planning was handled in the Soviet Union, perhaps he himself did not believe what he was saying. In order to judge, it was necessary to know more about Gorbachev: Who was he? That remained the question. For many Western politicians, because of the enigmas posed by the Soviet leadership as a whole, it was not easy to find an answer. Knowledge of its inner world did not abound (which might also explain the scrutiny— worthy of the secret services—with which, for example, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and President Mitterrand observed the masters of the Kremlin). During their meeting of October 29, 1984 at Bad Kreuznach, Chancellor Kohl thus noted to President Mitterrand: “We don’t know where the Kremlin wants to go,” but, he went on, he had had an interesting discussion with Ceauşescu. Granted, what the latter was doing in Romania was hardly encouraging, but what was interesting was precisely what Ceauşescu had had said to him on other topics. Specifically, the Romanian dictator had provided the chancellor with explanations on the world of leaders in Eastern Europe, and Kohl clearly believed him. At the time, he reported to Mitterrand what he had learned from Ceauşescu about Jaruzelski, Kádár, Honecker and Schiwkow and above all, he informed him on the Romanian president’s point of view concerning the power structure in the Kremlin. According to him, it was in fact Chernenko who held the real power. After he had said that, Kohl wanted to continue talking about another man in the Kremlin whom he thought Mitterrand was interested in. He began by wording his sentence: “As for ….” But he stopped, because the name of the other member of the Soviet leadership about him he wanted to speak slipped his mind, so he turned to his diplomatic adviser, who was accompanying him, and asked him: “What’s the name of that young fellow?” “Gorbachev,” the other responded. Kohl

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could thus go on and tell Mitterrand what the Romanian dictator had told him: “Gorbachev is not yet in power.”24 However, he became the new chairman of the CPSU on March 10, 1985,25 and in the workshop, the interpretative work began. Hermeneutical exercises, so to speak, should henceforth aim at understanding Gorbachev and present, through a gripping picture, his persona in such a way that he became known. When Mitterrand and the president of Brazil, José Sarney, met in Brasília on October 14, 1984, the latter expressed his urgent desire to hear his guest’s point of view on Gorbachev. What might be expected of him, he asked clearly: a simple change of style or a real, fundamental change?26 The answer was just as clear: even better, Mitterrand sketched an impromptu portrait of Gorbachev with a few strokes, giving the impression that he had taken inspiration from a literary model, the mirror of a prince: Both. He is of a new, flexible generation and knows its weaknesses. He hopes to increase his compatriots’ purchasing power. He is quite worried about the arms race. His eyes are turned towards the outside world. He knows how to handle himself there. He is endowed with a flexible mind but his analysis is of a highly orthodox college as regards Marxism-Leninism. He is not closed to dialogue. The human rights issue is annoying for the USSR’s reputation. He wants to broach the problem. Towards an opening. He has a clear view of the USSR’s psychological position in the world. Ronald Reagan told him: I don’t need you. His number one preoccupation is Star Wars.27

During a meeting at 10 Downing Street on November 18, 1985, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand exchanged impressions of Gorbachev. In their opinion, he looked more like someone coming from the old Communist world to which, they judged, Gorbachev’s wife, Raissa Gorbacheva, still belonged just as completely: M.T.: “I find Gorbachev very, very sure of himself, quite different from a western leader. We must give Gorbachev something. How might he change? He is still very, very much a Communist.”

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F.M.: “His wife, too: she thinks there is nothing better than their system. She views Russia the way a French aristocrat viewed France in 1771!” M.T.: “She has seen London!” F.M.: “She must think of the Spartan quality of life.” M.T.: “Gorbachev is young. He is comfortable.”28 As if to confirm this last observation of Mrs. Thatcher’s, Mitterrand added to these impressions on the persons of Mikhail Gorbachev and Raissa Gorbacheva a few phrases in which he related to the British prime minister the banquet given at the Kremlin in June 1984, in the course of which Gorbachev had let him know so freely that the Soviet economy was functioning poorly and had been since the beginning of the Soviet experiment.29 The judgments were therefore divergent: on the one side, the great change in the East indeed seemed to be heralded in the person of Gorbachev; on the other, he appeared to prolong the old system with a new suit of clothes. And between these two remote points of view, a few additional observations about Gorbachev slipped in, some pleading in one sense, others in the opposite. We see this clearly in Mitterrand’s remarks at the end of their meeting on July 24, 1986 when the prime minister of Pakistan, Mohammad Khan Junejo, asked him to tell him what he thought of Gorbachev. Mitterrand complied, answering: I think that his arrival does not mean a change of policy—he is instead in charge of perpetuating the system, but there is a considerable change in the way of doing so. Today’s Soviet leaders remain faithful to the Revolution, but it is something that is distant for them, just as World War II is distant for young French people today. They would like to tackle problems like Soviet or British managers, or your own elite. Gorbachev masters quite well the problems as they are currently posed and, in addition, is setting up an apparatus of men won over to that way of seeing things. With him, the USSR might be less turned in on itself, and he is more likely than his predecessors to understand the reactions of the outside world. The arrival of and the people around him heralds another era. I don’t know if the problems can be better solved, but in any event, it will be possible to pose them more easily. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Raimond, has studied these problems at length. I have consulted him, and we have talked quite a bit. Obviously, we are not privy to the Kremlin’s secrets or inside their head. The Soviet plan remains the same, but the policy will doubtless not be the same.30

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A year later, on July 18, 1986, during a meeting with the German foreign minister, Mitterrand fleshed out his portrait of Gorbachev’s persona much more assuredly. He no longer settled for drawing sketches or impressions that did not agree with each other, to arrive at an image that was not really one. His vision of Gorbachev had become more precise, forming a confident and more exact judgment that was the result of a thought-out, carefully weighed estimation in which one could capture the various impressions and classify them in relation to one another. Mitterrand henceforth spoke of Gorbachev as a person he knew and through whom, since he knew him, he also believed possible to apprehend the policy of the USSR. A few days before receiving Genscher at the Élysée, he had seen Gorbachev in the Soviet capital, from July 7 to July 10, 1986. The German foreign minister was to go to Moscow two days later, on July 20, and meet Gorbachev.31 His first wish was to know what the French president had to say about him. Who was Gorbachev? Once again, the question dominated the discussion that followed. Mitterrand sketched out for his guest’s information the image he had of Mikhail Gorbachev and did something else decisive: in this portrait of Gorbachev as a human being, he drew the main lines that Gorbachev’s policy might have. The portrait and, in it, the policy lines appeared when Mitterrand spoke about Gorbachev’s persona and then about elementary political issues: On Gorbachev’s persona: Mitterrand: So you’re going to see Mr. Gorbachev? Genscher: Yes, I’ll be in Moscow on Sunday. Mitterrand: I imagine you’d like to know my impressions of Mr. Gorbachev? Genscher: Indeed, I’d be most grateful to you. Mitterrand: He’s a very different man, in form and appearance, from his predecessors—not in substance, even though form and content are closely linked. Personally, he’s like a western political leader as concerns his clothing, language, way of doing things and his style. But he tackles problems showing that he understands them differently. I’d met him in Moscow. Previously, I’d seen him at length in Paris when he spent four days here, but the last time in Moscow, over the space of three days, I had nearly seven hours alone with him. This is a man who seems to have understood why the USSR is unpopular in the world and that is what he seeks to correct.

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On Gorbachev and France, Germany, and the United States: Mitterrand: With France, he is currently trying to charm; with Germany that would perhaps be different. But his objective, of course, I mean his principal partner, is the United States. But he is quite European. He is from the Caucasus but the Russian Caucasus. Gorbachev is seeking entente with the United States, first of all, but he also wants to show them that he is capable of having another policy if they prove too tough. This other policy is turned towards Europe and, at the moment, primarily towards France. Why France? Because it’s a tradition and because there’s always the Franco-German dialectic. The Soviets are still trying to profit from it at present and then, too, there is France’s specificity with its nuclear force. On the other hand, there is another dialectic: the Russo-German dialectic is an old attraction, and then the role played in American-Soviet relations played by the existence of the two Germany [sic!].

On Gorbachev, Franco-German friendship, and Europe: In Moscow, I naturally recalled the constant main lines of our policy, beginning, of course, with Franco-German friendship then the building of Europe and the desire to see better relations established between the two Europes. A priori, we are not hostile towards the USSR. The essential thing is that Gorbachev is playing Europe—and, at the moment, France—to reach the United States.

On Gorbachev and the Soviet Union: As concerns his plans on the domestic level, I was impressed by his remarks. “I have to change everything”, he told me. First changing men, continuing to change men. Change the USSR on the economic level, on the level of morals, in its way of thinking. He even said, true or false confidence, “we really need democracy in the USSR”. I can tell you—you are a friend—that he told me that as a true confidence but it is necessary not to let it show at all. He has a curious mind, capable of variations that could surprise us, Capable of triggering an aggiornamento. As an important representative of the older generation, there is no one left but Gromyko, even though he seems to get along well with him. But Gromyko acts especially as a cover for him.

On Gorbachev and Germany:

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I don’t think [Gorbachev] understood, that they haven’t understood, the change of nature [in Franco-German relations] and that we’ve passed a milestone. He still thinks that, as was the case for so long, it is in the interest of countries located on one side of Germany or the other to get along out of common mistrust. Moreover, it takes a certain boldness of thinking to understand the change in relation to the past. Intellectually, he knows it but that annoys him. So he told me, thinking of Germany: “We are best of friends, we Russians and French.” I told him: “Yes, I’m ready for that, but not by breaking Franco-German relations.”32

Mitterrand had clearly arrived at forming a sure judgment regarding Gorbachev’s persona as well as the policy that he was doubtless going to carry out. In a meeting with the emir of Kuwait, Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, on September 19, 1986, he explicitly expressed Gorbachev’s “positive evolution” on which was based the image he henceforth had of the secretary general of the CPSU: “I am obliged to state that Gorbachev is more open, and moreover, I in June 1986 found that he had further evolved positively in relation to his positions of November 1985 in Paris.”33 And on January 30, 1987, in a discussion with the Portuguese prime minister, Cavaco Silva, the French president was literally “optimistic”: it seemed to him that a miracle was truly taking place in the East. When Silva asked him: “Gorbachev. You think there is a real political change?” Mitterrand answered: “It is the USSR’s entry into the modern world. It is more than propaganda. He controls the situation; he’s putting his own men in place. It’s not yet won. He has understood why his country was unpopular in the world. His problem is trying to avoid the traditional outlines. Political change will come. I’m fairly optimistic.”34 Mitterrand had reason to be, for Gorbachev’s appearance and the new policy he had launched, combined with the considerable economic difficulties plaguing the Soviet Union, offered the West opportunities, in psychological and political conditions favorable to it, for obtaining concessions from the Soviet Union, opportunities that had to be seized. In East-West relations, Gorbachev provoked a movement that would benefit the West— if it encouraged the development of these favorable opportunities (or support them by supporting Gorbachev) and then working with the Soviets on the economic and financial level—which Chancellor Kohl would do in the summer of 1990 during the final negotiations with Gorbachev on reunification. François Mitterrand offered his analysis and conclusions in July 1986  in a letter to Margaret Thatcher, who approved them in her written response in August:

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Madame Prime Minister, As you know, I went to Moscow in early July for an official visit during which I had six to seven hours of private meetings with Mr. Gorbachev. On that occasion, I again laid out for Mr. Gorbachev my country’s positions on controlling the arms race, which you know well. I reminded him of the nature of the French strategy of dissuasion, France’s intention to maintain its nuclear force above the threshold of credibility and the ensuing absolute impossibility of France’s reducing its means or plans in any way. I know that you, in a largely comparable situation, understand and approve of this attitude. Without abandoning his position on this issue, did Mr. Gorbachev persist in making me turn away from mine. These encounters confirm my impressions of Mr. Gorbachev. His intelligence is vast, rapid and flexible. He encompasses problems in their entirety. It seems to me that he has a keen sense of the realities concerning his country as well as the rest of the world. Naturally, he is driven by great ambitions for his country and, doubtless, for himself, but, as a man of his time, he seems to have understood that these great ambitions were hindered by the incapacity that the Soviet Union had demonstrated in resolving its economic problems up until now. It is precisely because he wants a USSR that is powerful and respected that he will endeavor to modernize his country, making best use of the leeway that can be left him by the Soviet system from which he comes. I think that, while defending his interests with intransigence, he will manage to envisage compromises in such and such a sphere. The USSR’s western partners should find themselves in psychological and political positions allowing them to seize these occasions without abandoning their vigilance.35 Mister President, I thank you for your message of 2nd August in which you passed on your impressions following your July meetings with Mr Gorbachev in Moscow. I am struck by the analogies presented by the Soviet point of view as was expressed to you during your Moscow stay and the remarks of Mr Shevardnadze during his recent visit to London. Here, in both cases, we see the new Soviet diplomacy at work: the Soviets had, quite evidently, the intention of proving reasonable, flexible and fairly conciliatory. Your assessment of Mr Gorbachev and his objectives is quite similar to mine. He unquestionably embodies a new type of Soviet leader, and his style is both more pragmatic and more refined than that of his predecessors even though, at the same time, he is no less involved in the Soviet system or less profoundly nationalistic. I believe it well founded to consider that the Soviet Union must strive to resolve its economic difficulties if it wishes to maintain and improve its position vis-à-vis the West. It is obviously another problem knowing whether the rigid constraints of the Soviet system will allow ­carrying out the changes that would lead to the results hoped for by Mr Gorbachev.36

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“The Soviet Empire Will Be Hit from the Inside and the Germans Will Recover All Their Chances” From his portrait of Gorbachev Mitterrand deduced that the East was changing. That the East, not the West, be the one to change was, viewed from the West, the principle to apply. For Mitterrand this was a question of a principle that he as rebel endorsed. He who loved liberty more than anyone else. “What? It’s simple—we want to remain free!” he threw out to Yuli Vorontsov, the Soviet ambassador to Paris, on June 24, 1983.37 But on October 2, 1985, facing Gorbachev, he again recalled to what degree the balance of power was fragile in the world and that the borders of the European space—that is, according to his preferred term, the “order of Yalta”—should not be touched. Mitterrand the realist, of course knew that if one limited oneself to this point of view, half of Europe must remain under the yoke. When one called for the wind of freedom, it was also necessary to let it blow and behave flexibly with it, especially if one wished to (re)capture it. His frame of mind allowed Mitterrand this flexibility or, to put it the opposite way, he adopted this state of mind because he wanted to be and remain flexible. To the thinking of Mitterrand, the realist, a perceptiveness was also at work that suited Mitterrand, the rebel. “Political change will come.” It was the realist who uttered these words, and the rebel heard him with the ears of the realist. The rebellious perceptiveness of a realistic Mitterrand made him an extraordinary figure in recent German history. It enabled him to speak about the reunification of Germany—that is, the “German issue”—as might be expected on the part of a West German chancellor, but not of a French head of state. From the beginning of his first seven-year term, in the course of his first discussions with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, then a year later with Schmidt’s successor, Helmut Kohl, Mitterrand broached the topic of “reunification” as if it were totally natural. Whereas the two chancellors came up with vague terms for discussing this issue and appeared to be fully submissive to a history that had overlooked German unity. From their point of view, one could at most expect something in a distant future, but Mitterrand was developing concrete ideas not only on the temporal horizon in which the Germans might be able to obtain their unity, but also about the historical-political circumstances that would make it possible. As if he had to tell the Germans what they ought to have been telling themselves. As if he were thinking for Germany and as if the voice of Germany expressed itself through him, he predicted to his

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interlocutors, German chancellors, that the Germans would not have to wait much longer: history would very soon bring the chance of their unity. Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand thus inverted roles when, during their conversation of October 21, 1982  in Bonn, they came to speak about relations between the two German states, that is, the division of Germany. All things considered, Kohl explained, we are going to have normal relations with East Germany. Germans knew that they would have to live with division for a long time, and, as if he considered the alternative—the restoration of German unity—completely out of the question, he added that it was “no longer possible to envisage a national state à la Bismarck.” It would take generations before this situation could change.38 That was the German chancellor’s view. What was that of Mitterrand, the French president? Initially, he expressed himself somewhat timidly, even though he stressed the historical legitimacy of the Germans’ desire for unity, a wish that he of course contrasted with “Yalta.” In his opinion, it was normal that every German reflect intensely on this problem. One could not deny “the fundamental historical reality,” which was not, however, the actual reality. But what means have we at our disposal, also asked Mitterrand, thus letting it be understood that, in his view, it was thoroughly imaginable to leave actual reality and return to the essential historical reality. But that, he immediately added, to limit the scope of his remarks, was as complicated as getting rid of the consequences of Yalta.39 To these observations, Mitterrand added two phrases as if he had foreseen the peaceful demonstrations of 1989 in East Germany: “It will come about gently”—he was speaking of the solution to the German question— and “perhaps even before the end of the century. It will not take generations.”40 Kohl no longer raised any objections to this argumentation—how could he, the German chancellor, have wanted to disappoint the German hopes of the French chief of state?—and admitted to Mitterrand that he was right. But the latter had not finished speaking. As if his sole vision had given him wings, he let his gaze come down to the terrain of the immediate future that appeared to him, announcing: “The Soviet empire will be hit from the inside. At that time, the dominated countries will be able to regain freedom, and the Germans, now magnetized by the other Germany, will be able to recover all their chances. This is a matter of some twenty years, a question of patience.”41 In the East, he added, the history of Europe was going to open up again, followed by the issue of Germany. Such was, in Mitterrand’s vision, the succession of events and their inner cohesion. He himself took his

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views on history for insights into the course of history. It was history that would bring change; it was its course that had to be discerned and then to be expected. A year before his meeting with the new chancellor, Helmut Kohl, a piece of dialogue had developed while he was conversing at Latche with Kohl’s predecessor, Helmut Schmidt, where Mitterrand expressed himself fully in this sense. And naturally—it cannot be said otherwise—in that dialogue, too, the roles had been reversed. Across from a German chancellor who expressed himself quite cautiously on the German question was a French president articulating with a sort of joy the solution that could be anticipated. Schmidt said that he did not think he would see reunification in his lifetime. Certainly, Mitterrand responded, you (Germans) are going to spend time achieving reunification—that is what he conceded to the chancellor before giving him a lecture and resorting to the authority of “history.” Reunification, he explained, was “inscribed in history” and corresponded to “objective and subjective realities.” As concerned the temporal horizon, he drew the outlines with the same assurance. One generation would have to pass. Mitterrand also had precise ideas on the circumstances: for that, it would be necessary for the Soviet empire to be weakened. Nor was he afraid of displaying a precision about which he could not really know whether it would be accurate or not. That weakening of the Soviet empire, said he to the chancellor, “would occur within fifteen years.” From his point of view, Chancellor Schmidt replied, “that will last much longer.”42 Here we see it clearly: the German question was always present in President Mitterrand’s political thinking and was, as we have shown, a determining factor in his strategic reflections and ensuing political stands. For him, it was a thoroughly present question in the concrete form of the question concerning the weakening of the Soviet empire from the inside— the event that would restore all the Germans’ chances. Mitterrand was waiting for history to bring about this event and he therefore waited for the Germans to want to realize their wish for national unity, considered by him as completely natural. A few paragraphs above, we described François Mitterrand as an “extraordinary figure in contemporary German history,” basing this opinion on the rebellious perceptiveness of Mitterrand the realist who, as we described him, saw by anticipation the reunification of Germany. But he was also extraordinary from another point of view in the German perspective: he did not settle for drawing a horizon of hope for the German chancellors, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl. He did not settle for teaching

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them that this horizon was, in all likelihood, quite close at hand but, in his meetings with them, especially those he had with Kohl, he pushed his German partners toward a policy by which Germany would again find itself free and united. At the Bad Kreuznach meeting on October 30, 1984, between Mitterrand and Kohl, which has already been mentioned several times, the issue of an agreement concerning nuclear weapons between the United States and the USSR was brought up; Mitterrand warned against too much harmony between the two superpowers. It “would close the lid” and “block” the initiative of the Germans toward reunification. The French president found that as unacceptable for the Germans as he found the idea that the two superpowers exert an influence over France’s use of its nuclear power. Likewise, it was out of place seeing for Germany and France, because of their lack of material means, to abandon the civilian and military conquest of space, essentially leaving it to the Americans. No, he, the president of France, also thinking on behalf of Germany, had other conceptions of a free and sovereign policy. He therefore provoked the German chancellor as much as possible, inspiring him with all the force at his disposal to carry out a more visionary policy: “We must do everything that is not impossible. You, in any event, cannot decree that you are going to equip yourself with nuclear weapons. You cannot decree reunification; but it is necessary to start from the principle according to which everything that is not impossible is possible.”43 Mitterrand’s principle supplemented the one formulated by Hans-­ Dietrich Genscher: the East has to change. And indeed, it did. Gorbachev appeared, the Soviet Union “entered the modern world” (to borrow Mitterrand’s expression), and what was heretofore impossible seemed to become possible. It was necessary to capture the signals going in that direction. Among those who were lending an ear and perceiving them particularly well, was Genscher, the West German foreign minister. On July 30, 1988, he paid a two-day visit to Moscow, where he had a two-­ hour dialogue with Gorbachev and spent an evening with dinner in the apartment of the Soviet foreign minister, Shevardnadze, whose guest he was in the company of the minister’s wife, children and grandchildren. During a meeting with his French colleague Roland Dumas, which took place shortly thereafter, on August 8, 1988, Genscher related his Moscow meetings in detail. Dumas wrote a report of this discussion that was received at the Élysée and read by President Mitterrand.44 Dumas’ carefully worded report contains, in point 5, the following note: “Genscher

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wanted to bring up the question of Berlin. Gorbachev evaded any significant answer on the pretext that this problem was only in the domain of the GDR.” That was the signal. The Soviet Union (through Gorbachev) was distancing itself from the German question and directing the Germans—the two German states—back to one another. What was formerly impossible seemed to become possible. The rigid fronts of East and West were shifting, and the Germans again found possibilities—the freedom—of having their own initiatives. During a colloquium that took place on October 18–19, 1996  in Genshagen (near Berlin), Hans-Dietrich Genscher told how he picked up the same signal on January 18, 1989 in Vienna, at the end of the third in the series of CSCE meetings, in a conversation with Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, who had told him: “The Iron Curtain is rusting.” To which Genscher had replied: “It’s falling apart.” Whereupon Shevardnadze answered: “You must talk about this with [East German foreign minister] Fischer.” At Genshagen, Genscher told how he had never forgotten that remark as it was, in his eyes, the “signal” of the fact that, “for the USSR, the German Democratic Republic and the Curtain were no longer central issues.”45 The Germans could henceforth reach out—to seize their unity.

Notes 1. Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting in Paris, October 2, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/76. Dossier 3). 2. To Mitterrand’s remarks Gorbachev replied: “I’m quite pleased with the mood in which our meetings are going. I will add […] that France and the USSR have joint responsibilities in relation to peace in the world and that both countries can make a joint contribution to improving the situation” (Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting in Paris, October 2, 1985/ AN-AG/5(4)/CD 76. Dossier 3). 3. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, December 8, 1981.—At the end of the note, Védrine warned: “Any French attitude of wariness would strengthen those who, in the Federal Republic of Germany, are calling for ‘increased autonomy in foreign policy.’” In the logic of this attentive observation of relations between the two Germanies, Élisabeth Guigou and Hubert Védrine remarked on May 28, 1984, in a “note for the president”: “The discussions [in the Federal Republic of Germany] on the ‘German nation’, and the relations with the other Germany, are taking on

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increased importance: Messrs. Kohl and Honecker announce that they call each other every week.” 4. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, January 12, 1982. 5. Védrine thus wrote for the note that we have just quoted the following conclusion: “In the definition of German policy as regards its European partners, Atlantic allies and Eastern partners, these multiple links [with the German Democratic Republic], which are the result of a practically irreversible Ostpolitik, are important. At present, they are playing in the same direction as pacifism, and the concern regarding their security that a large number of Germans are encountering at the same time as they are again rediscovering a certain self-awareness.” (Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, January 12, 1982.) 6. Ambassade de France aux États-Unis, Report of the Mitterrand-Reagan meeting in Washington, March 12, 1982. 7. Ibid. 8. Letter from West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to President François Mitterrand, August 15, 1982, quoted from the French translation registered at the Élysée. 9. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting at Gymnich Castle, October 20, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 10. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in London, October 20, 1983 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 11. Ibid. 12. Report of the Mitterrand-Reagan meeting (with the participation of the other persons mentioned) in Washington, March 22, 1984. 13. Report of the European Council meeting at Fontainebleau, June 25, 1984. 14. Report of the Mitterrand-Kissinger meeting in Paris, 28 June, 1984 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/74). 15. Report of the Mitterrand-Jaruzelski meeting in Paris, December 4, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/66.Dossier 76). 16. Report of the Mitterrand-Fischer meeting in Paris, January 30, 1987. 17. François Mitterrand during his meeting with Hafez El-Assad, president of Syria, Damascus, November 27, 1984. 18. CM, December 16, 1981. 19. CM, December 23, 1981. 20. Report of the European Council meeting at Fontainebleau, June 25, 1984. 21. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting at Gymnich Castle, October 20, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 22. Report of the European Council meeting at Fontainebleau, June 25, 1984. 23. Report of the Mitterrand-Vogel meeting, October 20, 1987. 24. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Bad Kreuznach, October 29, 1984 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72).

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25. At the Élysée, Gorbachev was envisaged already in 1982 as candidate for the position of secretary general. In a note to the president, dated February 2, 1982, Hubert Védrine mentioned a meeting he had had with several French specialists on the USSR in which it was said that it was possible that Gorbachev succeed Brezhnev. 26. Report of the Mitterrand-Sarney meeting in Brasilia, October 14, 1985. 27. Ibid. 28. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in London, November 18, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 29. See above p. 75. 30. Report of the Mitterrand-Junejo meeting in Paris, July 24, 1986 (AN-­ AG/(5(4)/CD/66, Dossier 90). 31. On the July 20–22, 1986 stay and Genscher’s meetings in Moscow, see Gensch., 493–510  in which Genscher writes (507): “Our unshakeable impression was, in any case, that Gorbachev was serious about his reform policy; it had already crossed the Rubicon. The democratization and economic reform, his two central points, necessarily brought with them a new foreign policy.” 32. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting in Paris, July 18, 1986 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 33. Report of the Mitterrand-Al-Ahmed al-Sabah meeting in Kuwait, September 19, 1986. 34. Report of the Mitterrand-Silva meeting in Paris, January 30, 1987. 35. François Mitterrand to Margaret Thatcher, July 31, 1986. 36. Margaret Thatcher to François Mitterrand, August 21, 1986. 37. Report of the Mitterrand-Vorontsov meeting in Paris, June 24. 1983. 38. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 21, 1982 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/72).—During his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev on October 24, 1988, Helmut Kohl put off the possibility of a reunification of Germany to a time “in a few generations.” See Gorb.a., 72–76. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 7, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 43. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Bad Kreuznach, October 30, 1984 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 44. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Compte rendu de mes entretiens avec Monsieur Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Le Lundi 8 août 1988, August 11, 1988. President Mitterrand wrote “seen” on this report and signed (as usual): “FM.”

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45. See Sauzay, von Thadden, Mitterrand und die Deutschen. 28–29. Hans-­ Dietrich Genscher’s remarks quoted here were made during a colloquium in Genshagen on October 18, 1996, in which I participated. I reproduce, word for word, the notes I took on what Genscher said. In his Memoirs (Gensch., p. 589), Genscher limits himself to a more general, less concrete (and less colorful) version of his meeting with Shevardnadze in Vienna, but he explicitly emphasizes the signals that he gave him at the time: “When, towards the end of the third meeting in the CSCE series in Vienna, on January 18, 1989, I commented in detail on the political situation with the Soviet foreign minister, I had a surprise: Shevardnadze told me that it was less a matter of eliminating weapons than of surmounting the division of Europe. These were new, even revolutionary signals.”

CHAPTER 6

The Problem of France’s Economic Sovereignty

“But Will That Drive Bury the Grande Nation?” Law creates reality, real social and political givens, but unfolds in a reality that the law itself does not produce. This earlier, more fundamental reality is that of the people who produce it by the simple fact that they exist: the human universe. In this first universe occur what men do for their life and all the forms they think up for building their social and political world, including, precisely, the form of law. Human beings grant others sovereignty, for the human universe is theirs; it is they who compose it, they alone who produce its image. Sovereign by themselves and toward themselves, people are, in their universe, its free creators. Admittedly, but is that truly reality? In fact, the meaning of a civilizing creation such as law is rather that of being a socio-political form binding humans to a life within this form. The rules of law create a general obligation, their systematic priority applying to every other instance of power that emerges and exists in its sphere of validity, whether concerning the will of an individual or the decision-making power of a government. Like a charter of human action, law stipulates everyone’s attitudes, actions, and decisions. In the abstract, we would know and might even, to a certain degree, predict the way in which human beings, following a statute governing their action, will behave when faced with a given action or decision: this law would say it a priori, and all that is left is the execution of an act, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_6

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accomplishing what has been said (or predicted). Yet human beings are not, of course, the matrices of an abstract law, and law obviously falls within the universe of men. There it certainly produces realities since it has to be a form of reality, but this is not, strictly speaking, the reality of the human universe. In the natural universe that is theirs, people continue to think they freely create the religious, cultural, social worlds by which they shape their lives together even though they know that they themselves are molded in the forms of their civilizing creations. So is it that human beings themselves continually suspend the work of their civilization. On the one hand, they live in the organizations that they have created and that regulate their lives; on the other, they are constantly negotiating, by the way in which they lead their lives, the principles according to which they submit to those organizations and continue to reproduce them. In one way or another, human beings always carry, prolong, or implement the work of their civilization. That choice constitutes their fundamental freedom in the reality they are themselves. Against this reality, no reality of these organizations regulating their lives has a chance. If people no longer reproduced these orders, only the creation from which they stem would remain; and it would soon cease to exist, along with the acts of creativity from which it emerged. Consequently, all organizations of human civilization need a concern that is specific to them if they are to survive liberty. We call this concern politics or, even better, the political science of prudence in all activity carried out with the human race.1 As concerns France, the legal department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided the legal response to the German question in the autumn of 1989: “Germany continues to exist”; France with the other “allies, has upheld the principle of German unity.”2 But did such language constitute a political response? Given the emergence of the crushing effects of the German question, was it advisable to settle for observing the legal situation by itself? Would it have been wise to view Germany as solely a legal subject? And would it have been reasonable for France not to go beyond what it already knew: that it had never had any idea of Germany other than that of the united German nation? It is obvious that none of all that would have been sensible, wise, or reasonable. The French government’s task was to be concerned with France’s interests, and the problem with which Germany confronted France was less legal than existential. What would happen to France if the two German states to which everyone had become accustomed were to merge into a single Germany? France could not even look surprised at or

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reject the idea of German unity. It had been much too certain of the vital force animating this idea and, regarding its perpetuity, had not shared the doubts that were felt in Germany—doubts so intense that they had been greeted with incredulity in France. Henceforth, it was no longer a matter of facing up to a simple idea. France was confronted with a politically vital question, which was brandished like a mirror: what would France become, what would its position facing Germany become, its position in the entente between the European states in general, if, to the simple notion of German unity, such as it existed up until then, was added the reality of this unity? What if the French nation no longer had before it an “FRG” to which it could be conveniently compared, doubled by a “GDR” relegated to the eastern periphery, but a Germany, which, owing to its intrinsically larger size—and especially its economic superiority—would doubtless create an imbalance in the Franco-German relationship and, more generally, upset the division of power between the European states? The French government was required to be concerned about France, and this naturally bore the name politics or else prudence. France had to react to Germany and prepare itself for the possible existence of a larger Germany. What should it do? It was compelled to ask itself the question if only because of the legal realities in which it would be decisively involved, but also, of course, to defend its own vital interests. France would again have to find a form of relationship with Germany—unified Germany—that would give a new form to the balanced partnership between the two nations, and display a force of cohesion that would keep the Germans within the partnership. France had to propose an answer for Germany, and that answer could not be anything but political; France had to pursue a political action by applying—let us state it in the language of Aristotle— the very “virtues” specific to political action: reflection, force, courage, wisdom, knowledge, reason. It had to act creatively within the human world, with or against it, in order to bring new political forms into being among those already existing. As the German question became increasingly important, those two problems became burning. They had always transformed the Franco-­ German relationship into a balancing act with the considerable difference of economic weight between Germany and France, on the one hand, and the glaring divergences of France’s and Germany’s positions as concerned nuclear war, on the other. The conjunction of the two problems had strongly marked relations between Germany and France and given them a certain form which the German and French governments had to take into

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account in their relationship, and thereby made the two governments comply with it in a certain way. It was the form of a fluid balance between two weights in a division of political forces. The first was Germany’s economic strength, which largely exceeded France’s, and the other, France’s nuclear-military power, which kept Germany in its need for protection. Each of these weights put one of the two powers in a position of imbalance or even dependence favorable to the other. Germany and France thus found themselves in a dynamic of power that pushed them to disagreement and conflict and was by no means supportive for either of them, or for their relations, and therefore caused much apprehension on both sides. The two governments were united by the desire to set the force of politics against the attraction of those weights and to use the former to control the latter. The French and German governments had thus learned to work positively with each other and to compensate, by precise—albeit precarious— means, for the unequal division of power that gripped the two countries. It was precisely this arrangement concluded in the interest of friendship that would not hold in the context of a unification of Germany. Germany and France would be disengaged from one another. That would then apply especially to Germany, which would attract France by its weight, and France would have to follow. The vision of imminent German unity upset France’s policy. It would have been strange had this upset not occurred. The arrangement concluded with the Germans had, up until now—even if one clearly saw the “unnatural” nature of a divided Germany—been too effective as a form of creative politics. It had amply served the friendship linking Germany and France and contributed to this balance of different weights that indeed made them friends within the desired friendship. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was aware of this state of things when, on July 15, 1990 in Moscow, he conversed with Mikhail Gorbachev about Germany in the process of reunification and about its future relations with other countries. On that occasion, he spoke about the links between Germany and France and clearly defined the internal problem concerning Franco-German relations. A transcript of this meeting was made by both the Russian and German sides, and the two transcripts have since been published. As to their respective textual composition, they differ substantially from each other, but in the passage that interests us here, the two versions coincide remarkably on one point, the word we are concerned about: “balance.” The Russian version goes as follows:

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Kohl: We have good relations with France. Yet, there are also certain problems. Until now, a balance reigned between us. Federal Germany has no atomic weapons and will not have any either, and our economy is stronger than the French economy (Chorošie otnošenija u nas s Franciej. Odnako est’ opredelennye problemy. Do sich por byl balans. U FRG net i ne budet jadernogo oružija, a naša ekonomika sil’nej francuzskoj …) and will be even stronger after reunification. Naturally, then the question of the cost of nuclear weapons arises. Neither does the Soviet Union have any intention of making war, nor is NATO preparing for war, but atomic weapons swallow up considerable sums in the budget. For the French, that provokes psychological complications.3

The German version reads as follows: The German chancellor then reckoned that relations between Federal Germany and France were also extremely good. Admittedly, there were psychological problems. Up until then, there was a sort of balance between France and Federal Germany, even though Federal Germany did not have nuclear weapons at its disposal. But things being as they were, one was henceforth forced to ask the question: What value could nuclear weapons still have? Neither the Soviet Union nor NATO had aggressive intentions. Today, the economy had much greater significance. In the future, there will certainly still be a need for weapons but much less than at present.4

Those who shaped Franco-German relations would have most likely rejected the formulation that Germany’s economic strength and France’s atomic force “made up for each other.” The term “balance” designated, in a less embarrassing way, the arrangement by which the German and French governments, in a spirit of compensation and to their mutual advantage, had evaluated and compared the respective weights of Germany and France. Regardless of the terms used to define this arrangement— “compensation” or “balance”—it came down to an effort of political creativity whose meaning was that it had lastingly imbued Franco-German relations, giving them a “perpetual” form, and modified the temporal perception of them: what has held for so long will hold for a long time to come. The equation that Chancellor Kohl posed in the meeting with Gorbachev, which we have quoted, therefore had nothing new in the way of Franco-German affairs. On May 27, 1981, at a Cabinet meeting, François Mitterrand commented on the conversation he had had a few

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days earlier (May 24) with the German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. He explained that France needed Germany’s help in the monetary sphere and that Germany needed France’s in the strategic and military sphere: “[Federal Germany]’s solidarity for the defense of our currency [was] something quite important, but that was not the essential thing for him; it was the affair of the Euromissiles for which he needs support.”5 Two years later, during a meeting at Latche on June 2, 1983, Mitterrand and Schmidt discussed problems that the Europeans would encounter in their relations with the United States. And during that conversation, Schmidt also put the two weights, France’s nuclear military force and Germany’s economic capacity, into the equation. Europe, he said, should make sure of its being heard as much in Washington as in Moscow—for economic reasons in the American capital and for security ones in the Soviet capital—and, to do so, it would be advisable “to make progress in pooling French sovereignty and nuclear power with Germany’s economic strength.”6 During the Latche meeting, Schmidt clearly linked France’s nuclear military power and Germany’s economic strength, as did Chancellor Kohl seventeen years later during his meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow. And Schmidt also used, in a clear phrase, a term that—for some Freudian or other reason—said more about the linkage than the simple syntactical occurrence of the term conveys. Germany had economic strength on its side, but France had its nuclear power and its sovereignty. If one weighed Germany’s strengths on the one side and France’s on the other, the latter—as long as nothing changed in the conditions of the balance—could still be sure of keeping its own sovereignty whole, whereas Germany, regardless of what it did and owned, had nothing sufficient to propose. As long as nothing changed in the conditions of “the balance.” Yet it was precisely that which France feared in the autumn of 1989. “German reunification is coming” announced The Wall Street Journal in the article it published on October 9, 1989 under the eloquent title “French Fears of United Germany.”7 “But will that drive bury the Grande Nation?” If we put ourselves in the role of a contemporary reader, we would certainly be tempted to reply: Of course not. Drawing such a conclusion would be an absurd exaggeration; however, The Wall Street Journal article goes precisely in that direction. Faced with the prospect of a united Germany, the French looked troubled, anxious and fearful. However, was that justified? “That is entirely up to [France],” explained The Wall Street Journal, revealing in a few concise phrases, with as little regard as this kind

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of phrase can have, the urgency in France’s desire not to find itself with a Germany endowed with disproportional power: Little Switzerland does not feel buried by the far-bigger country of the French. Nor does even smaller Luxembourg. The grandeur of France is not affected by a lack of square miles (she is more than twice as big as West Germany) nor by a lack of citizens (she’d just have to invite more immigrants) but her inability to sell more automobiles, etc. abroad. But Mercedes Benz, BMW and Volkswagen are selling well abroad not because there are more Germans than French, while American cars are not, although there are more Americans than there are French and Germans put together. Whatever it is, whether the competitive spirit is lacking, whether social policies encourage laggardness, whether financial policies discourage risk-taking and encouraging feather-bedding, it is not the lack of size that hampers a country, but lack of spirit. If a nation aspires to the adjective “Grande”, she either has the spirit to justify it or else she had better settle for Mediocre Nation.8 Grandeur that depends on cutting down others rather than elevating itself is doomed to shrink.9

We could not state it more clearly. France could indeed fear a unified Germany—or rather, come up against the haunting feeling that it feared it. But if, seeking the source of its fear, it turned its gaze toward Germany and believed that it discerned it there, it seemed advisable not to forget itself totally. The question was: Was France itself not responsible in part for its distress and fear? Granted, the Federal Republic of Germany was an economic powerhouse, and a unified Germany could be even more powerful, but should the economic capacity of the Germans upset France so much? Did the political imagination of the French neighbor necessarily have to feed on projections that made Germany appear like a colossus whose size would have grown at the same time as the fear France had of it? Could France not help itself? Facing up to the Germans economically, relying on its own strengths? And consequently show itself, in the Franco-­ German partnership, to be a nation that stood on its own, from the economic point of view, and was therefore free? What was happening to France? Or, more exactly, what was happening to France’s economic sovereignty? “If Germany should be reunited, France would lose all prospect of one day becoming as strong as Germany economically.” Thus did the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sum up, on November 17, 1989, an article that former Finance Minister Édouard Balladur

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had published in Le Figaro regarding the relationship between Germany and France.10 This was indeed a remarkable declaration! Without the slightest ambiguity, it displayed the problem that Germany represented for France, a combination of oppression, vexation and rebellion. It was the perception of economic distress or, to use the words of power: the recognition of a diminishing of France’s national sovereignty because of economic reasons. The discussion on the possibility of a reunification of Germany, which was triggered in the autumn of 1989, heightened the perception of the problem in an extraordinary way, as is clearly shown in Balladur’s remark that was taken up by the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung and in the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article. The reason was obvious: the more likely German reunification, the more imminent the end of the Franco-­ German arrangement seemed—the end of a balance that had, up until then, been so beneficial for the bonds between Germany and France. What would France do then? How would it behave as regards Germany? On the basis of the quadripartite responsibility with the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR, it retained its legal position visà-vis Germany until German unification was implemented. But then what, once it stopped serving as a protective power for Germany? What significance would it then have for Germany? What would France be for Germany? A France in a state of distress? A France whose sovereignty in relation to Germany would be reduced in the long term? Without a powerful ally in the economic world, tossed about like a toy at the whim of market forces? In fact, the “Mitterrand experiment”11 had brought about an economic situation in which France was asking itself such questions. Shortly after the beginning of this experiment, France found itself in the grip of considerable economic difficulties and saw them above all in the context of its relationship with Germany. The protagonists—the political leaders in Paris and Bonn—fully understood that in creatively confronting these problems, they would redefine the respective positions of Germany and France in the field of finance and economy. Would they perhaps abandon, for a possible economic advantage, the political partnership each side had so often invoked? Or would they grow closer, in the economic area as well, drawing from their combined economic strengths a combined economic power that would allow them not only to preserve their sovereignty in the economic world over the long term but also, by exercising it, to ­contribute to shaping that world?

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The unique relationship between real economic problems and the perception of them was intensifying to the point of producing an impression of annoyance. France, from the earliest days of Mitterrand’s presidency, considered it had lost part of its financial and economic sovereignty. We bring up a few elements on the history of this “feeling” below in order to demonstrate, on the one hand, the meaning of the observation expressed above: the vision of an impending German unity upset French policy. But on the other hand, it is necessary to reflect on the political wisdom and prudence that allowed the turmoil the prospect of German reunification inspired in France to turn into a productive force in the process of implementing Germany’s unity. I speak of the wisdom and prudence of President Mitterrand and a few of his advisers. In a certain way, those same virtues had already created before the period of German reunification—when, in the general consciousness, it was still well beyond the horizon of real expectation—a presupposition in favor of the work of reunification. It was not intended, but when reunification did occur, it contributed decisively to its success. Here is that presupposition: In face of the serious economic difficulties that France, under Mitterrand, felt vis-à-vis Germany—and felt bitterly, as is shown by a considerable number of accounts—it did not in fact take the path of separation or distance itself from Germany. Within the political partnership, and supplementing it, France was seeking an economic partnership with Germany despite all the economic hurdles to be overcome as well as the problem of hurt feelings. And it indeed found its way toward a closer economic relationship with Germany. However, Germany did not support France as much as the French might have wished.12 France knew how to defend its own interests and draw closer to its own goals while proceeding at the same pace as Germany in the economic sphere. And above all, it carried out a major experiment in order not to lose even more of its economic sovereignty as regards Germany: it directed its efforts toward competition with Germany. Yet it was precisely in that effort to proceed at the same pace as Germany economically that France gained greater economic sovereignty. This was a determining experience for France. It took place a few years before 1989 but bore fruit especially in the course of that year and the following one, in 1990, when France made the political decision to support and become involved in Germany’s unification.

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“You Have Chosen to Follow a Different Path” The story of France’s economic difficulties occurred in contrast to and in competition with Germany: it first appealed to Germany then held itself aloof. This Franco-German story began immediately after Mitterrand’s taking office. Just three days after the investiture, on 24 May, 1981, the Federal German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, was awaited in Paris for his first meeting with the new president. The day before, the Élysée chief of staff, Pierre Bérégovoy, received a memo, in preparation for the meeting, on the economic and monetary issues to be discussed.13 The note begins with reflections on France’s currency, the most visible—as for any nation— the most sensitive and sometimes the most influential element of its economic sovereignty. The memo began by stating that it was advisable to make it quite clear to the chancellor that France desired to keep the French franc in the framework of the European Monetary System: “There must be no doubt on this point in the mind of our principal partner.” Certainly, France had the will to carry out the monetary policy it had chosen, but its desire for a strong franc also supposed that someone else shared that desire—and contributed their monetary strength. Further on in the memo, we read that, over the past few days, Federal Germany has exerted a positive role in the monetary area for which the president must address his thanks, since Germany has not raised its interest rate.14 But if we are to believe the memo, this was not yet enough: France wanted Germany to go on supporting its currency; it was important for France “that this wisdom [on the Germans’ part] persist,”15 because France’s monetary policy relied on German understanding. From the German point of view, this was not negligible, for Mitterrand’s new socialist regime was setting economic and social objectives for France that were not in harmony with the market economy as practiced in Federal Germany and on certain points was opposed to it. During their meeting of October 8, 1981 at Latche, Chancellor Schmidt expressed this straightforwardly to President Mitterrand: “You, you have chosen to follow a different path. I hope that you succeed. But your means and methods [on the one hand] and ours [on the other] are such that we can no longer coordinate them.”16 France hoped that Federal Germany would provide economic aid. It went without saying, explained French Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy during his meeting with Chancellor Schmidt on January 29, 1982 in Bonn, “that we are hoping for a boost from the German economy.” Schmidt, in

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turn, began by having him explain the economic and social measures that the French government envisaged taking or had already launched. Like a rigorous chief economist, he subjected the social idealist that Mauroy was to a question-and-answer session in which the latter revealed himself remarkably. Mauroy thus explained to Schmidt that they were hoping to create 200,000 additional jobs in France by lowering the retirement age. Helmut Schmidt immediately replied with a sobering reminder: it would be necessary to pay for the retirements that were being taken earlier. “It will be necessary to finance [them],” he observed, straightaway stating the other two problems that appeared to him: on the one hand, he saw the problem of “inflationist financing” (from the State budget) and, on the other, deemed that it would also have a “European dimension” (in other words, anything leading to inflation in France also concerned Germany). For we Germans, added Schmidt by way of a warning, “have already committed the error of financing pensions with public funds.” The chancellor had been speaking to a brick wall. As if having not heard the latter’s objections, the French prime minister did not answer the question that was asked(i.e., how would early retirements be financed?) but got lost in technical details on the way they would be paid. Without being put off, the chancellor then asked the question in a way that was impossible to elude: “Who pays?” he wanted to know. And the prime minister responded: “The state.” That in no way satisfied Schmidt who asked a new question: “Where do you take the money from?” Faced with this question, Mauroy exposed himself and admitted the extraordinarily problematical nature of the retirement scheme that his government was implementing: we are taking it, he said, “from public funds, at a cost of one hundred billion. A drastic remedy.”17 This was a confession in the seraglio of arcana imperii and did not, of course, dissuade the French government from implementing its economic and socio-political projects. However, the meeting between Schmidt and Mauroy brought about a different kind of effect: within the German and French governments, a way had been found for speaking quite openly and even without pulling punches, about the economic problems that persisted between Germany and France. A few days after his dialogue with Chancellor Schmidt, Mauroy spoke about it during the Cabinet meeting on February 3, 1982, relating it in thoroughly positive terms but limiting himself, in this positive presentation, to the form and neglecting all allusion to content—which would have forced him to mention the divergences on economic policy. He

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explained in particular the degree to which the German chancellor was interested in the development of the economic and social situation in France. “He wants to know what is going on here and asks precise, very detailed questions. He is clearly less skeptical about our experiment than he was a few months ago.”18 In the same sentence in which he mentioned the chancellor’s skepticism, Pierre Mauroy provided this self-interpretation: our experiment. The prime minister was speaking candidly, since, in the Murat Salon, the Cabinet room at the Élysée, only the members of the French government and the president of the Republic were listening to him. And they considered this experiment their own. In speaking so openly with Chancellor Schmidt, Mauroy would have run the risk, we may suppose, of awakening, if not reinforcing, his interlocutor’s skepticism. For all practical purposes, the German and French governments continued to diverge profoundly on the question of “the experiment”—le socialisme romantique19 —and, besides, this experiment was of course carried out in the economic world, and not through transactions in the world of governments. “International finance does not accept the socialist experience [of France],” wrote Pierre Bérégovoy on May 17, 1982 in a note to the president.20 Of course, the soothing words uttered by Pierre Mauroy in the Murat Salon did not dispel tensions within the European Monetary System, especially not those existing between the French and German currencies. Both continued to follow the influences affecting them independently rather than stand together in a common position. In the spring of 1982, a monetary drama began that lasted until June 13 (a Sunday), when exchange rates were modified within the European Monetary System, bringing about a devaluation of the French franc by 5.75% and a revaluation of the German mark by 4.25%. That very day, under the presidency of François Mitterrand, a meeting of the “sub-­ cabinet,” which had been formed to settle monetary and economic issues, met to deal with the issue. At the request of the president, who wanted to start with listening to others` comments, the minister of the economy and finance, Jacques Delors, began. He observed that “France has witnessed a genuine currency crisis whose gravity was such that it could jeopardize our policy.”21 Since March, Delors said, “attacks against the franc” (in its parity with other currencies) had occurred on the currency markets.22 Perhaps, from the French vantage point, it might have been possible to wait until September to make the necessary adaptation to the exchange rate, but the overall economic situation had led the French government to act sooner.

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In the course of discussions with its partners in the European Monetary System, the French government had proposed a modification of parity between 10% and 12%. Initially, however, this proposal had not been very well received since, for the time being, France’s partners envisaged a modification of only 7–8%. Whereupon, explained Delors, France had intervened more energetically and announced to its partners that it had decided to take the country out of the EMS “if we don’t reach 10%.” This threat allowed the French government to obtain what it wanted: a change in the exchange rate between the German and French currencies, a revaluation of the Dutch florin by 4.25% and a devaluation of the Italian lire by 2.5%. However, it obtained all that only after presenting its partners with a program that dealt with the monetary and economic policy that it was henceforth going to carry out, a program that “impressed” them, in Delors’ term.23 Faced with France’s threat to leave the EMS and thereby jeopardize its very existence, its partners demanded that France’s program draw closer to an economic and monetary policy that took the general interest into consideration. From the French point of view, on the other hand, the result of the monetary crisis set off on June 13, 1982 went much more in France’s direction, and France emerged strengthened by the crisis. It was pitting itself against Germany, and Delors, after the readjustment of rates, found only one thing to say about it: “Thus we gain 13% in competitiveness over the Federal Republic of Germany.”24 Perhaps, perhaps. One can wonder to what degree Delors was sure of that because, with respect to economic and financial policy, the French government remained obliged to “follow a different path” and knew perfectly well what that meant. This was shown by an exchange of remarks between the minister of planning, Michel Rocard, and President Mitterrand at the end of the sub-cabinet meeting of June 13, 1982. Commenting on the monetary crisis that France had just weathered, Rocard in fact presented himself as a partisan of an economic and monetary policy focused essentially on promoting economic growth. “We obviously cannot use the money we devote to social measures,” he said, “either for economic action or for growth.” He was wondering, he explained, whether the country could advance at the same pace on both fronts, that is, stimulate the economy and growth as well as implement costly social programs. In his opinion, the government would doubtless have to give up one or the other, but a question then arose: Which one? “At the present time,” replied Rocard without the slightest embarrassment, “we are sacrificing

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investment and growth.” That could not continue, especially given that “the international constraints” were heavier “than we thought.” President Mitterrand responded personally to this systematic objection to his economic and financial policy, stating his reply as unequivocally as Rocard had done. With the authority imparted to him by his office, he made it clear that his government’s political project in the social sphere was completely independent of economic and financial considerations and he saw no reason to change anything whatsoever in that hierarchy. As if being invited to say once and for all what “the different path” was, Mitterrand laid it out in terms that made clear its beginnings, its developments and orientation: The President of the Republic reckons that the measures we have taken in the past year were an essential part of our program and, as concerns social matters, we have done only the indispensable minimum to achieve our goals of social justice. He recognizes that Mr. Rocard’s reasoning is correct on the theoretical economic level but we cannot reason in abstracto: what was done was necessary to create the conditions of confidence that will enable us to be followed in the second phase of our policy. And this confidence is an indispensable factor for its success. [The president] knows quite well that what we devote to social issues does not go to production, but it is necessary to take the political factor into account. We cannot say to the good people “we are very close to you, we understand you” and, at the same time, take stricter measures than those of our predecessors.25

Who was right? Minister Rocard? President Mitterrand? That was the question to be asked. One might suppose that a confrontation was brewing between these two men; we know it existed.26 In our story of France’s economic distress another kind of confrontation played the decisive role. An antagonistic force opposed Mitterrand’s “program,” Mauroy’s “experiment,” a force against which all political power shatters: namely, reality. “We will thereby gain 13% in competitiveness in relation to Federal Germany,” asserted Finance Minister Delors, on June 13, 1982, quoting the figure to demonstrate the Mitterrand government’s financial policy. If one looked closer, however, it was not much more than a possible figure— and perhaps merely the appearance of one. Three days later, at a Cabinet meeting, Delors corrected his colleague Jean-Pierre Chevènement, one of the most enthusiastic partisans of the “program” and “experiment,” and once again, it was a question of figures. Chevènement, ready to provoke his colleagues, had asked them why it was necessary to consider an upper

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limit of the budget deficit, adding that Federal Germany was going “much further than us.” In addition, an increase in the budget deficit had become much less dangerous insofar as the money supply in France had only grown 12.5%. But Delors, already anticipating that Chevènement, who clearly judged that his thesis was confirmed, would be dipping into France’s budget, interrupted his colleague with this sentence: “No, alas, by 16%, and, besides, that is a figure that must not be revealed!”27 The economic and financial policy of the French government was thus in conflict with known facts even while it denied them. Which would be stronger: the government defending its policy or the reality contradicting it? That was the real question.28

“Leaving the European Monetary System Would Put Us Under the Control of the International Monetary Fund” In order to improve France’s monetary and financial situation, the sub-­ cabinet on June 13, 1982 defined a series of measures that were adopted by the Cabinet at its meeting on June 16, following a heated debate among ministers. Measures included a freeze on prices and wages (with the exception of the legal minimum wage) until October 31, 1982, as well as the decision to keep the French budget deficit in 1982 and 1983 below the threshold of 3% of GNP. However, owing to resistance in Parliament, it was necessary to wait until July 20, 1982 before the law went into effect.29 Essentially, even though not made explicit, the French government was henceforth counting on an economic austerity policy. Yet, the news coming from economic reality was increasingly bad. By the end of June, the latest figures indicated that France’s foreign trade deficit had reached frightening proportions, having increased by 30 billion francs in the space of five months. If things continued like that, one of Mitterrand’s advisers observed, the French currency would inevitably lose value at regular intervals unless France left the European Monetary System.30 The French economy simply lacked the money that it would need, explained Jacques Delors at an August 4 meeting of the sub-cabinet devoted to economic issues. Rather than the 460 billion francs necessary for the year 1982, the capital saved in France amounted to only 370 billion.31 By mid-September, at a Cabinet meeting, the president cited the franc’s “strength” which was already being threatened again: “We must do

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what is necessary to prevent speculators from hoping that we will result in devaluation or leave the EMS.”32 One of his advisers wrote a memo to him at that time, pointing out that the debt of French companies was constantly increasing rather than being reduced, and that this indebtedness was “blocking” the necessary investments.33 On October 19, there was a session of the sub-cabinet dealing with foreign trade issues. In a “brutal” debate—as Christian Sautter, one of the participants, described it34—they analyzed France’s economic problems. “We are in a situation close to disaster!” exclaimed the foreign trade minister, Michel Jobert, at the meeting.35 The French government’s notions regarding economic policy did not hold water. Economic reality increasingly contradicted them and forced ministers to admit what conclusions had to be drawn. On September 24, 1981, when François Mitterrand held his first press conference after his election, he had devoted the main part of his introductory statement to presenting his government’s economic and social policy. Each of its measures, he explained, aimed at “stimulation through consumption.” To this objective he had clearly subordinated that of “stimulation through investment,” which, nevertheless, ought to occur, too. In addition, he had clearly stated the essential weaknesses from which the French economy was suffering. For years, its products were losing market shares which meant the French economy had to strive to “win back our own market.”36 A little more than a year later, on Sunday, November 7, 1982, Finance Minister Delors sat down to write, by hand, a letter for the president, which began as follows: “Mister President. You asked me to inform you when the warning light ‘flashed red’. We are not yet at that point, but it could go on at any minute!”37 The “stimulation through consumption” had thus produced nothing—to the contrary, economic catastrophe was threatening to hit France so rapidly that the finance minister sent an alarm to the president about what would happen next. In this letter, Delors sharply warned Mitterrand and added a note dated November 8, 1982, in which he described and analyzed the “serious, humiliating financial crises” in which France henceforth found itself.38 This crisis had been preceded by a steep drop in French industrial competitiveness, which had initially led to a loss of domestic market share, followed by a surrender, pure and simple, in the battle for exports, and even industry’s abandoning all ardor and desire to export the merchandise it produced. When the new Socialist government triggered a rise in consumption with its economic and social measures, this did not, as in times past, provide the expected stimulation

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of French production but a sudden rise in imports instead. Rather than purchase unsatisfactory local products, French consumers bought foreign ones. French consumption increased by 3.7% between July 1, 1981 and June 30, 1982, but production over the same period, Delors said, grew by only 2.1%. The monetary readjustments—that is, the devaluations of the franc— added Delors, had not changed the situation at all.39 On the contrary, for 1983 one should expect deficits in the balance of trade and in the balance of payments even though “that would not be tolerable.” The situation would be further aggravated by the high rate of the US dollar; an additional 5% rise in the dollar would increase the French deficit by 10 billion francs. “We are threatened with a serious, humiliating financial crisis,” summed up Delors. In view of this crisis, he drew the following conclusions: First of all, France should, over the coming months—he specified: up until the month of March—set aside “piles of foreign currencies” (in other words, Delors was expecting the franc to decline further); second, France had to do everything to eliminate its foreign trade deficits. According to him, it was thus necessary to make sure that the demand for imported goods diminish and, inversely, that French exports rise. (This objective would concern Germany above all and in increasingly urgent fashion.) “For we cannot,” the finance minister concluded, “continue to spend more than we earn. Yet, in 1982, we are spending 90 billion francs more than we are earning.” There was only one solution: “We must act”; the alternative, he explained, was “a heart attack.”40 In truth, the red warning light was already flashing at threatening intervals, but the government had not yet taken any action. Warning signals were being recorded one after another as if they might provide some sort of oracular guidance. Catastrophic figures on France’s economic situation, from the most diverse statistical communiqués, were being turned this way and that as Mitterrand’s advisers in a state of desperation sought a magic formula to stave off France’s imminent financial coronary. Thus, in mid-January 1983, the president received a memo from Élisabeth Guigou, the adviser for international economy and foreign trade, indicating France’s total foreign trade deficit for the year 1982: 92.7 billion francs.41 In a memo dated January 12, the Élysée chief of staff, Jean-Louis Bianco, informed the president of the inflation rate for 1982, an uncomfortably high 9.7%.42 Mitterrand’s reaction to the “objective weightiness” of the foreign trade deficit at the January 19 Cabinet

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meeting: “intolerable.”43 But the same day, Christian Sautter, his adviser for international economic relations and Élysée deputy chief of staff, added to the list of negative economic news with a note that announced a “catastrophic deficit” for France in its trade with Germany in 1982; this deficit amounted to 38 billion francs, having nearly doubled in the space of a year.44 Sautter’s memo did not, however, contain only bad news. He saw the possibility of France’s improving a situation for which it could—and had— to find a way out. Germany had to help. It—and one must always remember that we are talking about Federal Germany—could lend France a hand by lowering interest rates, thereby stimulating its own economy and consequently France’s. But Sautter also called for another idea from the Germans, which he deemed much more important: a powerful and rapid revaluation of the Deutsche Mark. He developed two arguments. If the mark was not quickly revaluated, France could let the franc plunge to the lower limit of intervention within the European Monetary System (EMS) and then force Germany to intervene to support the French currency (and in Paris, it was expected that Germany would do much more to ensure the future of the EMS).45 Second, France could also decide on setting import quotas on foreign merchandise (relying on Article 109 of the Treaty of Rome). For the Germans, such a measure would naturally imply their selling a lower quantity of merchandise in France than usual and thereby earning less in the French market.46 Revaluation of the German currency: that was the magic formula. As if they had been under its spell or had attributed a power of clairvoyance to it, Mitterrand’s advisers—those who were called on and those who were not47—looked to inspect France’s core economic problems and open them up to find a solution. Time was of the essence and pressed with the restricting force that was its own. On the political calendar, municipal elections were set for March 6 and 13 throughout the country. Voters were expected to be influenced by their perception of “the experiment.”48 Moreover, the figures of France’s economic situation amounted to so many more-or-less devastating verdicts on “Romantic Socialism.” And third, at the very heart of the French government, fundamental conflicts on economic and financial policy continued to multiply. Naturally, Mitterrand was aware that the government was wearing itself out on the question of knowing what had to be done about the experiment, but in February and March 1983, the French state again found itself embroiled in a monetary drama. Time was short, action imperative.

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“France has no more currency credits,” wrote Christian Sautter in his memo for the president, dated February 17.49 According to him, France had but two lines of credit for defending its currency: The first, which amounted to between $4 and $6 billion, came from various credits (including $3 billion from the Deutsche Bundesbank) and unlimited credit from the Bundesbank as soon as, on the currency market, the franc reached the intervention floor of the European Monetary System. Sautter drew his information from another memo, full of figures and technical comments, written by Élisabeth Guigou. This inventory contained more precise data on the problem. If speculation against the franc spread, she wrote, the first credit line would be consumed in two or three weeks. If that happened, there would be no choice but to let the franc fall to the lower level, and “the Bundesbank would then be obliged to support our currency.” Guigou described it more precisely than Sautter, writing: “theoretically unlimited amounts for a duration of 45 days.”50 Therefore, although the Bundesbank was obliged to restrain the franc in its fall, it was not unconditional or unlimited. Amid the “automated” procedures, there was leeway that could be used for “non-automatic” behavior; furthermore, this system of rules was, of course, itself still subject to the primacy of the decisions that politics—that is, the governments of the EMS’s member nations—might make on its subject. Guigou concluded her memo by advocating a political remedy to the drama of monetary powerlessness confronting her country: “Our negotiating position with Germany would be stronger if we could present a set of accompanying measures that would allow for stabilizing the Franc-Mark rate on a long-term basis after revaluation of the latter.”51 Time was short, and, in the monetary drama, the main actors for France became aware of the fact that a way out of the drama would be found only through a political decision—the persuasiveness of the accumulating figures dispelled any lingering doubts. It was necessary to reduce the vulnerability of France’s economic situation, a crisis that was weakening the entire country. As the players in Paris understood, there were two ways to decide. The first: France could leave the EMS; the franc would then fall endlessly,52 but France would not be knuckling under to the pressure being exerted on it (in particular by Federal Germany) to correct its economic policy, and it would have proclaimed its “national independence.”53 The other path was the opposite: remain in the EMS and, in addition, promulgate a “set of accompanying measures” by which France might hope for a better position in the interplay of economic forces with its

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principal trading partners (which would seem better, then, in a “stabilized” exchange rate between the Franc and the Deutsche Mark). Between mid-February 1983 and the second half of March, an intense debate took place within the French government to determine which path to choose. This was a debate with clear arguments because the alternatives were stark. But the lines of argument crossed, shifted and were superseded. This was made even more complex by the fact that the stakes also involved personal objectives that were hidden by the debates but linked to the future distribution of power in the government.54 And in the middle of all that was President Mitterrand from whom they attempted to obtain support. On February 21, he received a memo from Élisabeth Guigou in which she announced what would happen to France were the franc to leave the EMS: They could count on a 10–15% devaluation of the French currency in relation to the American dollar, along with an increase in the French foreign debt and the obligation to ask for loans from the European Community or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which would surely impose a restoration plan on France. Guigou’s memo transited through the offices of Christian Sautter, deputy chief of staff at the Élysée, and Jean-Louis Bianco, chief of staff. Both commented on this note with a handwritten remark, and both raised the question of France’s economic sovereignty. Sautter, with provocative terseness, noted: “Leaving the EMS would make IMF control over the French economy almost inevitable.” Bianco’s annotation was even more brutal: “Leaving the EMS would put us under the control of the IMF.”55 A few days later, on February 28, another presidential adviser, Jacques Attali, sent Mitterrand a note in which he not only urged making a decision but also made the German chancellor personally responsible for the implementation of the requested revaluation of the Deutsche Mark: “If Chancellor Kohl is reelected and has not agreed to the revaluation, we must prepare for leaving the EMS at any moment.”56 Yes, said François-­ Xavier Stasse (another adviser, in charge of economic issues) and Élisabeth Guigou, in a memo to the president dated March 3: the Deutsche Mark must be revaluated by at least 8%; otherwise there will be no other solution but to leave the EMS. However, they went on, France did not really want to go that way. Floating the franc would in no way increase the field of economic action but would instead create constraints as it would only cause “our foreign trade and prices” to deteriorate.57

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The revaluation of the Deutsche Mark remained the magic formula, but this formula was nowhere near as simple as the written words suggested: “The Deutsche Mark is revaluated!” For although they wished to apply this formula, it became thoroughly complicated. It required all the practical know-how, resolution and executive toughness of politics: its creative force to think, choose and do something else. The finance minister, Jacques Delors, followed a logical process and left the field of economic and financial policy to consider that of political imagination and political vision. In another Sunday letter (again handwritten), sent to President Mitterrand on March 6, he formally advised against leaving the EMS. Beyond all the economic thinking, he argued the logic of a policy that they had wished to carry out. “Our arguments—as regards foreign policy and European politics—would lose their value,” he explained simply but forcefully to justify his choice.58 In fact, Europe or, more exactly, the unification of Europe, was the project that President Mitterrand placed above all others. If there was one thing that defined the essential political decisions of the French government under the Mitterrand presidency it was this: the European project. So which path should France follow? Should it leave the EMS or not? According to Delors’ argument, they were wrong to consider this alternative, for if France were thinking about Europe, it made no sense. The European project simply did not admit France’s leaving the European Monetary System (whose existence, moreover, would have been jeopardized by this decision). But once that was acknowledged, a first—and, to a certain degree, the decisive—step had also been made for formulating and elaborating a political-economic program to rescue France from its economic problems. Henceforth it was clear what the thinking, decisions and actions to come had to focus on. The program that the French government finally, in March 1983, agreed on to resolve the country’s economic problems began with a change of viewpoint: France as viewed from Europe. By turning its back on “the experiment,” the economic autarky France had sought, something completely different was thought up: France’s commitment to an economy adapted to its European project and, above all, to its political partnership with Federal Germany. So then, another economic policy was called for, one that would stabilize the French situation. And the magic formula was needed because it would give access to the other economy, to leveling the monetary and economic processes between Germany and France especially, and in the rest of the European circle.

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In mid-March 1983, Mitterrand and his government thus found themselves before the gate of the “revaluation of the Deutsche Mark.” Their projects for France had to go through this gate but, of course, access belonged to the Germans. Would they open it so that France might continue on its way? On Monday, March 14, President Mitterrand received a memo from his advisor Attali where Attali sketched out “for this week” two scenarios for the next stage, if the German government had not “done its duty, which consist[ed] of revaluating the Deutch [sic] Mark.” The first scenario led to a public confrontation with Federal Germany, where France would show its absolute determination facing Germany and impute to it the responsibility for a major fracture in the shape of Europe; by having neglected its duty to reevaluate the Deutsche Mark, Germany would have made the European Monetary System lose all its meaning. According to the other scenario, France would enter into secret negotiations with Federal Germany, in the course of which Germany had to feel Mitterrand’s absolute determination in regard not only to currency but also to economic, industrial, and political matters (i.e., to turn away from “the experiment” and set up a new political-economic program). What’s more, during these negotiations, it would be necessary to put the Franco-German marriage contract on the table.59 Over the next few days, people in both Bonn and Paris worked on constructing this gate, even though, at first, hardly any prospect of success was seen. Jean-Louis Bianco—whom François Mitterrand had secretly sent to Bonn for meetings at the federal chancellery and from which Bianco returned empty-handed60—was finally able, on Friday, March 18 at lunchtime, to inform the president, in a handwritten note, that Waldemar Schreckenberger (chief of the German chancellery at the time) “called me at 1:30 p.m.” and that he could deduce the following points from the latter’s “long explanations”: (1) We, too, have our difficulties. (2) We are not unwilling to take a step in your direction, but you must take one, too. (3) A unilateral 8% revaluation of the Deutsche Mark is absolutely out of the question. (4) A 2% devaluation of the franc would not, in all likelihood, be sufficient. Bianco also reported that Schreckenberger had seemed worried by the idea that France might resort to protectionist measures and had implied that the German effort, in terms of percentages, would be much greater than France’s. What’s more, Schreckenberger had said the same thing to Jacques Delors (which Bianco already knew).61 Over the next two days, negotiations resumed in earnest and indeed led to the construction of the gate. Delors exchanged urgent messages with

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Gerhard Stoltenberg, his German counterpart, to whom Chancellor Kohl had given full powers in the area (or at least that is what was understood in Paris).62 Stoltenberg again deliberated with the chancellor and also communicated the latter’s intentions to Delors: To clarify the situation, Kohl wanted to discuss the object of the negotiations with President Mitterrand and deal with the decisions that would come out of the next meeting of the Federal cabinet. He counted on confirming prior agreements that applied to the subject. Bianco again informed the president of all that in a handwritten memo.63 This was Sunday, March 20. In Brussels, the European Community finance ministers had been meeting since Friday to prepare a modification of exchange rates within the EMS. On the currency markets, “attacks against the franc” (as viewed in France) had in no way subsided and, in the last few days, had further intensified. On Monday morning, March 21, a meeting of the European Council (heads of state and government of the European Community member states) would begin in Brussels. The French foreign minister, Claude Cheysson, therefore called Jean-Louis Bianco early that Sunday afternoon and strongly advised against continuing the negotiations in view of the modification of exchange rates set for Monday morning. It would be better to postpone the European summit. Moreover, Cheysson explained his mistrust of the negotiations underway and the questions he was asking himself about them. Would the Germans only pretend to grant concessions so as not to bear responsibility in the event of the negotiations’ failure? And would the reactions of the “little countries” (he was basically thinking of the Netherlands and Belgium, which refused to let their currencies also be revaluated) not be “remote-controlled” by the Germans? Bianco immediately passed on all these thoughts to Mitterrand in his memo written on Sunday, March 20, at 4:15 p.m.,64 finding a president in full creative reflection, desirous of accomplishing a constructive political act. Mitterrand attentively recorded the news of the Brussels negotiations and stayed totally absorbed in them but did not settle for that. For the past few days—and this was also the case on March 20—he was preparing to form a new government for France. The Germans also wanted the gate to open onto a path leading to a more promising economy for France and contributed their share to its construction. And Mitterrand, too, worked on it. On the morning of March 21, 1983  in Brussels, a change in exchange rates within the European Monetary System was announced: the French franc was devalued by 2.5%, the Deutsche Mark revalued by 5.5%. Two days later,

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President Mitterrand held the first meeting of his new government. He had put off decisions on this point to a “post-Brussels” date,65 the political architect waiting to know exactly what he had to do before fully executing his work. For today, he said at the outset, there was not yet an agenda. The new Cabinet would begin its work the following Friday, March 25, and would deal with the “government’s economic program.” This government was smaller, Mitterrand went on, and the reason was that, as a “tightened team,” it would better achieve the goal of “winning the economic battle.”66 France saw itself “at war” (we shall return to this point in detail) and by choosing the monetary issue, since this choice pulled all the rest behind it, they were only starting down the path toward management. Unlike “Romantic Socialism,” it would be in tune with the economic forces and the rules of the market that these forces stipulated. For pursuing this path, President Mitterrand had appointed a new government. Its task was the “final” mission, the unavoidable one, in a way, since it had to determine and design the details of the journey. A “plan,” a “program” needed to be enacted, precisely the “set of accompanying measures” that Élisabeth Guigou had mentioned in her February 18 memo and which other Mitterrand advisers had prepared and worked on under other names,67 a program—this must not be forgotten—that also had to correspond to the Germans’ expectations. This is precisely what the French cabinet did when it gathered on March 25 for its first working session. One single point was mentioned on the agenda—“Economic, financial and social measures”—and it was dealt with exhaustively. President Mitterrand and Finance Minister Delors, whose appointment had been renewed, presented and explained at great length the measures envisaged. The ministers, hearing them for the first time, asked several questions before formally promulgating a “ten-point action program for restoring France’s balances.”68 “The Government has decided to institute”—thus begins the resolution—“a national action for restoring our trade balance within two years. To achieve this central objective, it has adopted a ten-point action program to continue the austerity measures of June 1982.” The program’s points were then enumerated in the dry and arduous language of this type of document, and a translation into ordinary language is necessary to understand to what degree an emergency policy was being announced here. Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Roland took on this task by proposing a comprehensible version, which follows:

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A drop in purchasing power, zero growth, forced saving, rising unemployment and draconian restriction of household spending abroad. The austerity plan, modestly baptized “economic, financial and social measures”, presented by Jacques Delors Friday morning in the Cabinet meeting, aims at reestablishing the balance of payments in two years by making inroads of 65 billion on household consumption and state spending in 1983. The 1983 curb is twice as drastic as the 1981 boost. The stimulus policies totaled 1% of the GNP. The austerity measures are focusing on 2% of the GNP. This is the real austerity that the Socialists denounced with such conviction at the time of Mr. Barre. The Left is burying ten years of redistributive discourse and paying dearly for the mistakes in assessing the scope of France’s maneuvering room and the weight of its German partner.69

On April 20, 1983 the office of the French prime minister issued a long paper titled “The Choices of the IXth Plan” whose first sentence was: “A world dies, another is born.”70

“Our Problem in Relation to Germany” The path leading to an economic partnership between France and Germany remained difficult, but the two countries continued striving to enlarge it and make it more acceptable. The will to do so was not lacking: France and Federal Germany had chosen the path and, under the sign of “Europe,” from the economic point of view neither state saw another option. But France continued to observe the inequality of the situation. In the economic cooperation with Federal Germany based on the partnership toward which slowly but surely it was headed, the forces were divided unequally and France sometimes had the impression, quite unequally. In relation to France, Federal Germany had unbounded economic power, and in this case, it was asked on the French side, could the Germans not make a few more efforts for the common cause? Federal Germany, it was said in Paris, was not doing everything it could. As, for example, Mitterrand’s adviser Hervé Hannoun explained in an update he wrote for the Franco-German summit of May 21–22, 1987,71 owing to the “massive surpluses” Germany was producing in its trade balance, it bore a particular responsibility (like Japan, the other country whose trade balance boasted considerable surpluses) for stimulating industrial activity in the industrialized world. But, as Hannoun made clear, Federal Germany was not assuming this responsibility and thereby

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transgressed the international agreement (“Louvre Agreement”) by which it accepted that responsibility. The French were tempted to indict Germany because its trade policy did not correspond to the agreement it had concluded. Even though the Germans could produce several arguments against this idea—Hannoun named five—they were “politically” too light to counterbalance the general feeling that “the FRG could do even more.”72 The path was difficult, and on certain points, opened up chasms before which stood the French on the one side and the Germans on the other, looking across at each other, wanting to go toward each other and having between them only the valley that separated them and nothing else, nothing that would have allowed for bridging this gap. The institutional and cultural structures by which each side understood itself in its own way, and according to which one behaved very differently from the other, produced effects that could surely not be surmounted for the moment and could exist in the future only after extraordinary efforts. Such was, in any case, the experience to be made of the general idea of an “encounter,” an “exchange” between the nations, between the cultures. And it is certainly noteworthy that this experience was expressed in a text written by the president’s military staff. This memo of October 14, 1987 dealt with the probable reasons for the lack of prior cooperation between France and West Germany in the field of military technology and was titled “The causes for failure of cooperation” and mentioned a considerable number of them. Here we are also struck by a phenomenon already observed: the military interpreted the problem they perceived—military cooperation between Germans and French was not working—by giving explanations for it that were not solely military but also cultural and political. The gulf they described was deep indeed: The French Defense Minister has power over industry, unlike his German counterpart. The executive power decides programs in France; in Germany, it is the Bundestag [Federal Parliament], etc. For the Germans, a dossier must be complete with all the elements: historical, economic, demographic, and so on. Too heavy, say the French. A French file does not include everyone’s known variants. There are only the latest elements. Too light, say the Germans.

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Everyone prefers his short-term interest to his long-term interest (especially if he doesn’t see it or if he’s a member of the Bundestag, for the elections are coming up.)

Nonetheless, at the end of the sheet, contrary to the overall thesis, is mentioned the fact that decisions concerning a few major projects for the ten or twenty years to come (fighter plane, tanks and artillery) were settled. There remained a few things yet to be decided, but these concerned only small projects. And as if wanting consolation in spite of everything: “This is not, however, negligible, for the sum of the small programs amounts to that of the major programs.”73 In the realm of the Franco-German partnership, which had to be stimulated and cultivated continuously, the players were torn between very different experiences. What was increasingly successful on one side continued not to function on the other. Thus an imbalance in the internal arrangement of this relationship seemed to set in that despite the considerable progress that had been made in the mutual political ties, showed precisely the degree to which they were still behind in the effort to work together on the economic level. The fine image of partnership presented distortions, and they who had conceived it saw that their work was becoming unbalanced. One had the impression that parts of this image had been detached and distorted in relation to others in such a grotesque way that the most striking feature of this image was its deformity. Of course, it would have been a display of total incompetence or, to state it more forcefully, behavior totally out of place, had one not wanted to implement more, for example, than the “sum of the small programs in relation to that of the major programs.” Moreover, this was not the case. On the contrary, some of the important players understood full well the difficulties confronting the Franco-German relationship as well as the need to remedy it by using the strength of their political art, this creative force capable of forming a whole from contradictory elements. On August 30, 1988, French Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, wrote a memo for President Mitterrand in which he brought up his concerns inspired by the difficulties France was having with the Federal Republic of Germany over financial and political matters. Dumas told how he had mentioned this concern to his German colleague, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, when the two had met shortly before. “I summed up my thinking to Mr. Genscher in the following way,” wrote Dumas: “It is thoroughly regrettable that our two countries, which have good relations on the political

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level (in the international domain on bilateral problems or within the European Community), do not manage to translate this harmony in our economic and financial relations.” Some of the determining players, as we have indicated, understood quite well the distress in which the Franco-German relationship found itself. Dumas was one of them, as was Genscher, who, sharing the concern voiced by the former, recommended that his French colleague include President Mitterrand’s preoccupation on the agenda of the next meeting with the German chancellor or, even better, of a Franco-German summit; in addition, he promised to mention it himself to the chancellor, to “lay the groundwork.” But the German foreign minister also described the situation to his French counterpart. The situation that they deplored, explained Genscher, was in part due to the “difficult character” of German Finance Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg, who was much more interested in his budget than in a long-term perspective on economic issues. “There is no contact between the two [French and German] finance ministers,” he said, according to the terms repeated by Dumas in his memo. “They do not, as it were, talk or consult,” although, as Genscher emphasized, that constituted an exception among all the ministers of the two governments. It would perhaps be useful to ask Pierre Bérégovoy, Stoltenberg’s French counterpart, to “make the first step” (Genscher clearly judged Stoltenberg too obtuse to accomplish even this gesture). Moreover, Roland Dumas informed his president that, following his comments about Stoltenberg, Genscher had made remarks about Karl-Otto Pöhl, the president of the Bundesbank, Germany’s Federal Bank, “insisting on the fact” that, contrary to what was generally said about him, Pöhl was much more flexible than the finance minister. “He is not hostile,” he told me, “to the idea of the European Bank and is more willing to engage in dialogue.”74 Mitterrand knew the worry expressed by Dumas and had, for example, stated it in similar fashion shortly before, in his February 5 meeting with Franz Vranitzky, chancellor of Austria. In that conversation, the president explained that Franco-German relations were quite positive but there remained a small shadow on the horizon of those relations: “Germany, which has regained its power, tends to refuse to share this power in economic and monetary matters.”75 It was, in a certain way, a definitive word and, moreover, oriented toward the future: definitive insofar as fighting the inequality in dividing economic power between France and Germany rather than taking it as a starting point. And Mitterrand’s terms were

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oriented toward the future insofar as he was calling for something in the framework of this existing inequality: a more uniform division of Germany’s economic power. The exception was that this issue was no longer economic but political, and that is why he raised it during his meeting with the Austrian chancellor—and the reason why Dumas stated to his German counterpart what gave him cause for concern regarding Germany and France. In Paris, they understood that if France wanted to make up for its lagging behind a Germany that economically was getting further ahead, France had to fight to catch up to Germany politically. Let us stress the year that François Mitterrand informed the Austrian chancellor of this insight: it was 1988. As we have stated, that year Mitterrand and the members of his government debated the issue of the relationship between Germany and France, their relationship in general and, in particular, in its actual state. They had a clear idea of the power structure reigning over the relations between the two countries. And it was certainly also because they had clear ideas that this structure, transparent and enlightening as it was, hardly pleased them; it was suspect to them. Even if one could describe Franco-German relations as “harmonious,” they were not “harmonizing.” During the Cabinet meeting of October 26, 1988, which we have already discussed above, François Mitterrand interpreted the Franco-­ German relationship and presented it as an enigma. In truth, everything was clear with nothing truly clarified. France was in great economic difficulty in relation to Germany, but the best response to those difficulties was military, not economic. Similarly, the best response to the enigma of Franco-German relations was not its elucidation but the creative play with it: One cannot reproach Federal Germany for having interests dictated by its geographical location. But the economic cooperation and financial advantages that the Federal Republic of Germany brings to the Soviet Union will not make the latter evolve on the problem of the reunification of Germany, a reunification that would represent a veritable threat for it. There is nothing threatening in Germany’s drawing closer to the Soviet Union. This only shows that Germany is more useful to the Soviet Union than France, from the economic point of view. It must stimulate us to improve our balance of power with our closest ally. One wonders about the “true German intentions”. Instead, one should wonder about Germany’s true interests. They are its geography. It is between two blocs: how can you expect such a country not to look to both sides? For

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the USSR, there are two “non possumus”: reunification and Germany’s holding nuclear weapons or even the Germans having a say in their use. As for us, we must return to Eastern Europe in force. In relation to Germany, our problem is to find a better balance for foreign trade. As was said a while ago about domestic policy, union is a struggle. In any case, it is a competition that must be won. Beyond the interest for our security, our nuclear weapon gives us an additional diplomatic capability.76

What a compliment for the Franco-German couple, presented as a bouquet of steel flowers: “Union is a struggle.” And what an impression, the idea that, despite all the relationships that France had formed with Germany, this one nonetheless escaped it: Germany’s true interests are those of its geography. It is between two blocs. And, then, there is the association of ideas: reunification, USSR, atomic weapons, the influence of France in Eastern Europe. What was going on here? Were the familiar links of a Franco-German partnership that had never (naturally not) been completely harmonious being torn apart; and were they being examined brutally along the relational lines over which passed the pure technical tension of power that ensured the partnership’s cohesion? Were other, totally different contexts not being brought into play, in which it was necessary to begin by redefining Germany, where France freshened the forces of its political influence in Europe, which went beyond Germany? If we follow the analytical notes written at the Élysée about facts of the period’s politics and the analytical terms with which Mitterrand commented in Cabinet meetings on questions linked to current policy, the Franco-German relationship in late 1988 and early 1989 appears, in the French view, extremely tense. Sticking to the vocabulary of the previous lines: The tension in Franco-German relations had gone flat to form another tension that still maintained the cohesion of Federal Germany and France but also carried—or better, pushed—them beyond this context. The effect of tension seemed to reverse itself, bringing the two states closer together and pushing them against each other. These “hindrances”—that is, commercial obstacles that still so complicated France’s task of selling its products in Germany and contributed to further aggravating its trade deficit with Federal Germany—wrote Mitterrand adviser Marc Boudier on April 19, 1989, in a memo to the president, “are not politically and psychologically admissible with a country that shows such strong trade surpluses.”77 During that same period, at

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the April 26, 1989 Cabinet meeting, the French president uttered words that suspended the Franco-German relationship—everything the Germans and French had agreed upon was suddenly suspended, and in the transparency thereby obtained, Mitterrand pointed out something else: “There are ambiguities, things left unsaid in our relationship. We must always think that Germany is in a state of suffering since the war and that it has not ceased being in a state of suffering since the defeat. Vis-à-vis France’s nuclear power, there is a little latent jealousy.”78 Things left unsaid between Paris and Bonn, yet stated (and concealed) in the Élysée’s arcanum. In the course of the Cabinet meeting on September 7, 1988, Defense Minister Chevènement mentioned his recent visit to Federal Germany, the meager extent of the military cooperation with that country, and the Germans’ moods regarding security in Europe. He also mentioned the fact that during the congress of the Social Democratic Party, extraordinarily critical words had been uttered about France’s military doctrine of nuclear deterrence. Whereupon the French president said to the members of his government: “France did not take charge of Europe’s defense and therefore has no need of a German contribution to define deterrence. Germany’s support for the American graduated response strategy is understandable, albeit erroneous, but it is not for Germany to ask France to change its strategy. Even though France is behind its allies in the framework of the Atlantic Alliance, it is not Germany’s guardian.”79

Notes 1. See Aristotle’s remarks in Nicomachean Ethics (1141b 10–30). 2. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. Direction des Affaires Juridiques, Note. A/S. De l’Allemagne, Paris, October 24, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/JLB/87). 3. Sowj. Dok., 466. 4. Dok. Dt. Ein., 1347 5. CM, May 27, 1981. 6. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, June 2, 1983. 7. von Loewenstern, French Fears, 6. 8. In the Germanic countries, the term “Grande Nation” is still often used, with a touch of irony, to designate France. 9. French Fears, 6. 10. FAZ, November 17, 1989, 4. 11. I borrow this formulation from the title of Ross, The Mitterrand Experiment.

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12. With one considerable and, in the historical perspective, decisive exception: France continually observed—and that fully corresponded to its expectations—that the Bundesbank was a reliable ally, at its side in the defense of its currency. 13. Note pour Monsieur Bérégovoy, May 23, 1981. 14. On this subject, it must be said that in Paris, even at the highest level, people had trouble understanding—or accepting—the Bundesbank’s constitutionally guaranteed independence from all political influence, for example, that of the federal government. In the French capital, things happened differently: traditionally, the Banque de France had to follow the French government’s instructions. 15. For all the quoted remarks, see Note pour Monsieur Bérégovoy, May 23, 1981. 16. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 8, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 17. Report of the Schmidt-Mauroy meeting in Bonn, January 29, 1982 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/72). 18. CM, February 3, 1982. 19. This is how it was characterized in Gélédan, Le bilan économique, 9. 20. Pierre Bérégovoy, Note pour le Président, May 17, 1982. 21. Report of the Sub-Cabinet (for economy and currency matters) meeting on June 13, 1982. 22. Ibid. In the week of March 8–13, the Banque de France had to spend $900 million and, the following week, $1.3 billion to bolster the franc. On Monday, March 22, the Banque de France’s reserve funds were down to $8.7 billion. It would therefore have found itself depleted had it been necessary to continue support buying. See Jacques Attali, Note pour Monsieur le Président, March 22, 1982. 23. Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Roland report that Jacques Delors had, above all, agreed with his partners in the EMS to freeze prices. (La déc., vol. 1, 425.) 24. Report of the Sub-Cabinet (for economy and currency matters) meeting on June 13, 1982. 25. Ibid. 26. La déc., vol. I, 426ff.—On the particular case of this interminable conflict between Mitterrand and Rocard, which handicapped French policy, see Schneider, Michel Rocard; id., La haine tranquille; id., Les dernières années, 51–61; Boccara, Mitterrand en toutes lettres, 331–335. 27. CM, June 16, 1982. 28. Already on August 19, 1981, President Mitterrand received from his adviser Jacques Attali a memo bringing out the development, harbinger of conflicts, in France’s economic and financial situation. A budget deficit of

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120 billion could be expected, he said, which could only be covered by digging into the monetary supply. Following a new franc-supporting operation, the state’s coffers would lose 11 billion; on the foreign trade level, a deficit of 67 billion francs was to be expected, 30 billion of which could only be covered by state borrowing … Consequently, it was necessary to economize, limit imports, and boost industrial investment activity (Jacques Attali, Note pour Monsieur le Président, August 19, 1981). Mitterrand wrote “seen” on the note. 29. La déc., vol. I, 430–431. 30. François Hollande, Note pour Monsieur le Président, June 23, 1982. 31. Report of the Sub-Cabinet (for economy and currency matters) meeting on August 4, 1982. 32. CM, September 15, 1982. 33. Jacques Attali, Note pour Monsieur le Président, September 17, 1982. 34. Christian Sautter, Note manuscrite à Jean-Louis Bianco, October 19, 1982. 35. Report of the Sub-Cabinet (for foreign trade) meeting on October 19, 1982. 36. See the partial reproduction of Mitterrand’s declaration in: Gélédan, Le bilan économique, 15–17. 37. Letter from the Minister of the Economy and Finance, Jacques Delors, to President Mitterrand, November 7, 1982—If the president had asked his finance minister to warn him in time, before the “warning light flashed red,” it was because, according to him, he was already turning away from “Romantic Socialism.” He made this understood in his speech of September 27, 1981 in Figeac. See Gélédan, Le bilan économique, 23ff.; La déc., vol. I, 445ff.—Delors’ letter was also read by Jacques Attali and commented on in a memo that the latter sent to Mitterrand. His judgment: “This letter contributes nothing new” (Jacques Attali, Note pour Monsieur le Président, November 19, 1982). 38. Ministère de l’Économie et des Finances, Note au Président de la République, November 8, 1982. 39. The devaluation of the franc, on June 13, 1982, had been preceded by another, on October 4, 1981, after the value of the franc underwent a massive drop on the currency market in the months of August and September. The devaluation carried out in October provoked an 8.5% drop of the franc in relation to the Deutsche Mark. 40. Letter from the Minister of the Economy and Finance, Jacques Delors, to President Mitterrand, November 7, 1982. 41. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour Monsieur le Président de la République, undated. 42. Jean-Louis Bianco, Note pour Monsieur le Président, January 12, 1982. 43. CM, January 19, 1983.

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44. Christian Sautter, Note pour Monsieur le Président, January 19, 1982. 45. In a memo to the president, dated December 13, 1982, Élisabeth Guigou had stressed the fact that the Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, had clearly drawn this impression from a meeting with his German homologue, Gerhard Stoltenberg: “Germany … remains very worried about the future of the European monetary system.” 46. See note 43. 47. The minister of the interior, Gaston Defferre, proved to be particularly insistent with the president when the monetary drama intensified. On March 17, he bombarded the president, first from Paris, then from Marseilles, with two long letters in which foreign policy, economic policy, local policy, considerations on the national psychology, advice and demands were bizarrely mixed. On March 20, he sent another long letter, which was followed by yet another, on the 23rd, again long and fairly confused, to Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. Therein, he did not allege the Germans’ good intentions (typed letter from the Minister of the Interior, Gaston Defferre, to President Mitterrand, Paris, March 17, 1983; handwritten letter from the Minister of the Interior, Gaston Defferre, to President Mitterrand, March 17, 1983; dictated letter from the Minister of the Interior, Gaston Defferre, to President Mitterrand, Marseilles, March 20, 1983; letter from the Minister of the Interior, Gaston Defferre, to Prime Minister Mauroy, March 23, 1983). 48. And, in fact, on March 6, the Left lost the majority in 16 of the cities with a population of over 30,000; on the 13th, it lost 15 more. 49. Christian Sautter, Note pour Monsieur le Président, February 17, 1983. 50. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour Monsieur le Président de la République, February 18, 1983. 51. Ibid. 52. With the result—which would not, however, be lasting—of making French merchandise cheaper abroad and therefore sell better. French governments had continually resorted to this method of stimulating exports by lowering the currency. 53. On Sunday, March 20, 1983, the last day of tension in the monetary drama, Mitterrand received a letter from Marseilles dictated by his minister of the interior, Gaston Defferre (and, as is shown in an annotation, indeed read by Mitterrand), a letter beginning with these words: “The Germans, in sum, want to impose on us the main lines of a policy similar to theirs, with its inevitable consequences.” Then, a few lines further on, it suggested that the president, to oppose the German intention, “assert … national independence” (Letter from Gaston Defferre to President Mitterrand, March 20, 1983). In a more general form not specifically related to Germany, the topic of “national independence” was also raised by others in Mitterrand’s entourage. In two memos that the president

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received on March 11—one from Jean-Louis Bianco, the other from Jacques Attali—, they wrote that France should, from the economic point of view, “win back” its “national independence” (Jean-Louis Bianco, Note pour Monsieur le Président, March 11, 1983; Jacques Attali, Note pour Monsieur le Président, March 11, 1983). 54. With differing nuances, Pierre Mauroy, Élisabeth Guigou, Jean-Louis Bianco, Christian Sautter, Jacques Attali, Gaston Defferre (with, however, rather bizarre interventions) and François-Xavier Stasse—supported by other Élysée advisers, such as Alain Boublil and Charles Salzmann—opted for staying in the EMS. Essentially those in favor of leaving it were Pierre Bérégovoy, Jean-Pierre Chevènement and Laurent Fabius (who, however, changed his opinion shortly after March 21), as well as Mitterrand’s “informal” adviser, Jean Riboud. Michel Rocard played his own role as always. (See also: La déc., vol. I, 440ff.)—Jacques Delors clearly tried to use the uncertainties triggered by the debate and the circumstances to accede to the office of prime minister; at least that is what is related in La déc., 477). 55. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour Monsieur le Président de la République, February 21, 1983. 56. Jacques Attali, Note pour Monsieur le Président, February 28, 1983. During the Bundestag elections, on March 6, 1983, the CDU/FDP coalition represented by Helmut Kohl, claimed victory; Kohl was then reelected to the position of chancellor. 57. François-Xavier Stasse, Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour Monsieur le Président de la République, March 3, 1983. 58. Letter from Jacques Delors to President Mitterrand, March 6, 1983. 59. Jacques Attali, Note pour Monsieur le Président, March 14, 1983. 60. Bianco’s interlocutor at the German chancellery was its chief of staff, Waldemar Schreckenberger, that is, his counterpart in the German governmental structure. Their negotiations were unfruitful. Bianco observed that Schreckenberger remained “tough.” As he saw it later, Bianco had undertaken his mission to Bonn in vain. Granted, he ran into Chancellor Kohl, but literally in passing and by pure chance, and they exchanged no more than a courteous greeting. Nor was the fact that he spoke German and could carry out his meetings at the Federal chancellery in that language of sufficient help to Bianco. (Interview with Jean-Louis Bianco, March 26, 2000). 61. Jean-Louis Bianco, Note pour Monsieur le Président, undated handwritten note from bearing the subsequent dating in Mitterrand’s hand: “March 18, 1983.” 62. President Mitterrand was informed about this perception of Stoltenberg’s role by Foreign Minister Cheysson in a handwritten memo on which Mitterrand added remarks. “Mister President, Genscher called me at 11 last night. He agreed with Kohl to designate Stoltenberg with full author-

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ity to speak with Delors or whomever you wish. I must call Genscher back at lunchtime or right afterwards to tell him what we’re doing with Kohl’s offer for an immediate discussion.” 63. Handwritten, undated Note pour Monsieur le Président, including Jean-­ Louis Bianco’s indication of the time, “4:15 p.m.,” with the date written in Mitterrand’s hand: “March 20, 1983.” 64. Ibid. 65. According to his own statement at the end of the Cabinet meeting on March 25, 1983. 66. CM, March 23, 1983. 67. For example, Jacques Attali, under the title “Un nouvel élan,” and Jean-­ Louis Bianco under “Un programme pour trois ans” (see Jacques Attali, Note pour Monsieur le Président, March 11, 1983; Jean-Louis Bianco, Note pour Monsieur le Président, March 11, 1983). 68. CM, March 25, 1983. 69. La déc., vol. I, 485. 70. Premier Ministre, Secrétariat d’État, Les Choix du IXeme Plan, April 20, 1983. 71. Hervé Hannoun, Fiche. Sommet Franco-Allemand. La responsabilité de la RFA dans la situation économique internationale actuelle [May 21, 1987]. 72. Ibid. 73. Head of the president’s military staff, Les Causes d’Échec de la Coopération, October 14, 1987. 74. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Le Ministre, Note pour Monsieur le Président de la République, August 30, 1988. 75. Report of the Mitterrand-Vranitzky meeting in Paris, February 5, 1988. 76. CM, October 26, 1988. 77. Marc Boudier, Note pour Monsieur le Président, April 19, 1989. 78. CM, April 26, 1989. 79. CM, September 7, 1988.

CHAPTER 7

The Question of Nuclear War

Mrs. Thatcher’s Question During the Venice Roundtable: “Would You Use Your Bombs to Protect Bonn?” François Mitterrand related the following episode several times afterward—to SPD President Hans-Jochen Vogel, Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and West German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and in Cabinet meetings. What he had heard that evening of June 8, 1987  in Venice clearly made quite an impression on him: Not only did he return to it on several occasions, but related the remarks he had heard also in different versions. For him, this story was exceptionally instructive, and he thought others should also hear it. Mitterrand was evidently quite anxious that it be understood because he continued to mull over its significance, interpreting it even while telling it, turning it this way and that, depending on the conversation he was having, as if seeking to extract every possible message from it. What triggered this quarrel on that June evening in Venice occurred during a roundtable on the issue of nuclear war. Seated around the table of the Palazzo Grassi for a dinner were French President François Mitterrand, American President Ronald Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani, and the president of the European © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_7

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Commission, Jacques Delors. They had gathered in Venice to participate in one of the G7 economic summits but, for this roundtable, they had chosen to bring up the disarmament negotiations between East and West. They exchanged information, stressing one aspect or another, stating their points of view, some of which were quite different—not to say at variance. During their discussion, Chancellor Kohl and Prime Minister Thatcher got involved in a heated exchange. President Mitterrand remained silent for some time as he often did at this kind of meeting. In those cases, one never knew whether he was following the conversation or not (he sometimes wrote postcards while others were talking). But it also happened—most often with Chancellor Kohl—that a strategy for the conversation would be previously agreed upon with someone else, whereby he would intervene at a very precise moment; in those cases, too, he began by remaining silent but winking at his strategic ally from time to time. This time, his silence lasted quite a while, but after the argument between Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, he ended up—impatiently, and encouraged by the liveliness of the preceding exchange—without the slightest rhetorical flourish, voicing his thoughts on the question of disarmament, the question of nuclear war. And so developed this quarrel—or “scandal” to borrow the expression that he himself used—set off by Mitterrand in Venice,1 providing the material for the anecdote he recounted numerous times concerning the Venice summit: The President [Mitterrand]: I’ve been listening to you for two hours. I’m going to tell you what I agree on and what I don’t agree on. The double zero option: I agree and I’ve said so. Reducing strategic arms to 50%: I wish it absolutely. And I’ve said so. But the “flexible response”2: no. I don’t believe in it at all. To avoid a nuclear war, to deter effectively, it is necessary to rely on all nuclear weapons, in particular on the central systems. Killing a few Russians along with a lot of Germans will not be deter the Russians. It is necessary to hit the Russians on their very own territory. The idea of a limited nuclear war on European soil is ridiculous.

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Would you use your bombs to protect Bonn? No. If France is alone, only the defense of its national interest will count. On the other hand, if there is a resolution of the whole Alliance, if there is total American willingness, France will be a party, even if it is necessary to make something of a flexible response with the others. Mrs. Thatcher: How can you ask Reagan for protection of Europe that you yourself are not ready to grant? The President: That is a sophism. What would you do? Mrs. Thatcher: It’s true that my nuclear weapons are not entirely mine3 but, in any event, neither can I say in advance what I would protect. What matters are my national interests. What would I do? I shan’t say in advance. President Reagan: You don’t understand. We committed to your protection because it’s in our interest, our security, because Europe is our first line of defense. The American commitment is entire.4 Mrs. Thatcher: The President:

A month after the Venice economic summit, on July 9, 1987, President Mitterrand received the man who was president of the SPD at the time, Hans-Jochen Vogel, at the Élysée. During their discussions, they quickly raised the issues of security, war and disarmament. They had not gotten very far in their conversation when Mitterrand began to relate: In Venice, the seven of us around the table had a very serious discussion. You are the first one I’m telling about it. Mrs. Thatcher asked me why the French insist that the Americans intervene with their nuclear weapons at the outset of the war. I said that it was the sole possible guarantee as long as no European defense existed. And there will be no European defense until there is political unity. And Germany has its own particular problem: it’s divided in two. Geography placed it between East and West: it can’t look to just one side. We indeed have a Mediterranean policy. It’s geography that commands history. In Venice, I said that we were not in favor of the strategy adopted by NATO for the past 15 years. Mrs. Thatcher [asked]: “And if Bonn is occupied militarily by the conventional Soviet army, do you use the atomic bomb?” And I replied “no”.

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“Then,” she said to me, “how can you ask the Americans to take this risk [of using atomic weapons] if you’re not ready to do so for the Germans?” “Because what you’re saying are sophisms. If the Alliance stands together, this solidarity must be expressed in the first minute of the war and not on the second day. All the American, British and French forces must be ready—not to bomb Bonn but to bomb the USSR in its vitals. If things are like that, there will be no war. That is deterrence.” “If you say that France is ready to launch an atomic bomb on German soil, then no. But if the Alliance plays its role, I’m ready to bring all French nuclear forces into play to respond to the aggressor.”5

François Mitterrand continued to tell this story to his interlocutors. On August 25, 1987, Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González was his guest at his vacation home in Latche. Over lunch, they had a detailed discussion, and Mitterrand came back to the topic of Venice: At the Venice summit, with Mrs. Thatcher, in the presence of Chancellor Kohl and President Reagan, I had a very heated discussion on this subject. She asked me whether, in the provocative way she sometimes has, in the event the city of Bonn were captured by the Russians, would I use my nuclear force. I told her certainly not. First of all, because this bomb would fall on Germany, a friendly country. Then because, for France, that would be the assurance of our destruction. I also told her that I would be ready to have the French nuclear force intervene on two conditions: first, that the United States and the United Kingdom also intervene immediately; and second, that this intervention occur on Soviet soil. If those two conditions are met, if that’s the case, we won’t have war. For one must always remember that nuclear deterrence is meant not to win the war, which would be impossible, but to avoid it.6

More than half the meeting that Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand had in Bonn on October 20, 1987 was devoted to problems of military strategy and the issue of nuclear war. Mitterrand explained that he had his own thoughts on this point and, to illustrate it, reminded Kohl of the evening in Venice: Do you recall Mrs. Thatcher’s question in Venice? “The Russians arrive in Bonn, what do you do?” The question’s stupid—the Russians mustn’t arrive in Bonn. The problem must be dealt with strategically. There’s a diplomatic side and a military side. The diplomatic side is our attitude in relation to the

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discussions between Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev, and that’s the ­solidification of Europe through Franco-German solidarity. The military side brings us back to the question: How to keep the Russians from hoping to take advantage of war? War has to present more dangers than advantages for the Russians.7

To the West German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Mitterrand explained his strategic thinking on that day and once again did so by relating his answer to the question that Prime Minister Thatcher had raised in Venice: In Venice, Mrs. Thatcher had asked me the question: “If the Soviet troops invade West Germany and reach the Bonn suburbs, will you launch the French bomb?” I told her: “Certainly not! That’s sophistry. That’s not where the problem lies. The important thing is that the USSR not come [in the first place]—that has to be our strategy. We must act before and not after. If they get to Bonn, the game’s over. And it’s not up to France alone to launch the bomb when we alone would be destroyed within the day. I’m going to tell you how the problem is set: either the United States, France and Great Britain are in agreement: –– on a disarmament and peace process naturally; –– but also in threatening the Soviet Union with an all-out nuclear war on Soviet territory within the first 15 minutes, a real threat; or else this is not the case [i.e., the agreement is not made], and in that event, France must not be asked, in the event of British and American abstention, to start a nuclear war by itself. Only the power of an alliance can contain Soviet power.”8

The inner circle of Mitterrand’s team of course also heard the story of Mrs. Thatcher’s question, which had allowed the British prime minister to set off this discussion in Venice, leading to such clear words. Around the Élysée, Mitterrand’s story became—in the words of one of the president’s collaborators—“the famous Venice Summit story.” And those who had not yet heard it in the larger circle of the government in Paris learned of it at latest on July 13, 1988, at the Cabinet meeting, when President Mitterrand told it in the following terms:

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To Mrs. Thatcher’s question—“If the Russians were in Bonn, would you unleash the French strike force?”— [Mitterrand] answered, “Certainly not. It would be too late and would mean that the Alliance had not functioned. If the Alliance sticks together, there will be no war. We French will show solidarity. How about you?” “I must say,” the President went on, “that the answer did not come either from Mrs. Thatcher or from Mr. Reagan.”9

Which is false—we must correct this point immediately—because the French president received a certain response from his American counterpart, even though it was not the one he would have liked (and even though, relying on his own evaluation of the American attitude, he could not in any event have expected Reagan to answer that way). As if to protect the Europeans who were worked up about the nuclear threat on their continent, Ronald Reagan threw out soothing promises—which was indeed a response. But the sole objective remark contained in those words—our first line of defense—could only make Mitterrand wary from his perspective because he did not believe that the United States would risk the nuclear destruction of Chicago (or some other American city) to save a European city. And it was for precisely that reason, thought he, that the Americans would initially graduate their reactions in case of the outbreak of a nuclear war. Indeed, Europe would not be much more than their first line of defense, so that, to take up the concrete language used at the Venice roundtable, a threat to Bonn would not yet signify (far be it!) a threat to Chicago. Mitterrand would have recognized the quality of “response” in Reagan’s remarks only had they signified this: “Europe is America’s line of defense.” Prime Minister Thatcher was more honest. She admitted the logic that allowed her country’s nuclear deterrence to produce its effect and consequently refused to answer the question she herself had thrown out and which Mitterrand had thrown back at her. “What would I do [in the case of a Soviet attack in West Germany]? I shan’t say ahead of time.” Of course not. That was precisely the deterrent effect: the fact that the potential aggressor not know when or how one would act. Yet this was precisely Mitterrand’s logic. By not giving him an answer, Margaret Thatcher gave him the only genuine answer and thereby showed, in an obvious way, to what degree the question she had asked was “stupid.” “The Russians arrive in Bonn. What do you do?” This was not the problem. The issue that was raised was completely different: “The Russians must not arrive in Bonn.” But how might they be prevented from doing so? That was the question.

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In recounting the strategic argument in Venice, however divergent each telling might have been, Mitterrand always remained attached to that question: How to guard against nuclear war, this war of total destruction that East and West were capable of engaging in? How to avoid this war? How to protect oneself against its ever being triggered? The nature of nuclear war required that no one ever wish to wage it. Thinking about nuclear war consequently meant—and Mitterrand continuously repeated this argument—thinking about it by starting with its prevention. The strategy that might be conceived for this war could not be raised—one did not even have the right to do so—in terms of the objective of winning it. The strategy adapted for nuclear war should rather—or better: could only—be a strategy against such a war. From Mitterrand’s point of view, any strategic thinking on nuclear war had to be deployed starting with the supreme imperative of not allowing it to break out, from preventing it at its root. How does one guard against nuclear war? In François Mitterrand’s mind, as concerned nuclear war, it was the only question to be asked on the strategic level since it was the one that immediately decided all the rest.10 Starting from this point, he developed a strategic thinking that was perfectly clear in his personal logic and did not shrink from the terrible implication of total destruction. His thinking on the issue of nuclear war was unshakeable. He said to others, just as inflexibly, that the terror of nuclear war was the proper response to the threat constituted by its possibility (which did not prevent him during the same period from arguing in favor of disarmament measures, which would lead to the exclusion of atomic weapons from the arsenal of the leading powers, both in the East and in the West). The rigor of Mitterrand’s strategic thinking is striking, and it might be added that this is true also of its seriousness. Nothing must be taken lightly; everything weighs heavy—that is what his words continually mean despite the very different declarations he made concerning nuclear war. As if overcome by silent despair over the simplemindedness he encountered here and there, he sometimes threw out appeals to his interlocutors for them to think over this problem as clearly and as rationally as he did. The threat of terror that François Mitterrand had to bear as France’s strategist did not make him indulgent regarding those who understood nothing or chose not to understand anything on this point, or even those who proved to be lightweights on this issue or whose thinking about it was fuzzy or self-interested. For them, he felt only the most profound disdain.

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Sometimes he expressed it—as, for example, in regard to certain French politicians who, as he said to the German chancellor in Bonn on October 20, 1987, “always want to believe that nuclear war would resemble a classic war. We can’t prevent people from being stupid. There’s always the same proportion of imbeciles, whether in government or in first grade. But when one is at the top, one has more knowledge if not necessarily better sense. The way we tackle the problems of defense today plunges me into the depths of reflection.”11 However, there was one problem that Mitterrand asked himself in his strategic thinking, for which he also knew a solution but one that, as he increasingly understood and with a certain displeasure, made a casuist of him and not the strategist superior in his answer to the question asked of him. For the Germans were expecting of France guarantees and even certainties on a question that clearly worried them considerably: What did French thinking foresee, regarding Germany, regarding a commitment of France’s nuclear forces? To be precise: In what way was the German territory integrated into those considerations—as an area to protect or as a battlefield? The Germans were nervous about a question that concerned their very existence. As they were given no response, their worry and dissatisfaction took root, but they continued to ask the question and seek information. In addition, they proved to be so concerned that their extreme worry awoke many other worries. Mitterrand and those who governed with him saw that the Germans needed an answer that would liberate them from the burden of their problem. And they told each other that, nevertheless, they had to continue owing the Germans this answer by refraining, in a reassuring way, from giving it. Germany was “dangling” on the French nuclear war doctrine and sought the support that French guarantees, from its point of view, could have provided. On the other hand, Mitterrand’s France deemed that it could give such guarantees only by abandoning the logic of its nuclear doctrine and was therefore not in a position to do so. West Germany had to try to provoke France into moving, whereas France necessarily had to remain immobile. Thus, under the black star of nuclear terror, the two states found themselves captive in a strange game of attraction and repulsion. Owing to the nature of its nuclear strategy, it was a game with no exit. If, on the other hand, the game was conceived politically, it left room to maneuver to one of the countries but not to the other. It must therefore be said that France found a possibility for exercising power over Germany.

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“Peace Is Never the Daughter of Renunciation”12 François Mitterrand’s Strategic Thinking We understand that it be made use of and worked with, but we do not, for all that, understand the game of power that has just been presented. We must further state and discuss in detail the problem with Germany, for which François Mitterrand had a sort of “solution” in his strategic thinking but did not really have one at his disposal. Naturally, he tells us what we must know and, more precisely, we learn it through his strategic thinking.13 Balance Mitterrand was sometimes a man of simple phrases, formulating them, often with a provocative nuance when he saw himself prompted to express a discovery that he deemed a teaching of life or an idea that, in his opinion, constituted an indispensable contribution to our thinking. He proceeded no differently in stating his strategic conceptions: “I am personally in favor of strategic balance,” he said straight out on July 31, 1981, as he began a long conversation with the Soviet ambassador to Paris, Stepan Vassilyevich Chervonenko on the issue of disarmament. Let us emphasize it: all the strategic thinking of Mitterrand aimed at obtaining a balance, which is why he was thoroughly able to repeat to Chervonenko, in simple, easily understood terms, what he stuck to in East-West relations: “It’s a golden rule. If I see the Soviet Union stronger than the United States, I want the United States to strengthen itself. If I see that the United States is stronger than the Soviet Union, I want the Soviet Union to strengthen itself.”14 Mitterrand expressed, in somewhat different terms, the guiding idea that he would develop a little less than a year later, on May 14, 1982, at the Übersee Club in Hamburg: “For me, the balance of power on the worldwide strategic level is a given that always makes me assess according to this fixed point: Is it the East [or] is it the West that is in a position to attack the other?”15 Peace depended precisely on the balance of power, continued to depend on it and depended on it constantly, even though it could be deplored, as he stressed in his Hamburg speech.16 Let us listen to him for a moment in this speech. For here, Mitterrand presented his strategic thinking to an audience that he might suppose was unfamiliar with these issues. He

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clearly wanted to explain it in such a way that he be understood. Moreover, he had followed a pedagogical path, to the degree that he spoke on the concrete situation of security and made use of it to develop his thoughts on the essential—and, in particular, on the main idea of balance. Mitterrand insisted on this point - what he said about strategic relations of power in the world, the estimation of forces on both sides, their evaluation by the standard set by the idea of a balance. With this idea it was necessary to think about peace because, realistically, it was necessary to think in terms of what this peace might result from. All this represented the logic of his thinking. He naturally applied this to the alliance to which he belonged (“mine”) as well as to the opposing one, without particular indulgence for his side. And of course, he said, he would fully stick to the decisions (on the side of “his” alliance) once they had been made. He had thus arrived at the conclusion that up until the previous year (1981), a certain balance of force in international strategic relations had been maintained; conversely, in the 1985–1990 period, the trend could lead to a certain inferiority of the Atlantic Alliance in relation to the Warsaw Pact. He therefore agreed with those who said: “Let’s take precautionary measures; let’s restore the balance.” And, by repeating himself, as if it were necessary to use the register of invocation, Mitterrand abandoned the reserved tone that he had adopted at the beginning of his argument for a much more energetic style: “Well now, honestly, it seems that the trends of ’79 and ’80 could lead to an imbalance to the detriment of the Atlantic Alliance. So I said, let’s restore that balance.” He had not, however, said— and he specified so expressly—that it was necessary to restore the balance and then go on to a stage that would assure the superiority of the Atlantic Alliance and thereby constitute a threat for the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. That was a natural temptation: It was necessary to first rebalance the forces then seek to be the stronger—that was how, it was thought, there would be peace. But precisely, Mitterrand would not be taken in like that, for the one who might then feel inferior would not wait until he felt inferior: The bridges of entente would be cut, and everything would have to be done to prevent the conflict from breaking out even more quickly. Furthermore, explained François Mitterrand, now in the context of geostrategic balance in the world, there was the totally unsolved problem of Europe. For looking at Europe, he was led to observe that the imbalance was flagrant: “I see that the conventional power of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact is real, unquestionable and considerable.” To

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eliminate this imbalance, what were called the “forward deployed forces” of the American strategic system had been installed in Europe. These were also called “tactical,” but for his part, the French president, adding in a critical spirit, believed that semantics was a source of illusion here: “What does not cross the Atlantic is tactical, and what crosses it is strategic: This distinction seems quite strange to me; in any case, it’s quite strange for a European country that can be destroyed just as easily by tactical weapons as by strategic forces.” For the country in question, it made no difference, and this was the same for France as for Germany. The forward deployed American arms system was meant to restore the balance, Mitterrand summarized in his Hamburg speech, but they had perhaps gone beyond that, and henceforth the Soviet Union was modernizing its missiles. “This is why we have a missile system, the SS 20, that launching 150 of them, according to our information, could wipe out all the installations of Western Europe’s military establishment, from Norway to Italy, in fifteen to twenty minutes.” By launching 150, the French president repeated—yet there were more than 200. He had already said it to the French National Assembly while still a member of the opposition. “I have long felt that this factor of imbalance must be corrected and have asked for the withdrawal of the SS 20s.”17 But NATO, and especially the United States, subsequently announced that they were ready to station “the famous Pershing IIs” on European soil, and especially in Germany, which once again created a tactical as well as strategic advantage, for with these weapons, the same effects on the Soviet Union’s vital centers could be produced as with strategic forces stationed in the United States. The discussion on the point of dispute had thus been begun: This was the arms race. Did one wish to participate in it? The peoples on the ground where this new weapon would be located, and who would doubtless have only a secondary role in the decision-making process, were worried, Mitterrand judged. Wrongly or rightly? It was not up to him to decide: “We are not members of NATO’s integrated command and are not going to decide in the place of those who are.” But France was attached to “the balance of power in the world” as a member of the Atlantic Alliance as well as a “great European country.” From now on, “we are saying: Friends, let us seek balance.”18 Mitterrand naturally did not settle for setting forth his grand guiding ideas on balance in public declarations; he also defended them, particularly in world politics workshops and within his own government, where he often played teacher and sage. He had begun speaking about this as soon

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as he left the opposition to take over the duties of president of the Republic. For example, on July 29, 1981, at a meeting in London with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher he explained: “Why my attitude regarding the Soviet Union? Traditional relations between the Soviet Union and France are good. Hence my surprise in face of the SS 20s, which represent a mortal danger. Even though I am not in NATO, I must reason taking the balance of power into account.”19 On December 14, 1982, America’s Secretary of State George Shultz again heard from Mitterrand what he had already said to him the previous May—moreover, Mitterrand reminded him of it immediately: In the area of military forces, what preoccupied him was the “strategic balance between the United States and the USSR, and, especially, the balance in Europe.”20 In the course of the Cabinet meeting on January 26, 1983, the president declared, on the mode of official, binding governmental policy: “When all is said and done, France wants the balance of power. It observes that this balance has been broken alternatively, initially by the Russians, then by the Americans with the setting­up of the ‘forward deployed system’, then again by the Russians with the deployment of the SS 20s. It risks being so again in favor of the Americans with the Pershings. This must be stopped, otherwise we’ll be exhausted, and war could end up breaking out.”21 That should certainly not happen and, from Mitterrand’s point of view, the threat of nuclear war could also be pushed back if everyone acted upon the strategic principle that in fact allowed for preventing it: “Everything ensues from a central principle: the balance of power in the world as in Europe. Anything that aggravates the imbalance is bad,” the French president explained to the “other side” and, more precisely, to this other “friend” with whom it was necessary to strike the balance: Mikhail Gorbachev, secretary general of the CPSU, speaking with him on October 2, 1985 at the Élysée.22 Mitterrand analyzed the issue of nuclear war and freely expressed his analysis of what he thought and saw. When thinking as a strategist, he granted himself absolute freedom, in particular regarding the conclusions of his thinking. The balance for which he pleaded was also, in the final analysis, only a means. In his strategic thinking, Mitterrand did not think about nuclear war, but against it. For him, it was therefore coherent to think against this war and its possibility to the point where the possibility of seeing it break out would be eliminated, in the form of a zero/zero balance.

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Egor Kuzmich Ligachev represented an adversary—or, to be more accurate, France’s potential adversary—when he met with the French president at the Élysée on December 3, 1987. He was secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, but Mitterrand drew Ligachev into an understanding that is, ordinarily, encountered only between allies. For his interlocutor from the other side, Mitterrand painted a picture that his guest could reject only with difficulty—and even less since the French president immediately revised this vision in ironic terms as if it were obvious, for him, that it was improbable if it did not become everyone’s vision: If there were no longer any nuclear weapons at all in the world, France would not have any. I’m not attached to nuclear weapons if I’m not obliged to be. Perhaps someday each of us will keep one for the museum.23

Deterrence When Mitterrand spoke of “balance,” he still chose a term stemming from the language of power politics in which the forces rendering power to politics are compared with each other, weighed in relation to each other, and used with regard to the others for a projection of power toward them. The forces upon which the power of threatening atomic war were based, as well as the ability to wage it, were not however of a political nature, but, at the highest point, simply military: the possession of weapons by which nuclear destruction could be accomplished. If the ensuing power were used for a projection of power toward others, one created the shadow of a threat hovering over them, which, of course, was also military: Our weapons will be your destruction. Consequently, when Mitterrand spoke of a balance concerning nuclear war, he was praising a configuration of politics that ensured an equation of power potentially satisfying everyone. But he also counted especially on the motive that made this equation attractive and even, to a certain extent, irresistible: It was the specific anguish triggered by any projection of nuclear power, namely the fear of being wiped out by an atomic attack. All security as regards nuclear war came from deterrence. For precisely nothing but deterrence produced the motive that indeed protected: It generated the fear of total, absolute destruction and consequently the interest to take up the idea of balance. “Nuclear war would be total, violent, brutal and general,” said François Mitterrand to Margaret Thatcher during their meeting on March 23, 1987, at the Château de Bénouville, in Normandy.24 According to him, it

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was illusory to believe that there could be a limited nuclear war, for example, if the USSR wanted to seize the city of Lübeck. There would be no nuclear war “in a corner,”25 which was the reason France had focused its entire strategy on nuclear deterrence. The French president stressed this to Chancellor Kohl during their meeting on January 16, 1986 in Baden-­ Baden: “We consider that we are preventing war.” It was around this objective that France had organized its military strategy. Its nuclear force, Mitterrand explained, was intended less for protection, or the “destruction of missiles that would come at us,” than for “penetration.”26 In their meeting of October 27, 1986 in Frankfurt, he expressed more precisely what he meant by that: “Our territory being directly threatened by Soviet armament, it is normal that ours directly threaten Soviet territory.”27 Three years earlier, at the Cabinet meeting on January 26, 1983, Mitterrand had stated with the same precision: “The affirmation by General de Gaulle of an all-round defense could no one deceive. The French [nuclear] forces were always aimed at a certain direction.”28 Nuclear weapons were not there to wage war but to avoid it, explained Mitterrand, once again in clear terms, as he spoke with the Belgian prime minister and acting president of the European Council, Wilfried Martens, at the Élysée on March 19, 1987. To that end, France could brandish the threat constituted by the “capacity to destroy a territory slightly larger than its own,” and, as if he wanted to be heard, he continued: “So we are saying: don’t touch France or its immediate surroundings.”29 France threw out a warning that was difficult to ignore. Moreover, it was written in the language of terror, which was understood everywhere. Mitterrand thus reminded his ministers on several occasions in 1983: “Our strategy is anti-­ cities,” a strategy, said he, “more horrible” than that directed against military units, but France had no choice: “We can only act through terror.”30 No doubt, the Soviets had well understood the threat, as Yuli Vorontsov, their Ambassador in France, confirmed, when he spoke with Mitterrand on June 24, 1983: “We know, you could destroy hundreds of Soviet cities.”31 However, he always immediately added a few words of explanation to this proclaimed terror strategy. If this “horrible” strategy justified itself, said he, it was only “because we hope not to have to use it.”32 Only the Russians and Americans could permit themselves the luxury of a flexible defense—“not us.”33 Should deterrence—the threat of nuclear destruction of cities in the potential adversary country—fail, he told Thatcher at their meeting on March 23, 1987, France was absolutely not in a position

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to choose between several “more” or “less” destructive levels of reaction. The French nuclear arsenal was, on the one hand, much too limited for that, and, on the other, its targets were much too precise. It served for deterrence, for the threat of an atrocious nuclear strike against a potential adversary, but it was unusable for a war waged by tactical blows. It could not be used “selectively” as a strategy similar to the American flexible response, and even less for a nuanced cover of the whole European space.34 “We cannot say,” Mitterrand explained to Wilfried Martens during their March 19 meeting, “that beginning with Lübeck [i.e., in the event that the Soviet Union wanted to seize that city] we would find ourselves involved, so why not Venice? France is not in a position to ensure Europe’s security.”35

American Uncertainties Europe had to count on America—or, in more realistic terms, it could not come through without America. From Mitterrand’s point of view, nothing in the given context could replace the protection that Europe expected from the United States (the sole alternative would have been a European defense but there was none).36 Let’s not make the mistake of speaking of such a “substitute,” he said to Martens.37 On the question of knowing how Europe might be protected from attack, there was only one answer in the eyes of the French president: The whole alliance would have to be ready, in total solidarity, to react immediately and unhesitatingly at the outset of an attack. Any adversary who knew that (and it was essential that it be known) would retreat if, in attacking, it did not want to provoke its own certain destruction. In other words: the deterrence exerted by the Atlantic Alliance would have worked. “The Alliance represents such a force that the USSR would never move if it was assured of [NATO’s] determination,” argued Mitterrand during his meeting with Hans-Jochen Vogel on July 9, 1987. But in order for the Atlantic Alliance to have the effect he attributed to it, it had to be perfectly clear that the United States would commit its full nuclear force immediately and unhesitatingly. To illustrate this by an image, as Mitterrand readily did in this type of meeting: The United States had to consider an attack against Lübeck (already against this city and without waiting for it to be Bonn) like an attack against Chicago. For “Chicago,” the United States would certainly set off the most powerful nuclear strike possible. Lübeck would therefore be guaranteed against an attack—“Lübeck would be the same as Chicago.”38

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However, that is precisely what Mitterrand did not believe: that the United States would support Lübeck like Chicago. “If the Soviets entered the FRG by conventional means, no one would be able to stop them before the French border,” he explained to Portuguese President António Eanes during their London meeting on July 29, 1981. “Would the United States start a war? No one can say.”39 With the Americans, we are in uncertainty, he said in his January 13, 1983 meeting with Hans-Jochen Vogel, at the Élysée. The United States had “never affirmed that there was an automatism for defending Europe.” Similarly, at their Cabinet meeting on October 21, 1981, members of the West German government had engaged in an intense discussion, apparently full of worry, about recent statements by the American President Reagan on the possibility of a “limited” nuclear war—a war, if happening, occurring on German soil certainly.40 At a meeting on March 16, 1983  in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs the German Minister of Defense, Manfred Wörner, stated: “The American military never got rid of the idea to lead a limited war on European soil. Germany tries to combat that concept.”41 The American policy, concerning nuclear war, placed Europeans in uncertainty and, moreover, brought with it, Mitterrand in his conversation with Vogel added, “the idea that the Americans have made themselves the judges of what is good or bad for Europe.”42 Everything would be clearer, he noted during his meeting with Helmut Kohl on March 28, 1987, “if the United States said: ‘The atomic weapon will be used as soon as a Soviet soldier sets foot on West German soil.’”43 But Mitterrand had heard no mention of this kind of guarantee, just the “flexible response” doctrine according to which America counted on retaliating “gradually” to an attack against Europe, as it said itself— and in truth, wanted to keep all the possibilities for itself, as the strategic critic of the Élysée saw it. We can thus imagine the effect produced by the quarrel over nuclear strategy at the roundtable in Venice! The absence (felt by Mitterrand) of the requested answer from President Reagan! Also the lack of a response from British Prime Minister Thatcher, America’s vassal, as concerned nuclear war! No, the Americans would not defend Bonn if occupied by Soviet soldiers. No, they were not saying that Bonn would never be seen falling under an assault of the Soviet army for they would never let things reach that point. They would, in fact, prevent any attack against Federal

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Germany from the very beginning, exercising the terror of nuclear force. So Bonn could fall, was the conclusion that Mitterrand drew from the Venetian argument, but in that case, he clearly saw, there would be nothing further to do: Europe would already be brought down, having fallen before the aggressor. “Do you believe,” Mitterrand asked Israeli Defense Minister Itzhak Rabin on June 12, 1987, “that if there were [in reprisal] a blow four times more powerful than Hiroshima on Germany or Czechoslovakia, without touching Soviet territory, the war would stop? One has to be resolved [to nuclear war] as of the first quarter-hour—after a half-hour, it will already be too late.”44 The American president and his British vassal thereby confirmed on that evening of June 8, 1987 in Venice—in the presence of a German chancellor—all of François Mitterrand’s suspicions about the United States on the issue of nuclear war. When he told the story and commented on that evening to Felipe González, on August 25, 1987, he stated his fears in total clarity: “The flexible response seems a heresy to me. It only serves to mask American hesitations regarding intervention in Europe. Since the American commitment is doubtful from the outset, this theory was thought up as if saying to them: ‘Come, commit yourselves if you must intervene, it wouldn’t be so serious’. This theory is a way for the Americans not to intervene. The more degrees there are, the more the Americans hang on to them. So, if we dissect the problem, we lose.”45 “Let’s see what might happen,” he also said to Martens on March 19, 1987: “The Russians destroy Hamburg, we destroy a Russian city; then they destroy Strasbourg and Rouen. There, I assemble the government, and it is decided to destroy Kiev, and so on and so forth, until they destroy 15 French cities. Then I would assemble the government to say that’s enough. We make war on the Russians. It’s laughable. This is, in truth, the reasoning on flexibility. There’s no nuclear flexibility for Europeans. There is for Americans.”46 Mitterrand did not cease from voicing in the workshop world politics his views on the question of nuclear war. On April 19, 1990 the successor of President Reagan, George Bush, heard him say: “I told Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher [at Venice] that I did not like flexible response. The fact that I didn’t like flexibility shocked them. We need a massive nuclear threat so that the Soviet Union would never consider moving militarily.”47“I haven’t changed my view,” he reiterated at their Key Largo meeting on April 19, 1990, during lunch.48

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When Would France Have Grounds for Starting a Nuclear War? From Mitterrand’s point of view, Europe, so far as its protection by America was concerned, had but one certainty: the uncertainty of the American commitment. If that were so, could France not intervene and therefore place its deterrent force over Europe as over itself? What? “France alone?” said Mitterrand, asking himself the essential question during his meeting on September 4, 1986 with English politicians David Steel and David Owen. His answer was clear and unequivocal: “No. I can’t say that if there are Russian soldiers in Lübeck I will use [France’s] nuclear force in every case.”49 How stimulating, this president of France’s strategic thinking! Mitterrand was unshakably persuaded of the uncertainty that weighed on the United States’ commitment of strategic nuclear forces in case of war in Europe. Certainly. But that changed nothing concerning the fact that he was just as unshakeable and inflexible in his “Non” to the question of knowing whether, in this case, France could intervene in its place. Every time he raised the issue, he continually and inexorably made known this decision that he had summed up in that categorical phrase in his meeting with Wilfried Martens in March, 1987: “France is not in a position to ensure Europe’s security.” And yet, was France not a nuclear power, equipped with a capacity for deterrence and likely to inspire the paralyzing fear of a potential adversary’s own annihilation? When, then, would it use its nuclear force? When would it see grounds for waging nuclear war? President Mitterrand would certainly have been unable to find a better place to speak out on this point or, doubtless, a more attentive listener than the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Paris. We have already encountered Yuli Vorontsov in these pages: It was he who, after having judged reproachfully that Moscow no longer understood what France’s objectives in foreign policy were lately, had received this perfectly clear response from his interlocutor, François Mitterrand: “What? It’s simple: we want to remain free!” This rather undiplomatic exchange was characteristic of the tense atmosphere in which the whole meeting between the two men unfolded at the Élysée on June 24, 1983, but basically, the conversation went on without incident, both speaking in clear, well-chosen terms. The Soviet Ambassador was thus able to hear the French president explain clearly at what moment France, if its decision alone were at issue, would see itself provoked to use its atomic weapons. “The use of nuclear force would be conceivable only in case of utmost necessity, if the life of our country were in danger.”50

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François Mitterrand had prefaced this essential sentence with a few others that paved the way for it. France’s nuclear force, he said, played a strategic, not a tactical, role and, what’s more, consisted primarily of submarines. “The French force is only defensive.” He of course knew that everyone said that but, he proposed to Vorontsov, “We will not use diplomatic language between us.” He said once again: France had defensive arms, which was proved by its good faith and by necessity. Why would France use its nuclear weapons if that could only lead to inestimable disaster? “We’re not crazy!” This force, he explained movingly, was “our ultimate means of honor and defense.” All that seemed so obvious to him, he added, that it was not even worth discussing. On other occasions, however, Mitterrand strove to describe even more precisely the circumstances whereby France might be pushed to commit its nuclear power (still supposing that it was a matter of its own “autonomous” choice, independent of NATO). France would use its nuclear force, he said then, if it found itself obliged to defend its “vital interests” and the “sanctuary” of its territorial existence. He was thereby referring explicitly to Charles de Gaulle, who had stated these conditions for the use of French nuclear force; and since then, as Mitterrand confirmed at the Cabinet meeting on June 1, 1983, nothing had changed.51 Granted, he was speaking about “determining” conditions, but what were they? What were France’s “vital interests” and what precise territorial area did this “sanctuary” include, this territory that was “untouchable by others,” as it were? “Don’t touch France or its immediate surroundings,” Mitterrand had said during the aforementioned conversation with Belgian Prime Minister Martens; but he had simply replaced one imprecise definition by another, equally so. At the June 1 Cabinet meeting, he gave a long report to his government on the problems of the security policy and explained, in a bit more detail, through a few allusions, what he meant by France’s “vital interests” and “sanctuary.” In the framework of those allusions, he thus spoke “for example”—although it was not at all by chance— of the case of Germany and asked the members of the French government the clear, concrete question of what—necessarily—France’s response would be “if the Germans asked us: ‘Is German soil part of your vital interests?’” President Mitterrand was asking this question “by way of an example,” but the example was well thought out. Germany was bound to France by close friendship, and the two countries stuck together, were it only for the obvious economic and political usefulness of this alliance (if not for its “higher” historical meaning); in this friendship, one country committed

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itself on behalf of the other. The future of Germany worried France: so what other country might expect all its protection from France, a special protection that evidently was owed to it? Therefore, it was surely a singular lesson for those listening to him, hearing President Mitterrand explain, on the subject of the German matter, what he meant by the two conditions, “vital interests” and “sanctuary,” and, even more important, what strategic use to make of them if those two points were considered elements of deterrence. He then asked the question that had to be asked to bring him the answer he wanted to give his ministers. This immediate response took the form of a very short phrase: There was nothing to interpret, just as there was nothing whatsoever to change in the phrase itself, in these essential words from the president of the Republic. For him, it was in fact the only accurate and necessary phrase and, as concerned the relationship between Germany and France, this question expressed what was so difficult, unresolved and, in truth, so insoluble that it must be repeated here so that we may immerse ourselves in it. “Is the German territory part of our vital interests?” That was the question. And the answer followed: “We cannot reply.” Of course they could not reply, for the whole sense of France’s discourse, when its representative spoke in imprecise terms of its “vital interests” and “sanctuary,” came down precisely to the fact of propagating uncertainty on all sides regarding the point at which France would feel “touched” and thereby incited to commit its nuclear force. It was a way of further increasing its force of deterrent capability. “We cannot give up a formula that, by its vague nature, has a deterrent impact.”

Notes 1. “In Venice, I explained my ideas to Ronald Reagan, to Mrs. Thatcher and to Chancellor Kohl. I caused something of a scandal.” François Mitterrand in the course of a conversation with American senators Robert C. Byrd, Samuel A. Nunn, and Claiborne de Borda Pell, March 14, 1988. 2. Mitterrand used the French term “riposte graduée” for the concept of a “flexible response” by which the NATO doctrine designated a flexible— depending on evaluation and needs—and therefore, graduated reaction to an attack coming from the East against NATO territory. 3. British nuclear weapons cannot be used without American participation, that is, without the approval of the Americans. 4. Report of the “political dinner” of June 8, 1987, during the Venice economic summit.

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5. Report of the Mitterrand-Vogel meeting in Paris, July 8, 1987. 6. Report of the Mitterrand-González meeting at Latche, August 25, 1987. 7. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 20, 1987 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 8. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting in Bonn, October 20, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 9. CM, July 13, 1988. Mitterrand also spoke publicly about this Venice discussion in an interview he granted to Le Nouvel Observateur that was printed under the title “La stratégie de la France” in the December 18–24, 1987 issue (39–42). 10. Lastly, Mitterrand was concerned with preventing not only nuclear war but any kind of war. The way for achieving this was by responding to any threat of war with the threat of nuclear war and, as an ultimate consequence, which would block it, brandish the threat of nuclear dissuasion. That was, in any event, his argument during his meeting with German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher on October 20, 1987: “Every form, every threat of war must be brought back to nuclear war and consequently prevented by dissuasion” (Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting in Bonn, October 20, 1987/AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 11. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn on October 20, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1. Regarding the context of Mitterrand’s remarks, it must be pointed out: he found himself at the time in a confrontation with the “cohabitation” government of Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, especially on issues of military strategy. The Minister of Defense. André Giraud, supported by members of the conservative majority, wanted to integrate the “flexible response” strategy into the French defense doctrine, but for President Mitterrand, this was unthinkable, a fundamental error. On October 15, 1987, Giraud had singularly stirred up this confrontation by granting an interview to Le Figaro in which he mentioned, in positive terms, the possibility of a limited nuclear war in Europe. That provoked Mitterrand to react as strenuously as he had in his meeting with Chancellor Kohl. To the latter, he had already expressed himself in similar terms at a luncheon on October 17 with his collaborators Hubert Védrine and Jean-Louis Bianco: “Concerning defense, Chirac doesn’t think anything; or rather his convictions vary according to the moment. As for Giraud, he’s more of the MRP [Popular Republican Movement] tendency of the Fifties. He talks about the notion of nuclear protection of French soldiers, therefore of Franco-German soldiers, therefore of German soil, and arrives at a double key, which has no sense. There cannot be a joint weapon without joint strategy. Yet the French and German strategies are different because our nuclear status is different” (Report by Jean-Lois Bianco on a lunch meeting of Mitterrand, Védrine and himself on October 17, 1987). See also La Déc., vol. 2, pp. 639.

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12. This phrase is taken from Mitterrand’s introduction to his essays on foreign and security policy, see Réflexions, 44. 13. On what follows, see the introduction to Mitterrand’s Réflexions, 7–135 and, moreover, Chapter XXI (“Mitterrand stratège”) in Védr., 713–746, as well as: Cohen, La défaite, Chap. III “Le maître de la stratégie nucléaire,” 73–99, and Chap. IV “Pluton, Hadès, ou le triomphe illusoire de corporatisme militaire,” 101–121. 14. Report of the Mitterrand-Chervonenko meeting in Paris, July 31, 1981. 15. Discours prononcé par M. François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, à la Chambre de Commerce de Hambourg devant l’Übersee Club, May 12, 1982. 16. The following references to the Hamburg speech are not in the form of direct quotes. 17. In a meeting with former German Chancellor Schmidt at the Elysée, on March 17, 1987, Mitterrand remembered in these terms: “I was hostile to the SS 20s. I said so in 1979 to the French National Assembly. I was in favor of the Pershing IIs. It was the only way to stop the SS 20s” (Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting in Paris, March 17, 1987/ AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 18. Discours prononcé par M. François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, à la Chambre de Commerce de Hambourg devant l’Übersee Club. 19. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in London, July 29, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 20. Report of the Mitterrand-Shultz meeting in Paris, December 14, 1982 21. CM, January 26, 1983. 22. Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting in Paris, October 2, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD 76. Dossier 3). 23. Report of the Mitterrand-Ligachev meeting in Paris, December 3, 1987. See also: Haslam, The Soviet Union. 24. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting at the Château de Bénouville (Normandy), March 23, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 25. Ibid. 26. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Baden-Baden, January 16, 1986 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 27. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Frankfurt, October 27, 1986 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73, Dossier 1). 28. CM, October 26, 1983. 29. Report of the Mitterrand-Martens meeting in Paris, March 19, 1987 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/67). Mitterrand told Martens clearly: “The nuclear weapon is not made for making war. It is made for avoiding it.” Similarly, during a meeting with Felipe González on August 25, 1987, Mitterrand stated: “For we must always remember that nuclear deterrence is not intended to

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win the war, which is impossible, but not to wage it” (Report of the Mitterrand-González meeting at Latche, August 25, 1987). 30. CM, April 20, 1983. 31. Report of the Mitterrand-Vorontsov meeting, June 24, 1983. 32. CM, June 1, 1983. In the course of the Cabinet meeting of April 20, 1983, he would similarly say: “we have this force that we hope not to have to use.” 33. CM, April 20, 1983. 34. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting at the Château de Bénouville, March 23, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 35. Report of the Mitterrand-Martens meeting in Paris, March 19, 1987. 36. See Védr., 715, 723ff., 741ff. 37. Report of the Mitterrand-Martens meeting in Paris, March 19, 1987 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/67). 38. Report of the Mitterrand-Vogel meeting in Paris, July 9, 1987 39. Report of the Mitterrand-Eanes meeting in London, July 29, 1981 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/66). 40. KAB 1981, October 21. 41. Documentary Note, Ministère des Relations Extérieures, Le Directeur des Affaires Politiques, May 16, 1983, 5 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72. Dossier 2). 42. Report of the Mitterrand-Vogel meeting in Paris, January 13, 1983. 43. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at the Château de Chambord, March 28, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 44. Report of the Mitterrand-Rabin meeting in Paris, June 12, 1987 45. Report of the Mitterrand-González meeting at Latche, August 25, 1987. 46. Report of the Mitterrand-Martens meeting in Paris, March 19, 1987 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/67). 47. https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­telcons/1990-­04-­19%2 D%2DMitterrand%20[2].pdf, 4 (accessed February 9, 2021). 48. Record, by the French Ambassador to the United States, of the conversation between Bush and Mitterrand over lunch, April 19, 1990, 4. 49. Report of the Mitterrand-Steel and Owen meeting in Paris, September 4, 1986. 50. Report of the Mitterrand-Voronzov meeting at the Élysée, June 24, 1983. Quotes in the following paragraph are from this report. 51. CM, June 1, 1983. Quotes in the following paragraphs are from this report.

CHAPTER 8

Germany in France’s Power Game

“At What Point Will France Bring Everything into Play? I Don’t Know Myself” In the logic of French deterrence, Germany remained on the outside and could not expect to be included in the French “sanctuary.” What separated it from France was rather a large difference: the nuclear difference. France reckoned that the existence of its deterrence capability, which constituted a threat of destruction, protected it against nuclear war; Germany, on the other hand, as the potential theater for a nuclear war, was doomed to partial, if not near-total, destruction. The first of the two partners relied on its own forces to repulse dangers to its existence; the other, in this specific area, needed to be supported. It was there, in the awareness developed by France, that the perceptions of freedom and autonomy thrived. It was there, in destruction of defeat to which Germany considered itself exposed, that feelings of dependence and the need for protection were growing, the painful worry and, especially, the sharp anguish of the idea of not obtaining such and such hoped-for assurance, of not receiving the sought-for tranquility provided by a kind of certainty. France, of course, understood Germany’s distress and wanted to remedy it, that is, not really to leave Germany on the outside, but to provide it with something like security and above all give concrete signs that France was Germany’s ally, including on the military level. But given its military strategy, France could only go so far and no farther. On the central point, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_8

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the question of nuclear war, France had to deny itself the slightest gesture, the slightest word—and a fortiori any act—that, viewed as pressure, guarantee or firm agreement, would have transgressed the absolute commandment of vagueness that surrounded its deterrence doctrine. It was thought, especially at the Élysée, that the real issue seeming to present itself would be a work of European unity also concerning the military sphere, a defense system specific to Europeans. But that was not a realistic alternative. Germany and France thus remained suspended in this game that their quests for security, which were so different, forced them to practice. On the nuclear war issue, they discovered each other as two powers wanting but unable to balance themselves. Let us follow them in this strange discovery. Germany (the Federal Republic) appealed to France for protection and guarantees. During his meeting with François Mitterrand at Latche on October 7, 1981, Helmut Schmidt openly told the French president what he wanted. He felt bound to the Americans but affirmed that “without the alliance with France, I would feel much too bound to the American alliance.” West Germany was seeking greater freedom of movement as regards the United States and this could, according to Schmidt, also be the fruit of an alliance (to borrow his term) with France. And this term, which expressed just a wish, had the appearance of a reality. There was no “alliance” between West Germany and France comparable to that attaching Germany to the United States within the framework of NATO. Why then, did Chancellor Schmidt, speaking of their alliance, assume the existence of a similar relationship between his country and France? He launched a charm offensive and, as in all courting, presented his wish to the object of his attentions as a common conception, this wish being precisely that of an alliance between Germany and France. But something stated orally is far from being a reality. In one of the following phrases, Schmidt, after having given a sort of lecture in his conversation with Mitterrand, also backed up this wish with words meant to prove its necessity: “France’s demonstrative support of Germany is vital for us.” Schmidt’s courting was not, however, terribly useful. His interlocutor courteously but firmly rejected the requested alliance—he basically responded that he did not want a Paris-Bonn axis—and redefined the Franco-German relationship, taking it out of the security and protection framework and going more toward friendship. (“But,” he added, “I am thoroughly aware of the special friendship between our two countries.”)

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Mitterrand turned a deaf ear to the chancellor’s wish for “France’s demonstrative support of Germany.”1 Too many obstacles hindered Germany’s courtship. On the one hand, there was the contradiction in which France had put itself with the strategic concept of sanctuary and the vagueness in which it intentionally described it. France and Federal Germany were allies within the Atlantic Alliance, and within NATO, West Germany could count on France’s total solidarity in case of an attack on its territory. But, according to its own military doctrine, France did not picture itself going to war except following a violation of its “sanctuary.” It had thus pledged to contribute to defending West Germany but if it had to decide alone, it would not embark on a defense of West Germany as soon as its territory was hit but only if its own sanctuary was affected. The definition of this sanctuary remained totally vague, but one thing was certain: Federal Germany could not expect its whole territory to be part of it. As President Mitterrand himself explained at a meeting of the defense council on October 30, 1981, France put itself in contradiction with its contractual obligations within NATO, by which it agreed to defend the territorial integrity of each member state—including West Germany—in case of attack against one of them. But Mitterrand did not want to decide on what he would define as his sanctuary before being constrained to make a decision: “Our sanctuary is perhaps threatened if the Russians are in Kassel. I’m not opposed, but it has to be assessed.”2 France was unable to extricate itself from the contradiction in which it found itself. The second thing not settled between France and Germany was the extraordinarily important question of the type of consultations France would enter into with Germany in the event that nuclear weapons were launched from German soil and even have targets in Germany. The idea that, to repel an attack, France would use Germany as a nuclear battlefield without other form of process was intolerable—as much for the Germans as for the French—but it was realistic if one considered the zone where the French tactical—or, as they would later be called, pre-strategic—nuclear missiles would be stationed, either in France or quite close to France, on the western side of the Rhine, as well as their very limited range. What to do then with this realistic but intolerable idea? France had no right to make Germany the battlefield of its atomic weapons. Moreover, both the German and French sides agreed that here, the term “Germany” covered the territory of the Federal Republic as well as the GDR (if this was the Germans’ desire, the French could not reject the idea that the GDR was

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also Germany). Under the threat of nuclear war and the ensuing destruction, an apparently ineluctable reality emerged: all of Germany—one Germany, so to speak—had to be preserved. And yet, French nuclear missiles would hit targets in Germany. What could be done? When Schmidt and Mitterrand met at Latche on October 7, 1981, this question was far from being resolved. It had not been resolved under the governments of President Pompidou and Chancellor Brandt, and they had discussed it in vain.3 At the end of their long meeting that day, it was Mitterrand who raised the issue. He had been in office only a few months and was manifestly not yet fully conversant with all the mysteries of Franco-­ German relations. He asked Schmidt, who had been chancellor for seven years: “Has mutual information been envisaged between France and Germany in case of conflict?” Schmidt replied: “We have an agreement on mutual information concerning the use of atomic weapons with Great Britain and the United States; we don’t have one with France.” Mitterrand insisted: “Had France refused?” No, answered Schmidt, “but Giscard had said that France would never put atomic weapons in Germany.” Apparently, this remark was perfectly clear, but immediately after repeating Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s phrase, he added: “[Giscard] had skirted this issue” (the idea of an agreement), for that is indeed what it came down to.4 The personal words of a French head of state—especially since he was no longer in office—did not take the place of an agreement between countries. The Germans understandably wanted to be able to rely on an agreement that would guarantee their being consulted before France used its nuclear weapons in Germany. But a third element also opposed the German request and inevitably blocked it. This was the consensus that Germany should not have an entryway to atomic weapons, either now or in the future, in any form whatsoever. France would be transgressing this principle if it reached an agreement with West Germany on the commitment of its nuclear forces in Germany, but Paris was not prepared to do so. Even if we depend on one another for questions of security, Mitterrand explained to Chancellor Kohl during their meeting on October 22, 1982 in Bonn, that “does not imply German participation in the nuclear decision.” Moreover, he specified immediately, Germany “could not serve as a battlefield.” The president thereby posed again, in another way, the question he had just rejected. By admitting that Germany must not be considered a potential battlefield—and that, above all, its allies should not envisage it—he acknowledged that it was in the Germans’ interest to be able to talk with

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their allies, before the commitment of their nuclear weapons, about their own destiny in case of atomic war. The question of “What to do?” had by no means disappeared. Barely had he rejected German participation in the nuclear decision than Mitterrand referred to it himself: “There must be dialogue between our two countries.” But he was wary of saying anything further on the subject, and it might have been thought he had nothing more to say. However, he noted, as if wanting to console the chancellor that, with technical progress, certain problems became less serious. New tactical weapons (that were not yet built but under study, at the time, for the French army) would have a range “beyond the Federal Republic of Germany’s territory.”5 By way of “consolation” (if that was indeed the aim), this was a singular—not to say shocking—bit of information. Did they want to reach an agreement so as not to rain down French nuclear missiles on Hesse or Bavaria but on Thuringia or Saxony?6 No, the set of issues raised here was much too complex for that, and those who discussed them in both the French and German governments were constantly aware—with worry, not to say affliction—of the fact that all the joint responses that could be found were totally insufficient. During their Bonn meeting on October 22, 1982, after nearly half an hour, Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand invited the French prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, the German and French foreign ministers, Hans-­ Dietrich Genscher and Claude Cheysson, as well as both defense ministers, Manfred Wörner and Charles Hernu, to join their discussions. At the chancellor’s suggestion, this circle took up the topic of security policy. The ministers first informed the chancellor and president of the results of discussions that they had just had. The question of a “dialogue” between West Germany and France was again raised, prompting Manfred Wörner to stress that there had been “a great deal of speculation as to our cooperation” in the press that very morning, and he went into detail on the topics that interested the journalists. Among other things, they wondered “whether the American nuclear protection of Germany [was going] to be replaced by French nuclear protection.” Charles Hernu supplemented his German counterpart’s point by remarking that, when leaving the room where they had been talking, they had said nothing to the journalists (“We were mute”). Mitterrand congratulated him, saying “You did well,” and, without transition, launched into a ten-minute presentation of his thinking on France’s behavior toward Germany concerning nuclear war. He expressed precise thoughts in precise form, and the impression of

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inadequacy that emerged from what he said that day only comes across all the more clearly: Vagueness is necessary on the point of knowing what our reaction will be if there is an attack against Germany. This point can only remain obscure, and there is no response to this subject except the confidence between us. At what point will France bring everything into play? I don’t know myself. I’m the only one who can give the necessary order. We must evolve between two concepts: [on the one hand] the French vital interest comes down to the sanctuary of French soil. On the other: as soon as German soil is touched, French vital interests are touched; but can all German soil be included in this sanctuary? Do we have the means to inflict on enemy soil the destruction of an area corresponding to the area of France and Germany? Naturally, if Germany could have atomic weapons, things would be different, but we know that is impossible. Mr. Mauroy is the only one until now to have specified the notion of vital interests a bit, combining it with the notion of proximity. We must remain vague, and all that comes from the confidence between us. I’ll have you know that, in any event, Germany’s security is an essential concern for us, on the borderline of vital interest. It will be the realities of the moment that will dictate the exact interpretation. [Italics in the text] We must, in any case, take into account the problems of Germany’s security as far as possible. We are in an alliance, we are loyal allies, but we cannot let ourselves be dragged into just any California fantasy by the decision of people incapable of distinguishing between the Palatinate and Lorraine. There’s even worse: the declarations of American leaders—Kissinger, for example—show that, in fact, there is no automatism in the American commitment. So imagine the dramatic and necessary nature of my situation. In any case, a minimum point is gained: Germany’s security problems will not be handled by France without Germany. [Italics in the text] But I repeat: the notion of vital interest must remain imprecise. [Italics in the text] Naturally, the press and the Soviets will ask us for further information, but we can grant ourselves mutual confidence without having to make revelations.7

Many words, and the French president admitted only that West Germany would have to wait for a military attack against its territory to know whether France would commit its nuclear weapons in Germany and, if so, in what zone. However, Kohl thanked him effusively for his words: “Thank you so much. What you have just said is very important. It is of vital

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interest for us.”8 Of vital interest? Had the chancellor been so captivated by the president’s remarks that he found nothing else to do but repeat this term with which Mitterrand intentionally cast a shadow over the question to be elucidated, plunging it into such perfect vagueness that it eluded any attempt at a response? The intended imprecision remained, combined with knowledge of the fact that it was not enough. No one saw this better than François Mitterrand himself. In the workshop of world politics, he came back to this matter on several occasions in the course of many discussions over the years. It clearly preoccupied him—obviously, for he knew that France had to clarify with [Federal] Germany a subject that, precisely, it should not in fact clarify. And yet, France could not leave Germany in that predicament—something had to be done, but what? And then: how? Let us consider a few of these meetings in the course of which Mitterrand thought about this affair and examined it from every angle, producing a certain analytical effort without, for all that, modifying his fundamental position: François Mitterrand to Margaret Thatcher, November 4, 1982:9 It must be seen that with current weapons, to reach Soviet soil, our tactical nuclear forces would have to advance into Germany. It is quite normal to consult the Germans on this point. Moreover, the 1963 [Franco-German] treaty makes provisions in this area for strong coordination despite the diplomatic terms of the treaty. The problem of the battlefront is, of course, complicated. We don’t want to be involved in a battlefront problem that would be in contradiction with our deterrence strategy. But the French nuclear weapon is not incompatible with the [Atlantic] Alliance, so there is a device to be found. We must place ourselves between two extremes: Either our territory is considered a sanctuary, in which case it is difficult to use this territory and the future of this country to defend interests that would not strictly be ours. Or else we consider that our security also relies on an alliance with neighboring countries and that if all of Germany were occupied, France’s security would indeed be compromised. It’s necessary to think about these two terms [and] try to clarify them. It’s difficult to translate them into military terms—it would have to be very concrete, which is why our administrations met in Bonn to examine these issues together. We have this dialogue with Germany but, naturally, are not asking it to get involved with the definition of our strategy. Germany cannot have access

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to the nuclear decision [the decision to use nuclear weapons or not], which would, moreover, be contrary to all the agreements made after World War II.

François Mitterrand to George Shultz, December 14, 1982:10 The difficulty I inherited, and which is inherent in our form of nuclear deterrence, is reconciling our commitments to the Alliance and our nuclear deterrence force. It’s a question that my predecessors were unable to resolve, either General de Gaulle or Mr. Giscard d’Estaing. It’s a difficult question. We have a nuclear deterrence at our disposal, which we will resort to in case of serious threat, but we also have commitments toward our allies, and the problem is knowing at what moment to use our deterrent force, for example, in case of a serious threat to one of our allies, I’m thinking in particular of the Federal Republic of Germany. It’s something we’ve been discussing for the past twenty-five years.

François Mitterrand to Johannes Rau, October 14, 1986:11 We French have two pillars for our security: nuclear deterrence and the Alliance. Deterrence was long understood as a sort of substitute for the Alliance. I hope to find a path that reconciles these two forms of security.

François Mitterrand to Margaret Thatcher, March 23, 1987:12 Moreover, short-range French weapons aren’t of much use. For us, that’s not very useful; we can’t have a flexible defense. Our short-range weapons only shoot onto the FRG, the GDR and Czechoslovakia. It’s not really worth our while. France cannot offer a nuclear umbrella to all of Europe. But I don’t deny myself a broader interpretation of our vital interests. I may think that, as soon as a Russian soldier set foot in Germany, it would affect France’s vital interests, but I can’t say so. I’m told that the French nuclear force should guarantee as far as the Elbe, and I’m obliged to say “maybe yes, maybe no”.

François Mitterrand to Hans-Jochen Vogel, July 9, 1987:13 The strategy that consists of using INFs [intermediate-range nuclear forces], destroying West Germany, East Germany, a bit of Czechoslovakia, a bit of Poland or a bit of Holland, is an absurd response. All those peoples will immediately revolt. Not one soldier will remain at the front if he knows his family is in danger.

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Are we going to kill two million Germans to help our German friends? We don’t want to enter into the integrated arrangement of the [Atlantic] Alliance. But what counts is the geographical arrangement of our armies. I’ve already had occasion to make alterations to de Gaulle’s doctrine on this point. I don’t see the first order I would give in case of conflict being “Germany’s under attack; let’s go home”.

François Mitterrand to Felipe González, August 25, 1987:14 Some ask that French nuclear protection be extended to Germany. But aside from Germany not asking for it, I don’t see how I could grant such protection to Germany and refuse it to the other European countries.

François Mitterrand to Hans-Dietrich Genscher, October 20, 1987:15 What France is prepared to do for itself, in a desperate spurt to save honor, it cannot do for others. Thus, the question of the FRG’s nuclear shield by France has no meaning. And yet, as you know, I’m in favor of tightening security bonds between France and the FRG!

François Mitterrand to Egor Kuzmich Ligachev, December 3, 1987:16 You know that I’m in favor of the agreements with Germany and I hope that they’ll be deepened but, as I said to my German interlocutors, there is no question of bringing them into the decision on the use of nuclear weapons. Moreover, I informed your ambassador of this.

This selection—for it is one—of Mitterrand’s remarks on the question concerning us first of all shows his embarrassment. It bothered him, on the one hand, not being able to tell his German friends something like “Don’t worry—we’ll guard your country. At the first attack, France will grant you its protection.” Nor, on the other hand, did he relish his role as France’s nuclear war leader, worried only by the particular interest of his own country. Given the “characteristics of his situation,” he would necessarily act the wrong way in both cases. He was therefore seeking a path between these two extremes, a path that they did not leave him, as if wanting to “harmonize” or bring into line a contradiction. The only thing the French president could say in constructive terms (concerning an extension of France’s nuclear protection as far as the Elbe) was “Maybe yes, maybe

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no.” As for the rest, the extremes doomed his words to failure, and it was doubtless for this reason that Mitterrand, as the above quotations show, spoke against his “situation” in a way that was as vain as it was obstinate. But it was nonetheless necessary that a “solution” for Germany be found between the demand for total protection by the French nuclear force and the fate of turning into a battlefield—even though, it was understood at the time, this game of attraction and repulsion regarding nuclear war in which West Germany and France were committed offered no way out. In this case, what could be done in the game that yielded something to each player? The benefits to France had already been granted prior to the match. Its vital interests, its sanctuary, and above all the vagueness of its definition were not the stakes in this match but its conditions and therefore also the trigger. Moreover, France was anxious to allow Germany to win something for itself in this game: a portion of the security that it sought so energetically. Apart from the winnings already obtained under the initial rules, above all, the game gave France the power to keep Federal Germany in the game. And what did this game bring Germany? The role of a player dominated. Germany therefore worked to obtain an agreement based on a treaty, and the French party replied (as did, for example, President Mitterrand to Chancellor Kohl on October 22, 1982) that “confidence” (of the Germans in the French president’s decision regarding the commitment of French nuclear force) was still a better way. West Germany was seeking an entente on French objectives in the use of its nuclear weapons, and France therein discerned the problem of a “second key”: a German right for which everyone knew there was no question of granting.17 The “key to Europe,” as they said at the Élysée, was “the Franco-German couple,” and the “key to Franco-German entente was Germany’s security.” But this “haunting question” of Germany’s security constituted precisely a crux that was doubly difficult to resolve: On the one hand, the German anguish was existential. Even with the leaders, it expressed a state of mind rather than concrete demands. Moreover, no French head of state could pledge to “use nuclear dissuasion for Germany exactly as he would for France.” To conclude with the question of Germany’s security (with the crux), there was but a single way: change nothing in French nuclear strategy but “give a maximum of symbolic and affective force to the announcement of all the decisions that could be made without challenging deterrence.”18 The governments of West Germany and France spoke often—amazingly often—about security that concerned one as much as the other and,

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with time, they also managed to find certain points of agreement, but those were all in the sphere of conventional armed forces, which posed no problems. When the existential question of nuclear war was broached, the governments of both countries let themselves get caught up in flagrant misunderstandings. How many times did Mitterrand and his people tell their German interlocutors that the strategic interests of France and Federal Germany were quite different and that the latter’s protection would not at all automatically apply to the interests of the former? And yet the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, acted as if he had never heard those remarks. On October 20, 1987  in Bonn, he said to Mitterrand: “France and Germany make up a single security area. The FRG is a pocket handkerchief. It is obvious that France’s security interests begin at our eastern border.” Mitterrand replied, as we have already mentioned: “The question of the FRG’s nuclear military cover by France has no significance.”19

“Since It’s They Who Want Something, Let’s Let the Germans Come” It was a magnificent dialogue of the deaf. In that year 1987, it would not have happened within the Franco-German couple if we refer to the text that formally determined its partnership, the Franco-German treaty of January 22, 1963 (also called the “Élysée Treaty”), because by this treaty France and Federal Germany had explicitly agreed to discuss their ideas in the security area. In the article concerning “defense,” we read: “On the level of strategy and tactics, the competent authorities of both countries will endeavor to harmonize their doctrines with a view to arriving at mutual concepts.”20 Perhaps the treaty’s diplomatic terms did not state things clearly enough, as Mitterrand reckoned in his November 4, 1982 meeting with Margaret Thatcher, but the objective formulated in the article we have quoted was evident: by signing the Élysée Treaty, Federal Germany and France agreed to make their points of view converge on security issues. And yet, up until Mitterrand’s presidency, this objective had not been worked on or pursued. It took his coming to power for France to start a dialogue with Federal Germany on cooperation regarding security policy. On January 13, 1982, the President sent a letter to Chancellor Schmidt, reminding him of the common desire, observed during their meeting the

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previous July, of establishing a “dialogue” in the area of defense, and expressed the wish that both now launch the cooperation in the military sphere by drawing up concrete plans.21 On February 10, the answer was delivered to the Élysée: a letter from the German chancellor in which he stressed for his part that “just like you, I consider our dialogue on security and defense issues to be of extreme importance” and proposed that this entente be emphasized publicly at the next opportunity (during the governmental meetings that were to take place shortly).22 And it was done, with the productivity that this new élan, hoped for by Mitterrand, implied. In the “joint Franco-German declaration,” published on February 25, 1982 at the end of the 39th Franco-German governmental meetings, both parties in particular made public the resolutions drawn up during the summit: “Acting in the spirit of the Franco-German treaty of January 22, 1963, the President of the French Republic and the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany have decided that in-depth exchanges of views should be carried out between the two governments on security problems.”23 Only a few months after this resolution began the process allowing for devising governmental procedures and forging a series of institutional instruments to implement it. To this end, a first meeting took place on July 1, 1982 at the Petit Château in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, outside of Paris. This meeting, between the French and West German foreign ministers, Claude Cheysson and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, along with both countries’ defense ministers, Charles Hernu and Hans Apel, was followed by another meeting of the defense ministers in Paris, on October 14, accompanied both times by a group of ministerial officials, diplomats and military personnel (seven on Charles Hernu’s side, six on the side of Manfred Wörner, his new counterpart who had taken office following Chancellor Schmidt’s replacement by Helmut Kohl). The meetings between the two delegations took place in an “atmosphere of confidence and friendship,”24 and during the joint dinner that followed, the two ministers agreed that, when they saw each other again in Bonn on October 21 for the next Franco-German consultations, they would study the creation of a “Franco-German commission on the issues of defense and armament.” This was the case, and during that summit, the foreign affairs and defense ministers from both countries formally decided to create a “permanent Franco-German commission on security and defense issues,” which would be divided into three work groups: one devoted to armament; another to military cooperation; and the third to geostrategy.

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Ministerial instructions given in Paris and Bonn gave the commission the responsibility of providing the foreign and defense ministers of both countries with a report on their work before the next meeting. During the period when efforts at cooperation between West Germany and France in the areas of security policy and the military were being undertaken at the ministerial and commission levels, the French president and the German chancellor were also pursuing efforts aimed at advancing this type of cooperation, now that the first steps had been taken. As we shall see, they tackled the problems, which presented a singular degree of difficulty, by implementing creative will and political imagination. This contrasted remarkably with the inertia of the elements that were hindering solution to those problems. This applies to more than the confusions and contradictions in questions of nuclear strategy, which the chancellor and president (the latter especially, of course) sought to resolve in a continuous, obstinate but, in the long run, futile manner. It also applies to the bitterness of negotiations at the level where work was really accomplished, the apparatus of councils and experts. Politics is creativity, but in the process that allows it to advance beyond its own past creations often create obstacles for it. Then, considerable discrepancies appear between politics directed at action and politics already in the form of action. When we hear Kohl and Mitterrand, as political creators of the cooperation work between France and Germany, speaking about military and security issues, and when we next hear what their advisers are saying on this point, we perceive, in exemplary fashion, the discord of politics with itself. At the instigation of the president and the chancellor, their people in Paris and Bonn set to work with a certain élan to resolve the problems hindering possible cooperation between France and Federal Germany on the issues of security. But during the meetings begun at the time, the initial élan was quickly checked by the stubborn nature of the problems, with two of them presenting real stumbling blocks: the problem of tactical (or, after their 1984 name change, “pre-strategic”) nuclear weapons, and that of the French doctrine regarding nuclear strategy, deterrence. Why did the Franco-German meetings not succeed in settling the problem of France’s tactical nuclear weapons? First, it stemmed from the very nature of those weapons: the Pluton missiles, surface-to-surface missiles introduced in 1975, had a range of only 150 km and, given their site close to the French-German border, in the case of an engagement, they would have landed on West German soil where they would naturally have wreaked havoc. A war waged by France would then have transformed West Germany

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into a nuclear battlefield. For Franco-German relations, this prospect of course created an extraordinarily difficult situation. The situation seemed to improve—at least from the French point of view—when, after Mitterrand’s new government took office, it was decided at the first meeting of his defense council, on October 30, 1981, to begin replacing the Pluton missiles in 1992. The new type of missile, the Hadès, boasted a considerably greater range of 350  km.25 That is what Defense Minister Charles Hernu immediately mentioned to his German counterpart, Manfred Wörner, when they had a discussion on October 14, 1982. And, as if wanting to reassure him, he added: “It is a better guarantee for you [Federal Germany]. [The Hades missile] will strike beyond the Federal Republic’s eastern border.” Wörner, who clearly had the German nation— and not only West Germany—in mind, replied: “Beyond the eastern border of the Federal Republic is still Germany.” He was therefore not satisfied with the offer of “best guarantee” or by the overall situation. For Germany, he told Hernu, questions would arise in the context they had just brought up, and to be fully understood, these were issues of prime importance for his country: “In the event of their use, how, from where, when and to where would French tactical nuclear weapons be used?”26 What they heard about the Hadès missiles did not dispel the Germans’ worry—these weapons would also hit Germany and, in any case, would not be operational for ten years (this was still back in 1982). Mitterrand knew this full well; on June 16, 1989, he spoke to General Jaruzelski on this point in the clearest possible terms: “Our current tactical weapons cannot go beyond Germany. For the moment, [the Hadès missile] destroys only our German friends.”27 One can understand why the Germans wanted to know more and, in particular, have the precise information that Wörner demanded. But proceeding this way, to the unresolved problem of France’s tactical nuclear weapons was added the problem of deterrence. Yet this imposed the opposite of what the Germans wanted, requiring the greatest possible vagueness for its use. “Concerning dissuasion,” Hernu explained in response to Wörner’s query, “everything depends on uncertainty. If we replied publicly to certain questions we would no longer have deterrence.”28 Certainly, said he on that occasion, his idea was not that the major powers use Germany as a battlefield, but he nonetheless preferred not answering “certain questions” asked by the German party. Even though they knew it full well, the French deterrence doctrine could not admit that the Germans’ uneasy questioning, would only become more pressing with time.

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Nonetheless, in order to continue brushing aside the Germans’ questions, the French government offered two options: It continued refusing to answer “certain questions” in public, of course, as well as in the very closed circles in which deliberations were carried out; and they remained reserved, reacted quite cautiously, promised and postponed so that the meetings with the Germans dragged on. A memo to the minister, written on April 18, 1983 at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the topic of the “Franco-German consultations on the questions of defense and security,” clearly described the line that France had adopted in the course of these discussions. To the questions asked by Wörner, “our ministers” had given “cautious … and very reserved answers,” and, on principle, there should be no deviation from that line. But it was to be expected that the Germans’ “impatience” would be voiced increasingly over time and that they would leave the sphere of repeated allusions and become more insistent. They had some reason to do so, the French had to admit, because Germans quite properly wanted to know how their close ally and partner envisaged making military decisions on which “the survival of a large portion of their population” depended. Moreover, asserted the memo’s author, “we ourselves have offered” Federal Germany close cooperation in the area of defense even though, as is said in the note, it was not, strictly speaking, for reasons of security policy but for fundamental political reasons, the main one being “to contribute to tying [Federal Germany] to the West.” Since all that obliged France not to respond to the Germans’ questioning in the way of a refusal to deal with it, it was all the more important to understand the problem that “the use of our tactical nuclear weapons” really raised. In truth, the French government was confronted with a problem of “political dimension”: The Germans indeed had the right to ask their questions, but France was then forced to wonder: How could it prevent a “conversation with the Germans on our tactical nuclear weapon from affecting our freedom of action or be interpreted as undermining it”?29 By carrying on discussions but not concluding them—such was the suggested answer, the sole possibility from the French point of view: the political way out. The story of this response is sufficiently complex to begin with, yet a new element must be added to it. If it were so difficult for the French government to reject the Germans’ question, this was in fact, because the latter could always refer to the agreements made with the United States and Great Britain concerning the use on West German territory of the nuclear and chemical weapons held by those two powers. If

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the American and British governments had been able to conclude agreements with the German government providing for a consultation mechanism on these issues, why could the French government not do the same thing? Besides, as Mitterrand told Kohl on May 28, 1985, France had concluded with the United States “15 secret agreements” concerning nuclear weapons policy.30 The French government was familiar with the agreements the United States and Great Britain had concluded with West Germany only through documents that NATO provided on its plans for committing nuclear forces. And its “institutional memory” (in the form of written pieces) had naturally recorded the fact that Helmut Schmidt had already called for an agreement of this type with Mitterrand’s predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, through his chief of staff at the chancellery, Manfred Lahnstein, and the Élysée chief of staff at the time, Jacques Wahl. Giscard had made it known, through the same intermediaries, that he was not opposed to the idea of Schmidt’s proposed agreement, but the matter went no further and was not taken up again until after the transfer of power from him to Mitterrand. On October 7, 1981, the Élysée chief of staff, Pierre Bérégovoy, handed the president a memo informing him that Chancellor Schmidt would soon bring up this affair with him. “The Germans,” Bérégovoy indicated in an unambiguous phrase, “have an agreement dating from several years ago—through an exchange of letters—with the Americans and English on a consultation procedure preceding the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. They want a similar agreement with France.”31 True, the French government received the German request without rejecting it and set up structures with the West German government that allowed for discussing it on a regular basis. The foreign affairs and defense ministers formed a specific consultation circle for security and defense issues, meeting systematically during the semiannual Franco-­ German summits; the work groups of the “Standing Franco-German Committee on security and defense issues” met several times a year; there were exchanges between the representatives of governmental apparatuses in Paris and Bonn (foreign affairs and defense ministries, Élysée, and chancellery), which worked out details and prepared the top-level discussions; and, of course, the French president and German chancellor, in their ongoing dialogue, spoke about security and defense quite a bit and with surprising frequency. They talked and talked, and the principal German questions remained unanswered. It was impossible to give the Germans specifics on the use of

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the deterrence force, wrote Hubert Védrine, Élysée adviser in charge of security policy issues, on January 31, 1984.32 In a memo to President Mitterrand the next day, he indicated that the Germans greatly appreciated the meeting of the four foreign affairs and defense ministers that henceforth took place at each Franco-German summit, as well as the meetings of experts that were held every other month. However, the Germans—and Védrine underlined this sentence in his note—were beginning “to ask us delicate questions, in this framework, on the modes of using our various forces.” On the other hand, as if to reassure himself, he mentioned that, according to the French ambassador in Bonn, the chancellor had no intention of bringing up “with you” [President Mitterrand] the question of a “possible dialogue with Germany on the use of the Plutons and Hadès.”33 This was a bit hasty (or there was too much wishful thinking), because several months later, in a summary dated May 28, 1984, devoted to the 43rd Franco-German Summit, beginning the same day at Rambouillet, Védrine (with co-author Élisabeth Guigou) had to inform the president again that Franco-German discussions on the topic of security had been occurring regularly for the past two years and that “the Germans are now questioning us above all on the modes of use of our tactical atomic weapons.”34 And in fact, during the specific meeting at which the French and German foreign and defense ministers found themselves on the occasion of the May 28 summit at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, Manfred Wörner spoke somewhat impatiently about the absence of clarification of those modes and was also quite frank about what concerned the preservation of Germany’s (and not just the FRG’s) interests. He was, certainly, in total agreement with “the idea of uncertainty” and asked for no “automatism” for the tactical nuclear weapons. But what the Germans wished for in the future was consultation at the moment when those weapons were to be “used from German territory or on German territory.” “Dresden, Erfurt and Leipzig,” asserted the West German Defense Minister, “are German cities.”35 They no longer left any room. When Chancellor Kohl’s adviser for foreign affairs and security, Horst Teltschik, met with Mitterrand’s advisers Jacques Attali and Élisabeth Guigou at the Élysée on September 26, 1985 for a fairly long meeting, Teltschik also expressed the German wish of obtaining a Franco-German agreement similar to the one made with the United States in the form of an “exchange of top-secret notes” (and Teltschik assumed that Attali and Guigou knew nothing about a

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German-American agreement on this issue). But, once again, Attali settled for giving Teltschik a wait-and-see answer: “We are quite open. We’ll study [it].”36 At the “lower” level of teams of advisers and governmental apparatuses, the momentum from the summits dropped off quite quickly. Here it was necessary to begin by distinguishing the numerous paths leading toward a solution, then evaluate and compare them in order to decide which one(s) might eventually be taken. “Our experience with the United States,” explained Teltschik in his discussion with Guigou and Attali, showed that entente on political and strategic cooperation was possible “only at the level of heads of state and of government.” So here, as concerned Franco-­ German relations, that meant speaking about a sphere reserved for the president and the chancellor.37 This was the “outside perspective.” Seen from the inside, judged by the meetings between President Mitterrand and Chancellors Schmidt and Kohl, there was no dwelling on the crypto-constitutional restrictions that a reserved sphere or other similar concepts would have implied. The irritating questions that arose between France and Germany regarding the deterrence doctrine and French tactical nuclear weapons did not require the kind of political creativity that established political institutions but rather the creativity that set them in motion. And it was, in fact, the business of the president and the chancellor to pull the whole creation along like a team of horses. In this story unfolding before us, the meeting that Mitterrand and Kohl had in Paris on December 17, 1985 thus seems particularly significant. The day before, Mitterrand had received a memo from Hubert Védrine, reminding him once again of the chancellor’s explicit wish to devote their upcoming discussion to the “Franco-German dialogue regarding defense.” This dialogue, Védrine observed immediately, was “marked by the gap between the aspirations of German opinion on this subject and France’s obviously restrictive answers.” And, he explained, they knew what was expected in Germany: that deterrence be extended to German territory (West Germany, no doubt, even though they were indeed speaking here of “German territory”). The use of France’s strategic nuclear force had to be planned jointly, and plans for the use of conventional French armed forces should take a place among the other Allied units in the defense line planned for Federal Germany. In short, he summed up in a phrase not devoid of polemic (doubtless with the intention of influencing the memo’s addressee), it was hoped that “France” would come back into the

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integrated command [of NATO], but it did not look as serious as that. Védrine was supposing that the German chancellor would console himself because the latter had “always asserted that he understood” France’s not being able to envisage these measures, “which, moreover, he was not asking for.”38 Really? Was the Élysée adviser so sure of that? Was he certain that the chancellor would not attempt to fulfill his wish, that he did not intend to use the upcoming conversation to make progress in the “Franco-­ German dialogue on the topic of defense”? Why would he have expressed this wish if it was not real, as the adviser wrote to his president? In any event, on December 17, 1985, after having welcomed Kohl to the Élysée, taken him into his office and exchanged gifts, Mitterrand immediately switched to the topic that had been planned, he emphasized, for their conversation of the day: defense policy. For the next hour and a half, they did not change subjects, even discussing it in a way that led the chancellor, a little more than midway through the conversation, to express his great astonishment at their discussion. Never before, said he, had a conversation of this type been able to occur between a president and a chancellor. It was happening for the first time that day, and that stemmed from “our very confident relationship.” The chancellor did not pass over what Federal Germany wanted from France. Without its neighbors, its protection (in the event of war) was unthinkable, and when it thought of its neighbors it thought first of all, of course, of France. From the security point of view, France and Germany formed a unit, the reason for which “we” (i.e., West Germany) must do two things, he said: “rely on the American pillar” and “increase the Franco-German dimension.” What interested him in this context was the French nuclear strike force. That was a reality that posed no problem for him, but he would have liked to know to what degree the vital political interests of the two countries (West Germany and France) could be made comparable. Kohl continued to speak cautiously but he had quite obviously asked the crucial question in the “Franco-German dialogue on the topic of defense.” How would François Mitterrand respond? The chancellor again threw out some bait, adding, as if informing himself about something obvious: “With Great Britain and the United States, we have consultations on nuclear weapons.” But Mitterrand dodged the invitation to establish that kind of consultation in turn and radically cut the connection that Kohl had established between West Germany’s security and France’s nuclear strike force. The heart of the problem, said he, could not be

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circumvented. As concerned nuclear weapons, there could be no joint action. Was that not clear and unequivocal? Had not everything been said that could be said? Or was there still a point worthy of reflection? Certainly. And Mitterrand was not neglecting it—quite the contrary. As if he enjoyed again turning a problem that had just been settled into a gaping, unresolved problem, he observed: “I understand that, concerning the targets [of French nuclear weapons] that might possibly be located in Germany, you were saying: that’s my business. This must be thought over. Is dialogue possible?” That day, the French president and the German chancellor had gone as far as they could. They had sufficiently been engaged in a dialogue, and one of the elements of their “very confident relationship” was also the art practiced by both leaders (and thereby bringing them closer together) of using the resources of political power—in particular, a resource as important as time—as effectively as possible. Consequently, they did not want to talk for two hours in vain. “Is dialogue possible?” asked Mitterrand, asking it of himself as much as of the chancellor seated across from him. The latter, who still had in mind what he had heard a few moments earlier (“there can be no joint action between France and West Germany concerning the nuclear strike force”), answered: “That is the problem.” To which Mitterrand replied: “We must see what consultation mechanism there might be.” And Kohl added: “We could ask the two most competent military men to prepare a text for us.”39 He insisted that his idea be implemented and, before leaving the Élysée, left a fairly lengthy memo in which he laid out precisely and in detail for the French government the German government’s ideas concerning the agreement it was calling for on the use of French nuclear weapons in Germany and the form that, more generally, Franco-German military cooperation should take. This text was evaluated at the Élysée by Mitterrand’s military advisers and, on December 20, the head of his military staff, General Gilbert Forray, sent the president a memo of several pages, giving a critical commentary of “the documents handed over by Chancellor Kohl” and concluded by passing judgment on the contents. At the end of the note, before signing it, General Forray added that, overall, the French chief of staff, General Jean Saulnier, agreed with his analysis. The complex problems posed by military cooperation between France and West Germany had also been dealt with at the highest military level, in discussions between General Saulnier and his German counterpart, General Wolfgang Altenburg, inspector general of the Bundeswehr. Of course, as General Forray pointed out at the beginning of his memo, the

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latter had presented arguments quite similar to those of the other FRG representatives, the sole difference being the much stronger aversion, compared with President Mitterrand’s conciliatory attitude on this occasion, caused in the French military by any attempt whatsoever at making the deterrence doctrine more flexible. So General Forray brought out the heavy artillery to write his memo, punctuated with highly defensive phrases: “The proposals made by the Germans are not innocent.” According to him, they simply concealed the intentions of NATO, which wanted to get France back under its thumb. In principle, he reckoned, there was certainly nothing objectionable in the mechanisms of information and dialogue proposed by the Germans. But if they were implemented (inspired by the agreements between Federal Germany and the United States and Great Britain), France risked seeing its decision-making freedom restricted—which precisely brought “our own concept” into question. France’s defense, he said, should remain independent, which was why it was necessary to deal cautiously with the German attitude, which was presenting a “new character,” one that had become more demanding and quite concrete. Yes, it had to be considered with all due prudence, this also being the point of view of the Élysée chief of staff, Jean-Louis Bianco, who was the first to receive General Forray’s note before passing it on to the president, like other memos addressed to him. Bianco wrote in the margin: “Mr. President. Yes to conversations. With caution. JLB.”40 The president’s collaborators also adopted a somewhat more restrained attitude than that of the president himself—we have already quoted Hubert Védrine’s negative comments—but he continued to work on a sort of agreement with the Germans. At a Cabinet meeting on December 18, 1985 (immediately after his meeting with Chancellor Kohl), he had summed it up in these terms: “We can go with the Germans as far as information or dialogue, but we cannot make commitments.”41 What an adroit phrase—Mitterrand was a past master at coming up with wording like this—for designating an objective consisting of wanting one thing and its opposite, while keeping the absolute ability of being able to say that one was thinking one thing rather than the other and vice versa. By reaching an understanding, was one not making “commitments”? And if one did not so wish, what might the word “understanding” still mean? That the commitment to reach it had doubtless been made, but that, in so doing, one was in no way committed.

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In any case, through the French defense minister, Paul Quilès, President Mitterrand saw to it that General Saulnier continued to discuss possible modes of an agreement with General Altenburg. “I’m not hostile to it,” he had written explicitly on a memo that General Forray sent him on January 6, 1986, and that was returned to the latter with Mitterrand’s comment. In other notes in the margin, the president had, however, also set the French conditions for later negotiation: A Franco-German entente had to be set up “through [a] direct agreement with the Germans,” which would under no circumstances go through NATO.42 On January 16, 1986, in Baden-Baden, Mitterrand again met with Kohl and spoke quite optimistically about the “problem of consultations between the two countries.” For this type of consultation, said he, they could surely find a “system.”43 In keeping with the mission he had received on January 23 from the minister of defense, General Saulnier met with General Altenburg on February 4, 1986 in Bonn to study (among other issues) the problem of using pre-strategic French nuclear weapons “in the Central European theater.” On this occasion, the inspector general of the German armed forces explained in detail to the French chief of staff the agreements Federal Germany had made with the United States and Great Britain in case of engagement of tactical nuclear forces. According to those texts, it was provided that, before an engagement of this type, Federal Germany would be informed and consulted in keeping with two procedures: The first consultation mechanism went via NATO authorities, the second through direct contact between the American president and the German chancellor, or between the latter and the British prime minister. As concerned the hoped-for agreement with France, General Altenburg explained, only the second consultation mechanism was envisaged, that is, direct contacts between the French and German governments. Moreover, it was hoped that the agreement would concern France’s tactical nuclear weapons insofar as they might be involved “on FRG territory or from this territory on countries located at the edge of the FRG (the GDR in particular).” The French general gave an account of his Bonn meeting to the defense minister, Paul Quilès, in the form of a fairly long written report,44 and on February 20, the minister sent President Mitterrand a letter informing him, on the one hand, of the generals’ meeting—which he had wanted and which had just taken place—and, on the other, above all, the part of their meeting that had concerned the “issue of using French pre-strategic nuclear weapons in Central Europe.” Quilès added comments to this

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account: For him, the German idea of direct consultation presented no difficulties. According to that mechanism, the decision to involve tactical nuclear weapons remained entirely the “sovereign decision” of the state whose weapons were concerned. On the other hand, the other German demand was much more problematical: they wanted not to be limited to “simple preliminary information” but also to conclude a precise agreement on all the methods, including the technical ones, in which French pre-strategic weapons would be involved—with considerable restrictions. Could they, the defense minister wondered, thus follow “our German partner” on this point?45 They could not, which rendered meaningless the agreement announced by President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl on February 28, 1986, resulting from the 47th Franco-German governmental consultations in Paris: “Within the limits imposed by the extreme rapidity of such decisions, the President of the Republic declares himself ready to consult the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany on the possible use of French pre-strategic weapons on German territory. He reminds that, in this area, the decision cannot be shared.”46 “We can go with the Germans as far information or dialogue, but we cannot make commitments in their regard.” Such had been Mitterrand’s formula, and the February 28 agreement corresponded to it exactly, for on the issue of the involvement of French pre-strategic weapons, nothing had been settled. It was simply agreed that, before this commitment, the French president should consult the German chancellor if possible. But a consultation on just what point, since the commitment decision, which “could not be shared,” had to be made totally independently of the consultation? In truth, it could henceforth concern only the scope, intensity and objectives of the commitment—yet it was precisely on this point that the agreement had led to no solution. What had General Forray informed President Mitterrand about in his October 24 memo? About the fact that there were meetings between the French and German staffs on the “problems of using the pre-strategic in Central Europe”; that these meetings were carried out by General Saulnier “with caution”; and that the Germans henceforth wanted to negotiate an agreement on the conditions for implementing the agreed-upon consultation, with everything defined quite precisely, including the technical details. In other words, they were back to the point where they had already found themselves before February 28, 1986, apart from the fact that, to borrow General Forray’s expression, from then on, the “ball was in the

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German court.” Previously, the Germans called for an agreement on a consultation, and France had agreed. Henceforth, the French party could, conversely, ask the Germans to formulate all the conditions they had in mind to implement it before another agreement might be considered. For the moment, General Forray wrote in his note, they were still waiting for the German authorities to express themselves more precisely.47 They did so by presenting proposals made by General Altenburg’s successor as inspector general of the Bundeswehr, Admiral Dieter Wellershoff, in March 1987. But, as shown by a memo from General Forray to President Mitterrand on May 18, 1987, in view of these proposals, the French feared that they were getting closer to a “NATO-type planning mania.” Their fear was not unfounded. As Horst Teltschik told Charles Powell, Prime Minister Thatcher’s private secretary, on November 12, 1987, the Germans wished “an arm-lock on French planning for use of pre-strategic nuclear weapons, so that they could not be used on German territory.”48 At all events, Germany showed no haste in advancing on that terrain; moreover, the memo from General Forray pointed out that no other meeting with Admiral Wellershoff had been scheduled.49 It would be necessary to wait until the spring of 1989 before having the impression of again being able to envisage the conclusion of a formal agreement on “nuclear consultations” (this being the term henceforth in use), but even at that date, nothing similar was implemented. Let us return to 1987. Before his ministers and collaborators, President Mitterrand spoke yet a little more precisely about France’s behavior— which is to say his own, since it was he who held the power to use the French atomic force—regarding Germany on the issue of nuclear war. In the context of his state visit to West Germany on October 19–21, 1987, on the first evening, he discussed the French defense strategy with the Élysée chief of staff, Jean-Louis Bianco, and said: “France is not going to declare nuclear war because a German battalion was beaten. Never will I give the order to set off a bomb on German territory.”50 It was a sentence of (almost) perfect clarity but which, by that very clarity, of course completely contradicted the deterrence theory, which had to act through the sole fact of its absolute indetermination (consisting of leaving everything that concerned its implementation vague). Kohl understood François Mitterrand well when he spoke of his confidence in the president regarding nuclear war. Mitterrand, exercising the powers of president of the French Republic and thus commander in chief, endowed with nuclear forces, had no intention of letting atomic bombs ravage Germany. But he

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could not give any guarantee other than that of a trust that allowed for “understanding each other.” On the other hand, he refused, as an excessive, inconvenient demand, the request to find another type of agreement on what he naturally planned on doing—a formal agreement that would commit him. “Informing the Germans about everything that touches their country is normal,” said Mitterrand on April 29, 1989, during a luncheon with Jean-Louis Bianco, Hubert Védrine, Élisabeth Guigou, Jean Musitelli, General Jean Fleury and his successor, Rear-Admiral Jacques Lanxade, “but the power of decision is ours. To my mind, there is no question of setting off nuclear bombs on FRG territory or even the other Germany. But in the end, we cannot renounce this option of using our bombs.”51 A few days later, on April 26, the French president repeated what he had said at the Cabinet meeting. On the one hand: “Do we have the intention of setting off a nuclear device against Germany? No, naturally, we don’t want that and will do everything to avoid it.” On the other hand: “Do we have to put it in writing? No, we can’t tie our hands in case of war or give [the Germans] the right to decision-making on the use of autonomous French [nuclear] force.”52 If Mitterrand was prompted to make these two clarifications, it was because the head of the French army, General Maurice Schmitt, had carried out new negotiations with Rear-Admiral Wellershoff on the old problem that henceforth constituted the involvement of French pre-strategic weapons. A letter from Defense Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement had informed him of this as had the three memos from his military adviser, General Fleury, on April 3, 4 and 10.53 Mitterrand learned that General Schmitt and Rear-Admiral Wellershoff had finalized a written proposal, almost finished already, concerning an agreement to be concluded on the details of the “nuclear consultations” between France and Germany—and that it went well beyond his own notions of the “consultation” mentioned here. Hubert Védrine examined this text, and his critical judgment, expressed in a memo dated April 13, then another the next day (“is the scheduling of use coherent with the doctrine of uncertainty that must remain?”), aroused Mitterrand’s full mistrust.54 On this point, one could not “be too cautious,” and even the changes in the text for which General Fleury had, on April 19, obtained the Germans’ approval, changed nothing in the attitude of refusal of the president and his advisers.55 Even the letter that the president had received the day before from Chancellor Kohl, pressing him to approve the draft agreement, changed nothing. In a memo written about this letter, Védrine recommended that the

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president speak about it immediately with the chancellor, during the governmental consultations (the 53rd, in Paris). Mitterrand’s adviser, clearly knowing full well what the president would say to the chancellor, reckoned that the latter would inevitably be disappointed.56 Two days later, on April 20 at 9:30  a.m., during the first meeting of the Franco-German defense and security council, which had just been instituted, the question of Franco-German “nuclear consultations” also was to be brought up, but Mitterrand had that point removed from the agenda shortly before the meeting began.57 On July 21, 1989, Védrine and Admiral Lanxade recommended adjourning the negotiations on this point sine die (“Nothing must be written on that, and the follow-up negotiations must be postponed,” to which Mitterrand responded in the margin: “Agreed”).58 Other attempts by the German party in October and November to achieve progress on this point through direct meetings between the chancellor and president failed. That only encouraged Mitterrand and his advisers to come to an agreement on the fact that they were in no way willing to accept more than was provided for (or not said) in the agreement of February 28, 1986, and that the formula it contained, that of a “consultation,” designated absolutely everything they wanted this term to mean.59 As if wanting to fulfill his duty—at the heart of other dramatic events: it was now the winter of 1989–1990—Admiral Wellershoff again spoke to Admiral Lanxade, without wasting time on the failure of efforts he had undertaken in vain out up to then. Under the dark star of nuclear terror, France and West Germany (through their governments) were henceforth captives in a strange game of attraction and repulsion. Federal Germany (speaking in the name of all Germany) was forced to try to push France to carry out consultations, and France, which refused those consultations, was forced to remain motionless. In the memo to the president, on February 13, 1990, in which he related Admiral Wellershoff’s new attempt, Admiral Lanxade emphasized this paradox that clearly disconcerted him and that, when all was said and done, he discerned in the Germans’ behavior. They wanted to obtain “a type of control” over the commitment “of our pre-strategic weapons,” that is precisely on those weapons against which they had, in fact, taken a stand.60 But naturally, this paradox did not concern only the Germans: It stemmed from the thing itself, and both parties, French and German, were inevitably confronted with it when they discussed it. To the question “Is German territory part of our vital interest?” the president responded, from the very beginning of his term: “We cannot answer.” That is where

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things stayed, even though the most diverse methods were used—which we have described here—to make things easier for the Germans. The political world does not always—and often not at all—let itself be brought back to the obvious facts we reduce it to in order to think up solutions to problems threatening it. The fabric from which it is made, and the structures running through it, stand up to our sense of symmetry, balance and justice. Whoever wants absolutely to do good in this world can, in a perfectly coherent way, act badly by implementing his intentions. In his reflection on nuclear war, François Mitterrand was thinking against nuclear war, counting on deterrence and the concomitant terror aroused by the anguish of death even before any nuclear strike effectively to prevent an atomic war. If one reached the point of preparing to strike as a “final warning,” it would in truth already be too late: The nuclear war would have already begun, and deterrence would not have accomplished its mission. (This is why, for François Mitterrand, the “pre-strategic” nuclear weapons constituted a problem more bothersome than real: According to his “war prevention” strategy, they should not be used in any event.) He could not deviate from his strategic logic against nuclear war: Otherwise, he would have authorized it. And that is what made this logic—ordinarily so conclusive—totally inoperative from a certain point of view: It was a logic into which German anxieties (and the ensuing German demand for guarantees and certainties) absolutely did not fit. And yet, although the French president and his advisers had wanted to meet the Germans’ requests on this point, doing so would have made a mistake: They would have abandoned deterrence and with it, the protection that the Germans were also calling for. Here, on the question of nuclear war, the world of Franco-German politics (and, naturally, the world of politics in general), did not let itself be reduced to the symmetry or equity wished for by both parties—yet achieved in other areas. Instead, France and West Germany found themselves in the game that we have just described. It was certainly time that, with the new year 1990, a new dialogue between France and Germany (having since become unified Germany) begin. This discussion on their position vis-à-vis one another and on the position they both occupied in the political universe common to them both had to take place, for although it might be said that Franco-German relations were “in tune,” they were not, for all that, “harmonious.” Shortly before reunification, Joachim Bitterlich and Horst Teltschik returned to Bonn empty-handed, after a meeting in the Élysée with Admiral Lanxade and his staff. “The French military people,”

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Bitterlich later recounted, “were adamant (steinhart).” They just didn’t want, regarding the nuclear question, to enter in any agreement with the Germans.61 Let us come back, once more, for a moment in Franco-German relations, to the Élysée Palace, on February 13, 1990, and reread the memo that Admiral Lanxade sent to President Mitterrand concerning the question asked by Admiral Wellershoff about the use of French pre-strategic nuclear weapons. Before this note reached the president, it was read by the Élysée chief of staff, Jean-Louis Bianco, and, as in a game wherein the players have been committed too long already, he added this remark: “Mr. President, if they are seekers, let’s let the Germans come.”62

Notes 1. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 7, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 2. CD, October 30, 1981. 3. See Harpprecht, Im Kanzleramt, 243, on the exchange between Georges Pompidou and Willy Brandt, on June 21, 1973 that focused on the French nuclear missiles stationed on German soil, and which Brandt recounted to Harpprecht as follows: “Then [Willy Brandt] became concrete. Concerning the French nuclear missiles stationed on German soil, Pompidou asked the recording secretaries to stop writing for a moment and explained exactly what it was all about. Then he provided explanations on the agreement reached with former NATO Supreme Commander Lemnitzer: France would collaborate in the alliance. [Brandt] then asked for explanations on the new missiles that were being installed on the other side of the Rhine, about which it was known that their range would certainly not reach the far side [i.e., East Germany]. [Pompidou] indicated that the staffs would be informed. This was great progress.” Earlier on (221), Harpprecht mentions a report by the German defense minister, Georg Leber, according to which there was a “central problem” on the security issues between Germany and France: “the stationing of French nuclear missiles in Federal Germany, aimed at German targets in the GDR—and this without dialogue, unlike what happens with the United States and England.” 4. Quotations from the report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 7, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 5. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 22, 1982. (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/72). 6. On November 4, 1982, François Mitterrand said to Margaret Thatcher: “Thanks to the evolution of technologies […], within four or five years, we

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will have gone from the current Plutons [the French tactical nuclear missiles], which cover only 120  km, to the Hadès, capable of striking at 350 km, that is, directly on the countries of the Warsaw Pact, East Germany, Czechoslovakia” (Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in Paris, November 4, 1982/AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75, dossier 2). In the same spirit, on December 14, 1982, he said to George Shultz: “We are going to begin construction of the seventh nuclear submarine and increase the range of the tactical weapons from French soil, going from 120 to 400  km and enabling us to strike the Democratic Republic of Germany and Czechoslovakia without penetrating the soil of the Federal Republic of Germany” (Report of the Mitterrand-Shultz meeting in Paris, December 14, 1982). 7. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 22, 1982; italics in original (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 8. Ibid. 9. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in Paris, November 4, 1982 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 10. Report of the Mitterrand-Shultz meeting in Paris, December 14, 1982. 11. Report of the Mitterrand-Rau meeting in Paris, October 14, 1986 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73, Dossier 1). 12. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting at the Château de Bénouville, March 23, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 13. Report of the Mitterrand-Vogel meeting in Paris, July 9, 1987. 14. Report of the Mitterrand-González meeting at Latche, August 25, 1987. 15. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting in Bonn, October 20, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 16. Report of the Mitterrand-Ligachev meeting in Paris, December 3, 1987. 17. Chancellor Kohl consequently responded by guaranteeing that Federal Germany in no way wanted a “second key”: “I have no real problems regarding the second key. Last week, I received some twenty German editors-­in-chief who all asked me this question. I told them that I didn’t need it and that for me, having confidence in the French President was enough, and I believe that the French President, when he thinks about Strasbourg, must also think about Freiburg” (Report of the Mitterrand-­ Kohl meeting in Cologne, November 24, 1983/AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72. Dossier 2.) 18. [Jean-Louis Bianco], Note pour Monsieur le Président, June 18, 1985. 19. Report of the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting in Bonn, October 20, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 20. See https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/text-­of-­the-­ elysee-­treaty-­joint-­declaration-­of-­francogerman-­friendship/ (accessed November 10, 2020).

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21. Letter from President Mitterrand to Chancellor Schmidt, Paris, January 13, 1982. 22. Letter from Chancellor Schmidt to President Mitterrand, in the version that arrived at the Élysée on February 10, 1982, translated into French, via the German Embassy in Paris. 23. 39th Franco-German Consultations, Franco-German Declaration, February 25, 1982. 24. Ministère de la Défense, Cabinet du Ministre, Note. A/S: France-RFA-­ Entretiens entre les Ministres de la Défense (Paris, 14 octobre), October 15, 1982. 25. Hubert Védrine brings up the problem of the Pluton and Hadès missiles (France’s tactical or pre-strategic weapons in general, and as regards Franco-­German relations in particular) on several occasions in his book Les mondes: 119, 403ff., 720ff. 26. Ministère de la Défense, Cabinet du Ministre, Note. A/S: France-RFA-­ Entretiens entre les Ministres de la Défense (Paris, 14 octobre), October 15, 1982. 27. Report of the Mitterrand-Jaruzelski meeting, June 16, 1989. 28. Ministère de la Défense, Cabinet du Ministre, Note. A/S: France-RFA-­ Entretiens entre les Ministres de la Défense (Paris, 14 octobre), October 15, 1982. 29. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Le Directeur des Affaires Politiques, Note pour le Ministre, A.S./: Échanges de vues franco-allemandes sur les questions de défense et sécurité, April 18, 1983. 30. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting, May 28, 1985 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/72). 31. Note pour le Président, October 7, 1981. 32. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, January 31, 1984 (AN-AG/5(4)/HV/4). 33. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, February 1, 1984 (AN-AG/5(4)/HV/4). 34. Élisabeth Guigou, Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, a.s.: 43e consultations franco-allemandes au sommet, Rambouillet, 28–29 mai. Summary, May 28, 1984. 35. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Report of the meeting of the German and French foreign affairs and defense ministers at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, outside of Paris, May 28, 1984. 36. Élisabeth Guigou, Compte rendu des Entretiens franco-allemands du 26 septembre [1985], location and date unspecified. 37. Ibid. 38. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, a/s.: Entretiens avec le chancelier Kohl. Inventaire des questions en matière de sécurité et de

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défense, December 17, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/HV/5). In a memo dated November 22, Védrine had already informed President Mitterrand of the chancellor’s wish: to essentially deal with defense and security issues during the meeting planned for December 17 (Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, November 22, 1985/AN-AG/5(4)/HV/5). 39. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Paris, December 17, 1985 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/72. Dossier 2). 40. Head of the president’s military staff, NOTE à l’attention du Président de la République, OBJET: Documents remis par le Chancelier KOHL, December 20, 1985. 41. CM, December 18, 1985. 42. Head of the president’s military staff, Note à l’attention du Président de la République, January 6, 1986. 43. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Baden-Baden, January 16, 1986 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 44. Le Général d’armée aérienne Jean Saulnier à Monsieur le Minister de la Défense, Objet: Entretiens Général ALTENBURG  – GÉNÉRAL SAULNIER à Bonn le 4 février 1986. 45. Letter of the Defense Minister Paul Quilès to President François Mitterrand, February 20, 1986. 46. Bulletin d’information [of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs], no. 43–86, March 1986. 47. Head of the president’s military staff, Note à l’attention du Président de la République, October 24, 1986. 48. PREM-19-3334. 49. The president’s military staff, Note à l’attention du Président de la République, May 18, 1987. 50. Conversation of Mitterrand with Jean-Louis Bianco, October 19, 1987 (Documentary note, PC). 51. Documentary note by Jean-Louis Bianco, April 20, 1989 (PC). 52. CM, April 26, 1989. 53. Head of the president’s military staff, Note à l’attention du Président de la République, April 3, 1989; Note à l’attention du Président de la République, April 4, 1989; Note à l’attention du Président de la République, April 10, 1989. 54. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, April 13, 1989; Note pour le Président de la République, April 14, 1989. 55. Head of the president’s military staff, Note à l’attention du Président de la République, April 25, 1989. 56. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, April 18, 1989. 57. The idea of a “Franco-German defense and security council” was conceived on the occasion of the “Moineau hardi” (“Bold Sparrow”)

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­ ranco-­German maneuvers on September 28, 1987 in southern Germany, F following introductory discussions on the subject between collaborators of the French president and the German chancellor. It was in this circle that the project was followed and concretized during the Hanover FrancoGerman summit on November 13, 1987. A supplementary agreement to the Élysée Treaty, signed January 22, 1988, instituted this council as well as the “Franco-­German economic and financial council.” After ratification of the two additional agreements (one for each council) to the Élysée Treaty by the German Bundestag and the French Assemblée Nationale, it was decided to found the defense and security council, whose constituent meeting took place on April 20, 1989. 58. Hubert Védrine and Admiral Lanxade, Note pour le Président de la République, July 21, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/HV/8). 59. Based on: Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, October 23, 1989; Note pour le Président de la République, November 2, 1989; Rear-Admiral and Head of the president’s military staff, Note pour le Président de la République, October 24, 1989. 60. Rear-Admiral and Head of the president’s military staff, Note pour le Président de la République, February 13, 1990. 61. Interview with Joachim Bitterlich in Bonn, August 17, 1998. 62. Rear-Admiral and Head of the president’s military staff, Note pour le Président de la République, February 13, 1990. The memo bears the president’s customary note after his having read it: “Vu” (“seen”).

CHAPTER 9

The Reunification of Germany: In Quest of a Scenario

The Problem of History and the Problem of the Scenario The nature of the process of reflection, negotiation, and discussion that led to the reunification of Germany was extraordinary. It was necessary politically to master the developments that were unsettling world politics, and politics had to give them new forms. It was therefore a matter of taking up a challenge thrown down to politics, the most creative of all the arts of which man is capable, a challenge that demanded the full creative imagination and energy of which politics was capable. Who should shape what and how? That was the fundamental question, covering all others and to which, above all, an answer had to be provided, whether in the GDR, the FRG, Moscow, London, Washington, Paris, or the other capitals of the European and American continents.1 Such an observation did not facilitate an answer: The revolutionary events affecting the world forced politics to embark on a truly historic course. “History,” Mikhail Gorbachev noted later on, “was unfolding at an unheard-of speed … the history that was set in motion swept us along with it.”2 “We sensed we were running against a clock, but we did not know how much time was left,” explained George H.W. Bush for his part.3 No one knew, no one could know—and this was the basic problem of the whole process—whether politics, at the heart of changes that were unfolding in an anarchic trend and thereby threatening to elude it, would © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_9

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manage to summon sufficient creative force to capture these phenomena, shape them and integrate them into an outline of order.4 Between the autumn of 1989 and the summer of 1990, politics put on a show of consummate creativity on the American-European stage. Its actors, the politicians in the political drama, were having the greatest difficulty finding their way, swept along in an action that they were supposed to shape. “After the radical changes that had taken place in the German Democratic Republic, the situation developed at such breathtaking speed,” wrote Mikhail Gorbachev in his Memoirs, “that there was a real danger that it would get out of control.”5 George Bush described the situation in similar terms: “Shepherding reunification and the future architecture of European security in this way was a monumental undertaking. Because changes were unfolding so fast, we had little time for introspection. Fortunately, the tide of history in Germany and across Eastern Europe was in our direction. We had to push, guide, and manage, to the extent possible, the positive currents that were flowing.”6 And for the audience watching these actors, it was still much more difficult to follow the drama within the drama: having to find out what play, in the end, one really wanted to have put on. It was necessary to orchestrate the multiple energies of history underway and channel them, but who should do it, and how? What should come out of it? History was performed, and the most problematic element was, precisely, the script. But those who were acting out history here, namely those who were making it, were working both in history (being performed) and on history (by writing the text of what was being performed). These actors—who spoke of a “scenario,” the “comprehensive package,” the “grand design,” “timetables,” “schedules,” or the “chronology of how we got from here to there”7—thus had a self-reflexive attitude that increased with time. They all resembled one other on this point. But in the conception of the scenario they thought they had followed and clarified as they progressed, they can clearly be distinguished. If we are to trust existing documents, the reunification of Germany came about according to very different synopses; depending on whichever one we trust, this reunification followed several divergent courses. We can also imagine that Germany existed in forms as diverse as those in which it seems to have been reunified. These are conclusions that may appear strange, but only if one neglects what is so striking in the scenarios: They present the same story, but the turn of events differs in each one. Let us take, for example, the American scenario and compare it with the French scenario: We will

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observe that, according to the former, the reunification of Germany was— as we might suspect—undertaken entirely under American direction; according to the latter, it took place under European organization, which was the sole explanation for its success. Two scenarios for a single event—and we could provide even more, all entirely different, written under West German, East German8 or Soviet authorship. We may be surprised by this and wonder how it so happens that the drama of Germany’s reunification occurred according to so many different scenarios. But, contrary to what might perhaps have been thought, it is impossible to limit this drama to one very precise performance or to conclude that this creative process of shaping the play followed a single staging. For here, in the reunification process, we were not dealing with one director but several, and none exerted exclusive direction. “The critiques according to which France is not controlling the phenomenon of German unity are absurd,” wrote Hubert Védrine on March 23, 1990, in a note to President Mitterrand, “insofar as no one is really controlling it.” Chancellor Kohl himself, Védrine observed, is only adapting to it (with considerable flexibility and skill). “At the moment of his famous Ten-Point Plan in November, he was still hoping to slow down the process so that it unfold only by steps.”9 That sounds like a commentary on our theme—and this is not by chance, of course, for when he said that no one was controlling the German unification process, Védrine was quite simply talking about the scenario problem. There was no scenario in which one could have read in advance what was happening. The only possible thing was to write the scenario of the “movie” (to borrow the term from the American text, which we shall quote in a moment) as the “filming” went along, then see it again in the course of an ongoing revision process in which the scenario—or some parts of it—which seemed to have been formulated, appeared to have been rewritten and transformed, recomposed, supplemented, adapted in multiple ways, and had to be polished with even greater meticulousness. The result was not a scenario, strictly speaking, but something else. American-European politics constituted a scenario workshop around the reunification-of-Germany process, to which the players attended assiduously and where they and their collaborators, along with those who were brought into the workshop to advise or make their contribution, worked zealously throughout the whole process up to its final phase.10 The movie was not guided by a scenario but by a workshop of screenwriters.

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In the final analysis, the completed scenario—or rather scenarios— coming out of the actor s’ workshop had no relation to the production, strictly speaking; it was a matter of integrating precisely what was thought to have been wanted and therefore done in the course of the events that had been lived and shaped, starting from a retrospective look at what actually happened, the sequence of actions, the succession of events, the threads of motivation and the axes of objectives. Therefore, the respective documents always present the scenario of one of the key players—the United States or France, for example—to account for the dramatic work of reunification. Authentic testimony curiously blends with filtered interpretation. In other words, the story of our story (the drama of the reunification of Germany and the acting therein of France) continued, and is still going on. Even while the story was unfolding, very shortly afterward the actors were already beginning to transform it into history produced by their recollection. They assembled the story or rather what they considered their story; then a recollected history appeared in the testimony of those who had been the actors. However, it was thus a corrected, and therefore already interpreted, history—and there were naturally as many of these corrected, interpreted histories as there were actors recalling their story. The two scenarios we propose to examine more closely at present could hardly be more different. The American scenario was set down on July 20, 1990, in Paris, in the form of a report on a background briefing. Three days earlier, senior State Department officials had spoken in detail about “recent events in Europe” after a meeting in the framework of the two-­plus-­four negotiations.11 They integrated the drama of Germany’s reunification into the “time line” of their chronology—an American chronology.12 The French scenario was finalized on July 31, 1991 by President Mitterrand’s diplomatic adviser, Pierre Morel, based on several notes he had written for the president on the topic East Germany and reunification (July 1989–June 1990).13 The American text involves two speakers—introduced only as senior State Department officials—whom we would have difficulty imagining more sure of themselves and of their professional skills. The one who speaks first (and most often) relates history as if he had been the master of it: Apparently, he knows the chronology of events in Germany and Europe between May 1989 and July 1990 so well and so naturally that he can offer to “run through them quickly” for his listeners. “If you put your mind back to December, and if I had drawn you aside and said that we

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were going to achieve a united Germany in NATO with Soviet troops out [of Germany] in three to four years, Germany being part of NATO and having NATO forces in the GDR territory … [If I had announced] the termination of four power rights at the time of unification, all done while enhancing U.S.-Soviet relations and perhaps the role of the Soviet Union as a constructive partner in Europe, I think that I would have encountered a fair amount of skepticism. Indeed, I did encounter a fair amount of skepticism.”14 The “senior State Department official” teaches his listeners that one should already be able to look at history as if having shaped it oneself, which is what he is doing. In this case, he is indeed sure of the chronology, “of how we got from here to there.” He can bring back the events and put them in order on his time line and make the whole movie unwind in front of his audience. “From my perspective,” he explains, things occur like this: “If you take a snapshot at one point in time you are sort of getting one frame without getting the whole movie picture.” However, he adds, “I think it is useful to have [the whole film].” Without a doubt—if it were only a matter of film. The movie for which the scenario was proposed in this background briefing on July 20, 1990, in Paris (let us recall: a scenario written afterward) presents the unification of Germany as an event conceived and directed by the Americans. This is not the definitive film but a particular version of it. Let us view the series of scenes offered us and we shall see America staging German unity, Germany unified as a country that is above all a member of NATO. Here are the different scenes of the reunification of Germany as presented in the American movie: May 31, 1989. The president’s [George H.W. Bush] speech in Meinz [sic!]. Talking about partnership and leadership with Germany. Then on October 16th when Secretary Baker gave his “points of mutual advantage” speech on the Soviet Union and … there was an aspect about trying to include German reconciliation through self-determination and peace and freedom … Similarly, about that time frame, in October-November 1989, the president was quoted in the press stating his unqualified support for German unification, and that was very important because it put the U.S. out front in establishing credibility on this issue with the German public. In early December, having met earlier in the day with chancellor Kohl, the president announced the four principles that we would use to organize NATO support for German unification. And these were subsequently echoed in the EC summit declaration from Strasbourg.

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December 12th was Baker’s Berlin speech … In setting out a European architecture the pieces relate to what we are doing here. For example, this is for the first time we really tried to focus on a more politically adapted NATO, the role of the CSCE, and the EC. Then in late January or early February, the United States started to preview the possibility of a 2 plus 4 mechanism. … You had German unification moving very quickly, but you did not really have any mechanism to handle it. And through meetings with Dumas, Hurd, Genscher, Shevardnadze and Gorbachev, the secretary [of state, Baker] previewed this idea. And then on February 9 [1990], on the eve of Kohl’s first trip to the Soviet Union, the president sent him a message assuring him of U.S. backing on the future of four power rights … There was also the trip that proceeded Kohl by about a day and we prepared some observations that the Germans found very useful in their guidance. Then we went to Ottawa. And on February 13 there we had the 2 plus 4 announcement. On February 24th and 25th, the president met with chancellor Kohl at Camp David and that was an important announcement because it was the unequivocal agreement, stated publicly, that a united Germany will remain a full member of NATO. On March 15th, President Bush talked to chancellor Kohl on the phone about a common understanding on handling the Polish border issue. On April 13th the president met with Prime Minister Thatcher in Bermuda and that led to a common agreement on the 2 plus 4, termination of four power rights, and the achievement of German unity. On April 19th, the president has a similar meeting with President Mitterrand and on April 25th, the president wrote to chancellor Kohl, giving his conclusions and details on emerging allied positions on 2 plus 4 issues. May 5th was the first ministerial meeting of the 2 plus 4 in Bonn. And in that meeting, the United States proposed that the six act as a steering group. […] And then the day afterward, Secretary Baker carried the invitation for the Poles to join the Paris ministerial, on a trip to Warsaw. May 17th, the president met again with Chancellor Kohl in Washington to try to reach firm agreement to resist any Soviet effort to delink four power rights from internal reunification. On May 30th, the president spoke with Chancellor Kohl on the phone to make sure that our views were harmonized before going into the Washington summit [the meeting between Bush and Gorbachev, from May 30 to June 3]. And between May 30th and June 3rd, the president presented the nine points [sorts of “guarantees” concerning rules that must be respected during the unification of Germany] to Gorbachev.15

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On June 8, the president again met with Chancellor Kohl in Washington to review our strategy for the coming months, including the NATO summit. June 21st was when the president wrote to Chancellor Kohl and other key allied leaders giving our draft declaration for the NATO summit [in London]. July 5th and 6th was the London declaration, the NATO summit, which we feel was pretty important in bringing this sequence [toward the unification of Germany] along. And then on July 16th you have the announcement that Kohl and Gorbachev made with the eight points that closely parallel the nine points assurance.

We had thus arrived at the end of this series of scenes, and the first speaker of this background briefing concluded in these terms: “So that gives you a quick run through on, sort of, over the course of a little bit over a year, how we got from here to there.”16 The reunification of Germany was an event thought out and directed by the Americans. This scenario leaves not the slightest doubt on that point. The conductor was consequently the American president, assisted by his secretary of state in the role of concertmaster. It was the president of the United States who set the principles of the performance, invited the principal soloists, in particular the German chancellor, the British prime minister and the French president, to come play with the orchestra, setting for them, as for the other performers, the tempo and the idea for a finale. As for the Soviet delegation, it was subjected to a “conditioning” that made it subservient to the baton of the American conductor.17 German unification—as this American scenario maintained—was implemented in the arena of NATO, the setting for the American staging. It required a NATO summit so that the procedures favorable to unification be put in place. For the establishment of German unity, the American scenario did not recognize a field of action essential to the European Union; generally speaking, it left Europe with a single role: cooperating with American objectives concerning it (a “European architecture” conceived in Washington). The European Summit of December 1989  in Strasbourg—in the course of which, from the European viewpoint, something decisive occurred for allowing the unification of Germany—had consequently been, according to the American scenario, a simple event leading to an innocuous result regarding the German question: The Europeans only echoed what the president of the United States had

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announced to them. And according to this American version, it was not the French president who had brought up the problem of the Polish border to the German chancellor but the American president—a way of saying that nothing would have happened in this sphere had the conductor in Washington not thought of it.

The French Scenario Now, I would like to speak about the French scenario, which could not be much farther from the American version. No master of history stands out, and no one is directing the others. Nor does anyone make up a chronology of the story to “run through quickly.” The style of the French scenario is totally different, characterized by reserved, analytical and concise terms that have been taken from the documents. It expressed the idea of Germany’s reunification where the primary objective was to place political creation not under the control of a political leader brandishing his marshal’s baton—as his profession would have wished—but under that of a political vision. And this vision had to be the European vision. The work of German unification had to be a European work. This is what Mitterrand’s France wanted. According to this vision, a great, powerful act would unfold with the creation of German unity, and this would be precisely within the creation of Europe—a Europe politically in agreement with itself, consequently sure of itself (at last) and (finally) its own master. In this vision, it was imperative that the staging of the reunification of Germany be a European staging, and in order for it be so—or rather: in order that things take this turn— Mitterrand and his government also set to work in the aforementioned scenario workshop. From the beginning (and, for France, as we have seen, this beginning went back well before 1989), in an obstinate, constant way, the event that was being written in history under the name of “German unification” carried the banner of Europe. François Mitterrand and the France he was running were, of course, working toward German unity. And just as naturally, they were working so that this creation within Europe became a European creation. Let us start with the first pages of the scenario written by Pierre Morel, Mitterrand’s diplomatic adviser—the first of the notes making up the French scenario. The subject of the handwritten Note pour le Président de la République is East Germany and reunification (July 1989–June 1990), and here Morel first of all tells the president that the dossier contains a series of positions on the indicated subject: (a) the president’s declarations

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on the question of German unification, (b) the principle declarations (on the same topic, naturally) by Kohl and Genscher, and (c) declarations by some well-known French politicians, “Messrs. Giscard d’Estaing, Chirac, Léotard and Méhaignerie.”18 To this information Morel adds two retrospective observations that could not have been worded with greater concision—and one might also say: with greater precision. And yet, they trace the whole history of French policy— above all, President Mitterrand’s—in the process of reunification. They sketch out the scenario thanks to which Mitterrand and his government followed the unfolding of German unification while working to give it form: This work [to constitute the file] leads me to make two retrospective observations. Throughout this whole period [July 1989-June 1990], you [President Mitterrand] defined what I call a positive middle line in face of this event [developments leading to the unification of Germany], which in fact agrees quite well with the overall orientation adopted by the two main German leaders because the central theme is the link between German unification and European construction. Two exceptions notwithstanding: –– the issue of the Oder-Neisse border, which was not finally settled by the chancellor until June’90 before the Bundestag –– the solitary initiative of the Kohl 10-point plan (November 28), that was absorbed fairly quickly, thanks to the numerous Franco-German and European meetings.19

In the following note devoted to his scenario, Morel listed the declarations made by Mitterrand between July 1989 and June 1990 on the question of German unity.20 A simple list, one might think if one settled for skimming over it as such without seeing what, in truth, this list accounts for. It comes down to an inventory of declarations, and certainly nothing more is said about it. But this inventory goes well beyond its role, because—and that is the purpose of Morel’s scenario—it stages a representation, the rehearsal, from memory, of a public performance: The terms of the note evoke the large arena of international politics. The speaker appearing here discusses German unity, talking on several occasions and even with considerable frequency, before world audiences, facing French, German and European listeners and all the others who listen to the speeches given in the arena. It is the president of France, François Mitterrand, who makes one public declaration on German unification after another.

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Here we hear the president of France, and moreover, we listen to Pierre Morel who accompanies Mitterrand once again in his performances on numerous, different tribunes in the form of a posteriori commentaries, thereby interpreting the speaker’s words and relating them to the policy formulated therein.21 This then is what Pierre Morel’s inventory presents, based on these public declarations made by François Mitterrand between July 1989 and June 1990 on the reunification of Germany: [Morel’s introductory indication:] Élysée: Gorbachev visit: July 5, 1989 [i.e., the press conference following the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting at the Élysée that day]. [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] This aspiration to reunification is legitimate for those who feel it here and there. […] I believe that all the German leaders themselves want the process, which they deem desirable, to occur peacefully and not be a factor of new tensions. Nouvel Observateur and four dailies: July 27, 1989 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] Reunifying Germany is the preoccupation of all Germans. It is fairly understandable. This problem, existing for 45 years, is becoming more important insofar as Germany is gaining weight: in economic life it has already happened; in political life, it’s happening. [Morel’s comment:] No German tilt towards the East; no reversal of alliances. [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] The Germans’ aspiration to unity seems legitimate to me. But it can only be achieved democratically and peacefully. [Morel’s comment:] Need for an agreement of the responsible powers and agreement of the two German governments. Élysée: Soares [president of Portugal] visit; October 18, 1989 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] It would be necessary to assume a democratic consultation and the agreement of the witness countries. […] All the time [during which the movement leading to German unity is spreading] must be used to strengthen the European Community. Strasbourg: speech before the Parliament; October 25, 1989 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] Everything is disappearing there because something else is coming, and that something, which we are fortunate to have ourselves … is freedom. Bonn: Press conference; November 3, 1989 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] What counts above all is the people’s will and determination so that this sequence of events occurs at a time I don’t know—right away or later on—, so that the Germans be but a single people

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in a single state or in a form to be determined […] it is the will of the Germans that will be able to tell. And no one can substitute for that will. France will adapt its policy [regarding the Germans’ desire for unification] for the best of Europe’s interests and its own. That will not go as quickly as might wish those who are speaking about reunification for right now. […] Copenhagen: Press conference; November 10, 1989 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] East Germany is a country well placed industrially. So it is a real need for freedom that has just been expressed, not resulting from hunger or anxiety. [Morel’s commentary:] Having got out of Yalta, Europe is coming of age; doubtless a time without balance; much better but more difficult; inventing another phase of Europe’s history; don’t forget the USSR; soon a single pole of attraction: the Community, hence the obligation of succeeding by going further faster. [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] The reunification of Europe will encounter many obstacles because the map of Europe has not changed to such an extent but […] it expresses the will of the German people. That must be our law, our supreme law. It is the people’s will that commands, and France has no reservations to express on this subject. [Morel’s commentary:] Between the push towards freedom and the organic phenomenon of reunification, a certain number of acts and delays will doubtless occur. (Élysée: CEE Dinner [informal European summit]: Press conference; November 18, 1989) [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] In the end, it is democracies that will crystallize peoples’ hopes today. Paris Match [interview]; November 23, 1989 [Morel’s commentary:] The process [of Germany’s reunification] will be slower than some imagined. The will of the people cannot do without the agreement of the states; tomorrow, everything can give way to popular pressure; who knows? The question of the borders resulting from the last war still remains unresolved and will not be settled in a moment of emotion, however comprehensible that emotion might be. Athens: Press conference; November 29, 1989 [Morel’s commentary:] Legitimate German aspirations; may the other peoples of Europe not find themselves before a situation considered settled without having their word to say. [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] If these two states decide democratically to establish a confederation between them to jointly handle a number of subjects, I don’t see who could prohibit it.

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[Morel’s commentary:] This German confederation can bother only those within the Community who seek pretexts. (Europe 1; Antenne 2 [Interview granted to the radio and TV stations]; December 10, 1989) [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] Germany cannot possess nuclear weapons and, moreover, Germany is not demanding it. [Morel’s commentary:] The risk of Germany’s neutralization exists, but we can say no. Regional newspapers; February 14, 1990 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] The speeding-up of events changes nothing in the principles from which it is advisable to take inspiration. Today I am posing no further precondition to the Germans’ self-determination than yesterday. Unification is essentially a matter of their desire, of their choice. It is a fundamental right. This said, the Germans must take into account the commitments that bind us to each other, security in Europe, the evolution of the Community, and European balance. [Morel’s commentary:] Unambiguous recognition of the Oder-Neisse border is indispensable; the Four have jurisdiction that they will not use without discussing with the Germans; on the unification of the two states, the German people will probably decide this year; how? There are multiple hypotheses. [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] Let the Germans know that I, like most Frenchmen, send my fraternal good wishes for their destiny to be happily fulfilled. Élysée: Press conference with Mr. Kohl; February 25, 1990 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] I can tell you immediately: the Oder-Neisse line must be recognized. [Morel’s commentary:] No German neutrality; but concern for respecting balances in Europe. Islamabad: Press conference; February 21, 1990 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] I continued to tell those who talk to me about [Germany’s reunification] that all these changes in Europe are fortunate. [Morel’s commentary:] If self-determination leads to unification, France will have the right to take part in the definition of the consequences: security, alliances, borders. Dacca: Press conference; February 23, 1990 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] This problem [of German unification] results from events that are very fortunate for Europe […] The consequences of this unification must be examined with considerable calm. A priori, there is nothing to complain about.

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Daily Times [Interview]: February 25, 1990 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] German reunification is inscribed in [historic] facts and appears to be desired by the German people in its entirety. No one could take umbrage at or fear this prospect that, as we know, meets the requirement, expressed for the past 40 years by the FRG’s Allies, including France, of seeing the Germans in a position to freely determine their destiny. The right to self-determination cannot be the subject of any questioning or even any debate. It is up to the Germans to decide, and France does not intend to act as a substitute for them. Élysée: Press conference with Mr. Havel (president of Czechoslovakia); March 20, 1990 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] The result of these elections [in the GDR] marks an even stronger desire than expected of speeding up the unification process between the two German states […], a great event that […] must be greeted with friendship by Germany’s neighbors and, especially by France. Sept sur Sept [televised interview] March 25, 1990 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] It is therefore the Germans’ will. This will must be respected. So I have no reservation, nor have I had any. Moscow: Press conference with Mr. Gorbachev; May 25, 1990 [Mitterrand quoted by Morel:] Unification is a German problem. Its consequences are international.

“A Positive Middle Line” Pierre Morel summed up François Mitterrand’s political behavior during the period of German unification with this expression. The latter’s remarks recalled by Morel contain the key political concepts and guiding formulas explaining why the president’s diplomatic adviser could see a “positive,” “middle” line in Mitterrand’s policy regarding the reunification of Germany. We shall return on several occasions to these key concepts expressed, then constantly used, by him. But it is certainly useful to present them here summarily: The revolutionary uprising of the people in East Germany is above all the expression of a desire for freedom. What counts above all is the German people’s will, its self-determination: this constitutes its fundamental right, which must be recognized by all. The Germans’ desire for reunification is legitimate. It lies within the course of history.

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Reunification of Germany can only come about in a democratic, peaceful manner. The way towards reunification is European. Germany contracted obligations for the unification of Europe that also commit it at the moment of its own reunification. The formation of a reunified Germany within its European setting requires the approval of its neighbors. The overhaul of Europe through a reunification of Germany must again lead to European balance. Along with the question of the unification of Germany, the question of security in Europe must also be settled. Recognition of the Oder-Neisse line is part of the unification of Germany process. Unified Germany will have no nuclear weapons. And the supreme principle applies generally: Unification is a German problem. Its consequences are international.

And in his commentaries, Morel again took up these major principles of Mitterrand’s: In the revolutionary upheavals in Central and Eastern Europe, the European Community exerts a force of attraction that must be reinforced if we want these upheavals to have a positive outcome. The process of a unification of Germany must not result in Germany’s neutrality. Everything must be done to avoid a reversal of alliances on the occasion of German unification. The Germans’ emotional upsurge regarding reunification is understandable, but establishing the latter requires a series of legal steps and deadlines. These must be taken into account. And, finally: what is at stake in the question of German unity? The answer is the following: the relation between German unification and European construction.

This survey repeated François Mitterrand’s understanding of the reunification of Germany. The French president followed a determined method (the “line” that Morel mentioned) by which he presented his conceptions on a unification of Germany. And he sang a hymn to freedom, in which he hailed the Germans’ wish for unity. With a methodical rigor Mitterrand marked out the path he foresaw for the unity of Germany. Let us briefly consider his method.

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The Mitterrand method was based on alternatives. On the one hand, the French president extended to the Germans his “fraternal wishes” for the reunification he judged they desired, wanting to accompany their progress in that direction with friendship. On the other hand—and given his responsibility for his country and Europe—he presented the “formal, exterior principles” that a unification of Germany would have to respect, thinking of the international consequences, as he said. We should emphasize that, on this point, Mitterrand in no way distinguished himself from President Bush, who also laid down principles for a reunification of Germany. Bush proclaimed them through the megaphone of NATO and giving them thereby resonance and force. However, the French and American presidents differed on one point: Bush, at the NATO meeting of heads of state and government on December 4, 1989 in Brussels, set out as a kind of decree the four principles that he wanted to see applied in event of German unification.22 Mitterrand, on the other hand, introduced the different principles (that he never grouped into a single whole) sometimes here, sometimes there, in such and such a choice, such and such an oratorical form, and, above all, in the form of appeal and political discourse. Such a discourse does not decree—it seeks to convince. If Mitterrand adopted this method of teaching through rhetoric it stemmed, on the one hand, from a wish to maintain his reserve. France did not have to interfere in a decision that was up to the Germans alone. On the other hand, if he used this method, it was precisely owing to a wish to meddle in the process. France and the other countries had the right and duty to have their say in how the geographical map of Europe would best change if Germany were unified. So “reserve” was on one side, “meddling” on the other. But if one did not see the two guiding principles of a single method in the two approaches that could lead to divergent and therefore separate perceptions. In this case, the “reserve” would be perceived as policy based on objections, or even refusals, and “meddling” as a policy of supervision or even instructions from on high. That is precisely the impression that large portions of his public, especially the Germans, had of Mitterrand’s method.

The Song of Freedom In the fall of 1989 Mitterrand publicly discoursed on the revolutionary events in Europe and on Germany’s reunification. This discourse went through a number of speeches given in varied places and on different

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tribunes. That of course played a large role in the resulting effect. It would have been necessary to follow him from one public performance to another to hear what constituted his discourse. Henceforth no one can follow him anymore. Yet, his discourse remains in the texts of his speeches. François Mitterrand was president of the French Republic at the time Germany’s unification was beginning to take shape, and he was speaking publicly about it in the arena of international politics. Let us go back to some of his speeches of the time, and we will “hear,” once again, what he was saying about the events in Europe and what ideas he associated with them in public.

At the Élysée, October 18, 1989: “The European Community Must Be the Point of Attraction” The president of Portugal, Mario Soares, is in Paris on a state visit. At the end of the first part of the visit, his host, President François Mitterrand, and he give a press conference. They are asked numerous questions including one directly inspired by current events. In the GDR, that very day, Erich Honecker has resigned from office. What does President Mitterrand think about this? How does he analyze the German situation? Does he, with Soares, agree on the possibility of a reunion of the two Germanies? These are the questions that Mitterrand was asked. Mitterrand sees, he says in responding, the sign of a change of era. The events occurring in the Soviet Union are similar to those occurring in East Germany. They are decisive for they herald “new times.” “You have spoken about reunification. I don’t know what will become of this,” he answers, “but it is in the very logic of history to imagine that the German people will not be eternally separated in this way.” And when he said “eternally,” he comments, for him it was not a matter of “postponing ad infinitum” the expected end of German partition, but rather of placing it within immediate current events. According to him, those in charge of international policy and, in particular, of European policy, were at the time working primarily on the “eventuality” of an end to German partition. It was necessary, though, to envisage a “democratic consultation” (of the Germans on the question of their unity) and obtain the agreement of the neighboring countries to ensure the necessary international support for Germany (he had almost said “both Germanies,” Mitterrand notes ironically). It would take time. The fact remained that, between “the Germanies,” as well as between Europeans, agreements could be made “to facilitate things.”

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Granted. But there was this “intermediate period” separating the expected end of German partition and the implementation of reunification. That is what the French president was speaking about then, in conclusion to a long answer wherein he made a short speech on the question of German unity. It was necessary to profit from the actual period, he insists, for there was an energy that was exerting a veritable “attraction” on the process in question. This energy was the European Community and, in Mitterrand’s opinion, the force allowing Europe to free itself and become itself. “All this time,” says he, “must be used to reinforce the European Community, which must, to my mind, be the essential point of attraction to the peoples of Europe, irresistibly drawn, it seems, by freedom and democracy.”23

Strasbourg, October 25, 1989: “Like the Great Moments of 1789” No, it’s freedom! That is what President Mitterrand answered during the fall of 1989 to those who were wondering at length about the events occurring in Europe and not recognizing the force that was once again gripping European peoples who were proclaiming its reign: freedom. We see Mitterrand speaking in the European Parliament, and his words are a hymn to freedom: It is she, liberty, he says, that is driving Europe in these dramatic days. It was not misery that pushed the East Germans to revolt! If they acted, it was because they were stirred by their hope of freedom. Let us look and see, he exclaims: “nothing resists—not the hardest, most closed systems nor history that is already ancient nor a strong ideological tradition nor a coherent system of thought. There, everything is going because something else is coming, and that something is something we are lucky to possess ourselves. That’s why we are here, that’s why you are here, you the representatives of twelve democratic countries. […] Is this a hackneyed expression? No, it’s freedom!” From one country to another, from one capital to the next there in Europe (i.e., in Eastern Europe), the movement followed the same direction and would also go through the same contradictions, undergo the same setbacks. Nothing, he says, is written in advance, “however, everything is written over the long-term.” Let us make sure, he exhorts, that “the page to be written is finished quickly and that we might also contribute to it.” François Mitterrand certainly and clearly sees before him the history that he would like to see written! It is the history of the birth of

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another Europe. “It seems intolerable to me that our Europe not be ever present, as active and alert, with reflexes as swift as a few others in the world who have power.” And there he is, speaking to the European parliamentarians in Strasbourg, delivering the kind of text he envisages drafting for this “page to be written.” Europe’s principles must appear on it: “We do not have to remain absent from this debate [on the exercise of power in the world]—we are entitled to our say!” That would be an absence of Europe, something to be avoided at all costs. And henceforth, the historic time had come. For a half-century, the French president explains, we have lived in a very precise framework of order, “the Europe of Yalta”: Europe divided in two, cut in three; the Europe of blocs and systems. That Europe is currently dissolving before our eyes, but we are not yet through with it. And are we prepared, a concerned Mitterrand then asks, for what might happen or, indeed, what has to happen? Will we be able to cross from one balance of powers to another and go to the end of this path that we are currently taking? Despite all the relapses, difficulties and crises? For if we want to establish this new, thoroughly desirable balance for Europe it will take imagination and willpower, efforts and obstinacy that few generations before us have mustered. So does the French president mean to say that there is little hope? No, certainly not. He is just rhetorically preparing a look at peoples who, by rising up to obtain their freedom, are changing the course of the world to make it the history of their will—a vision that his words are going to put on stage. The memory of the Great Revolution of 1789 fit naturally into Mitterrand’s words. Then, the French nation had swept away the ancien régime in a few months and, in the streets, in the organs of public expression and people’s assemblies that sprang up on all sides, proclaimed itself the sole legitimate power, investing the role that was henceforth its own, that of true sovereign. Taking this look at the history of freedom, the president of the Republican France born of the 1789 Revolution was of course thinking about France’s own experience in this history. In 1989, when, once again, “nothing could resist—neither the hardest, most closed systems nor history that is already ancient nor a strong ideological tradition nor a coherent system of thought,” that same year, all of France was celebrating the bicentennial of its own revolution. It had been two centuries since the people of France made the break-through toward freedom. And, in 1989 nothing was preventing the people from doing the same thing as in 1789. It sufficed to observe, said he: “But such élan! Such hope! Like the great moments of 1789, it is the people whose clamor is

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making itself be heard. It is the people who are tracing the path that will be taken in this waning century that the future times will follow. Again, peoples are moving, and when they move, they decide.” Eastern Europe’s ancien régime is falling apart. Should this not be seen, Mitterrand asks again, as the prelude to a profound change, an upheaval or even a crumbling, including of Western Europe? There is much talk of that these days, the president goes on, and all discussion on this point is still turning around the “two Germanies.” So what is happening to Germany during this period of upheaval in Europe? Or, inversely—and that is Mitterrand’s real question: what then is happening to Europe through Germany during this period? Once more, Mitterrand used a rhetorical crescendo to give more heft to the words he was going to utter. He has chosen the site of his declaration well, addressing the Parliament of the European Community and specifying explicitly that he does not want to “shock” his German friends present when saying that every debate concerning the future of the European Community is centered on the “two Germanies.” They were certainly not hearing this for the first time. There is something that he himself does not understand—and he then goes on to the heart of his subject. This “dialectic,” according to which the destruction of the power system in Eastern Europe would automatically bring with it a dismantling of political structures in Western Europe is incomprehensible to him. People were reasoning as if back in the era of the “swing diplomacy,” when one country—Germany, as it happens—could switch from one alliance to another in case of grave circumstances. But what country having played a role in world history over the previous centuries has not acted in this way? The “reversal of alliances” was “the most obvious proof of self-­ loyalty,” but was it still topical, asked the indignant French president, “whereas the Community of Europe already has a few decades behind it?” Mitterrand would like to perceive it thus, wanting nothing as much as a Europe, with the European Community, that had got out of the “era of swing diplomacy.” And now in Eastern Europe there occurs this ­irresistible advance toward democracy and freedom. Germany is freeing itself to become itself. Europe is on the move, taking other forms. And what do we want, asks Mitterrand of his listeners, speaking about the events that were rushing, what have we been wanting from the very first day, we who built the European Community? That our community exert an attraction over all of Europe, he answers himself. We wanted to draw Eastern Europe toward us. It is underway, and the peoples there have hope in us; we must

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therefore respond to the movement that is arising in Eastern Europe; we have to harness this movement, speed up the community construction of Europe and reinforce it at the same time. According to him, this was the “sole response.” Europe will be truly free only when it is free to become Europe.24

Copenhagen, November 10, 1989: “These Are Happy Events” At the end of his visit to the Danish capital, the French president gives a press conference. He makes a report on the meetings he has had dealing with European topics, since France held the presidency of the European Council at the time and he was its titular president. When he asks if there were any questions, one of the journalists immediately fires off the question: “Mr. President, what do you think about the developments going on now in East Germany? What is your reaction? What does this mean for European stability?” The day before, November 9, the Wall fell in Berlin, and of course, questions like this are on all lips. “Mr. President, what do you think ….” “I think,” replies François Mitterrand, “that these are happy events since they mark the progress of freedom in Europe. We had observed it in Hungary, we had observed it in Poland, we are observing it today in East Germany. We had, in a way, observed it in the Soviet Union, and it is likely that this great popular movement will continue to be contagious. So it is a happy event for those who believe in the will of the people and the laws of democracy. We are not yet there, but the direction has been taken. I have already had occasion to compare: 1789 was for us the popular movement that gave rise to our Revolution that is at the dawn of new times. Today, I think an event of greatest importance is taking place. [In East Germany,] a real need for freedom has just been expressed.” But in this ode to freedom, the French president does not forget the question of “European stability” and gives the fall of the Wall a precise signification, laying out what, in his eyes, are its future consequences for the political situation in Europe. With the East Germans’ march toward freedom, he recalls, we are escaping from this order that was established after World War II and which is called the “order of Yalta.” “We are in the process of getting out of that,” he emphasizes, adding that only they who, like himself, wanted to get rid of it could rejoice over this. Europe will grow because the people of Europe have wanted it thus. But we are not yet seeing a “new balance” emerging for us. That will doubtless still be

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lacking a while longer for European politics, and Europe is going to find itself in a situation that is certainly better but also more difficult. It is therefore necessary to find an idea to enter another era of the history of Europe.25

Strasbourg, November 22, 1989: “A Breach in the Wall” Once again, President Mitterrand speaks before the European Parliament. A few days earlier, on November 18, an informal meeting of the European Council took place in Paris, and he wants to summarize it before the Parliament. He also wants to bring up the direction of European affairs, which at the time he is carrying out as “President of the European Council,” as he designates himself. The informal meeting of the European Council was triggered by the events occurring in Eastern Europe, which have aroused the attention of all Europeans and have accelerated even more following the rush of events in the eastern part of Germany. Less than a month earlier, on October 25, he spoke here about the resolution of the people who, by taking its freedom and democracy, brings down the walls and borders: “Again, peoples are moving and when they move, they decide.” And what happened, according to him? On November 9, “history on the march offered the world the prospect—something still unlikely the day before—of a breach in the wall that, for nearly thirty years, embodied the ruptures in our continent.” “On that day, democracy and freedom, inseparable one from the other, won one of their finest, most noticeable victories. The people had moved. The people had spoken, and its voice went beyond the borders, breaking the silence of an order that it had not wanted, which had been imposed on it.”26

Interview, Paris-Match, November 23, 1989: “Peace Is as Precious a Possession as Liberty” Journalists from Paris-Match interviewed the French president, and the article is published that day. Once again, the events in East Germany are one of the topics discussed during the interview, and François Mitterrand again comments on them, exclaiming: “Phenomenal!” When asked if the reunification of Germany has become possible and, above all, desirable, he first of all suggests speaking about it “in precise terms.” For him, “it is the will of the German people that counts,” but although reunification fully

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occupies the Germans’ dreams and thinking, the process [leading to reunification] will be slower than some people imagine. It is the will of the people that counts, but one could not, for all that, renounce the approval of Germany’s neighbors, of the two German states and of the four powers being the guarantors of Germany’s status. It is necessary to make sure that the (reunification) process underway is democratic and peaceful. What did Mitterrand mean? When he thought about the reunification of Germany, he was thinking about the order in Europe. Europe, he went on in the interview, should peacefully come out of the situation to which it had been subjected since 1945. Let’s think about it, said he: “We were living in the framework of an established order. This order was that of a Europe dispossessed of itself. However, like all order, it ensured balance, and this balance was what had been achieved by the two major powers of East and West between themselves. An armed peace, but peace nonetheless.” Henceforth, he said, it would be necessary to find a new balance, and before being found, Europe would go through a period of turbulence and crisis. It would take considerable imagination and sangfroid, but all that would not lessen the joy that was felt in face of this “gift from Heaven—and from men”: Liberty is on the move. Here it was quite useful to state things simply, to know that nothing would be easy and that, in addition to freedom, it was necessary to preserve “another precious possession”: peace.27

Berlin, December 22, 1989: “We Would Not Want There to Be Any Contradiction Between the German Will and the European Will” “At the end of this trip to the German Democratic Republic,” states the French president at the beginning of his press conference in East Berlin, “I find myself before you as we are used to doing in comparable circumstances.” A host of questions arises, he adds, and he is naturally there to try to answer them. Mitterrand doubtless foresaw that the game of questions and answers with journalists would last quite some time (it would go on for over an hour and a half) and that detailed answers would be expected of him. Such is in fact the case, and to continue to reproduce his discourse on the German reunification, I would like to underline four of those answers.

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In the first, the president of the Republic mentions the “two revolutions of freedom”: the “French” in 1789 and the “German” in 1989. In the second answer, he explains what he means by the idea that he is constantly expounding: that of a “democratic path” for pursuing the reunification of Germany. In the third, he comments on the task—essential in his opinion as to the future of Europe—of linking the project of German unity to the building of Europe and synchronizing them. In the fourth, he sketches out a procedure for settling the international aspects of the reunification of Germany, which is quite close to what will be adopted in early 1990 with the “two-plus-four negotiations” formula. Two freedom revolutions quite similar to one another: indeed, that is his view when asked if the French Revolution can be compared to “this revolution here.” He would go so far as to say that it came down to two predominant events that occurred in echo, in singular fashion, two centuries apart. For “rarely has one seen a people determine the conditions of its renascent freedom by itself as in 1789 in France and in 1989 in Eastern Europe, especially in Germany.” The democratic process is extremely simple and interests him a great deal, the president answers when asked how he imagines a “consultation of Germans” process. According to him, deciding their future as regards reunification is the business of the Germans themselves. What then does the course of this decision look like, supposing that it concerns not only the Germans but also their neighbors? “The East Germans and West Germans are going to vote,” explains Mitterrand, and when they have done so, they will have deputies. Among those deputies, majorities will form and, from them, governments that will come up with programs and messages. If the message is “immediate unification” on both sides, the problem (of reunification) will arise, for then the condition of the democratic way leading to reunification will have been settled. It’s necessary to have a few simple ideas, adds Mitterrand, again providing a few variants on what he has just said: “Immediate unification or unification by stages […] or the federative forms that Chancellor Kohl spoke about? The whole imagination is free. All that is a matter for the Germans.” One thing is therefore certain for François Mitterrand: when it comes to Germany and the form in which it unifies itself, everything depends on the Germans themselves. But when it comes to Europe, that also begins to concern France, concludes the French president, changing the level of thinking. Among the elements that characterize the German problem and which, according to

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him, must be thought about, one finds not only the German problem itself but also the problem of Europe. If the established order, known for forty years, has to break up, then Europe must also reconstruct a new order for itself. “That cannot escheat,” Mitterrand says harshly, using the language of a jurist inviting to settle a problem. We must think about peace for Europe, he underlines, and there is an element that also concerns “us,” France and the other European countries alike: the conditions of Europe’s status. No imbalance must be established since the final consequence would be a sort of reestablishment of the “Europe of wars.” He does not want to predict the outbreak of a war but, says he, we might run the risk of finding ourselves in the “situation of the pre-1914 Europe that rushed into a status resulting in an explosive situation and tremendous dramas.” This is the reason for which he has always associated the two elements: German unity and European unity. The Germans have to proclaim their will democratically—“France will offer no obstacle to that”—but when it comes to Europe—for example, the issue of borders—France has the right to say: “We would like there to be no contradiction between the German will and the European will.” Moreover, he wants the four powers to speak with the Germans. In his opinion, German unification has to “come under a certain number of rules and international principles.” And its unfolding on the “international terrain of European balance” still has to be discussed by the four powers— the Soviet Union, the United States, England and France—which also have things to say to each other. To underline his remarks, he embarks on a kind of pedagogical exercise and recalls that, to change the existing situation, it is necessary to set up a procedure. The two German states exist, says he, and belong to two different alliances, two different systems. A considerable number of those barriers have fortunately come down, but there are armies here: Soviet armies (i.e., in the GDR) and “our” American-­English-­French armies on the other side. These “problems,” which he mentions in terms of “alliances” and “armies,” are not resolved, but he hopes that “when they discuss them, they will discuss them with the Germans” and not do so—Mitterrand insisting on this point—in a form characterized by legal constraint. The discussions between the four powers and the Germans—thus the French president’s thinking here anticipates the “two-plus-four negotiations”—should never take on the aspect of a sort of foreign intervention as if one wanted to eternally prolong a situation going back a half-century.28

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Notes 1. In addition to the four powers and two German states, other high-level political leaders participated in the external ruling of the question of German unity: in particular, we must emphasize the role of Prime Minister Felipe González for Spain, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney for Canada, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki for Poland, and NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner. 2. Gorb.a., 206. 3. World Trans., 206. 4. In a text published on October 17, 2000  in the FAZ, Felipe González, Spanish prime minister at the time of German reunification, had painted a different—but fundamentally identical—picture: “I was in Berlin, ­participating in a television program with Helmut Kohl … Before the image that the Brandenburg Gate offered us, the past and future of the European Union combined in our discussions. We recalled history galloping like a riderless horse through the night of the fall of the Wall” (“Europa am Scheideweg,” FAZ, 241, October 17, 2000, 1, 2). 5. Gorbachev, Memoirs, 666–667. 6. World Trans., 231–232. 7. See “Bericht der Bundesregierung zur Lage der Nation im geteilten Deutschland, abgegeben von Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl vor dem Deutschen Bundestag am 8. November 1989,” Europa Archiv: 24, 1989, D 705ff., with this passage, D 714: “Let us be wary of presuming that it be possible to set a solution to the German question in advance, with a scenario and calendar in hand. History—this is precisely what the last twelve months show—is not limited to ‘indicators’. Historic changes do not respect schedules”; see also: Embassy of the United States of America, Bonn, US Information and Texts, Background to Recent Events in Europe Detailed (Transcript: State Department Briefing), [Paris, July 17,] July 20, 1990; Elbe, Kiessler, A round table, 13 f.; World Trans., 273.; Germ. Unif., for example, 259. 8. For a detailed description of the East German scenario see the memoirs of the East German foreign minister at the time: Meckel, Zu wandeln die Zeiten. 9. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, a/s: votre politique allemande depuis l’automne, March 23, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/HV/9, dossier 1). 10. Among them, in the United States, were Henry A. Kissinger in particular, once again. On the others who played a role at this level within the governmental apparatus in Washington, see Germ. Unif., 21ff.; in Bonn, it was the confidents and close collaborators gathered at the chancellery around

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Helmut Kohl (see Auss.d.E., 98) as well as the advisers and collaborators of Foreign Affairs Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (Elbe, Kiessler, A round table, 20). As a configuration of political creativity, the “scenario workshop” of course corresponded to the “workshop of world politics” described above. 11. This was the third “two plus four” meeting at the level of foreign ministers in Paris, on July 17, 1990. 12. Embassy of the United States of America, Bonn, US Information and Texts, Background to Recent Events in Europe Detailed (Transcript: State Department Briefing), [Paris, July 17,] July 20, 1990. 13. In this collection one finds an introduction and a note of principle: Note pour le Président de la République, Objet: Allemagne de l’Est et réunification (Juillet 89–Juin 90), July 31, 1991, and two long supplementary notes: Note pour le Président de la République, Objet: Allemagne de l’Est et ­réunification: rappel de vos déclarations de juillet 1989 à juin 1990, July 31, 1991, and Note pour le Président de la République, Objet: rappel des déclarations de MM. Kohl et Genscher de juillet 89 à juin 90, July 31, 1991. 14. US Information and Texts, July 20, 1990. 15. These nine “assurances” were as follows: 1. The United States was committed to follow through on CFE (Conventional Armed Forces in Europe) negotiations for all of Europe. 2. The United States agreed to advance the SNF (Short-Range Nuclear Forces) negotiations to begin once the CFE treaty was signed. 3. Germany would reaffirm its commitments neither to produce nor to possess nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. 4. NATO would continue conducting a comprehensive strategy review of both conventional and nuclear-force requirements. 5. Extension of NATO forces to the former territory of the GDR would be delayed during a transition period. 6. The Germans agreed to a transition period for Soviet forces leaving the GDR. 7. Germany would make firm commitments regarding its borders, making clear that the territory of united Germany would comprise only the FRG, GDR, and Berlin. 8. The CSCE process would be strengthened, with a significant role for the Soviets in the new Europe. 9. Germany made it clear that it would seek to handle bilateral economic issues in a way that would support perestroika. (See Bush/Scowcroft, WorldTrans., 273–274). 16. US Information and Texts, July 20, 1990.

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17. In the background briefing of July 20, 1990, it was the second speaker who, basing himself on the succession of scenes related by the first, described this “conditioning” of the Soviets: “One thing that I think is worth noting is that there was an awful lot of conditioning of the Soviets over this period. There were eight bilateral meetings that Baker had with Shevardnadze, there were three meetings with Gorbachev, there were two summits. And in all of these meetings the German issue was on the agenda. And when I talk about conditioning what I mean is that we went through frequently the logic of the principles that we were talking about. On almost every occasion we heard their concerns and we began to develop a set of responses to those concerns. That is what the nine points grew out of … But over time I think that the conditioning had an effect” (US Information and Texts, July 20, 1990). If this “conditioning” was effective, that is perhaps also due to the condition in which the Soviet Union found itself, that is, the secretary general, Gorbachev, who was the first in charge. A detail related by George Bush in WorldTrans., 287) is perhaps quite instructive on this point. Following their “Washington Summit,” Bush and Gorbachev went to Camp David on Saturday, June 2. After dinner, a very “private” conversation took place between the two men during which—there’s no other way to say it—Gorbachev begged. “After supper, Gorbachev again took me aside, this time to ask whether Baker had talked to me about his discussions with Shevardnadze on financial questions. He explained that he did not want to raise the question of needing money from the United States in front of his own team.” 18. Pierre Morel, Note pour le Président de la République, Objet: Allemagne de l’Est et réunification (juillet 89-juin 90), July 31, 1991 (AN-AG/5(4)/ CDM/33). 19. Ibid. 20. Pierre. Morel, Note pour le Président de la République, Objet: Allemagne de l’Est et réunification: rappel de vos déclarations de juillet 1989 à juin 1990, July 31, 1991 (AN-AG/5(4)/CDM/33). 21. Morel borrows the quasi-totality of expressions and terms from the texts of Mitterrand’s speeches but also draws his commentary and interpretation through selection and reconstitution. 22. In A World Transformed (200), George Bush himself defined this process as follows: “On the following morning I briefed the allies on Malta and in the afternoon I gave an address on the ‘future shape of Europe and the new Atlanticism’. … I spelled out our four principles which should guide reunification, to which we had added that it should occur with “due regard for the legal role and responsibilities of the allied powers.” Bush’s “four principles” were: “First, self-determination must be pursued without prejudice to its outcome. We should not at this time endorse nor exclude any

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particular vision of unity. Second, unification should occur in the context of Germany’s continued commitment to NATO and an increasingly integrated European Community, and with due regard for the legal role and responsibilities of the Allied powers. Third, in the interests of general European stability, moves toward unification must be peaceful, gradual, and part of a step-by-step process. Lastly, on the question of borders we should reiterate our support for the principles of the Helsinki Final Act” (quotations based on Germ. Unif., 133). In their study, Zelikow and Rice also discuss the context of the birth and elaboration of the “four principles” (see ibid., 113–114, 132–133). 23. Conférence de Presse de Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, et de Monsieur Mario Soares, Président de la République Portugaise, October 18, 1989. 24. Discours prononcé par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, devant le Parlement Européen de Strasbourg, October 25, 1989. 25. Conférence de Presse de Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, lors de sa visite à Copenhague, November 10, 1989. 26. Allocution de Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, devant le Parlement Européen, November 22, 1989. 27. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, à Paris-Match, November 23, 1989 28. Conférence de Presse de Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, à l’issue de sa visite d’État en République Démocratique Allemande, December 22, 1989.

CHAPTER 10

The Voice of Europe

The Song of the Rebel, the Refrain of the Exhorter “I Hoped for a New Time” François Mitterrand was prepared for the unification of Germany. Of course, he did not request it nor did he aspire to it as Germans did—his feelings were those of a Frenchman not of a German, and it would have seemed strange to him that anything else be expected of him. Precisely through his sensitivity to his own nation he understood the Germans. He attributed a national feeling to them identical to what he himself felt—the German sensitivity for Germany was the same as what the French felt for France. He would have suffered if his country were partitioned, he would not want to accept it and, of course, he would have insisted on overcoming it. The Germans, in his view, suffered from the division of their country, could not accept it and were naturally insisting that they get out of this situation. We have seen with what steadfastness Mitterrand believed in the Germans’ united national identity and therefore in their quest for political unity. And with far more persistence than the German chancellors to whom he was able to say repeatedly and determinedly that, in terms of an historical perspective, they would not have to wait longer to think about a reunification of Germany. As Hubert Védrine attests in his book Les mondes de François Mitterrand, the president understood that German policy had © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_10

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an obvious national dimension even though the German politicians (or other orators speaking in the name of Germany) disputed it or avoided the question. His French patriotism also inspired a German patriotism in him: “Reunification has been at the center of Bonn leaders’ thinking since Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, perhaps since the first day of the division. How could it be otherwise? Intellectually and ‘patriotically’, François Mitterrand understands it.”1 The Germans would unite if the possibility presented itself—for Mitterrand, that was perfectly evident. He thought about it constantly when conducting French foreign policy and, as we have observed, viewed with a rebel’s eye all the breaks and flaws in the current order of world politics (the “Yalta” order) on which all thinking about German reunification depended; herein he sought signs revealing a new process leading to an entirely new organization (beyond Yalta). We hope, said he on July 22, 1988, in a meeting with the NATO secretary general, Manfred Wörner, “that the Eastern countries will free themselves from the Soviet Empire.” He was persuaded of its “dislocation,” he added a few sentences further, even though he was not expecting it to happen during the twentieth century.2 He claimed to be the defender of liberty: On the one hand, in the rebel role, as he did with every speech on international policy mentioning and celebrating a totally free Europe when, through a subversive process, he pretended to consider it as reality. “The Europe of 1945 is merely an accident of history … hardly important for the future.”3 And on the other hand, he embodied the virtue of constancy, as when he uttered a classic sentence to the USSR ambassador, Yuli Vorontsov, that engraved itself in our memory: “It’s simple: we want to remain free!”4 By insisting on freedom, Mitterrand was of course demanding an exit from this system of European partitions and divisions. Yet, within that order—at its “center,” as Mitterrand himself expressed it—was Germany, divided in its center: the “German problem.” It was therefore perfectly logical that he continually come back to Germany and its reunification, for the freedom that he called for in his wishes implied, above all, a consequence for Germany: a freedom beyond the “order” that condemned it to division. Mitterrand associated the time when Germany could in fact decide its fate freely with his historic wish, which was bound to come about: “I wanted a new era.”5

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“Nationalities Never Cease to Exist” But even before this date, while they were still surrounded by the general arrangement of the Cold War system, Chancellor Helmut Kohl heard President François Mitterrand express words that could be described as “unheard-of”: In space, the Germans (the West Germans) had a potential sphere of autonomy in the areas of technological policy and the military. Yes! Unlike the nuclear domain, the Germans were not forbidden access to space. Why did they not embark on the conquest of space (at the same time as France), trying to take over a field of autonomous political action? Pronouncing these increasingly urgent words to the German chancellor regarding space, Mitterrand, in the Germans’ place, formulated (in vain) the project of a nation having a more autonomous decision-making power. Up there in space, Federal Germany was free. Why did it not exercise that freedom? It could do so, Mitterrand said; it absolutely should do so. Because he took his thinking further than the existing situation, Mitterrand saw that the United States should not be the only one ruling in space. The Soviet empire naturally did not constitute a definitive factor either in Mitterrand’s story. Quite the contrary, explained Mitterrand to the Élysée chief of staff in May 1981, shortly after his government had taken over: Instead, it was the dismemberment of the empire that should be expected. Over the following years, as is shown from the meetings from which we have quoted, he did not deviate one iota from what might be called his premonition. Quite the contrary: He never stopped bringing up, within his government as in the workshop of world politics, the topic of the Soviet empire’s crisis, then mentioning the obvious signs of decomposition that were undermining the cohesion of this empire from within. The political sense of his discourse was clear: It was necessary to be prepared for the jolts that were going to affect the Soviet empire. Even more, of course, it was necessary to prepare for the consequences that crises of this type would have or even—for it should not be excluded—those that would be provoked by a collapse of the imperial system of the Eastern bloc. Every time he spoke about it, Mitterrand had the reunification of Germany in mind: A fall of the Soviet Union would give the Germans their chance—and the French president thought about that constantly. Mitterrand was clearly quite sure about his diagnosis, his judgment based on a presentiment, but how? The response stems from his conception of history, which was, as he clearly saw, largely defined by elemental forces and principles such as freedom (or the demand for freedom),

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nations, geography. Even if one acted deliberately against those forces and principles, even if one covered them by structures that were supposed to deactivate them, even if one made every possible effort to make them disappear, these forces—freedom, nations and geography—maintained their full impact on history. History, pushed back underground, so to speak, continued to act there up to the day when one of those elemental forces would resurface and prove to be the strongest. It was from this conception of history that François Mitterrand drew the considerable certitudes of his judgment on history; he knew how to discern and interpret its processes and, in particular, those to be expected in the near future. He demonstrated this publicly, most often in speeches such as the one he gave on January 21, 1983, for the 20th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty (also called the Franco-German Friendship Treaty) wherein he mused in advance about the reconstruction of Europe “such as history and geography made it and in which the artificial borders between East and West must someday be erased.”6 The second place he expressed his certainties was the circle of his government, and there he did so with determination. Let us listen in on a meeting of the defense council on July 20, 1988. The period shortly preceding 1989 is especially interesting in our context, just as is the subject taking shape in the course of the meeting, which Mitterrand developed in detail: the destabilization of political power in Eastern Europe. “If the danger,” he said, “is supposed to come from the East, it’s important to know what’s happening there.” And he went on to ask what, in his mind, was the decisive question on the situation of the Soviet empire: “Is there an awakening of nationalities?” He answered in these terms: “It is not an awakening [since] nationalities have never ceased existing.” They had simply fallen silent when subjected to the power of the empire; the minorities in the part of Europe that lived under the Ottoman Empire also remained “intact.” Even better, nationalities would prove their vitality as soon as they felt the USSR weakening and would then weaken it further. Should one follow the crowd and hope for a “disintegration of the [Soviet] empire”?7 One might believe that Mitterrand’s response was “Certainement!” Was he not resolutely seeking a way to go beyond this “order” that had deprived numerous peoples in Eastern Europe of their freedom and, precisely, kept its balance from the existence of the Soviet Union? But François Mitterrand stopped on this point (as did the American president, George Bush, and his security adviser, Brent Scowcroft,

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thinking similarly),8 holding in check, in a way, the logic that implied the collapse of the Soviet empire. Instead, he brought up, for himself and those seated around him at that meeting, this objection: “Disorder is not necessarily preferable to the existing order. Disorder can provoke a loss of influence of civilian power, which would be advantageous to the warmongers.”9 “The Policy of a State Lies in Its Geography” Here Mitterrand was not playing his rebel role but that of the exhorter: “Disorder [the disintegration of the Soviet empire] is not necessarily preferable to the existing order” [“Yalta”]. We have already mentioned how he nurtured the vision of a free Europe in his mind but never let this vision escape from a language of order. If a free Europe was wanted, he reminded himself and others, it could not be wanted in such a way that Europe would disappear at the same time. This order, put together in the post-­ World War II years, brought Europe into a system of divisions and deprived some of its parts of freedom: It was necessary to go beyond that order, but another order had to succeed it—one could not settle for making room for disintegration. Destruction and dismemberment would not suffice for inaugurating the reign of freedom—in Eastern any more than in Western Europe. It was necessary to begin by building freedom as a form of power, by imposing the appropriate order. To achieve the goal of a wholly free Europe, master of its fate—the reconstruction of a Europe—“such as history and geography made it and in which the artificial borders between East and West would someday have to be erased,” Europe had to be thought of starting with itself and recognized in its nature: in the forces and elements of which it was made up and to which whosoever wanted to “order” it had to conform. Mitterrand thus summed up his historical-political thinking in what I would call “visionary realism.” The French president had a vision that went beyond the existing political realities, but he developed it in an utterly realistic way, starting from political-historical realities that he considered elemental and therefore immutable. One of these political-historical realities was geography. Mitterrand could not have expressed his conception more clearly than in the following phrase, taken from the interview he gave French television, February 12, 1989: “Geography makes history.”10 For him, this irrefutable fact was explicable: geography imposed itself on states, which are the creators of

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history. To Napoleon is attributed the remark: “The policy of a state lies in its geography.” Mitterrand borrowed the remark in support of his point of view in another television interview, on March 25, 1990, a little more than a year after the previous one.11 In both, he asserted one of his convictions—or, one might say, doctrines—concerning the political universe. He could have expressed it at any moment, but it was doubtless not by chance that he brought it up in early 1989, then again in the spring of 1990, for by then the theme of Germany had become acute and, from Mitterrand’s viewpoint, this meant interpreting Germany’s geographical location and the Germans’ resulting geographical interests. And among these interests, as he saw things, there was always the fact that the Germans were thinking about their reunification. He reminded the French government of—or rather, taught—this in a Cabinet meeting on October 26, 1988. Roland Dumas had spoken during that meeting about the international situation, in particular about Helmut Kohl’s visit to Moscow, which had taken place the two previous days, and of his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. Mitterrand then commented on the chancellor’s trip to Moscow: “We cannot reproach Federal Germany for having the interests that its geographical position dictates. But the economic cooperation and financial advantages that the FRG provides the Soviet Union will not make the latter change its views on the problem of Germany’s reunification, which would represent a real threat for the USSR.  There is nothing threatening in the rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union, which only shows that, from the economic point of view, Germany is more useful to the Soviet Union than is France. It must stimulate us to improve our balance of power with our closest ally.”12 In his geopolitical logic, Mitterrand reckoned that geography prescribed a policy of rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union, because their respective geographical locations engendered in both peoples the interest of a proximity that suited them and to which it was, of course, possible to give different forms: that of power politics, the economy, a security strategy. Together with Henry Kissinger, in their meeting at the Élysée on June 28, 1984, Mitterrand studied the geostrategic game he had discovered between the Soviet Union and ­ Germany. “Germany interests the Soviets a great deal,” he remarked to Kissinger; they “want to be able to control this country.” But, in the end, they also knew that Germany was not “militarily independent of the United States”—that it was captive to the American sphere of power and,

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to that degree, eluded the Soviet Union. (Here, as so often, Mitterrand did not really make the distinction between “Germany” and the Federal Republic of Germany).13 In this game between the Soviet Union and Germany because of their proximity, the others—both the United States and France—eventually took part as well. Mitterrand interpreted the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interest thus: “[The Soviets] always have fears, in Europe, concerning an alliance between France and Germany that is, to their mind, too close. They are willing for us to be friends but not too close.”14 Kissinger thought he understood Mitterrand on this point. In his reply, he reckoned that France and the Soviet Union had the same geopolitical idea about Germany: “In a certain way, your positions are closely akin to each other. No one wants a unified, neutralist, nationalist Germany.” It is not sure Mitterrand went that far; at that moment, he imagined rather a Soviet Union whose constant interest would be that France would constitute a force facing Germany—now and for the future. Of course, the Soviet Union could also expect France to maintain this stance—which, in all likelihood, it would do—if, in actual fact, the problem of Germany’s unification arose. Mitterrand, however, had said nothing that would allow for thinking that he (or, with him, France) had anything to do with this category of a person who “did not want a unified, neutralist, nationalist Germany.” Thus, in responding to Kissinger’s remark, he did not dwell on this wish that “no one had” and went on rather to say what he thought of the Soviet Union. “[The Soviets] think they can prevent it.” Mitterrand did not reveal what he thought about it, even though the phrase gives the impression that he did not share this belief that he attributed to the Soviets.15 Naturally, the French president was not observing the geostrategic game between the Soviet Union and Germany only from the Soviet angle (or what he considered as such). Germany’s geographical position in relation to the Soviet Union also inspired West Germany with a certain interest in a policy of rapprochement. It could not be otherwise, Mitterrand explained to Hans-Jochen Vogel, then-president of the SPD, during a meeting at the Élysée on July 9, 1987. “Germany has its particular problem: It is cut in two. Geography has placed it between East and West: It cannot look only to one side. [France has] a Mediterranean policy. It’s geography that commands history.”16 “It’s geography that commands history.” From Mitterrand’s point of view, this observation was certainly exact but not completely so, because

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politics can and must intervene and place action above the imperatives of geography, which was also his opinion. Germany could certainly not “look only to one side”: this was a certainty, because it was “between East and West,” its natural position in European geopolitics. There was no doubt about that, but it did not solve the problem, because Germany’s natural position in European geopolitics placed it politically in an uncertain position, inviting it to play with changes in position and to refer all decisions to itself. From the geopolitical perspective, Germany’s geographical position destined it to a policy wherein it would do better not to commit itself. The policy imposed by its geographical position would only muddle the balance of power in Europe and create permanent instability. It was in this situation, Mitterrand concluded, that creative politics had to intervene, being a matter of formulating a policy for Germany that would permit escaping the imperatives of its geographical position and integrating it into a work of politics in which this country would find its own lasting place, solid and sure, within the European space. What objectives could be aimed for and how could they be achieved? President Mitterrand explained this to the members of his government at the Cabinet meeting of February 11, 1987, and here his words take on full meaning. “Are we capable,” he asked them, “of offering the Germans a prospect of great power?” And his response was as follows: “There is only the building of Europe—otherwise Germany will play between East and West. Without progress in building Europe, we will not escape it. [Nineteen] eighty-seven is fraught with risks of failure for Europe.”17 For in France, it was thought—and feared—that Germany always had the possibility of straying from the path of European unification and taking another one, leading to its own geography. At the end of the day, Germany remained cut in two, but the Germans were also tied to one another as the French well knew, especially in the debate over nuclear war—the predominant question for the Germans at the time. On May 17, 1989—it is necessary to date France’s opinion on this issue precisely— President Mitterrand’s military staff at the Élysée produced a working document dealing with the problem of short-range nuclear weapons. In the introduction, the different positions on the problem were presented: Soviet, American and, first and foremost, German (West German). The German question was discussed initially: A consensus seemed to exist on one point in public opinion—short-range weapons were “engines of death” made, above all and perhaps solely, to kill Germans (1), whether Western or Eastern (2). The two figures in parentheses refer to notes on

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the same page of this working document. Note 1 observed that the fact that there were large numbers of allied armed forces stationed on FRG soil was generally neglected. Note 2 explained the French perception of Germans’ unity within the geography of their nation. In this context, the expression “German nation” took on its full value: The West Germans meant to devote as much energy to protect their brothers in East Germany as to ensure their own security. This was confirmed in a declaration that Hans-Dietrich Genscher made in the Bundestag shortly before, when he reminded his listeners that he was born in Saxe-Anhalt and that short-­ range missiles could reach “the other half of his fatherland.” According to the note’s author, a recent (May 17) interview given by Oskar Lafontaine to Le Monde bore witness to the same phenomenon.18 “The Deutschmark Is, in a Way, Its Nuclear Force” One did not escape the German question, or at least that is how it was seen in Paris. It was possible that, spurred on by an ardent sense of their political division, the Germans might turn toward the East and the Soviet Union. President Mitterrand and his advisers sometimes observed that this had to be considered. On January 19, 1987, Jean-Louis Bianco thus sent the president a note informing him of a visit the West German ambassador had paid him “in a personal capacity” to say that an imminent initiative by Gorbachev could exert a “seduction effect” on Federal Germany, “given the [Germans’] ‘national-neutralism’ and the problem of reunification.” The ambassador deemed it desirable that there be thinking at the highest level (between Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand) about the paths to long-term political rapprochement and therefore to rapprochement regarding defense that need not take place in public. He reckoned that it was possible that Genscher, who shared this point of view, might bring up the problem on his next visit to Paris.19 Mitterrand heard approximately the same thing on December 2, 1987 from the president of Yugoslavia, Lazar Mojsov, during a meeting at the Élysée. “Gorbachev,” Mojsov stated, “is playing with the German people’s feeling over unification.”20 “Without progress in the building of Europe, we will not avoid Germany’s play between East and West,” explained Mitterrand at the Cabinet meeting on February 17, 1987. He saw it as increasingly autonomous, increasingly resistant to the wishes of others and less and less meeting the expectations that the countries of the European Community—and,

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in particular, France—felt they could nurture in its regard. Those hopes referred especially to the economic strength or even power that, in Mitterrand’s interpretation of it, was not only increasing more and more (thanks to the European market that favored its economic activity) but, in the community that it formed with its European partners, giving it also a preeminent position that suited the others less and less. Rather than advancing toward a balanced relation with its European partners, West Germany was moving away from any integration into that type of system. There was a German problem there, a problem that interfered with and even blocked the continuation of the construction of the European edifice. The French president had the impression that the Germans were not taking the path that might lead to a solution. “Germany’s” reserved attitude could already be seen in the fact that it was “always reticent when it came to expenses,” regretted Mitterrand on September 30, 1986, in a meeting with Louis Jung, president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.21 The Germans quite simply preferred abstaining from tackling the problem, commented Mitterrand a few months later, on July 9, 1987, in a meeting with Hans-­ Jochen Vogel—this was a simple, general observation. It was not by chance, he explained, if they displayed less European conviction than in the past. Renouncing the enjoyment of its economic power was precisely the idea that bothered West Germany, and quite understandably. However, that economic power posed a question that had to be settled if they wished to advance in constructing the European Community: “As concerns monetary problems, the Germans are very much Europeans even though less so than before. Germany is a very great country whose capacity for political and military [action] is limited. It is also a country that feels amputated. It is difficult to ask it to also renounce its economic power. National feeling finds its satisfaction in this success. However, it will indeed be necessary to resolve this problem; otherwise there will be no [European] domestic market.”22 These words were still in the style of a critical analysis, even though expressed with a clarity close to warning,23 but in Mitterrand’s perception of (West) Germany’s behavior an idea took shape that year of 1987, taking him much further than a warning: (Federal) Germany—that became a conviction in his consciousness—was drawing its political power from its economic power, political power that it held nowhere else but was discovering itself in this sphere: Economic domination allowed it to hold sway politically over its European partners.24 And, of course, West Germany was

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more than anxious to preserve this sole source of power, and on that point, the French president, himself a masterful logician of power, could not think otherwise. The Germans would not want to be won over to plans aimed at perfecting the European construction that would diminish their economic (for them, their political) power; better, they would refuse. West Germany would use its power to make this power last. When François Mitterrand received Felipe González on August 25, 1987 in his vacation home at Latche, the two men talked—first over lunch then late into the afternoon—and the French president revealed his conclusions about the German attitude and the conviction he had drawn from them: “We must move towards a common currency. The development of the ECU is of utmost importance. Of course the Germans are resisting. I’ve come to the conclusion that because they are not a diplomatic or military power on the same level as their economy, they rely on their economic domination, the most obvious expression of which is their currency. The Mark demonstrates Germany’s power. It is a profound motivation that goes beyond the reflexes of bankers and even political reflex. It’s very deeply rooted, almost psychological.”25 I previously described this extraordinarily taut relation in which France and Germany found themselves in 1987–1988. A tension had grown between the two countries that both brought them closer together and set them against each other. France and (West) Germany had become involved “with each other, against each other” in a complex of two problems, which brought them together and separated them at the same time and from which they could no longer extricate themselves. For the period immediately prior to 1989, we observed that it was certainly possible to explain Franco-German relations in a collaborating way, but they did not really collaborate. We understand that the tension between France and Federal Germany had reached a degree that ensured the cohesion of both countries but also loosened it. On January 20, 1989 Charles Powell; Private Secretary of Prime Minister Thatcher, went to Bonn for a meeting with Horst Teltschik, the principal security and diplomatic adviser of Chancellor Kohl. When they discussed “Franco-German Relations” Teltschik “claimed that these were rather in the doldrums. Mitterrand was increasingly interested only in grand events which would secure his place in (French) history. It was difficult to get anywhere on substance with the French at present.”26 So it was not by chance that, during the French Cabinet meeting of February 16, 1987, François Mitterrand affirmed that “[19] 87 would be

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fraught with risks of failure for Europe.” In Germany he detected signals that aroused France’s full concern for Germany: Did that country seem not to be endangering this common work called Europe? Was it not possible that it wanted this work to be its own, wanted to dominate it? Or else would it choose the other path, detaching itself to follow the imperatives of its own geography and take the lead in this play between and with East and West, the play that made the center of Europe the center of Europe’s unrest? Was Germany going to try to establish what it aspired to—its unity—by its own means? Would it do so even if the balance of power in the concert of European nations, and peace in Europe, would suffer from it? Questions, again and always—but in 1988, for François Mitterrand, one thing was certain: (West) Germany was playing its economic power against Europe and drawing its strength from it. Its currency was the weapon used to achieve this. This comparison was striking, and the French president himself made it in 1988 when studying the relationship in which West Germany and France found themselves in order to bring out the structure of the pure power relations that reigned between the two countries. Mitterrand wanted to give a name to this power that West Germany had and describe the “choice” that France still had on this point: the recognition of the power exerted by Federal Germany or the reserve of a hope that remained to be mustered. There was nothing uplifting about the words he addressed to the members of the French government at the Cabinet meeting of August 17, 1988: “What is worrisome is the Federal Republic of Germany’s economic policy. West Germany’s attitude in this area is in contradiction with other aspects of its behavior vis-à-vis Europe. We must understand that Germany is a great people deprived of certain attributes of sovereignty. Its diplomatic place remains reduced. It compensates for this weakness with its economic might. The Deutschmark is, in a way, its nuclear force. Despite France’s good relations with Germany, it would be illusory to believe that we can convince it to change economic policy. For its part, France must continue to make up its mind in relation to its own interests that are, moreover, in keeping with Europe’s. France has to accept Germany’s conception in the sphere of economic policy even though it can and must denounce its drawbacks, both for Europe and for the underdeveloped countries.”27 On the one hand, the response was positive, but on the other, it could also be negative. The terms Mitterrand used in 1988 to summarize his

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view of power relations between West Germany and France show this: He did not consider that he and France had reached the end of their power confrontation with Germany. Otherwise, he would not have expressed what he meant in the form of power concepts, nor would he have weighed Germany’s economic power and France’s nuclear power, judging that they cancelled each other out. Nor would he have carried this compensation mechanism between their relative powers even further, ultimately making them interchangeable, and he would not have gone so far as to say that West Germany’s currency was its nuclear weapon. He acknowledged the power exerted by the Federal Republic but matched it with the hope of a development that is engendered by any balance of power. For it can be said that anything that is called power and lives by power is fickle and simply passes with time and circumstances; at any given moment, time can bring something else, and circumstances can change. And in 1988, those who were looking for it henceforth saw in the flow of power the power of hope: the balance of power had begun to shift. Consequently, François Mitterrand was not giving up and he made it known. There is in fact a second version of these somber words on the topic of Germany, alongside the first report that we have already quoted, and according to which he pulled no punches that day when speaking about the balance of power in the Franco-German relationship. But in this second report one also hears from Mitterrand aiming a note of hope: “A contradiction exists between the German attitude in the economic and financial area and its attitude in other areas. Everything is a balance of power. Germany is divided even though it remains a great country, a great people. It is deprived of the attributes of sovereignty. It insists on its power. Yet its power is the economy; the Deutschmark is its atomic force. I don’t believe that we will convince the Germans of the necessity of changing [economic] policy. But I hope so.”28

The European Passion “Such Power Europe Could Represent” François Mitterrand did not want to renounce his hopes of a joint European future with the Germans. In this, he was encouraged, first of all, by the fluidity of all political constellations, which always constitutes a reason for never giving up hope in political life, but he again stressed determination in his phrase “But I hope so.” It was a force acting in him

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like a passion, taking hold of him and not letting go—this force that I would like to call his European passion. Over the course of his political life, Mitterrand had diverse, and even extremely varied, motivations. How could it have been otherwise, given the considerable vicissitudes that marked the political periods he lived through? Of course, Mitterrand the politician’s first objective was to gain power, then to preserve it. But his impassioned commitment to Europe, born of the experience of World War II and, in particular, the time spent as a prisoner of war of the Germans in Thuringia,29 this commitment to a rebirth of Europe in the process of its unification was the great political passion of his life. After the war, and given the circumstances, it first took form in individual acts, but once he occupied the office of president, he implemented it in a targeted, methodical way, with a concentration and obstinacy that made all other preoccupations secondary. He always devoted himself, dedicated himself to his European passion. So it was with the impatience of an impassioned being that the French president appealed to Europe, showing it, for example, in his meeting with Louis Jung on September 30, 1986: The President: France will not be diluted in Europe, I’m convinced of that. On the contrary, it will find new means for developing its way of being, its culture, its way of life. The Europe of the 12 will make up a total of 320 million inhabitants, and the Europe of the 21, 380 million. Such power Europe could represent! We would reappear on the world stage, and this would be to the benefit of our country. Moreover, France appears as an element of impetus, conception and synthesis in Europe. Mr. Jung: A Japanese friend told me recently: ‘The only chance for you French is Europe.’” The President: This antagonism between nationalism and Europe is out of place. I have no fears for France and know what the others can bring us. All European peoples, including in the East, are asking us to develop technical and cultural cooperation. Mr. Jung: When I meet Russians, Poles or Hungarians, they tell me: ‘Make more of Europe’.” The President: That’s their safeguard. When I met Mr. Gorbachev, I observed that there was need to rely more on Europe.

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This is only an outline, but it’s going in the right direction. For me, Europe is in France’s interest, and all stalling maneuvers for circumstantial reasons must be excluded.30 This was the language of passion burning to achieve its goal and trying to draw into its brazier whatever opposed it. How could the idea of “Europe” leave a European indifferent? This is why, over the course of his two seven-year terms, François Mitterrand consistently articulated his unshakeable conviction stemming from his European passion. He combined a rational, universal teaching and a warning with the accents of historical reason. On such occasions he appeared as the thinker of Europe—for example, on December 9–10, 1994, in the circle of European heads of state and government, gathered in Essen for the European Council. Then he asserted: “The European Union represents the greatest idea of the waning century and of the one that is beginning.”31 During those difficult years in the Franco-German partnership, during 1987–1988, his European passion saved the friendship between Mitterrand and Germany. He refused to doubt the Germans’ European loyalty and, of course, recalled the guarantees that had so often been given him by the man they had elected to speak in their name: Chancellor Helmut Kohl. For example, at their Heidelberg meeting on August 26, 1986, when he stressed the importance he attached to the project of the common European currency, Kohl had replied: “Go ahead; I’m ready to be raped for Europe.”32 Or, another time, during the meeting at the Château de Chambord on March 28, 1987, the chancellor said unambiguously: “If Gorbachev stays, he’s going to want to talk more with Germany, or move in the direction of a kind of Rapallo. We’ll have to resist by relying on Europe. There are more and more German intellectuals, for example represented by Die Zeit (German weekly), who are moving towards neutralism. They are even going so far as to question the contents of the preamble of the Constitution [the German Basic Law]. But I say that the Germany of Bismark [sic] will not return. Germany has made a number of errors over the past hundred years. As long as I’m here, Germany will not be a walker between two worlds.”33 Naturally, Kohl’s words made their effect. When wanting to construct Europe, one counted on the German chancellor’s unconditional European loyalty, as did, for example, Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, at a Paris dinner with Jacques Chirac on January 22, 1987.

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That day, he fought with the prime minister to obtain a budget increase for the European Community. But Chirac would have none of it; on the contrary, he suggested that the Commission’s president “tighten his belt.” This would trigger a “very serious crisis,” replied an impassive Delors; for his part, he had no intention of presenting a deficit budget. Further, did they want the unavoidable consequence, that is cuts in subsidies from Brussels, including to agriculture (Chirac’s passion), that could amount to as much as 20 percent? Did they want to plunge the European Community into a crisis? There remained but one path open, Delors added, both consoling and advising the prime minister: “Get back in touch with Mr. Kohl. I’m not worried. You have the same opinions. He’s ready to go a long way—up to a Franco-German union. I’m not worried about that.”34 Mitterrand would not have proffered calming phrases like “I’m not worried” regarding the chancellor’s attitude about Europe in 1987–1988, because he was worried, despite Kohl’s assurances, or, speaking precisely, on account of those very reasons: Kohl integrated codicils and remarks into his assurances, limiting their scope. He had barely become chancellor when, during his Heidelberg meeting with the French president, he expressed his energetic profession of faith in favor of Europe—he was ready to be “raped” for it—and was already reconsidering it: “For the [European] currency, we are at the starting line; we will go, but I have some problems. Currency is like the days of the week: Sunday we make grand speeches, and the rest of the week we deal as we can with reality, which is a bit awkward.”35 And during the meeting at Chambord, he of course fueled Mitterrand’s ever-latent suspicion about the country at risk—as the French, in spite of themselves, still viewed Germany—when he alluded to those “German intellectuals” who, in his opinion, were encouraging Germans to turn toward neutralism. In that year of 1987, President Mitterrand did not say about the chancellor what he had said in the Cabinet meeting of February 11, 1987 about the foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher: “He is one of the Germans most favorable to the European Community and to France.”36 On the other hand, on several occasions at their Bonn meeting on October 20, 1987, he exhorted the chancellor, even in the car during their round-­ trip between Bonn and Rhöndorf, to acknowledge with the same resoluteness as he had done that there was nothing more important than “the construction of Europe, the Europe of citizens, monetary Europe, diplomatic Europe, political Europe and the Europe of defense.”37

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This near-ritual aligning of formulas conveyed a singular pathos; a sort of invocation had to make Europe shine, a Europe that would embrace everyone. The image was inducing; it evoked an enthusiasm that would give birth to a European faith: We are already united in the idea of our European work, our opus. By signing the Treaty of Rome, Mitterrand explained, the six founding nations of the European Community had accomplished an “act of faith” together. Even back then, he asserted, it was certainly something other than a “simple trade treaty.” It was necessary to “build the foundation of a Europe capable of combining forces.” Europe—as we saw it in the spirit of those words—is a matter of European faith. Its nations find their unity above all in an “act of faith.” At that particular moment, when he was stating this interpretation making European unification sacred, Mitterrand found himself in a highly significant place. It was December 20, 1989, and he was on a state visit to the GDR. At the state dinner given in East Berlin in his honor that evening, before his East German hosts he asserted his European faith.38 But he would certainly not have confided to them the recollection of a French president who was referring to the “act of faith” that had preceded and founded the work of Europe’s unification. In his speech, Mitterrand recalled the Treaty of Rome, but it was not his personal memory since he had not personally participated in that “act of faith.” He had, on the other hand, accomplished another act of faith in early 1983: the decision, which had been extremely painful for him and his people to make, of binding France to an economic partnership with Germany in the name of Europe. The European project would have shattered had Mitterrand and his team not made that decision at that time. Thus, Jean Musitelli rightly asserted that this resolution was a “founding act.”39 Had it not been done in 1983, the reunification of Germany would have been much more difficult, if not totally inconceivable in the winter of 1989–1990. It would have lacked the indispensable European preliminary: the existence of the European Community. France, under President Mitterrand’s leadership, had broken with itself in early 1983, that is with a tradition that had become almost innate, namely displaying systematic autonomy in relation to the other nations of the world: France henceforth linked its own future to that of Germany and Europe, thus creating the basis for German reunification. The way Mitterrand lived the spring of 1983 was, without no doubt, an act of faith. How, in the winter of 1989–1990, could it have disappeared from his memory?

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“We’re Divided on That” François Mitterrand saw too much in everything; too many ideas came to him about everything and, in particular, he thought about the pros and cons, demonstrating as much understanding of one position as of the other. He was thus sometimes the rebel then again the one who warned. On the one hand, he wanted nothing more than a fraternal entente with the Germans but then, on the other, as on October 2, 1985 in his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, he said that he could not hope for “the reestablishment of a dominant pole at the center of Europe.” “In France, we’re divided on that,” he explained at the same meeting regarding the German problem, before adding—and revealing himself as he did extremely rarely—“My very mind is divided.”40 However—and this “however” has great importance—in the autumn of 1989, as during that winter, he began singing the song of freedom with the Germans, in Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig. He sang it from the tribunes of world politics and in its workshops, as in the past. He knew precisely what he had to say, and wish for, the Germans, who had embarked on this adventure of freedom that was leading them toward their unity. Mitterrand borrowed the language of “act of faith” and referred to the European work for which Germans and French had combined forces with other Europeans, a work they had all begun then prolonged in their European “acts of faith.” Why might this work have been contradictory with a reunification of Germany? Had it been an act of faith, one would not exclude the other. The reunification of Germany could be combined with the European work in a European act of faith, which would reproduce the original “act of faith” of Europe and that of all those who, under the aegis of a certain number of states, had subsequently carried the European work through to a successful conclusion and created “Europe.” Now it was necessary to integrate German unity into this work. Mitterrand did not doubt for a second it was possible—it sufficed to want it. He wanted it and hoped that the Germans also wanted it. I would like again to contrast briefly Mitterrand’s act of faith in German unification with a few remarks that show how much the French president might also have reacted to the imminent question of German reunification but did not. For example, throughout the whole autumn of 1989, his predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, chipped away at the idea of German reunification in French public opinion. First of all, in September 1989, he

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wanted to postpone it on the pretext that it was improbable and would, in addition, constitute a “big problem for the European Community.”41 Then, in November—meanwhile, the Wall had already fallen—Giscard judged he had to warn “the Europe of the 12” against the “danger” of reunification and formulate a defense plan against it.42 On the 28th of that month, he met with former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in Jouy-en-Josas for a debate organized by the École des Hautes Études Commerciales and invoked the Soviet Union’s reticence about any reunification of Germany.43 Finally, in the December 15 issue of Le Monde, Mitterrand’s predecessor proposed a “calendar of hope” (!) according to which the GDR, in a statute recalling Finlandization, should remain separated from Federal Germany. It would certainly be necessary to grant both German states the formation of a “Germanic federation” without giving it any kind of sovereignty in the sphere of foreign policy and defense.44 George F.  Kennan inscribed his name in the history of international relations after World War II with a famous article written for Foreign Affairs in which he announced, somewhat in the name of the American government, a policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union by the United States.45 He had participated in the formulation of American policy regarding Germany during the postwar period, and he made his views explicit. The title of an article devoted to German reunification published on November 12, 1989, in the Washington Post, summed up Kennan’s position perfectly: “This is No Time for Talk of German Reunification.” He warned against “this danger found in the loose talk that has marked the discussion of recent days about German reunification.” Because Kennan did not want to hear anything about this reunification and in order to justify his attitude of categorical refusal, he mentioned the presence of “well over a million armed men on German territory, with all their elaborate modern equipment and, in the case of us and the Russians, with nuclear as well as conventional weapons.” Considering all those factors, it was practically impossible at the time to cancel complex military and contractual agreements that had been made over several decades to ensure European “security”—agreements that henceforth concerned some twenty-eight countries. To those unsatisfied by this justification, Kennan could offer another argument: “The principle by which most of us were guided when we found ourselves faced, 40 years ago, with the problem of Germany’s future was this: that there must not again be a unified Germany.”46

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Such a verdict might just as well have been handed down by British Prime Minister Thatcher, whose voice we certainly do not want to forget in the chorus of Cassandras regarding reunification. If one were seeking the opposite extreme of Mitterrand on the question of Germans and their unity, it would be impossible to do better than Thatcher. She quite simply did not forgive the Germans for their “national character” or, more exactly, what she viewed as such: their aggressiveness, their anxiety, their lack of self-knowledge, their thirst for power. In her political memoirs, The Downing Street Years, she explained that Germany’s immediate neighbors, as well as the Russians, were quite profoundly aware of these German characteristics; what’s more, it was “one reason why so many Germans genuinely—I believe wrongly—want to see Germany locked in to a federal Europe.”47 The “German character” was such that even the Germans had to protect their country against it. No one could remove these ideas from Mrs. Thatcher’s mind, and all who tried ended up despairing,48 for those objections never produced but a single result: confirming what, in her eyes, did not allow for the slightest doubt: “But I do believe in national character.” She had ready-made answers for the “German problem”—about Germany more than any other country and, a fortiori, a united Germany. As she explained in her memoirs, it could be expected that Germany would try to use the construction of a “federal” (more united) Europe to exert its domination over it—a reason for which, she implied, it was also necessary to refuse a Europe too tightly bound together. No, Margaret Thatcher had other designs for Germany. Other forces would have to limit this dominating power (the imaginary power, the mania for power that she attributed to it): the United States and, in Europe, Great Britain and France. But she was indeed forced to admit in The Downing Street Years that she did not succeed in establishing this “balance of power” during her years as prime minister. In particular, she deplored the “refusal of France under President Mitterrand,” who had not wanted to “follow his and French instincts” and those of the French to “challenge German interests.” And the same thing occurred during the winter of 1989–1990 when she had hopes of “stopping or slowing down reunification” by relying on an “Anglo-French initiative.” In various meetings with President Mitterrand between December 1989 and January 1990, she thought she could bet on “secret fears” that she felt she had detected in him and persuade him to participate in a joint policy of obstruction. When that no longer appeared possible, she hoped at least to restrict German

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unification. But Mitterrand did not follow her—one might say “once again.” According to Thatcher, who deplored it once again, far from expressing publicly “his private thoughts” about the German question (or the thoughts that she attributed to him), Mitterrand had explained that he would not be “one of those who were putting on the brakes.” In spite of the British prime minister’s efforts to convince the French president, it was his “tendency to schizophrenia”—to borrow her expression—that got the upper hand. As she let it be known to Gorbachev at their conversation in the Kremlin on June 8, 1990: “She had always been rather apprehensive about a unified Germany. So was President Mitterrand. The difference was that she expressed it publicly and Mitterrand did not.”49 We can read in The Downing Street Years that all the discussions Thatcher and Mitterrand had on the “German problem” led practically nowhere, and Mitterrand remained fundamentally “unwilling” to change the orientation of his foreign policy. From Thatcher’s point of view, he did not choose the path he ought to have taken by allying himself with her to hinder Germany’s reunifying. She did not forget it and again reproached him for this attitude years later when she wrote: “He made the wrong decision for France.”50 Such was Margaret Thatcher’s public judgment in The Downing Street Years concerning Mitterrand’s act of faith in behalf of Germany’s reunification. In addition, alone with Mitterrand at a luncheon meeting at the Élysée on June 2, 1992, she threw other words in his face: “Germany is even more dangerous since reunification. It is in the process of reconstructing its empire … The Nazis are now in the Community, and you have reunified them!”51 Thatcher hadn’t realized—or hadn’t wished to realize—what the French President was acutely aware of: with Germany’s reunification, if it was handled well, the European construction would gain momentum. Mitterrand found this desirable. Thatcher, with her stance toward “Europe” had blocked her mind to this insight. Their views here were incompatible. It is therefore difficult to see why Mitterrand should have thought of forming an alliance with Thatcher against Germany on the country’s way to its reunification, just to have as a result a failure of the European project for which he had been fighting—in conjunction with Helmut Kohl—so much and for so long. “She [Margaret Thatcher] should try to bind the Germans into the EC,” Helmut Kohl told George Bush at their meeting on December 3, 1989.52 However, as she stated, for example, at a dinner in London on

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March 11, 1990, to which the French Ambassador had invited, in order to discuss Germany’s reunification and the European construction, Margaret Thatcher completely ruled out the option that the European Community could by itself become a force of political attraction; for her it should be just an association for free trade. She didn’t see, she said further, which “concrete ideal one could offer in the name of Europe and in which way this could help to keep the Germans on the right track as they had become much too powerful for not dominating the structure within which one tried to lock them up.”53 Margaret Thatcher, though, through her position as Prime Minister of Great Britain, was an important figure in the configuration of political leaders who were involved in the process concerning a reunification of Germany. Her colleagues had to understand, or better: had to ‘read’ her. Helmut Kohl, in talking on February 24, 1990 with George Bush about Thatcher, confessed that he felt helpless: “I can’t understand her. I can’t do anything about her.” Bush, in the same conversation, had gentle, slightly condescending words to say about her: “We don’t fear the ghosts of the past; Margaret does. … I called Margaret today just to listen to her, which I did for an hour. … Margaret told me today that everyone expects German unity (although six months ago she felt differently).”54 Mitterrand’s approach was intricate, skilled. Having been a keen observer of Thatcher for quite some time, he carried in 1989–1990 a distinct image of her in his mind. It was, in terms of characterology, permeating, and, besides, thoroughly political. He pursued what he wished to pursue, and Thatcher understood what she had wished to understand. In a conversation with Kohl on June 27, 1989 he explained the procedure: “When she has yielded, she says: I have won. She has character, but she yields and she loves propaganda.”55 Douglas Hurd described the procedure in the following way: “At Strasbourg [at the European Summit on December 8-9, 1989], as was his habit, he [Mitterrand] juggled with ideas when talking to her, summoning the same thought that, as in the past, Germany could only be restrained by Britain and France acting together. But this was just intellectual play. … his constant juggling with ideas, phrases and historical comparisons was a pastime, not a prelude to action.”56 And, quite notably, Hurd added: “Before she met Mitterrand again in Paris a month later I warned Margaret Thatcher in a long minute that in public he was speaking in favor of unification and there was no evidence of any serious French effort to check the impetus.”57

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Notes 1. Védr., p. 406. 2. Report of the Mitterrand-Wörner meeting, July 22, 1988 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/67). 3. François Mitterrand in a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Karolus Grosz, November 17, 1988. 4. Report of the Mitterrand-Vorontsov meeting, Paris, June 24, 1983. 5. François Mitterrand to the Italian president, Francesco Cossiga, during their meeting in Paris, January 29, 1990. (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 6. Allocation prononcée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, à l’occasion du déjeuner offert en l’honneur de Monsieur Helmut Kohl, Chancelier de la République Fédérale d’Allemagne, January 21, 1983. 7. CD, July 20, 1988. 8. On page 207 of their book A World Transformed, they lay out the vision they had in January 1990 of the situation in the Soviet Union regarding the problem of German reunification. Brent Scowcroft explains: “We strongly supported self-determination as a matter of principle [in the case of the Baltic countries] as we were doing regarding German reunification. As a practical point, however, we were aware of Gorbachev’s vulnerability to the political threat posed by nationalism.” And, for his part, George Bush noted: “I felt caught between my desire to back self-determination and the reality of the situation. If we exhorted change, our rhetoric might produce a military backlash and set back the cause of freedom throughout the Soviet Union rather than move it forward—and we could do nothing to stop what we had helped set in motion. I tried to find a balance, speaking out for dialogue and perestroika, but my caution prompted criticism.” 9. CD, July 20, 1988. 10. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, à Madame Anne Sinclair dans le cadre de l’émission 7/7 sur TF1, February 12, 1989, 42. 11. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, à Madame Anne Sinclair dans le cadre de l’émission 7/7 sur TF1, March 25, 1990, 27. 12. CM, October 26, 1988. 13. Report of the Mitterrand-Kissinger meeting in Paris, June 28, 1984 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/74). 14. During the Cabinet meeting of February 11, 1987, the president spoke explicitly about the “game” between Germany and the Soviet Union: “It’s obvious that the Germans have a particular game in relation to the Russians, just as the Russians have one in relation to the Germans.”

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15. Report of the Mitterrand-Kissinger meeting in Paris, June 28, 1984 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/74). What’s more, after this phrase, President Mitterrand added an eloquent remark on the behavior of his predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing: “It must be said that my predecessor encouraged them in this, indicating that we were, of course, speaking with the Germans but that we would always be on the side of the Russians if the Germans attempted to go too far.” 16. Report of the Mitterrand-Vogel meeting in Paris, July 9, 1987. 17. CM, February 16, 1987. 18. Document de Travail, Le Problème des SNF, Paris, May 17, 1989. 19. Jean-Louis Bianco, Note pour Monsieur le Président, Paris, January 19, 1987. President Mitterrand sent the note back having written “seen” on it. 20. Report of the Mitterrand-Mojsov meeting in Paris, December 2, 1987. 21. Report of the Mitterrand-Jung meeting in Paris, September 30, 1986 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/66. Dossier 93). 22. Report of the Mitterrand-Vogel meeting in Paris, July 9, 1987. 23. Hans-Jochen Vogel responded to Mitterrand rather defensively: “We want the ECU to become the currency for all of Europe. A domestic market endowed with twelve currencies is an aberration. But we run up against two forces that resist us: the resistance of the Bundesbank, which is afraid of losing its influence, and the resistance of a large number of conservatives who fear that a harmonized monetary system will revive inflation.” 24. Within the French government, this sort of interpretation had already been going on for some time. During the Cabinet meeting of December 18, 1985, the minister of the economy and finances, Pierre Bérégovoy, explained, among other things: “It is true that, on monetary and financial problems, Germany is less cooperative [than in the past]. The reason … is psychological as much as it is political. Germany has economic power, it doesn’t have political power. When there is competition with France on the economy, [Germany] doesn’t tolerate it since, in a way, that is its sphere of excellence. This explains the behavior of [German Finance Minister Gerhard] Stoltenberg. His attitude stems not only from his concern about the budget but also from the fact that he reacts badly when France is getting along alright.” 25. Report of the Mitterrand-González meeting at Latche, August 25, 1987. 26. PREM-19-3334. 27. CM, August 17, 1988 (personal account, PC). 28. CM, August 17, 1988 (official account). 29. See Mitterrand, Les prisonniers de guerre, as well as the memories of Jean Munier, Jean Védrine, Louis Devaux and Georges Beauchamp in: Lang, Le cercle des intimes; Giesbert, Mitterrand, 32ff.

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30. Report of the Mitterrand-Jung meeting in Paris, September 30, 1986 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/66. Dossier 93). 31. Interventions du Président de la République lors du Conseil Européen d’Essen (9–10 décembre 1994), report made by the participants. 32. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Heidelberg, August 26, 1986 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 33. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at the Château de Chambord, March 28, 1987 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 34. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour Monsieur le Président de la République. Objet: Entretien entre J.  Chirac et J.  Delors (dîner du 22 janvier), January 23, 1987. 35. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Heidelberg, August 26, 1986 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 36. CM, February 11, 1987. The impression Mitterrand had is understandable if one reads, for example, Genscher’s European profession of faith in Gensch. 362ff., 385–386, 393–394. 37. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Bonn, October 20, 1987 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/73. Dossier 1). 38. Allocation prononcée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, à l’occasion du Dîner d’État, conseil d’État, Berlin, December 20, 1989, 4. 39. Jean Musitelli, François Mitterrand, l’Européen, 318. 40. Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting in Paris, October 2, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/76. Dossier 3). 41. FAZ, September 14, 1989, 4: “Giscard: Wiedervereinigung nicht zu erwarten.” 42. General-Anzeiger, November 14, 1989, 12: “Giscard will Europa mit einem ‘Abwehrplan’ retten.” 43. Le Monde, November 30, 1989, 3: “La réunification pose plus de problèmes à l’Est qu’à l’Ouest, déclare M. Giscard d’Estaing.” 44. Le Monde, December 15, 1989, 1–2: “L’avenir des Allemands de l’Est. Un calendrier d’espoir, par Valéry Giscard d’Estaing”; as well as Die Welt, December 16, 1989, 6: “Giscard plädiert für Finnlandisierung.” 45. The article appeared in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, signed “X.” George F. Kennan, who hid behind this pseudonym, was at the time director of the planning staff at the American State Department. 46. The Washington Post, November 12, 1989, D1, D2. 47. The Downing Street Years, 791. 48. This was George R.  Urban’s account in Diplomacy and Disillusion, 102–117, 120–143. 49. Charles Powell, Report on Prime Minister’s meeting with Gorbachev in the Kremlin, Friday 8 June 1990, PREM-19-3176.

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50. The Downing Street Years, 791, 796–98. 51. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in Paris, June 2, 1992 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 52. h t t p s : / / b u s h 4 1 l i b r a r y . t a m u . e d u / f i l e s / m e m c o n s -­ telcons/1989-­12-­03%2D%2DKohl.pdf., 4 (accessed December 4, 2020). 53. Cablegram of Ambassador Luc de La Barre de Nanteuil to Roland Dumas, March 13, 1990, La Dipl.fr., 261. 54. h t t p s : / / b u s h 4 1 l i b r a r y . t a m u . e d u / f i l e s / m e m c o n s -­ telcons/1990-­02-­24%2D%2DKohl.pdf., 7 (accessed December 4, 2020). 55. Report on the breakfast meeting between Mitterrand and Kohl (at the European Summit in Madrid), June 27, 1989. 56. Hurd, Memoirs, 383. 57. Ibid. For the text of the minute of Douglas Hurd see: DBPO, 208–211.

CHAPTER 11

Is Germany About to Break Loose?

On April 17, 1989, in Luxembourg, European Commission President Jacques Delors presented to the public the report of the Committee for the Development of the European Community through Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), a committee he chaired, which was created at the Hanover European Summit in June 1988. On May 2, Hungarian border guards cut the fencing of the Iron Curtain at the border with Austria. On May 7, municipal elections were held in the GDR; officially, 98.5% of the voters vote for unitary lists. Following the elections, Egon Krenz, a member of the Politburo of the SED interprets these results as “a clear vote of the people in favor of a strong Socialism.” In truth, the election results are falsified by the SED, and to verify them, civic action groups formed throughout the GDR; they succeeded in proving the election had been rigged. This provoked demonstrations the same day in Leipzig. On May 18, during a press conference, President Mitterrand announced state visits he planned on making in the near future to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, and the GDR. On May 29 and 30, the NATO Council (of which France was a member), headquartered in Brussels, published a final declaration in which is mentioned, among the Alliance’s goals, the reestablishment of the unity of Germany and that of Europe.1 On May 31, during his state visit to West Germany, American President George H.W. Bush gave a speech in Mainz in which he spoke in favor of an “undivided” Europe. With a massacre on June 4 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the Chinese army put an end to student protests, which had been going on for some time. In the autumn of 1989, certain members of the GDR leadership will envisage this “Chinese solution” as a possible reaction to mass demonstrations of citizens in Leipzig © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_11

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and Dresden. From June 12 to 15, the secretary general of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev, made a state visit to Federal Germany. During its June 26–27 session in Madrid, the European Council decided to adopt the plan of the Delors Commission in view of EMU. The first phase of this process was to begin on July 1, 1990, but the follow-up is not scheduled.

France and Germany in the Spring of 1989: The Conflict Around Economic and Monetary Union or “The Reestablishment of Parallelism Between Defense and Currency” In early 1989 the French government was worried especially about West Germany’s active collaboration in the project of EMU. At a luncheon meeting on June 2, 1988 at the hotel Royal in Evian, prior to the European summit that was to be held on the 27th and 28th in Hanover, President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl had come to an oral but explicit agreement:2 The West German government was, with the development of the European Community, seeking to ease restrictions on the circulation of capital between member states; the French government, which, on the contrary, foresaw easier circulation of capital resulting in difficulties for France, demanded in exchange a harmonization of taxation of interests within the Community and rapid preliminary work in view of forming EMU, which had been planned since the promulgation of the Single European Act (SEA) in February 1986. In their Evian agreement, the French president and West German chancellor combined these three objectives into a single plan. Mitterrand, however, did not, in June 1988, have a premonition that the agreement’s temporal framework, a framework that would essentially determine its scope, would become a source of profound dissension between him and Helmut Kohl beginning in the spring of 1989. Once launched, the plan for EMU should accelerate the overall building of Europe, and it was for that reason that it should be launched quite quickly as well as its timetable decided upon in advance. Besides, Mitterrand kept in his mind the plan he had spoken about when conversing with Felipe Gonzalez on August 25, 1987: “We have to go forward toward a common currency.”3

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The day after his meeting with the chancellor in Evian, the Italian Prime Minister Cirio De Mita said to Mitterrand: “We must speed up the unification process of Europe.” Mitterrand replied: “I’m convinced of it,” adding immediately: “It’s the choice I made long ago.” A few moments later, he told De Mita that he had met with Helmut Kohl and related the conversation. According to this narrative— Mitterrand’s view of his discussion with Kohl in Evian—the latter considered that the essential thing regarding EMU was to ease restrictions on the circulation of capital. Mitterrand, on the other hand, did not mention the slightest dissension between himself and Kohl regarding the objective that had been placed above the others: using the European Economic and Monetary Union to speed up the building of Europe and implement it quickly.4 Élisabeth Guigou twice reminded Mitterrand in the spring of 1989 (May 9 and 17) of the agreement made with Kohl in Evian, because in the meantime, on April 17, 1989, the Delors Commission Report on EMU had been published.5 Jacques Delors personally delivered the report to Guigou at the Élysée on April 14 so that she might hand it over to the president. That same day, she wrote a memo for the president in which she brought out the report’s “main lines” while commenting from the French point of view. She thereby stressed that the three phases of instituting EMU sketched out in this report made up a unit and that all the decisions on this point had to be made during the first phase; the report thus foresaw a single, overall treaty for the three phases and not a treaty for each one of them.6 However, the Delors Commission did not set up a schedule for the transition from one phase to the next—that would be up to the European Council—but, according to the Commission, it was clear that the first phrase would have to begin at latest on July 1, 1990, with the complete deregulation of capital movement between member countries of the European Community, planned for that date. And in this initial phase, assuming that the European Council adopted the Delors Report, the new overall treaty would also have to be negotiated and ratified, which implied, as the report specified, “that the preparation of negotiations on the new treaty begin immediately” and that, at the conclusion of these negotiations, the European Council immediately convoke a governmental conference to study and elaborate the treaty. (This is what would later be called the “Maastricht Treaty.”) From the French point of view, as Guigou’s note clearly shows, EMU should be set up at the outset of a procedure launched and carried out quite quickly. The next meeting of the European Council was to take place

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on June 26–27 in Madrid. If the Delors Commission Report was accepted, everything would have to be done to ensure the new treaty might “begin immediately,” as Guigou wrote. Her note to the president, concluded that nothing opposes the idea “that the French European Council [the Council under the presidency of France] be the occasion for deciding on the convocation of an intergovernmental conference at the beginning of 1990 or on July 1.”7 If events conformed to the French government’s plan. And if Helmut Kohl’s government played the game. But wasn’t that guaranteed by the Evian agreement? Certainly—except that the German chancellor was not the own master at home. What he had agreed upon—or intended to agree upon—with the French president did not necessarily create a consensus in Federal Germany. Kohl wanted to move toward EMU with François Mitterrand, but also had to worry about whether the country he was leading would follow. He spoke frankly about this to Mitterrand when they met on April 4, 1989, in Günzburg and compared their conceptions of the chronology of the work to be accomplished for Europe in the course of that year. He informed Mitterrand that Delors was getting ready to propose a procedure to be implemented in three phases and that the finished report concerning this point would be ready within a month. After an exchange of opinions at the European Summit in Madrid, it was hoped that decisions could be made during the summit presided over by France. Mitterrand confirmed this: the essential thing in Madrid was to create conditions for success at the next meeting of the European Council. In all his declarations during that period, Kohl seemed to agree entirely with the French president and to give him the hope of perfect Franco-German coordination: “I am firmly resolved to make important decisions.” In other words, he and Federal Germany would advance alongside France on the path to EMU. Really? That is the question that Mitterrand asked himself when he heard Kohl’s next remark, which laid out all the problems stemming from German domestic politics that opposed rapid progress in establishing EMU, discerning a “hostile” mood among the German electorate, one even “contrary to Europe.”8 Thus, as concerned the issue of the timing for working toward EMU, the French and West German governments were not at all in agreement. On the contrary, the schedule was a point of disagreement, with the French government wanting to take major steps toward the objective set with the determination they had shown in defining it; the Federal German government, on the other hand, was anxious to have a slow procedure.

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Considering that its population was eurosceptical, it counseled caution regarding the European demands that the EMU would impose on it. This discrepancy in the European schedule, which appeared in the spring of 1989 in relations between (West) Germany and France, widened between the two countries and, over the course of the year, provoked considerable frictions in the political relations between Bonn and Paris. As they were blocked on this divergence regarding the schedule for the “European” procedure, frictions became more pronounced and, at the end, quite painful, on both sides. This was particularly the case in the autumn of 1989. As we know today, the period chosen could not have been worse because, in that way and for that reason, Franco-German relations took a particularly dramatic turn that autumn. In her April 14 note, Élisabeth Guigou had already formulated a tentative warning: It was likely that Chancellor Kohl would prefer a schedule according to which the beginning of the first phrase planned for by the Delors Report (the opening of negotiations on a new treaty) would be postponed from the beginning of 1990 to July 1, 1990; he could also ensure that this phase not be completed until after the (Bundestag) elections held at the end of 1990 in Germany. François Mitterrand, who received the note, on which he wrote his customary “seen,” naturally understood what Guigou meant by that: Kohl wanted to keep the topic of EMU (one of the objectives of which was the common currency) out of the West German electoral campaign despite its importance. To do so, he wanted to present it as “outside current events.” French determination at the Élysée opposed this. In the new note Guigou wrote about this matter to the president, she sketched out the main lines of an agreement reached with the chancellor even before the beginning of the French presidency of the European Community, after having first obtained an answer to the question: “Is the Chancellor ready to negotiate a treaty, and at what date might negotiations begin?” One thing was clear: The fine-tuning of a procedure and a schedule for negotiations was a condition for progress be made under the French presidency. From the Élysée’s point of view, Kohl had no other choice than to come around to the rapid procedure that they wanted; yet pressure was something he wanted to avoid. “It is only at your level [during the direct discussion between the president and the chancellor] that these negotiations can come about,” concluded Mitterrand’s adviser. She recommended that the leaders’ advisers meet beforehand in order to lay the groundwork. In

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the note he read and sent back to Guigou, Mitterrand wrote “Oui” there, underlined with emphasis, a word he repeated once more on the first page of the note.9 The preparatory discussion took place the afternoon of May 17. Élisabeth Guigou, Hubert Védrine and Jacques Attali of the Élysée met with Horst Teltschik and Joachim Bitterlich from the chancellery. That evening, Guigou wrote a note in which she informed the president in detail about the discussions. On the core of the matter, they had progressed only to the degree that it had turned out, even more clearly than before, that Chancellor Kohl did not at all want an intergovernmental conference to be convened (for embarking on negotiations on a new treaty) just after the Madrid summit, any more than he wished a date set for these negotiations. On the other hand, the president’s and chancellor’s advisers had come to an understanding to try to persuade the German finance minister, Theo Waigel, who, quite clearly, defended only selectively the European projects that were pursued by the chancellery. His French counterpart, Pierre Bérégovoy ought to tell him again what the chancellor had told Waigel before: there existed the Evian agreement between the president and the chancellor. It bore on an easing of capital circulation in the European Community combined with a standardization of taxation on interest and, above all, progress in the setting up of EMU. Kohl had not forgotten it at all. “He’s counting on our help,” wrote Guigou to Mitterrand, “to make his finance minister understand what was decided at Evian. “Mr. Telschik [sic] and Mr. Bitterlisch [sic] told us that it was important that Mr. Waigel, who has no Government experience, understand our point of view.” As she attentively noted at the end of her note, the chancellor’s collaborators were also quite active in other areas, meeting with numerous French journalists to explain to them “that there is no questioning of Germany’s European commitment.” But, as if she were not completely sure, Guigou added in the final sentence of her text: “C[hristine] Ockrent [leading French TV journalist] requested an interview from the chancellor on the German drift.”10 For, as seen from Paris, Germany was suffering. It did not have the political or military status corresponding to its ambitions. It was searching; it had the European spirit but felt just as attracted by Russia. The monetary sphere was the only one in which it felt sure of its power. Obstacles were accumulating in relations with Germany. Did it perhaps want to distance itself from Europe? Mitterrand exchanged these remarks

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with Italian Prime Minister De Mita on March 30, 1989, in Taormina, Sicily. The pretext had been a burning question: How could West Germany be encouraged to advance on the path to EMU at the same time as the others? The answer was doubtless that it was necessary to erase the fear that, by entering the EMU, it would lose its true and only proof of power: economic and monetary power, to which the Bundesbank gave such sovereign expression in Europe. Was it necessary to arouse Germany’s enthusiasm for monetary union by announcing that it would open up opportunities for its economy? But did that not mean being definitively subjected to Germany’s economic power? What could be done? “I’d like to ask you for some advice,” Mitterrand said to De Mita. “I’m not hostile to the Central Bank but to the way it operates. The Bundesbank is completely outside governmental authority. Our Central Bank is independent, but the government defines economic and monetary policy. How to bring the Germans to accept progressing along the path of monetary union? I have the impression that if they were guaranteed that monetary union would not threaten their economic good health, they would be ready to move forward. But I hesitate to make this concession. In the absence of European political power, it is dangerous for the Central Bank to have sovereign power. But the FRG does not, for all that, have authority over our economies. With the Central Bank, it would have. I am therefore reticent—not by national reflex but because Germany, which does not have the same type of social problems as us [French and Italians], could push us towards antisocial measures with a risk of increasing unemployment.”11 Mitterrand’s fears, like those of other members of his government, were not allayed by the signs that came to them from Germany in the following months. On April 26, 1989, Roland Dumas gave a report to the Cabinet on the Franco-German summit of the previous week and concluded by referring to “three events” that, he explained, “reveal the existence of certain difficulties in the relations between France and the FRG.” The first—and it plays a major role in our context—was the Bundesbank’s decision to raise the interest rate without any prior announcement. This decision—made precisely at the moment of the Franco-German summit— was, according to him, symbolic of Germany’s wish to pursue a “go-it-­ alone” monetary policy.12 In using this expression, Dumas naturally knew that he had honed already sharp words. Everyone listening to him at that meeting in the Élysée’s Murat Salon would have perceived the disturbing image that the foreign minister wanted to convey: Guided by the

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Bundesbank, which no one controlled, West Germany was doing what it wanted as regards monetary policy—where it “already” exerts a superiority close to domination over its European partners. Having arrived at this stage, one would be tempted to wonder whether West Germany was not really in the process of breaking the political bonds that it had previously maintained with the others—those commitments that were continually invoked in France—by acting as it pleases in favor of its own economic, monetary and, more generally, foreign policy interests. However, President Mitterrand seemed to want to defuse his foreign minister’s remarks when he spoke—after a brief remark from the defense minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. “But in the end, all that can be arranged,” he said. “It suffices for France to clearly assert its positions on the military level [let us recall the “nuclear war issue”] and, I believe increasingly, on the monetary level.” Admittedly, but on May 2, Dumas could not give him any other news than this about the meetings he was having at the time with his German counterpart, Hans-Dietrich Genscher: “I manifested, on several occasions, our disappointment at not having been informed about the German stands on the monetary level as well as on the security problem.”13 The date when the European Council would hold its next meeting in Madrid and deliberate on the Delors Report was now getting close, and both governments, Paris and Bonn, diverged increasingly in their vision of the schedule for setting up EMU—or, to be more precise, the Élysée and the chancellery disagreed on this point, but not the foreign ministers, Roland Dumas and Hans-Dietrich Genscher. A deep personal harmony already prevailed between the two men, and on the issue of monetary union, they were preparing to engage a thoroughly singular cooperation to carry out a secret undertaking together (as we shall see in a moment). But let us begin by speaking about Chancellor Kohl, President Mitterrand and the conflict toward which they were headed over a very precise question: On what date should the intergovernmental conference be convened to negotiate the new treaty in view of EMU? The two leaders had agreed to meet at 1 p.m. on June 22 for a luncheon at the Élysée, during which they counted on having a preliminary discussion about the Madrid summit. To prepare for this meeting, Élisabeth Guigou wrote the president a note the evening before, informing him, among other things, of what Joachim Bitterlich, the chancellor’s adviser, had told her that very afternoon about “monetary union.” The chancellor, Bitterlich had said,

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agreed on the following four fundamental points: First, he confirmed his choice in favor of EMU; second, he considered the Delors Report a solid, irreplaceable base and that the process described therein had to be accepted in its entirety; third, the first phase could begin July 1, 1990; and fourth, it was necessary to convene a governmental conference, for which preliminary work should begin soon. But it was to be expected, Bitterlich allegedly told Guigou, that Kohl not want the conference to begin too soon—he certainly did not want it to end before the German elections in the autumn of 1990. Moreover, the chancellor’s adviser had noted in this remark that the president of the Bundesbank, Mr. Pöhl, estimated that it would take at least two years if one wanted to work properly and correctly carry out the preparations for this governmental conference as well as the conference itself.14 That naturally looked like an excuse, and this is how it was taken at the Élysée: The chancellor was using the president of the Bundesbank, who, in any event, was considered all-powerful, as a pretext in order to pursue his own objectives. The next day, at the Élysée luncheon, Kohl and Mitterrand spoke about “the next step in the procedure leading to the Economic and Monetary Union.” If we believe the note that his adviser Joachim Bitterlich wrote about this meeting,15 Kohl talked at some length about “certain problems” that were posed by the timetable of contractual negotiations and the governmental conference that had to be convened for this purpose (about which Mitterrand already had very clear ideas). Moreover, concerning the scheduling “objective” that he himself had drawn up, the chancellor noted that “it was better not to refer to it publicly.” According to Élisabeth Guigou’s recollection Kohl however spoke most resolutely: he “would never publicly announce” that he envisaged a conclusion to the preliminary work in the course of 1991.16 Think about this: The evening before, Bitterlich, his adviser, announced to Guigou that the chancellor envisaged a schedule for the year 1990. In Mitterrand’s somewhat briefer response, he again expressed the point of view on the procedure, which had been public since the beginning and which was certainly not unknown to the chancellor: He considered it as a whole, and it was necessary to decide on it now. They could not remain at the first of the three phases provided for by the Delors Report—they had to commit coherently, including “the implementation of the second and third steps.” But the chancellor did not want to make a decision on this point immediately; he thus evaded and, rather than give a precise date that Mitterrand would have so liked to hear from him, settled for a hint that did not commit him to anything: The

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intergovernmental conference should carry out its work after July 1, after the preparatory period.17 What did that signify if not “I don’t want to now”?18 In response, François Mitterrand settled for repeating, in two concise phrases, what he had just said, as if reciting a litany. And for a few additional minutes, he and Kohl continued a meeting in which they listened to each other without understanding the other, each one talking about his own conception of time, which did not suit the other. Yet, over the previous days, Dumas and Genscher had also been quite busy. They had come together in Paris on June 19 and composed a draft, initially kept secret, of a final declaration for the imminent Madrid summit.19 According to this text, the European Council was to confirm that the three phases “constitute the elements of a single process whose entirety must be maintained in terms of both substance and procedure (meaning that they could not be postponed as Kohl was imagining).20 The German foreign minister had presented this draft to his governmental colleagues the next day, at a meeting of the Cabinet in Bonn, but they did not seem to understand the implications as Élisabeth Guigou indicated to President Mitterrand on June 21. Of course not; Kohl reigned over the cabinet, and he did not want the process of instituting the EMU treated as a closely knit entity but, on the contrary, intended that possibilities for modifying its course be maintained. This is precisely the reason why Guigou received a call from the chancellor’s adviser Joachim Bitterlich on the afternoon of June 21, informing her first that Foreign Minister Genscher had conveyed to him the draft written with Roland Dumas and—as we have already indicated—laid out, by way of correction, so to speak, the chancellor’s conceptions on the whole procedure.21 The initiative of foreign ministers Dumas and Genscher thus seemed temporarily blocked, and the European Council’s final declaration in Madrid was in fact different, a bit less resolute and with a timetable less precise than the text written by the two ministers. But they did not sit idly by: Even before Kohl and Mitterrand met for lunch on June 22, Genscher called Dumas, who immediately passed on to Élisabeth Guigou what his German colleague had told him so that she would inform the president. She hastily handwrote a note to Mitterrand so that he would be in the picture before his lunch with Kohl. And what was to be read in this note, on which the president wrote “seen,” indicating not only that he had received it but had understood it? On the one hand, that Kohl approved of the main points concerning

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EMU. As she had already done in her earlier notes but in somewhat different terms, Guigou enumerated these points one after another. The chancellor’s “but” was not slow in coming—it was to be expected, we would now say—and this time, the French president was informed of it by the German foreign minister who distanced himself from the chancellor through the intermediary of his French counterpart: “But Mr. Kohl, unlike Mr. Genscher, hesitates to set a closer date for the intergovernmental conference” [italics in the original].22 That was the first element in this note. But Guigou, at the request of Roland Dumas, passed on something else to the president: an idea that Mitterrand did not immediately take responsibility for—at least not the luncheon he would have that day with Helmut Kohl. It was an idea he could not dismiss once he had appropriated and followed it with tenacity over the following months. The idea was to drag a date out of the chancellor for convening the intergovernmental conference during the European Council in Strasbourg after the Madrid summit. “R[oland] deems it necessary to plead with the chancellor over the possibility of setting the conference date at the European Council in Strasbourg.”23 This was the idea that was maturing in Paris in the spring of 1989 (Guigou had already mentioned it in her April 14 memo but not yet with Dumas’ determination), and implemented during the Strasbourg summit in early December 1989—with the decisive participation of François Mitterrand. In this matter, President Mitterrand—supported by his closest advisers—adopted an increasingly active behavior toward Chancellor Kohl. Did Federal Germany want the construction of Europe to take place around it? Did it want the work accomplished for constructing Europe to conform to the imperatives of its own domestic needs? Did it want to get out of certain “commitments” binding it to its partners (Evian!)? What were the Germans bringing into question? The pursuit of the European work undertaken together? Did they not know that France, in the work it had achieved in this area, could also be slower and more restrained? In any event, it was very difficult for France—and from its point of view, much more difficult than for the Germans—to carry it out. For example, was the German chancellor aware of the fact that the leaders in Paris were asking fundamental questions about the Franco-German relationship and had been doing so for some time? As Mitterrand and his collaborators saw it, there were clearly a number of things to be settled between France and Federal Germany, and these could be put off no longer. Henceforth, the two states were too often

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running into the discordant elements of their relationship. They could no longer close their eyes to the procedural problems that were slowing down the project of EMU. Things had to be classified. The conclusion drawn in Paris was that it was necessary to tell each other what their attitudes toward the other were and what one wished of the other—and even, if things went well, what one wanted for the other. With her May 9 note to the president, Élisabeth Guigou came up with a proposal from which I shall quote a fairly long extract because, if we project ourselves into the months that followed, what the representatives of the French government were calling for in the spring of 1989—the defining of relations between France and Germany—is extremely enlightening; it came down to “reestablishing the linkage between defense and currency.” “It is advisable,” wrote Guigou at the beginning of her text, “to seek an overall political agreement with the Chancellor that would then give rise to more operational and more technical translations”: I. The overall agreement would consist of two principal elements 1. The first is to help Germany in its relations vis-à-vis the United States: In exchange for our help on defense issues, Germany would agree to advance towards Economic and Monetary Union. It is therefore advisable to reestablish the parallelism between defense and currency. Progress towards Economic and Monetary Union at the European level must correspond to progress in the area of Defense. That can only be prepared by an agreement at your level. When you created the [Franco-German] Defense Council with the Chancellor, you obtained—not without difficulties—the creation of the [Franco-German] Economic and Financial Council. […] 2. The second element is the following: The completion of the single market is vital [underlined in Mitterrand’s hand] for Germany. During his 1988 Presidency, you helped the Chancellor considerably in advancing on this path: You remember that, in February 1988  in Brussels, you helped Germany obtain an agreement on the Delors package and, in particular, on the agricultural question. You also remember that, in Evian in 1988 … [underlined in Mitterrand’s hand; then follows the description of the agreement between Mitterrand and Kohl, which we have already reported.] Above all, the Germans fear that the process of the single market will be interrupted [underlined in Mitterrand’s hand]. This is indeed indispensable to preserving their economic power since it guarantees

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them their principal export markets. Chancellor Kohl must be made to understand that the completion of the single market is not a given in France and that we might well go backwards down a slope we had trouble climbing, if we do not obtain satisfaction on the harmonization of taxation and economic and monetary union. To make up for an agreement on the main subjects of the French Presidency, you would give the chancellor the assurance that the completion of the single market will not be brought into question by France [underlined in Mitterrand’s hand].”24

François Mitterrand put the topic of European construction (Do we want Europe, yes or no?) on the table, and in response, Helmut Kohl proposed tactical subtleties. It could hardly be hoped that the European Council, during its Madrid meeting, which was to open on June 26 at 10  a.m., might take up all the elements of the Delors Commission Report and, in addition, decide, as France wished, that the work on a treaty aiming at establishing a monetary and economic union be begun immediately and then advance rapidly. Germany was not alone; other member-states of the Council would follow the crowd only under certain conditions: Such was the situation described by Élisabeth Guigou on June 24 in a note to the president. Great Britain would undoubtedly approve the first phase of the Delors Report but would certainly demand a very limited interpretation of it. In addition, it would undoubtedly refuse the convocation of an intergovernmental conference and with it, naturally, negotiations over a new treaty. As concerned Spain, Prime Minister Felipe González admittedly had a very clear position, but his entourage within the Spanish government was pushing him to accept a compromise with Thatcher. As for the Netherlands, it let it be understood that it would “come aboard” if France, Germany and Spain were to arrive at “positive decisions.”25 Guigou devoted an entire page of her memo, which was over three pages long, to the questionable attitude of Germany and especially that of the chancellor. She added that Jacques Delors had called her two days before and told her that he found the chancellor’s attitude disturbing. From his point of view, Kohl was retreating, and this was increasingly pronounced. Whereas time was of the essence, there was a risk of “sinking” the plan for EMU if Kohl’s conceptions were followed and a year and a half were lost on preparatory work. It was necessary to “call the chancellor’s bluff,” in Delors’ opinion—and Guigou emphatically agreed.26

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However much anyone wanted to implement Delors’ proposal, no one managed to do so at the Madrid Summit. It began slightly late, at 10:20  a.m., and Prime Minister González, who was presiding over the Council during those six months, opened it by announcing the progress of discussions. He then turned the floor over to the “Commission,” that is to its president, Jacques Delors who, for the next hour, presented his report. After another intervention by the Council president concerning procedure, and a first contribution to the debate by Dutch Prime Minister Lubbers, at noon Chancellor Kohl spoke. He affirmed there were great hopes in this European Council, and he spoke in constructive terms on all the points of the Delors Report, with one exception: the question of the date at which the intergovernmental conference had to be convened and for which he settled for suggesting that it begin “in a foreseeable period of time.”27 President Mitterrand contradicted him most resolutely; he was the last to speak in the course of the morning session, which ended at 1 p.m. He referred to the vision to which they were committed and demanded that a suitable timetable be implemented: We are committed to building Europe. The question is knowing whether we still want it and when. We often have procedural debates. That is necessary, but procedure must not modify the substance. […] Of course, [there are] differences and nuances […] But we must remember what we are committed to and keep the momentum going. But, if the time limit is not respected, we will miss the encounter with Europe that was hoped for. France accepts phrase 1 on the basis of the idea that a second phase is necessary.

After the lunch break, deliberations resumed at 3:30, and Felipe González summed up the earlier session in four points, the fourth being the one that provoked the most differences of opinion: A few delegations wanted a governmental conference convened immediately; others preferred starting by having this idea examined by “competent organizations” and then, if need be, putting them in charge of handling it. Chancellor Kohl immediately pointed out that he had already made this proposal and that he was in full agreement with the Council president. Indeed, it was in his interest: “Competent organizations” always take their time, and time was what the chancellor played for. As if wanting to mark out the meeting that day by turning it into a simple dialogue with the German chancellor, the French president waited for the end of the afternoon’s debates before taking the floor again. A

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lively discussion had taken place on the Delors Report in general and, naturally, on the issue of scheduling the next stage in the process. Once again, it was primarily on that subject that Mitterrand at last expressed his fundamental views that, even though couched in objective terms, betrayed his impatience: “The Council’s proceedings cannot be set for the first phase and the intergovernmental conference left in vagueness, …. the intergovernmental conference must be decided upon.” The next morning at breakfast with Kohl, Mitterrand again expressed his growing impatience. According to him, it was now necessary to provide “proof” (owing to the fact that simple announcements were being replaced by real acts), and this proof had to take a clear form: It was necessary to convene the intergovernmental conference. Mitterrand offered Kohl a way out: It sufficed to talk about it, even vaguely—that was what it came down to—so that “something would have been salvaged from the wreckage.” The final official document on the Madrid Summit runs twenty-four pages in the French version (without the appendices), nine of them devoted to the “Realization of the Single Act,” including one on “Economic and Monetary Union.” Concerning it, the European Council remains resolved to implement it progressively and that the Delors Report fully carried out the mission entrusted to the Commission in Hanover. The sole decision announced is the beginning of the first phase, establishing the EMU on July 1, 1990. No date is given for convening the intergovernmental conference. On this matter, the European Council would entrust to “the competent organizations” the mission of implementing the works preparatory to the convening of an intergovernmental conference.28 Was it a lot? Was it a little? According to François Mitterrand, who stated his point of view at the June 28 Cabinet meeting, the principle of the intergovernmental conference was the essential point: Nothing had guaranteed that everyone would accept the idea of convening it. Yet they had succeeded; they had—to borrow the phrase used by Mitterrand during the breakfast discussion with Helmut Kohl—“salvaged something from the wreckage.” This was sufficient reason, in his opinion, for telling his Cabinet: “The forward march continues.” A day after salvaging the intergovernmental conference in Madrid, he seemed happy: “We have the constant, firm support of Belgium, the Commission and Germany—except in the event where the latter would set the date for the intergovernmental conference.” That was the problem, the one that still hindered the “forward march.”

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France and Germany in the Spring of 1989: François Mitterrand Speaks About The Reunification of Germany Germany had its own drivers to advance its policy, and no one bore this more in mind than François Mitterrand. Here we have reconstructed the remarks he had made on this subject as president of France since 1981. Our tale goes up to the fall of 1990, and it is, of course, with the greatest interest that we listen to what he was saying in the workshop of world politics at that time. What is striking is the importance this subject acquired in the president’s eyes. When he observed “Germany” or “the Germans,” the “German situation” or “German policy,” he seemed to discern a major dynamic of the international political situation, a dynamic that engaged all the machinery. Or, inversely: When Mitterrand analyzed the situation of the period from the angle of international politics, he inevitably spoke about the element that largely kept it in motion—the German element. If all his remarks on the issue are brought together and compared, we end up with a list of major and interesting subjects: the fall of the Wall, German reunification, the key role of the Soviet Union, the division of Germany, the fascination that Gorbachev exerted on the Germans, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Germans’ aspirations for unity, the idea of a solitary German march, France’s support for Germany on the path to unity. Beginning in the autumn of 1988, Mitterrand’s discourse was based on these subjects. At the Cabinet meeting of August 17, 1988, the essential point of the situation was “Germany is divided.”29 The following month, on September 22, in a discussion with the Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, he brought up the topic of Germany and proffered reflections that, even though expressed in the autumn of 1988, seem to have been preceded by the events of the autumn of 1989: “Let Germany set as its primary objective the end of the Wall and reunification, which would be subject to what the Soviet Union wants. Germany can continue on its road within the [European] Community, while exerting pressure for the Wall to disappear. This is not contradictory: Europe, France can help. If Germany were to go it alone, that would be another matter. The USSR is not ready to give up the power it exerts over half of Europe.”30 Slightly more than one year before the fall of the Wall, Mitterrand was imagining that its elimination could be, in the eyes of Germany, the very first objective to achieve. He also imagined that, by pursuing this goal,

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Germany aimed at reunification. These are, at that time, amazing conceptions. Let us therefore ask: In September 1988, did anyone else have such a thorough understanding of the German situation? Did anyone else detect a keen desire for reunification? In any event, Mitterrand seems to have presumed the existence of that desire when he shared his thinking on Germany with Sheikh Jaber. Indeed, he took up again the principal aspects that would have to be taken into account in the context of European politics concerning the reunification of Germany. First of all: Germany had to reckon with the Soviet Union, as everything would depend on what the latter wanted. Second: The dynamic leading Germany toward reunification, on the one hand, and its belonging to the European Community, on the other, were not contradictory. Third: Europe and France would support Germany in its effort to keep reunification and European unification on parallel trajectories. Fourth: the situation would quite obviously be different if Germany set out alone on the road toward unification. These are Mitterrand’s four points regarding the hypothetical case of a German reunification, for everything was still mere hypothesis, even in his eyes. The Soviet Union, as he mentioned to Sheikh Jaber, was not ready to give up “the half of Europe” that it dominated. That remark, however, changed nothing in the four stated points nor did it change the fact that they constituted the cardinal points of the policy adopted by Mitterrand when the hypothesis was no longer hypothetical. Let us contemplate what can be seen as a prefiguration. In January 1989 a message of freedom came from Germany—from East Germany, indeed, where apparently the wind of freedom had started to blow and was becoming dangerous for the Communist regime. It was the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the French foreign intelligence agency that had gathered the relevant information, and presented it in an intelligence report.31 The four-page note conveyed this information: a serious crisis was brewing within the Communist party, and therefore in the power apparatus of East Germany. The regime lost its support in the society and reacted to this phenomenon in an exclusively repressive manner, thereby only fueling discontent within the population, as well as further eroding the Party’s authority (along with that of subordinate social institutions). The general origin of the crisis was the SED leadership’s lack of “eagerness” in coming around to Gorbachev’s reformist arguments. In the course of the previous two months—November and December 1988—the note asserts, the crisis had in addition gotten worse following the adoption of two measures: the

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“pure and simple” banning of the Soviet monthly Sputnik on November 18, 198832 and, two days later, the order to suddenly withdraw five anti-­ Stalin films from circulation. The consequences, as the note further explained, became visible by several symptoms. The party’s basic organizations had more and more difficulty perceiving the population’s desire for change. Many of the party’s activists were beginning to doubt that the arguments of Erich Honecker, the Head of the GDR, still convinced the people. The SED, it was noted, “has lost 10,000 members, and 15,000 people have left the association for German-Soviet Friendship. The regime was taking new measures of repression against students in East Berlin, Jena and Erfurt, and against members of a military academy. Disciplinary proceedings were also begun against eleven students of the Weimar Architecture Academy.” In a fairly long passage, the note described attempts by the GDR regime to stifle all discussion on the Stalin era in magazines and newspapers— including the Budapester Rundschau, a bilingual German-Hungarian newspaper published in Hungary. In the long run, the blocking of discussion stirred great dissatisfaction among the population. Stalwart Communists, already disoriented because party leaders were no longer following Soviet instructions, contrary to what they had always done heretofore, had gone over to the reformists’ side. A proto-revolutionary situation was taking hold in the German Democratic Republic, the DGSE note finally observed, giving two pieces of concrete information. According to the first, as the party leaders feared social unrest, they had “put companies’ worker militias in several districts on maximum alert. In East Berlin, civil servants in charge of those militias received the directive to be prepared, in the event of a state of emergency, to fire on ‘the enemy within’ for, in a situation comparable to that of June 17, 1953, they could no longer count on Soviet help.” The second piece of information already sketched out a picture of civil war: “An exercise for the evacuation of the Central Committee building should take place with the militias of two companies. Theme of the exercise: the building is occupied by armed insurrectionary groups.” Let us emphasize the date of the DGSE intelligence report: January 2, 1989, for it is this date that makes its content so remarkable. Had it been dated—that is, written—eight months later, there would no longer have been anything extraordinary about it, other than the claim of being the product of intelligence-gathering. In October 1989, the evolution announced by the DGSE in its report from the beginning of the year had

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in fact occurred in the GDR. In the eastern part of Germany, freedom was on the march, but in the autumn of 1989, there was no longer need of an intelligence service to be aware of that. In January 1989, though, perceptions of the situation still diverged considerably. Concerning the picture of East Germany painted by the DGSE, we are struck by the clearly different vision on the German Democratic Republic and the domestic and foreign situation of that country. According to the DGSE report, the GDR was in the process of exploding, whereas to the rest of the world (and in the eyes of Honecker’s obstinate regime), it was still alive and kicking. The note thus reveals a contrast that is also a criterion: as of the beginning of 1989, it was possible to grasp what was going to come about later in the course of that year. During the winter of 1988 and into the following spring, Mitterrand’s eye remained glued to Germany. It was possible that the latter and the Soviet Union grew closer. Supposing that Germany had a keen desire for reunification, as Mitterrand presumed, such a rapprochement with the Soviets could become an explosive problem and open the way to an entente between the Soviet Union and Germany that, in the long run, would lead to an alliance between the two—an alliance sealed, as concerned the Germans, by reunification. This would be a solitary march of Germany with the Soviet Union, which would upset the balance of power in Europe and certainly engender considerable risks for everyone. No one in Europe could truly want a development like that, but if Germany was looking at Russia with such fascination, might it not feel attracted? In any case, Mitterrand believed he could detect the early signs of such a temptation when analyzing Gorbachev’s effect on the Germans, and what he saw clearly disturbed him. On February 23, 1989, he pointed out to the American president at a meeting in Tokyo: “[Gorbachev] has considerable seduction. He is the most popular politician in Germany.” And George Bush did not lessen his worry by answering: “Yes. It is a bit disturbing.” Moreover, in the eyes of the French president, the debate between the players interested by the subject of “Germany” was not being conducted as it should have been. After Bush had begun the conversation by asserting “our bilateral relations are good,” a critical Mitterrand answered: “We are somewhat outside the discussion you are having with the Germans.”33 What he thought he had thereby revealed certainly did not contribute to calming his worry regarding the Gorbachev effect on the Germans, and he expressed this once again on February 27, during joint meetings of the British and French governments in Paris. When Mitterrand made his

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personal contribution to the discussions and brought up German-Soviet relations, he again mentioned “the psychological and sentimental element” of those relations, the one that preoccupied him to such a degree: Gorbachev’s power of attraction, and therefore the Soviet Union’s, over the “Germany cut into pieces”: Gorbachev “is the most popular politician in Germany. Germany feels relief at the drop in tension with an adversary weighing so heavily on the situation of a Germany cut into pieces.”34 There was another, historic reason for Germany to be tempted to take the same road as the Soviet Union: It was focused on the East. “The President calls to mind that the Federal Republic of Germany [here, Mitterrand might also have said ‘Germany’] does not have the same geographical position as France. Likewise, its history turns it towards the East.” It was in these terms that the report of the Cabinet meeting of May 3, 1989 noted an observation of the president. Yes, it was a historical orientation, but why, in that spring of 1989, had he so insisted on this point? Was it not explained everywhere? Did the Germans themselves not say it: Over the course of history, two German states were formed? And was it not usually added that one would never again see the nation-state policy conducted by one Germany, if it became a united political actor? What then, to take up Mitterrand’s line of thinking, was this Germany that could turn entirely toward the East, if it would not have been the whole of Germany doing so? That May 3, 1989, the French president doubtless had the historic-political presence of Germany in mind, in which he discerned the wish for reunification. For Mitterrand’s just quoted phrase continues thus: “Its history turns [the Federal Republic] toward the East, all the more so since the reunification of Germany is one of its objectives and strongest desires.”35 Such then was Mitterrand’s vision in May 1989 on Federal Germany’s attitude in the area of foreign policy—one does not understand it if one does not interpret it starting from Germany’s preeminent desire for reunification. In that case, though, Germany posed a problem: How might one reconcile the project that drove it—reunification—with its relation to the West and, in particular, to France? “The difficulty arises,” Mitterrand went on at the May 3 Cabinet meeting, “when it comes to integrating Germany’s preoccupations into relations between the Western nations and Franco-­ German relations.”36 During the following months, that difficulty about which he could speak with such clarity appears in full light. But before our narrative tackles this period, we must study two other discussions that Mitterrand had in

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the month of May 1989 and in which he expressed himself most eloquently on the subject of Gorbachev, Germany’s aspirations and its reunification. The first discussion took place on May 19  in Ottawa with the Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, the second on May 21 with the American president, George H.W.  Bush, at his summer residence in Kennebunkport, Maine. A few points in the Mulroney meeting are striking. The first unusual point is that there are two handwritten reports made by the French, neither of which was prepared in view of producing a formal protocol of the meeting.37 There would be nothing particularly important about that if the two reports reproduced the same remarks in similar form, but such is not the case: Versions A and B, as I shall call them here, differ considerably, in size as much as in quality. On the various points, they are of quite length (and nothing is found on one point in one of the versions), and considerable discrepancies appear if content and style are examined. In both versions, certain passages do not go beyond fragments or allusions, so they must be considered unfinished texts, remaining open— “intermediary texts,” in a way, giving more an impression of the conversation they evoke than a faithful reflection of it. And that is how they must be read: as textual images of a discussion and not a report. On the two following pages, we quote François Mitterrand’s remarks on the topic of Germany and its reunification in the course of his discussion with Brian Mulroney in the two versions. They are arranged side by side to clearly bring out the differences:

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Version A

Version B

Reunification is the dream of all Germans. Kohl often goes to Berlin and East Germany. Having this wish as a patriot, it is not sure that he has it as a political leader. The solution to the problem depends on the Soviets— that is the principal wager they have—facing an age-old problem. I don’t consider that a threat. I don’t see the Russians … France posed a problem for him. Franco-­German wars, Bismarck, after having beaten the Austrians at Sadowa in [18]66, had had the wisdom not to destroy [the Austrian Empire]: They are Germans; they know how to deal with the SOUTH, let them. Hitler, Southern Germany’s revenge against Prussia. Dismantle the army’s Prussian staff. Prussia was the least Nazified part of Germany. But the opportunity for the victors to destroy the strong countries. I don’t see in Hitler’s approach the desire to invade France. He did everything to avoid it. He wanted to conquer the virgin lands to the East. As for the War of 1914, it was a game of dominoes. Austria-­Hungary in its relations with the Slavs. The others were dragged in by the play of alliances. The hereditary enemy was England.

On German reunification: FM: it’s their dream; it’s a constant problem. The solution to this problem, which is not necessarily desirable, depends on: (1) the Soviets; (2) the allies. A central German power is threatening; the German people in expansion. Drang nad ostern [nach Osten] … (FM quoting Mauriac) Bismark [sic] had had the wisdom not to destroy [A] ustria-Hungary after 1918 [sic!] France was not the target in 1970 [1870!] but stood in Bismark’s way … King Wilhelm did not want to become Kaiser; he wanted to remain king of Prussia. Hitler rejected Frederick II and Prussia … Prussia was the least Nazi country. The Nazis relied on Germans from the south, but it was the occasion for the victor [in 1945] to destroy Prussia Since it comes down to bringing Germans together, no one has the force to oppose it. The mistake: overflowing toward Bohemia then Poland, then toward the rich plains of Ukraine and Byelorussia. [Hitler?] wanted to avoid a conflict with the West. Conquering France was not an objective but a necessity. In [19]14–1918 that was a game of dominoes.

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Let us observe this table. As was already the case previously, Mitterrand seems filled with his idea of the Germans: They think of, and want nothing so much as their reunification. For him, Kohl had a dual personality— patriot on the one hand, politician on the other—and they pulled in two different directions. (This supposition of a psychomachia in Helmut Kohl would exert a decisive influence on Mitterrand’s political activity in October and November 1989 during the confrontation on EMU, as well as in February and March 1990 during the confrontation over the Oder-­ Neisse border.) Was the Germans’ situation changing? Only if the Soviet Union so wished. For the latter, the eventuality of a German reunification was the “forfeit” that guaranteed the eternal problem of Germany. In Version A, we read, after this statement, two phrases, one complete, the other unfinished, which are not easy to understand. We obtain a plausible interpretation by relating the word “threat” in the complete sentence to the phrase “the solution to the problem” in the previous sentence. The president would then say: I don’t consider the Soviet Union’s agreement on reunification of Germany a “threat.” That would suit the president if we were to believe Version B: For the president, as he said in hard terms, a solution to the problem—German reunification—is not necessarily desirable. Some readers may recall here the interview that Mitterrand granted on June 1, 1979, to André Fontaine and Jean-Marie Colombani of Le Monde, in which, regarding German reunification, he said: “I do not believe it to be either desirable or possible.”38 But in May 1989, those remarks were ten years old, and by that time, Mitterrand raised the subject from a completely different angle.39 However, we must not overlook the qualification he added in 1989—“not necessarily.” In relation to 1979, he withdrew part of his remark and reveals once more (which makes the relativization even more apparent) his ambivalent attitude to the Yalta order: He wanted it to disappear but recoiled before the disorder that would necessarily result from it. This retreat is expressed in the French president’s language when he said that reunification of Germany was “not necessarily desirable.” It does not absolutely have to come about in that way, said he, but it was possible that a reunification of Germany—in the wake of the dissolution of the Yalta order—would initiate changes in Europe that would certainly not be desirable for it: unilateral shifts of power; power games between the various alliances, then the triggering of conflicts they would have kindled; the disintegration of authority structures governing the whole of Europe; the awakening of nationalism, that bad demon of European politics; the likely end to European construction; and

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the possible return of wars waged by Europeans against Europeans. He saw the potential for all those developments that were contrary of what, in Mitterrand’s mind, should remain the goal of foreign policy in Europe and for Europe: the production of a balance of power and, beyond that, European unity. In worrying about this European problem, he worried about the German problem and noted that its solution was not necessarily desirable—not if that “solution” meant nothing for Europe, for its internal balance and unity (in which case, Mitterrand thought, it would mean nothing for Germany either). However, on that May 19, 1989, in his conversation with Brian Mulroney, Mitterrand’s position was eclipsed by a few of his remarks on Germany and German history, remarks that make one regret the multifaceted character, the irony, knowledge and wisdom that usually characterized his way of speaking in the workshop of world politics. Here we find openly nationalistic prejudices and populist-nationalist fantasies (“Drang nach Osten,” “the pressure toward the East …,” “no one has the strength to oppose it …,” “overflowing toward the rich plains of Ukraine …”), biased or false assertions (“France was not the target in 1870,” “King Wilhelm did not want to become kaiser,” “Hitler, southern Germany’s revenge against Prussia”) and strange associations (“the virgin lands of the East,” “the hereditary enemy was England”). But this is also what was remarkable in that meeting: Mitterrand seems not to be in a very good mood. Just before he began talking about the reunification of Germany, he reacted quite inelegantly to a phrase by his foreign minister, Roland Dumas, who certainly had nothing but good intentions. Dumas wanted simply to rectify the confusion he thought the president had made between two names. Mitterrand had said “Chancellor Schmidt …,” and Dumas interrupted him: “Kohl!” The president did not take this remark with a shrug of the shoulders or a sarcastic reply, nor did he settle for ignoring Dumas’ objection. On the contrary, he reacted with the curtness of an old schoolmaster: “No, I indeed said Schmidt. I confuse neither names nor characters.”40 On May 20, François Mitterrand left Ottawa for Kennebunkport, where George Bush received him at his summer home. On the morning of the 21st, the two presidents had an in-depth discussion on Germany before going on to another topic. The “Ottawa mood” had long left Mitterrand, perhaps under the effect of the fresh sea air of the Maine coast. Granted, he again spoke of “German expansionism” but did so as an objective analysis and not, as in Canada, like Bouvard et Pécuchet.41

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George Bush opened the discussion, hinting at his concern over the Germans: “We’re trying to work with the Germans [but] we’re not sure of succeeding […] The German Left is not constructive.”42 In any case, he said, there is “no question of letting Germany drift.” He was thinking of West Germany’s leaving the Western alliance, and its detachment from the West in the general sense—which, of course, received Mitterrand’s full interest. In response, Mitterrand immediately mentioned “Gorbachev’s popularity in the FRG,” which, for him as we know, expressed the Germans’ nostalgia for their unity. He also discussed the situation among the German Social Democrats, and explicitly raised the matter of reunification: “The SPD hopes that the disappearance of the nuclear issue will allow for reunifying Germany.” But Bush and he did not limit themselves to that subject. They would take it up again later—it is not possible to say clearly, based on the French notes, which of the two presidents brought the conversation back to the topic of reunification. In relating that conversation with Mitterrand in his 1998 book, Bush indicates that it was he who again brought up the subject.43 Regardless, the only remarks on the subject are in fact those of the French president, his American counterpart saying not a word about it, either in the French report or in Bush’s book. This difference between the remarks of one and the silence of the other is significant. On May 21, 1989, in Kennebunkport, François Mitterrand indeed asked George Bush a precise question—and received no answer. But he had one: “And you,” he asked, “are you for [the reunification of Germany]?” No answer from the American president—either then or later on. But Mitterrand stated right away: “Personally, I am not against, owing to the change[s] in Eastern Europe.”44

Notes 1. The literal text of Article 7 is as follows: “We want to overcome the painful division of Europe, which we have never accepted.” And Article 26 asserts: “The Wall dividing [Berlin] is an unacceptable symbol of the division of Europe. We seek a state of peace in Europe in which the German people regains its unity through free self-determination.” (Declaration of Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council [May 29–30, 1989], quoted here in the text sent by telegraph by the French Embassy in Brussels to the French foreign ministry and, from there, to the principle French diplomatic missions around the world.)

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2. Throughout the meeting Horst Teltschik, Chancellor’s Kohl adviser for diplomatic and security affairs, was present. In an interview Teltschik categorically confirmed the “explicit” nature of the Evian agreement between Kohl and Mitterrand (Interview with Horst Teltschik, January 9, 2017). 3. Report of the Mitterrand-Gonzalez meeting, August 25, 1987. 4. Report of the Mitterrand-De Mita meeting, June 3, 1988. 5. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, May 9, 1989; by the same, Note pour le Président de la République, May 17, 1989. In the course of an interview that he granted me on August 17, 1998 at the chancellery in Bonn, the chancellor’s adviser Joachim Bitterlich explained that “Delors’ would-be report was written by [the Bundesbank’s president,] Pöhl, even though the latter doesn’t want to admit it.” [On the full story of the birth of the Economic and Monetary Union, see Schönfelder/Thiel, Ein Markt—Eine Währung, in particular, 34: “In April 1988, the Bundesbank carried out a vast study on the development of the CEE. In it, numerous reflections of the future Delors report were anticipated.”] In the aforementioned interview, Bitterlich went on: “After the meeting [of the European Council in Hanover] during which decisions were made on the Central Bank and Monetary Union, Delors got into a car with Mitterrand, and I with Kohl. In five minutes, Kohl told me what had been decided. Then Delors and I settled in for one to two hours at night to put all that on paper and find the definitive formulations. As concerns the make-up of the board of the European Central Bank, Kohl showed the passage in question, before the decision was made by the Council, to [Hans] Tietmeyer [at the time, a junior minister at the Federal finance ministry]. He said nothing and simply added a note to the text: “personal.” And that is what happened: the members of the board of the Central Bank were elected ad personam; it is not the various nations of the Community that send representatives equipped with instructions to the Council.” 6. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, April 14, 1989. The three phases were as follows: (1) A reinforcement of monetary cooperation in the framework of the European Monetary System and the beginning of negotiations on the new institutional framework of the European Community for Economic and Monetary Union; (2) the setting up of a system of European central banks at the same time as a new treaty would come into effect; and (3) the replacement of national currencies by a single European currency, with transfer to the Community of certain economic and monetary competences. See also: Schönfelder/Thiel, Ein Markt— Eine Währung, in particular 22–48; La Déc., 160ff. 7. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, April 14, 1989. 8. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Günzburg, April 4, 1989. 9. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, May 9, 1989.

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10. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, May 17, 1989. 11. Report of the Mitterrand-De Mita meeting in Taormina, March 30, 1989. 12. CM, April 26, 1989. 13. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Ministre d’État, Note pour le Président de la République, May 2, 1989. 14. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, June 21, 1989. 15. “Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Kohl mit Staatspräsident Mitterrand, 22. Juni 1989” in Dok. Dt.Ein., 305–310. 16. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, June 24, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/177). 17. “Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Kohl mit Staatspräsident Mitterrand, 22. Juni 1989.” 18. During an interview that Élisabeth Guigou granted me on March 12, 1997, she once again explicitly declared that Chancellor Kohl, during this meeting with President Mitterrand, had “evaded” the issue of the schedule for monetary union as he had already done during the previous months and would do until December 1989. 19. In the press communiqué that the two foreign ministers published after their meeting, one does not find a single word about their work on this project, and the text is worded in very general terms. (See Communiqué commun donné par M. Dumas et M. Genscher à la presse le 19 juin.) The text of this project, presented as “confidential,” was communicated to only a limited number of people. 20. Projet de Conclusions. Approuvé par R. Dumas et H.D. Genscher à Paris, le 19 juin [1989]. 21. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, June 21, 1989. 22. Handwritten note from Élisabeth Guigou to President Mitterrand, June 22, 1989. 23. Ibid. On June 23, Genscher again called Dumas to express concerns that the chancellor’s behavior inspired in him and to tell Dumas that it would not be possible to postpone the convening of the governmental conference. What’s more, Genscher related in Gensch., 387, that the problem of the EMU had become “increasingly urgent” and was “in any case, a priority” for France. Moreover, he explains (390) that the chancellery as well as Bonn’s finance minister wanted to postpone the beginning of the intergovernmental conference owing to the elections in December 1990. 24. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, May 9, 1989. 25. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, June 24, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/177). 26. Ibid. 27. Report of the European Council meeting in Madrid, June 26–27, 1989. The following quotations are from this report.

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28. Conclusions de la Présidence, Conseil européen. Madrid, les 26/27 Juin 1989, esp. 10–11. 29. CM, August 17, 1988. 30. Report of the Mitterrand-Sheikh Jaber meeting, September 22, 1988. 31. D.G.S.E., Note de Renseignement, République Démocratique Allemande. Grave Crise au SED, January 2, 1989. 32. On November 18, the press department of the GDR’s Ministry of the Post and Telecommunications announced that “the Soviet review Sputnik was stricken from the list of journals distributed by the post.” Sputnik was a Russian magazine translated into German and favored the “glasnost” policy in the USSR; it published articles hostile to Stalinism. 33. Report of the Mitterrand-Bush meeting in Tokyo, February 23, 1989. 34. Report of the Franco-British plenary meeting in Paris, February 27, 1989. 35. CM, May 3, 1989. 36. Ibid. 37. Report of the Mitterrand-Mulroney meeting in Ottawa, May 19, 1989: Version A; Report of the Mitterrand-Mulroney meeting in Ottawa, May 19, 1989; Version B (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67). 38. Interview with François Mitterrand, Le Monde, June 1, 1979. 39. See the passages on German reunification in the following interviews: 2nd German television station (ZDF) on February 23, 1982; Cable Networks (Atlanta), March 24, 1984, London Times, October 24, 1984; 2nd German television station (ZDF), October 16, 1987; 1st German television station (ARD), October 18, 1987. 40. Report of the Mitterrand-Mulroney meeting in Ottawa, May 19, 1989: Version A (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/66). 41. Gustav Flaubert’s unfinished novel, published posthumously in 1881, deals with the two title characters’ frenzy to know everything, experiment with everything and, above all, their inability to understand correctly. 42. Report of the Mitterrand-Bush meeting in Kennebunkport, May 21, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/74). All other quotes: ibid. 43. WorldTrans., 77–78. In this report, George Bush literally quotes several of Mitterrand’s remarks without mentioning his source. 44. Report of the Mitterrand-Bush meeting in Kennebunkport, May 21, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/74).

CHAPTER 12

The “Inevitable”: The Pole Star of Unity Shines over the Germans

For the next six months, according to the rules, the presidency of the European Community fell to France on July 1. Mikhail Gorbachev made a state visit to France from July 4 to 6. At the end of their meeting at the Bucharest Summit, on July 7–8, the members of the Warsaw Pact published a final declaration in which the right of every people to self-determination was formally recognized. This is the liquidation of what was called “the Brezhnev doctrine” on the limited sovereignty of Socialist states. During the months of July and August, citizens of the GDR fled in increasing numbers through Hungary and Austria to reach West Germany. Starting on August 9, in spite of official agreements with the GDR regime, Hungary refused to repatriate refugees who had escaped from East Germany. The number of “tourists” from the GDR increased in Hungary. On June 22, the Lithuanian parliament published a declaration proclaiming the illegality of the Baltic states’ integration into the Soviet Union. On September 4, the East German police intervened against those praying for peace in the church of Saint Nicholas in Leipzig. During the night of September 10–11, the Hungarian government announced its decision to open the Austro-Hungarian border to citizens of the GDR, allowing them to go to a “country of their choice”. In three days, some 15,000 East Germans arrived in West Germany via Hungary and Austria. On September 24, in Leipzig, various East German opposition groups gathered to constitute the “New Forum”. The next day, approximately eight thousand people demonstrated in the city’s streets in favor of human rights and against the refusal, by the organs of the East German state, to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_12

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recognize the “New Forum” as a legal political force. On September 26, at the rostrum of the United Nations, Eduard Shevardnadze throws out a warning: It would be regrettable if, fifty years after World War II, certain persons were to forget the lessons of history. During the night of September 30–October 1, the GDR regime allowed East Germans who were in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw to take special trains to Federal Germany. On October 4 and 5, in Dresden, violent confrontations break out around the central railway station between demonstrators, on the one side, and members of the regular police and newly mobilized military police reservists (some of whom, however, refuse to obey and were arrested immediately), on the other. On the morning of the 5th, in flagrant contradiction to the GDR constitution, the East German regime did not hesitate to send the National People’s Army against its own population. On October 6 and 7, the leadership of the GDR organized ceremonies for the 40th anniversary of the founding of the GDR. Mikhail Gorbachev took part in the Berlin celebrations and received a personal idea of the regime’s blindness and, in particular, that of Erich Honecker. On the 9th, seventy thousand demonstrators gathered for the Monday demonstration in Leipzig, which had become a weekly event; they remained peaceful in face of the deployment of the regime’s repressive apparatus. It is from their ranks that came the famous slogan “We are the people!” The Soviet ambassador to East Berlin opposed a violent intervention of police and militia to avoid a bloodbath. On October 16, the Leipzig demonstrations brought together one hundred and fifty thousand people. October 18, Erich Honecker resigned from all his duties, and Egon Krenz took over as secretary general of the SED. GDR citizens again gathered for demonstrations on October 23; three hundred thousand protestors took to the Leipzig streets. Mikhail Gorbachev, in Helsinki, declared that those countries that were, up to present, satellites of the USSR would henceforth be able “to follow their own path”. The next day, the People’s Chamber of the GDR appoints Egon Krenz president of the GDR State Council and of the National Defense Council, replacing Erich Honecker.

In face of the upheavals underway in the European world the French government expressed its point of view with increasing clarity: It was necessary to speed up the construction of European political union. Whereas sweeping changes and revolutionary events were shaking up the world, this political construction offered Europe a haven. The more the former structures of the European world dissolved, the more the structures of the European Union had to be implemented and consolidated—and that had to be done all the faster.

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That a highly qualified expert from outside make similar reflections was, of course, of considerable interest. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former White House security advisor during the Carter Administration, conversed, on June 27, 1989, at the French defense ministry, with Christian Connan, reputed to be one of the most competent minds of the governmental apparatus in Paris in the field of European politics and, furthermore, a noteworthy connoisseur of Germany. That is how he was described by the General Secretariat of the Élysée to President Mitterrand when he was given a copy of the memo that Connan had written on July 3 concerning the essential points of his meeting with Brzezinski. François Mitterrand worked attentively on his copy: He underlined several passages scattered throughout the document, either underlining the text with a thick line or writing graphic symbols (arrows, checks) in the margin. He thus learned from Brzezinski, through Christian Connan, the following elements to which he paid particular attention: (1) the USSR must surmount serious economic difficulties. The standard of living is currently lower than during the forties. Beginning this year, hunger riots in Soviet cities are to be feared. The situation in the USSR has been critical for a number of years. That is the reason it must carry out large reductions in its military. (2) The real problem in the East is the GDR. It needs the aid from Federal Germany, aid that amounts to 2.5 billion dollars a year. (3) The USSR might allow changes in its sphere of influence. (4) The success of Franco-German cooperation depends largely on the speed at which European integration advances. (5) “As regards East Germany, the greatest danger is not the risk of unrest but the removal of the Berlin Wall.” (6) The Germans might be tempted to choose the withdrawal of American troops. This is a reason for speeding up the construction of the European political Union.1 If Brzezinski’s thoughts were received with attention by François Mitterrand, it is doubtless because they could help him prepare for the state visit that Mikhail Gorbachev would soon be making to Paris and for the meetings that they would be having on July 4. And in fact, in conversing with Gorbachev, he spoke quite quickly to his visitor about the explosive power of the problem of nationalities in the Soviet Union—regarding this, Gorbachev frankly acknowledged that he hoped only that the problem would not be used from the outside “to condemn us.” According to the French reports, Gorbachev and Mitterrand did not speak about the reunification of Germany in the course of that meetings. However, saying goodbye to Gorbachev on July 6, Mitterrand mentioned

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the “German problem” in a sort of praise to the “natural vocation” that France and the Soviet Union shared and that for him, it seems, concerned above all this problem since he spoke about it right away: “But there is a natural vocation between us, not only historical but geographical (MG [Mikhail Gorbachev] indicates his agreement). As concerns the German problem, we shall have to handle it together. It was settled in violence, it must be done in harmony.”2 On the other hand, this subject was brought up on July 5 by a German journalist during the press conference that concluded Gorbachev’s visit. He wanted to know what the two leaders thought of the right to self-­ determination in the case of the German people—and asked for the personal response of both Gorbachev and Mitterrand. Would this right allow, for example, the German people to make a decision that might go against the interests of “the four allied powers” (England, the United States, France and the Soviet Union, which remained responsible for all of Germany)? He was thinking more precisely, the journalist went on, of German reunification.3 Gorbachev replied first, with a series of phrases: “Let us respect realities,” “Let us limit ourselves to the Helsinki and Vienna processes,” “Let us build the joint European house.” He uttered no concrete word on reunification.4 Mitterrand’s reaction was completely different. He said what he had been thinking for quite some time and what he would say in slightly different formulations over the months to come: “This aspiration to reunification is a legitimate aspiration for those who feel it, here and there, in whatever part of Germany it be.” This was followed by the warning he had already associated with this subject and would often refer to in the future: “I believe that all the German leaders themselves desire that the process [leading to reunification], which they deem desirable, take place peacefully and not be a cause of new tensions.”5 As if the public debate on the topic of Germany’s reunification should not be interrupted, Mitterrand resumed the thread of the conversation he had had at the beginning of the month with Mikhail Gorbachev. This time, he was receiving representatives of five European newspapers (Le Nouvel Observateur, The Independent, El País, La Repubblica, Süddeutsche Zeitung) at the Élysée and, at the outset of the interview, he once again brought up the same topics. There we find Gorbachev’s comments on the “common house” that had to be built in Europe, those words that subsequently had been taken up with such excitement. The press was, of course, waiting impatiently for the French president to indicate what influence this project would exert on Germany’s situation, and in order that the

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question be “clear,” it was asked in these terms: “How do you envisage Germany in the future?”6 Mitterrand had very precise ideas on Germany: To his mind, Germany quite naturally aspired to overcome the division that had been imposed on it and regain its unity; if the opportunity were offered to the Germans, he reckoned, they would naturally take advantage of it; and that opportunity would come, he concluded, when—in the not-too-distant future— Moscow’s stranglehold on the Soviet empire loosened. But the question did not presume the president would go into his ideas on the subject in detail. He thus corrected it right away, judging it too general for him to answer it at present. Only afterward was the real question asked, the one corresponding to his ideas on “Germany”: “Do you think there is a process for the reunification of Germany?” To that he immediately responded: “Assuredly. Reunifying Germany is the preoccupation of all Germans. It is understandable. This problem, posed over the past forty-five years, gains importance as Germany gains in influence; in economic life, that has already happened and in political life it is underway.” A few sentences later, he repeated what he had already said at the press conference with Gorbachev on July 4: “The Germans’ aspiration for unity seems legitimate to me.” However, in keeping with his (immutable) notions on this topic, Mitterrand did not fail to again throw out his warning: “But it can only be achieved peacefully and democratically.”7 Let us again stress this formula “peacefully and democratically,” for the two words sum up Mitterrand’s whole conception of the reunification of Germany. It had to unfold in a democratic manner, in the framework of the German people’s self-determination. It had to take place in a peaceful manner, which meant that the European political world had to support it, maintaining an order, even though the order of that world would be ostensibly different following reunification. That was precisely what Mitterrand had in mind when he spoke about “conditions” or the “framework” of reunification. The phrase “peacefully and democratically” became Mitterrand’s standard formula in his remarks on reunification. Nor must we forget the tradition he revived when using this formula: It was the Gaullist tradition (which can, of course, be considered to be an essentially French tradition). Charles de Gaulle and the theorist of Gaullist thinking, Michel Debré, elaborated points of views on the reunification of Germany that do not differ from François Mitterrand’s ideas on the topic; namely that German unification must come about “peacefully and democratically”; these were the words of Michel Debré.8

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It was not in Germany’s interest to “reverse its alliances” or to sacrifice its European policy in a reunification for which, moreover, the USSR was not ready, said President Mitterrand himself in remarks made during this interview of July 27, 1989, devoted to German unification. Nor did Germany intend to practice this “reversal of alliances” or anything similar, nor to indulge in other maneuvers. At least he did not think so, he emphasized, as if wishing to attenuate his remarks. His mind was not entirely free of the fear of seeing the Germans, obsessed by their reunification, turn out to be ready to risk everything—their alliances, their friendships in European politics—to seek a path toward unity. Then an adventure dangerous for all the nations in Europe would begin that could entail the upheaval of all the conventions governing the balance of power in the European political world. Yet, Federal Germany’s leading politicians had already neutralized, by their words and behavior, the latent fear of seeing the Germans reunify “by their own means”: They had never given the impression, he explained in the interview, of wanting to obtain reunification in a way that would have heightened “internal tensions in Europe.” Moreover, he presumed, if they wanted to win their unity by a “reversal of alliances” (or, to use another contemporary phrase, by playing “the Russian card”), the Germans did not have the partner they needed. In July 1989, he did not think the USSR would accept German reunification, and the French president was far from being the only one to think so at the time.9 In Eastern Europe, however, peoples that had become unruly were continuing to rattle the bars of the Soviet empire. It was the month of May, the vacation month, and it suffices to think of these GDR citizens who were seeking an escape to freedom in Hungary. On August 30, 1989, Roland Dumas explained at the Cabinet meeting that he strongly recommended paying greater attention to the situation in the East. Quite obviously, events were creating the risk of serious crises, and, according to him, the movement questioning the ideology and power system of Communism was “accelerating” in a few countries, while the situation remained “blocked” in others. Tensions were observed everywhere, even in the USSR, as well as between different states of the Eastern Bloc, for example, between the GDR and Hungary. The West should not “provoke” the USSR; France wanted, he said, Gorbachev’s policy to succeed. In addition, France should carry out a “policy of attentive presence” in all the Eastern European nations.10 After a passing remark by Minister of European Affairs Edith Cresson on a scheduling question, the economy and finance minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, took the floor with a report on the deliberations of the

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Franco-­German economic and financial council that had taken place a week earlier. Bérégovoy related: “Up until now, Germany, unlike France, considered that going from phase 1 to phase 2 [in the creation of EMU] should depend on the results of the first phase. [But I showed the Germans] that it was necessary to move quickly, and enter into the process of going to the second phase, that is preparation of the intergovernmental conference.” And indeed, something amazing occurred—in any case, that is what the French finance minister thought he had perceived: “For the first time in the course of this informal meeting, the governor of the Bundesbank seemed to admit that the adventure [of EMU] should be attempted.”11 Dumas immediately seconded this opinion. “The great affair” of those six months, he declared, was EMU. He was delighted to hear Bérégovoy speak of this change in the German point of view, but as he did not fully believe (the Germans could change their minds), he uttered this proverb, suggesting energetic action: “We must strike while the iron is hot.” For, in the long run, it came down to the historic production of political ironworks: “European economic union will be the outstanding point of the Strasbourg Summit.”12 That is what was hoped and wished for in Paris, but the German attitude was still undergoing changes and continued to evolve. During his meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, on October 5  in Venice, President Mitterrand had to admit that the proverbial iron was not as easy to strike, because it was still far from being hot: “The FRG’s position is not terribly clear. Kohl is besieged by financiers and politicians who want to remain in the Deutschmark zone. He is changing in a favorable direction. He accepted the Delors Report. That is a political decision, of political authority over administration. But circumstances are not good (the German anxiety: the better things go, the less well they go). It is necessary to see if Kohl’s will stays the same. Even Stoltenberg isn’t too keen. It is difficult for the Germans to change paths.”13 “Circumstances are not good.” But Mitterrand wanted to “strike while the iron was hot,” giving the work of EMU an initial form, that of a governmental conference. And in the course of that second half of 1989, it was he—with his government—who was directing the work in the workshop. During this period, France (he himself) was presiding over the European Community. The time would come to show how “he struck while it was hot” at the next European summit, which would take place under his presidency, the workshop of the European Council in Strasbourg. It was necessary to prepare for it.

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His principal strength was his adviser on the Élysée team for European affairs, who worked with him on building Europe, Élisabeth Guigou. On October 11, 1989, she related at length to historian Georgette Elgey, who was working at the Élysée, how she had carried out this task and, in particular, the very latest changes. Elgey recorded Guigou’s remarks, giving rise to a freshly forged oral history at the Élysée. Guigou told the historian what happened at the time in the European workshop and what should be thought of it from the French point of view—and in particular that of President Mitterrand. So let us slip in between the historian and Mitterrand’s adviser to hear the elements of this oral history linked directly to our subject: The necessity of rooting Europe politically is vital: The stronger the community of Europe is the greater its power of attraction. There are different assessments on the policy to follow. We French say that, first of all, real economic and political progress must be made […] For the Germans, coming back into a unified process means sharing their power. In fact, they are afraid of being polluted. When they are told: Your interest is in this economic union, you who are a major exporting country, they respond: Not sufficiently. In fact, what is at stake is the capacity for integration. The president always made that analysis. We will not find a financial or technical solution but a political one. […] It is a political process, a decisive step towards integration but, for the Germans, the Deutchmark [sic] is, in a way, their flag. I’m convinced we cannot obtain more. In Madrid, two decisions: 1) Take the necessary measures for beginning the first phase; 2) Set in motion the preparatory work for the intergovernmental conference that must be held around July 1990. In early July [1989], the question arose of making best use of the French presidency [of the European Community]. The President wants the preparatory meeting to take place as soon as possible. We have settled on groups of Sherpas of finance and foreign ministers. Bérégovoy and Dumas suggested it to the President who gave his agreement. […] The letter offering our partners a meeting was not sent out until the second half of August. When the president went to see Margaret Thatcher on September 1st [at Chequers, the British prime minister’s country residence], they spoke about this group for an hour. The English did not want it. The President pointed out that the group’s vocation was not to make decisions but to set up a list

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of questions to explore. Thatcher said no. […] After an hour’s discussion, the President said that it was an initiative of the French presidency and that the group would meet on September 5, regardless of the number of participants. We were sure of the agreement of Kohl, González, Martens and Andreotti. The British have made it known that they would not go, and the Dutch had the same attitude. That very morning [September 5], the British changed their mind and decided to come. As a result, the Dutch did, too. The group thus met as twelve […] The reference document was the Delors Report. Finally, last Tuesday, a complete list of questions was drawn up. […] The objective of this meeting was to provide the Cabinet meeting of the end of October with a report on the questions to be raised so that the ministers might observe that the totality of the preparatory work had been carried out. In order for the president to announce in Strasbourg that the conference would be held during the second half of 1990, we will need German agreement. However, Kohl is caught up in his domestic problems with his far right; the German elections will take place in early December 1990. One of Kohl’s colleagues told me: I think that if the President insists, the Chancellor will accept that the conference begin in early 1990 to be concluded in 1992 under the Dutch presidency. The President: “I don’t doubt Kohl’s language, but he has difficulties of circumstances.” The president puts this intergovernmental conference even before the social charter since it is really the decisive problem for Europe. In Madrid, the setting-up of the conference, which has to define the new treaty, was, in principle, adopted, but Thatcher immediately contested this. […] For her, the agenda is a red flag. It shows everything that must be done. The President: “Precisely, I’m very much aware that it is a matter of transfer of sovereignty.”14

François Mitterrand wanted the European work to advance. He decided or provoked European decisions: He created a group of personal delegates (the “sherpas”) of the foreign and finance ministers from the twelve member states of the European Community. They would gather on September 5 for their first meeting and carry out the necessary preparatory work for the intergovernmental conference. Those who (initially) did not want to participate would remain on the sidelines, and the sherpas would accomplish their work nonetheless. And since everything would happen under France’s six-month presidency, the group would be presided over by the French representative, Élisabeth Guigou. The group was therefore called the “Guigou Commission,” which presented the “Guigou Report” at the council of European foreign ministers at its November 6 meeting.15

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There was one point on which the French president could not, of course, make any decision: that was German agreement, Federal Germany’s approval of the date for the intergovernmental conference. To Georgette Elgey, on October 11, 1989, Guigou again mentioned a collaborator of Helmut Kohl who had said that the chancellor might accept “early 1990” if Mitterrand insisted. However, only two days later, on October 13, Guigou wrote a note to the president in which another—later—date was proposed, chosen by the German chancellor: “According to Mr. Bitterlich,” she wrote, “the Chancellor would be ready to accept the following schedule: Beginning of the intergovernmental conference: second half of 1990.”16 When the president read the note and underlined the words “second half of 1990” with a thick line, perhaps he told himself that a schedule was being discussed at last and that all that was missing was the date. “On the European side, I am more optimistic than two months ago,” he said to Mario Soares, president of Portugal, when they met at the Élysée on October 16; but he could not refrain from adding: “It is necessary to set a date for an intergovernmental conference with an agenda.” This very simple phrase looked like a purely technical question. It was necessary to set a date and decide on an agenda. It was so simple, yet as soon as we consider the reality concealed by the words and rediscover this well-known game between the German economic power and the experience of French difficulties in the Franco-German report, we see how illusory it was: “The most difficult thing,” Mitterrand explained during his meeting with Soares, was “agreement on monetary problems. The FRG wants to revaluate but we have no reason to devaluate. The Franc is under attack.”17 A few more surprises lay along the road leading to Strasbourg, as can be quickly observed during the Cabinet meeting that followed the August 30 meeting, during which the foreign minister had asked for “greater attention to be paid to the situation in the East.” As of the following meeting, on September 6, it was understood that “greater attention” would no longer suffice. The world of “the East” was in full disintegration, the members of the French government explained to each other, based on their most recent information; France was going to have to take a position on the revolutionary developments in the East and especially on the reunification of Germany. Poland, reported Foreign Minister Dumas, was shaken by a severe crisis in its governmental system, and in Hungary, the Communist party was in the process of splitting; the Hungarian leaders were henceforth turning toward West Germany to request experts and

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loans. (In the following portion of his report on the “international situation,” Dumas also mentioned the fact that Hans-Dietrich Genscher had recently “assured [him] of Germany’s support” for his exercise of the European Community presidency.) For his part, Defense Minister Jean-­ Pierre Chevènement mentioned the impressive figure of 100,000 people who had reportedly fled the GDR since the beginning of the year. He commented perceptively on the GDR’s particular situation, which constituted an elementary peril for that country owing to its Communist, non-­ national, legitimacy: “The GDR remains the sole Eastern European nation whose unity is based solely on Marxist-Leninism in its Stalinist version.”18 The United States’ ambassador to Bonn, Chevènement went on, had publicly brought up “the prospect of a reunification of Germany following free elections.”19 President Mitterrand also spoke out on the topic of the “rapprochement between the two Germanies,” reckoning that “the Soviet Union [would] reject the reunification for some time to come.” But, he added, “the possibility must however be envisaged coolly.” Dumas agreed with him indirectly when he again came back to the situation in the GDR and explained that the country was “threatened with implosion.” Honecker, he said, was very sick, and the East Germans had great need “of emancipation and freedom,” especially owing to the increasingly powerful entrance of West German “mores” in the GDR. The time had come to react creatively to the dismantling of the Soviet empire and, especially, to the shifting relationship between the two German nations, with analyses, interpretations and concepts. At the Élysée, it was Mitterrand’s foreign policy adviser, Hubert Védrine, who received that task. On September 13, 1989, he presented a first detailed memo to the president who read it, underlining a few passages. I shall summarize the contents: Védrine begins by indicating that, over the past few weeks, he has met with numerous diplomats, journalists and representatives of the economic world, both French and foreign, and discussed “the changes in Eastern Europe and the USSR” with them. His note contains the essentials of what he learned on that occasion along with proposals that he subsequently made to the president: The prevailing pessimism is striking. In France, as in most Western countries with the exception of Germany, it was most often heard say that “Gorbachev won’t succeed”. Some already envisaged a fragmentation of the USSR and a “Balkanization of Eastern Europe”. In addition, it was feared that, to the

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degree that the Communist influence would decline in those countries, one would witness the reappearance of all the elements of an “archaic Eastern Europe” such as obscurantism, sects, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In France, the growing “obsession” with the reunification of Germany was more powerful than the fear of chaos. Busy denouncing Federal Germany’s drift towards the East in advance, the “French intellectual elites” (Védrine’s quotation marks) did not see the shift of Eastern Europe toward the West coming. Aside from a few rare individuals, they all remained frightened of a German colossus of 78 million inhabitants dictating its will to Europeans as a fixed point of their anxieties. The literally extraordinary events occurring in the East showed the triumph of democracy and heralded the progressive overtaking of Yalta within a greater Europe that would be less covered with arms and take up the thread of its own history. Instead of rejoicing over this, many in the West seemed frozen or ossified. Hardly numerous were those able to imagine that the Soviet empire would transform itself without horrible events. It was even more amazing, said he, to observe that only some of them truly acted to reinforce the chances of a positive development. The Western nations could especially help the Soviet Union in procuring vital products. Without massive aid from the West, the Soviet Union and Poland would not be able to guarantee decent food for their peoples much longer. The German problem was more delicate than that of the Soviet empire. Nothing led one to think that the USSR was disposed to accept a reunification in the style of the nineteenth century. The maintaining of two German states (three, if one counted Austria) [here Védrine thus considers Austria a German state] could constitute a “viable transition solution”. France’s entire interest depended on the “upheavals” in the East taking place in a “controlled fashion”.20

At the Élysée, as Védrine’s note shows, they were clearly capable of considering the question of German reunification from a constructive, relaxed point of view, this contrasting sharply with French public opinion. Védrine began by stressing the “triumph of democracy” about which one could speak in view of the developments in Eastern Europe, as did President Mitterrand in the speeches he gave during that period. Védrine spoke forcefully of the historic chance that, in his opinion, was being offered to Europe in its entirety: Thanks to a “progressive overcoming of Yalta.” Europe would succeed in rewriting the history of the Continent. What Mitterrand’s adviser said about the Soviet Union was equally noteworthy: According to him, it was involved, quite literally, in a fight for its existence,

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and in some way the West had to help it survive. That naturally meant the West could influence the Soviet Union, using economic and, in particular, financial, means. The USSR was not, however, disposed to approve of reunification of Germany (and, if we read these two remarks simultaneously, we understand why the federal chancellor could finally win a certain success in his negotiations with the USSR concerning reunification—as we explain in Chap. 16, Section “Interlude”). And finally, the fundamental argument running through Védrine’s note would have to be underlined: With a hint of disdain did he mention the emotional, irrational reactions he had noted in face of the revolutionary events in Eastern Europe. For “in the chaos,” one could fully carry out thinking leading to structures of order. Something extraordinary was happening, and the response to it had to be just as extraordinary. In Védrine’s eyes, the only conceivable policy had to be creative. He could not have better followed the intentions of the president himself, thinking for him and before him. A considerable number of memos would follow over the coming months, after that of September 13; therein Védrine would develop, in a creative, strategic spirit, ideas on the changes in Eastern Europe and, in particular, in Germany, giving those changes an initial form in the decision-making and action center that was the Élysée. Granted, nothing had really yet been said about the political work that a reunification of Germany would be. Should it be a reunification or another form of rapprochement or link between the two German states? Was the birth of one Germany starting from two in the middle of Europe conceivable, with all the consequences that it would ineluctably have on the continent’s political configurations? What could be expected—this was the major question in all that—of the Soviet Union: a radical, immediate and definitive nyet? Or perhaps a slow reorientation, imposed by the necessity of survival? Or else convulsions with profound consequences brought about by these economic difficulties, and provoking the fall of the person who embodied hope within the Soviet empire, Mikhail Gorbachev? During the two months just past, September and October, other certainties had, however, also been planted within the French government. The European East, such as it had existed up until then, was falling apart. The Soviet Union would doubtless not survive without Western aid. The GDR risked implosion (it had long been known, from the French secret services, that a very serious internal crisis reigned). The Communist regime that justified the existence of this state was collapsing at the same time as the GDR itself—leaving only Germans. This sudden return of the

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German question was giving the fever to Federal Germany, which was appealing to Europe as to a panacea. Henceforth, more than ever, it was advisable to revive a certainty widespread since the partition of Germany: France, through the responsibility of the four powers, had to participate in the legal construction of united Germany. To these certainties was added information that backed them up, broadened them, and was quickly integrated into the information held by the government. On October 16, President Mitterrand received a five-­ page letter from Defense Minister Chevènement relating a long meeting he had had with Egon Bahr21 two days earlier at a seminar on defense issues in the Black Forest (mountainous area in Germany near France). Mitterrand thus learned that, according to Bahr, Gorbachev had “given the FRG the assurance that, in case of uprisings in the GDR, he would not send in the Soviet army”; on the contrary, he intended to “push for ‘reforms.’” To the question that Chevènement had then asked Bahr— “Have the Soviets placed demands on you [West Germany] in return for pledges they have made (military nonintervention and reforms in the GDR)?”—the latter answered “categorically: ‘None.’” Moreover, Bahr had indicated to Chevènement that the CDU and SPD had elaborated “a veritable bipartisan joint policy” as regards the GDR; their respective presidents, Helmut Kohl and Hans-Jochen Vogel, just like Alfred Dregger (for the CDU) and him (for the SPD) were, for example, “in constant contact for everything concerning the situation in the GDR.”22 Information continued to support the opportunity given to the Germans. In October 1989, the government in Paris was working on the basis of this knowledge. On the first page of Chevènement’s letter, President Mitterrand wrote in the upper right-hand corner: “J.L. Bianco – Admiral Lanxade – H. Védrine – for opinion – FM,” which meant asking the Élysée chief of staff, the Élysée’s military chief of staff and the diplomatic adviser to take a stance.23 The president himself was waiting. And yet, he had no need to restrain himself. He simply did not need to, if he wanted to know more, because he knew enough: The pole star of their unity presently shone over the Germans. And they followed it. During the Cabinet meeting of October 18, Mitterrand commented on what, to him, henceforth appeared unquestionable: “Up to the present day, our foreign policy has been based on information that is changing quite quickly. The reunification of Germany is possible if the interested populations demand it. It would be pointless to think that France could oppose it.”24

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Let us emphasize the date—October 18, 1989—because it was the same day President Mitterrand gave the press conference at the Élysée with the Portuguese head of state, Mario Soares, during which he spoke (this time in public) about events then pointing to a reunification of Germany, asserting that it was now possible. The declarations he made on this point—“internal” declarations at the Cabinet meeting, the press conference declarations aimed at “the outside”—lay within the broader context of his other public appearances at that time. Among other speeches, Mitterrand gave one in which he celebrated the revolutions of freedom in Eastern Europe and spoke above all about German unity and the political work by which it could take shape. By intoning his “song of freedom” in October 1989 and addressing his message on their unity to the Germans, Mitterrand launched a clear, determined action so that reunification of Germany come about and succeed in a Europe that was advancing toward its own unity.25 The time had come. On October 24, American President George H.W. Bush also declared publicly, in an interview printed in the New York Times, that he personally did not “share a fear of [German] reunification” that was widespread— especially in Europe, he specified. He reckoned that the subject of reunification was henceforth “much more front and center” but that it “would take time” and “a prudent evolution.”26 In the weeks that followed, he did not abandon that principle of “prudent evolution,” again calling for it on November 13 at a dinner in the Residence at the White House, to which he had invited Secretary of State Baker, his security adviser, Scowcroft, and Henry Kissinger who, in late November, observed publicly and, he stressed, diverging from overall opinion in the United States, that reunification was “ineluctable.”27 Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott have described George Bush’s reflections that evening: “Since there was no stopping unification, and any attempt to slow it down would only stir up resentment among Germans both East and West, it would be best for the U.S. president to move in virtual lockstep with the West German chancellor. Bush […] had ‘no great hang-up’ about German unification. Still, he did not want to create the impression that the United States was in any way pushing it; instead, he preferred a ‘prudent evolution.’”28 “The fact that Bush and Mitterrand came out as being in favor of reunification constituted a great success,” Helmut Kohl was able to say on November 6, 1989 at a meeting of the CDU’s federal council in Cologne.29

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However, in what political work and in what form might one place the Germans’ “demand for unity, for reunification” whose “legitimacy was uncontestable”? Such was the question asked by Hubert Védrine in the note he wrote to take stock of his reflections on the German question at the time, October 18, the day the president said at the morning Cabinet meeting, “The reunification of Germany is possible.”30 Mitterrand had thereby uttered the revolutionary words—there was no doubt about that—but what should they lead to? When we speak of the legitimate demand for “unity” formulated by the Germans, what are we really talking about? That is the question Védrine asked at the Élysée. He at first observed: It is impossible to contest the legitimacy of the aspirations for unity or reunification, since, officially, the West has not ceased, during forty years, to wish that democracy be reestablished in the people’s democracies. This intention applies to Poland, Hungary, etc. … and has to apply also for the GDR.

“The movement of rapprochement between the two Germanies,” Védrine continued, appeared “inevitable.” Yet, “the finish line” [was not] decided in advance,” he remarked. And to determine this kind of end-state, he would list five variants: “a) personal freedom of movement; relaxing of border controls; b) tearing down the Wall; c) situation of easy relations, e.g. Austria-Hungary; d) BENELUX-type situation; e) confederation; f) single state.” Mitterrand’s adviser settled for this enumeration without saying anything further about this list or its diverse options. On the other hand, in the following paragraph of his note, Védrine underscored his most important thought on the German question: It was necessary to accompany the Germans in their movement toward unity if not, to be more precise, toward their reunification. Trying to counter this movement of rapprochement would be impossible. Therefore, from then on, according to him, there could no longer be any question of this when, in October 1989, one thought about the German question. Henceforth, it could no longer be a matter of anything else—it was necessary to go with the Germans by accompanying them. And a few paragraphs later, Mitterrand’s diplomatic adviser explained what he meant by “accompany”: Everything remains manageable if this movement toward the end of the division of the German people does not advance faster than the European

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construction and the overall removal of barriers between Eastern and Western Europe. Contents of the accompaniment policy: –– force the speed in the construction of the [European] Community and the insertion of the FRG into [the configuration of] the twelve; –– achieve monetary union at the risk of having the Deutschmark zone; –– actively take up Ostpolitik [Védrine uses the German term] at the level of all Western Europe. The Twelve together must attract Eastern Europe and not only that the FRG must attract the GDR; –– the Vienna negotiation [on disarmament] must lead to a balance of power at a low level that will reduce the feeling of a threat in Central Europe and the East-West antagonism. It is desirable that this be accompanied by a fairly long intermediary period and the maintaining of military alliances, even if their meaning becomes blurred. The preservation of the Warsaw pact and keeping all its current members, including East Germany, within it will be a stabilizing factor; –– a more dynamic policy of the whole EEC as regards the USSR […] to prevent it from feeling seriously threatened.”31

Once again, one of the notes written at the Élysée enables us to observe the functioning of this workshop of government, in this case concerning the German question. The president did not settle for receiving and reading his diplomatic adviser’s memo but treated it very carefully, going so far as making stylistic improvements. As is shown by the underlinings, additions, and corrections in his hand on his work copy, he integrated the memo into his own thinking on the German question and made it a tool for analysis and decision.

Notes 1. Compte rendu. A/S: Entretien avec M. Brzezinski (mardi 27 juin, 15 h 00), July 3, 1989. 2. Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting in Paris, July 4, 1989 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/75. Dossier 2). 3. Conférence de presse conjointe de M.  François Mitterrand, Président de la République, et de M. Mikhaïl Gorbatchev, Président de la Soviet Suprême de l’Union des Républiques Socialistes Soviétiques, July 5, 1989, 9. 4. Ibid., 9–10. 5. Ibid., 10.

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6. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, au “Nouvel Observateur,” à “The Independent,” à “El País,” à “La Repubblica” et à la “Süddeutsche Zeitung,” Paris, July 27, 1989, 2. 7. All quotations: ibid., 2, 3 (author’s italics). 8. In the official positions on German reunification that France subsequently adopted, alone or with other powers, among the conditions mentioned constantly were the necessarily “peaceful” and “democratic” nature of the changes (which therefore had to ensue from the Germans’ self-­ determination). This was the case in the proclamation issued by the three Western powers on June 26, 1964 concerning the treaty concluded between the USSR and the GDR, in the declaration of the Atlantic Council in Brussels, in December 1975, during the press conference given on December 2, 1982, by the French foreign minister, Claude Cheysson, in Berlin, on the German question, and in the declaration by the spokesperson of the French foreign ministry on the German question, September 20, 1984. Moreover, in their study on German reunification (Germ. Unif.) Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice also used this formula: “The US government was already formally on record in support of the peaceful and democratic reunification of Germany” (28). 9. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, au “Nouvel Observateur,” 3. 10. CM, August 30, 1989. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Report of the Mitterrand-Andreotti meeting in Venice, October 5, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67). 14. Account of Élisabeth Guigou, recorded by Georgette Elgey, Paris, October 11, 1989. 15. See also Schönfelder/Thiel, Ein Markt—Eine Währung, 60ff. 16. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, October 13, 1989. 17. Report of the Mitterrand-Soares meeting in Paris, October 16, 1989. 18. CM, September 6, 1989. In his telegram of June 27, 1989 to the director of the chancellery, the West German minister Rudolf Seiters, director of the permanent Federal German delegation to the GDR, had already clearly expressed this essential observation: “The sole qualifying feature for the nation of the GDR is socialism,” and he had drawn the following conclusion from it: “If socialism [the GDR] disappears or is put in question, the justification in the GDR autonomy also disappears.” (See Dok. Dt.Ein., 317.) In his September 7, 1989 conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Seiters told him that, for his part, “What is the GDR without the system? Germany!” To which Eagleburger replied: “Very good!” (See ibid., 397.)

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19. Dok. Dt.Ein., 408, as well as Biermann, Zwischen Kreml und Kanzleramt, 241. 20. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, a.s.: Evolution des pays de l’Est; conséquences pour l’Europe de l’Ouest et pour la France et la relance de notre politique, September 13, 1989. 21. On Bahr’s significant role in German politics and in particular for Germany’s Ostpolitik see: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/ encyclopedias-­almanacs-­transcripts-­and-­maps/egon-­bahr (accessed January 20, 2021); and David Binder, Egon Bahr, Who Laid Groundwork for German Reunification, Dies at 93, NYT, Aug. 20, 2015 (https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/world/europe/egon-­b ahr-­w ho-­ helped-­reunify-­germany-­dies-­at-­93.html, accessed January 20, 2021). 22. Letter from Jean-Pierre Chevènement to François Mitterrand, October 16, 1989. 23. Ibid. 24. CM, October 18, 1989. 25. Discours prononcé par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, devant le Parlement Européen de Strasbourg, October 25, 1989. 26. Germ. Unif., 94. See also the passage from A World Transformed (188) in which Brent Scowcroft says that “President Bush was the first in the Administration to back reunification unequivocally … I do not remember a specific moment at which it was clear he had made a firm decision” concerning German reunification. Secretary of State Baker committed himself earlier than the president on the topic of “reunification,” but Bush’s advisers brought him back. See Pol.Dipl., 161–162; Germ. Unif., 96–97; La déc., 3, 176; Dok. Dt.Ein., 51, 465ff. 27. Kissinger made this observation in an interview granted to the German television station ZDF. See its partial reproduction in Die Welt, November 30, 1989, 5. According to this text, Kissinger said precisely: “My point of view—and it is not terribly popular at the moment in America—is that reunification is ineluctable.” 28. Beschloss, Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 138. In their book, regarding the American president’s attitude (168–169), the two authors write: “At almost the same time [early December 1989], in the Oval Office, Bush was telling his aides, ‘I think Gorbachev and I basically see eye to eye on German unity. It’s coming, but it doesn’t have to come tomorrow.’” Regarding his meeting with Kissinger, Bush himself writes in A World Transformed (191): “On November 13, Henry Kissinger joined Brent [Scowcroft], Jim Baker and me for dinner in the Residence. Although we met principally to discuss his recent trip to China, the conversation inevitably turned to the dramatic events in Berlin. Unlike the controversial pro-

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posals he had put forth in our January meeting, this time his thoughts were similar to, and helped mold and reinforce, our own. He believed German reunification was inevitable because there was fundamentally no longer a basis for a separate East German state.” In a memo he wrote on November 17 for Chancellor Kohl, Horst Teltschik summed up “the attitude of the three western Allies and the Soviet Union on the German question and change in the GDR” (Dok. Dt.Ein., 546–47). His presentation was apparently positive regarding the United States but “more reserved” for France. In the paragraph devoted to the latter, he slipped in a very strange “only”: “It is considered that a process going in that direction [toward reunification] will be long and difficult and should only [?] take place peacefully, democratically and in the framework of Europe” (547). How else could it have taken place? 29. After Biedenkopf’s report in: 1989–1990, 29. 30. CM, October 18, 1989. 31. Hubert Védrine, Note. A/s: réflexions sur la question allemande, October 18, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/177).

CHAPTER 13

The Struggle with Chancellor Kohl: Mitterrand’s Leadership

On October 25, François Mitterrand gave a speech before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, mentioning in detail the current changes in Europe and the questions arising. A first meeting between representatives of the SED and the spokespersons for the “New Forum” took place on October 26 in Berlin. During that time, public meetings were held in the major cities of the GDR; a hundred thousand attended the one in Dresden. The secretary of the local SED, Hans Modrow, brought up the “revolutionary transformations” on the horizon. On October 27, the GDR government announced an amnesty for people having “fled the Republic” and for arrested demonstrators. The new leader of the party and East German state, Egon Krenz, paid a visit to Mikhail Gorbachev on October 31–November 1. The Soviet leader exhorted Krenz to reform the East German system rapidly and open the borders to prevent an “explosion.” In demonstrations in East German cities, hundreds of thousands of people demanded the abolition of the political monopoly held by the SED, freedom of the press, and economic reforms. In Federal Germany, on October 31, the SPD called for the “right to self-determination” for the GDR while demanding that “there be no sinking into pathos of reunification.” Theo Waigel, of the CSU, asked the parties of the (conservative) Union “to occupy the field on the question of Germans’ national unity.” On November 1, the GDR government did away with the visa requirement for East German citizens traveling to Czechoslovakia; the following week, some 40,000 people left the GDR via Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The 54th Franco-German consultations were held in Bonn on November 2–3. On November 4, in East Berlin, a million people marched to call for free elections and reforms. Two days later, during © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_13

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a mass demonstration in Leipzig, before 300,000 demonstrators, the resignation of the GDR’s government was called for. It occurred: on the 7th, the government of Prime Minister Willi Stoph resigned. And at the 10th congress of the SED’s Central Committee, on November 8, the Politburo resigned collectively. The same day, the Central Committee elected a new, smaller Politburo. Still on the 8th, at the Bundestag, Chancellor Kohl gave his speech on the state of the nation; we cannot, he declared, “determine in advance a solution to the German question with a scenario and calendar in hand”; by a large majority, the Bundestag voted a resolution aimed at guaranteeing the Oder-Neisse border. On the evening of November 9 and through the night, East and West Germans took the Berlin Wall by storm; it “fell.” As of November 10, in Berlin, the East German border guards began to demolish the Wall; the same day, General Secretary Gorbachev sent urgent messages to presidents Bush and Mitterrand, Chancellor Kohl and Prime Minister Thatcher, warning them against developments that were becoming uncontrollable in Germany. The weekend of November 11–12, two million inhabitants of the GDR crossed the “borders” into West Berlin and Federal Germany. On November 13, the GDR People’s Chamber elected Hans Modrow to the position of new prime minister of the GDR. The exodus out of the GDR continued. In his declaration of general policy, on November 17, Modrow proposed a “community sealed by a treaty” between the two German states. At Mitterrand’s invitation, the European Community heads of state and government gathered on November 18 for an informal meeting at the Élysée. On November 20, during the weekly Monday evening demonstration in Leipzig, the crowd, numbering some 200,000, called for reunification of Germany; banners were emblazoned with “We are one people” and “Germany, united fatherland.” On November 21, the Élysée press office announced that Mitterrand’s long-scheduled state visit to the GDR will take place December 20–22. On November 22, Mitterrand gave another speech before the European Parliament in Strasbourg in which he emphasized the “force of attraction” that the European Community” exerted and continued to exert on the developments in Eastern Europe. On November 28, at the Bundestag, Chancellor Kohl presented his “Ten-point plan for overcoming the division of Germany and Europe.” None of West Germany’s allies were previously informed of this plan. On November 29, Krenz rejected the idea of reunification and insisted on the existence of two separate, sovereign states. On December 1, the GDR People’s Chamber removed from the GDR constitution the mention of the SED’s leadership role. On December 2–3, President George H.W.  Bush and Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev held meetings aboard the Soviet warship Maxim Gorky in the port of Valetta

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(Malta). The “new” leadership of the SED, Central Committee and Politburo, with General Secretary Krenz, resigned collectively on December 3. Erich Honecker and Willi Stoph were excluded from the Party. In Strasbourg, the meeting of the European Council was held on December 8–9, during which European and monetary union was negotiated; the hypothesis of a reunification of Germany was also discussed.

A Struggle with the Federal Chancellor One political question above all separated Chancellor Kohl and the president in October–November 1989. We have already described their confrontation during the previous months concerning the intergovernmental conference or, more precisely, the date to set for its inauguration. From the French president’s point of view, as we have seen, his German partner practically no longer considered himself bound by their agreement in Evian on June 2, 1988, The chancellor obstinately dodged the president’s repeated attempts at mutually “taking stock.” The date of the opening of the intergovernmental conference was receding, postponed until late 1990 or even 1991, according to Kohl’s wishes and contrary to what Mitterrand hoped for. In any event, the date remained in abeyance, just as the moment when a date for the decision making was to be presented to the European Council. Kohl, with his tactic of dodging and postponement, had done everything to ensure no decision might be made. If he managed to impose himself in that way, he would have succeeded in having the European Community’s schedule follow his own, which was less linked to the Community than to his personal calculations of his chances for winning the next election. For his part, in early December, François Mitterrand launched the preparations for the European Council deliberations in Strasbourg. He was taking full advantage of his role as Council president because France held the presidency of the European Council for the second half of 1989. And he did everything he could to ensure the European Council made a decision on the point that Kohl did not want resolved: the date of the intergovernmental conference. The two men had opposed each other on this matter for some time but, until then, the confrontation had not turned into a real conflict. At the October 18 Cabinet meeting, Mitterrand still voiced hope. “The preparatory work for the European Council is going better than [I] hoped. We should arrive at an agreement on the intergovernmental conference and

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on the approximate meeting date.”1 His hope was premature. A few days later, on October 24, the chancellor expended extraordinary efforts to wipe it out. That evening, the two of them were dining together at the Élysée. Mitterrand also raised the topic of EMU—which came as no surprise to Kohl. There followed an exchange of very sharp—not to say cantankerous—remarks between them. The French president and the advisers present—Élisabeth Guigou and Hubert Védrine—had memories of a brutal dialogue. It was not a good day. François Mitterrand had already prepared the speech that he was to give next day, October 25, in Strasbourg before the European Parliament. In it, he counted on celebrating the revolution for freedom in Eastern Europe—“like the great moments of 1789”—saluting in emphatic terms the revolt of the East Germans. “It is however not misery that drove the East Germans to revolt! If they acted it was because they were driven by the hope of freedom!” And of course, he planned on speaking about the future of Europe: “You remember that it was in Hanover, in June 1988, under the presidency of Chancellor Kohl, that the European council confirmed its wish to arrive progressively at Economic and Monetary Union.” He was going to mention in detail the details connected with this long-­ time project, describe what had already been accomplished and above all stress all the work remaining to be done. And then he would come to this point in his speech: “For my part, I hope—I’m laying my cards on the table—that the opening conference on the new treaty will be held in the autumn of 1990 and give the national parliaments the time to ratify the new treaty before January 1, 1993.”2 To a certain extent, this would be the most important passage in the whole speech. François Mitterrand knew that and thus wanted Helmut Kohl to approve the given dates. A few hours before the October 24 dinner with the chancellor, the president, in the plane bringing him back from Valladolid, had worked with Élisabeth Guigou on the speech he would give the next day in Strasbourg, especially on the point that was essential to his mind: the schedule, setting the dates. Could he not simply declare, he asked Guigou, that he wanted a new treaty for January 1, 1993? However, he told himself that it would be better to obtain the chancellor’s agreement, and he would be meeting with him that very evening.3 At the Élysée table, the meeting initially went as usual. The chancellor and the president mentioned economic aid to Poland, the situation in the GDR, the development of the European Community and the reelection of

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the president of the European Commission. As if deeming it necessary, Kohl confirmed his European convictions quite explicitly and declared himself “concerned about hearing that Germany was no longer interested in Europe”; on the contrary: “We need the Community.”4 The “surprise” that then gradually took hold of the president and his collaborators was all the more greater, as Guigou would subsequently express it. They had not expected that Kohl, in the course of this discussion, would do everything to avoid the topic of EMU. With manifest impatience, Mitterrand ended up reminding him: “And Economic and Monetary Union?” Knowing full well what especially tormented Kohl in this project, he added another question in no uncertain terms: “Your elections are when?” The chancellor answered with teasing concision: “At the end of November 1990,” at which Mitterrand, who was gradually calling the chancellor’s bluff, asked another question: “Date of the intergovernmental conference?” But Kohl escaped from the hold and answered: “At the beginning of the process [of EMU].” To put it plainly, it would be July 1, 1990 at earliest. But Mitterrand had done everything to have the date decided much earlier, at the Strasbourg summit in early December, and Kohl was fully aware of this; his contortions made no difference. Mitterrand continued to hound him into a corner: “It must be decided.” The chancellor immediately adopted an oblique—one might say stubborn—position and responded: “It was done in Madrid.” That was, of course, inexact. By the evening of October 24, 1989, while they were dining in the Élysée, the French president and the German chancellor were no longer conversing. For some time they had been in a verbal confrontation. Kohl insisted, more and more strenuously; he did not want anything to weigh on the autumn 1990 elections (in other words, he did not want to have to say anything during the campaign about the “threat” of EMU for German voters). And when Mitterrand no longer knew what to do, he nastily asked his guest: “Is this the most important thing?”5 It was a bad day. When the president “drove Kohl into a corner,” as Élisabeth Guigou later related, the latter clearly felt “very uncomfortable” under this pressure and finally became “furious.” The next morning, when they again spoke to each other, they could only formally note the conflict that separated them and in which each henceforth intended to do what he wanted—which they told each other. Kohl said that he quite simply refused to talk about the date of the governmental conference, and Mitterrand replied: “But I will talk about it”6—which he did that very afternoon during his speech before the Parliament in Strasbourg.

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Of course, that did not end the conflict; the chancellor hedged and admonished anyone in his team who did not adopt the same attitude; for his part, the president, with even more energy than he had heretofore displayed, endeavored to reduce the chancellor’s maneuvering room for prevaricating and postponing the deadline. Franco-German coexistence became difficult, and the sudden transition from assurance to frustration that the two leaders lived through in late October-early November only reinforced their feeling of going through a bad patch. On the afternoon of October 30, in Bonn, the chancellery chief of staff, Lutz Stavenhagen, began by announcing positive news—or, at any rate, one might have that impression. In an interview that the minister gave to Reuters, he explained that the federal government henceforth agreed to convening, in the autumn of 1990, the intergovernmental conference that would prepare EMU. But in the same interview, practically in the same breath, Stavenhagen qualified his remarks—but not without sending a coded message: “However,” he explained, it was not at all sure that the national parliaments (of the EEC member states) would also be prepared to ratify the new treaty before January 1, 1993.7 This was, of course, Bonn’s response to the passage in Mitterrand’s speech before the European Parliament wherein he had revealed his intentions and mentioned the date of January 1, 1993 for the completion of EMU. And the identity of the bearer of the response also revealed the message that it concealed: Helmut Kohl, his natural interlocutor, did not answer Mitterrand but gave his chief of staff the responsibility of doing so. It was a cruel game. The information provided by Stavenhagen let the government in Paris expect that the confrontation with Bonn over the date of the intergovernmental conference was over, but the message it conveyed indicated that, in truth, the conflict could perfectly well continue, and now through intermediaries. Élisabeth Guigou was thus again able to announce to the president, in a memo dated November 1: “The preparatory works have advanced sufficiently so that, at the European Council in Strasbourg, a decision might be made to open the intergovernmental conference in the second half of 1990.” At the Élysée, they saw themselves ready for a great upswing. Guigou, in another memo to the president, preparing for his meetings with the chancellor in the coming days—November 2–3 in Bonn—again stressed, and even more forcefully, the disconcerting signals being sent by Germany to signify its “yes, but ….”8 During the first meeting, on the afternoon of November 2, the chancellor himself spoke about the “differences of opinion” and emphasized

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that he did not want “any controversy between France and Federal Germany” (as if that controversy had not already been at its height since the spring). As to the “possible” differences of opinion, he proposed—I quote from the German report—that they be “clarified and smoothed out confidently between the Élysée and the Chancellery.” This is also the reason why he had asked his foreign minister, Genscher, and finance minister, Waigel, “to exclude these issues [bearers of conflict]” from their meetings.9 However, Élisabeth Guigou, who participated in this discussion with the president, perceived the procedure proposed by Kohl and the “request” he had made from a different point of view. In her memory, one indeed sensed “Kohl’s reticence.” And as she perceived it, the chancellor had bet on the fact that, on the German side, he held the monopoly of negotiation—we would almost be inclined to say monopoly of the conflict: “He had asked Genscher to no longer speak. He used his constitutional powers to forbid Genscher any initiative.”10 No, Kohl may not have wanted “any controversy between France and Federal Germany,” but this did not prevent him from again postponing the date for the beginning of the intergovernmental conference. Three days earlier, he had asked the chancellery chief of staff to announce that the conference would be convened “in the autumn of 1990.” At present, during this discussion with François Mitterrand on November 2, he explained that “from [his] point of view, it could be held at the earliest at the end of the following year.”11 The penultimate act of this extraordinary drama bearing the banal title “Date of an intergovernmental conference” took place over two days at the end of November. One of them, November 28, 1989 has remained in historical memory: it was then that Chancellor Kohl announced his “Ten-point plan for overcoming the partition of Germany and Europe.” On the other hand, the other date, the 27th, no longer has its place in the collective memory (at least as it bears on the history that interests us here), which generally happens for “normal” days. At first sight, there is nothing surprising about this, for what happened on November 27 took place discretely and silently in the routine style characterizing daily governmental business: That day, President Mitterrand received a letter from Chancellor Kohl devoted to the “pursuit of work leading to Economic and Monetary Union.”12 However, it is necessary to be a bit curious and not settle for observing the two elements separately— Kohl’s November 27 letter to Mitterrand and the announcement of the ten-point plan the next day—but study them both at the same time: two successive days. When, in the sixth paragraph of his ten-point plan, the

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chancellor mentioned the vague objective: “Germany’s future architecture must integrate into the future architecture of the whole of Europe,”13 what then had he said to the French president the day before about the very concrete objective represented by EMU? Kohl’s letter (to which was attached a “Work schedule for the later stages up until 1993”) arrived at the Élysée on November 27 at 4:30 p.m. Élisabeth Guigou immediately had the letter and its appendix translated in her office by two translators summoned from the foreign ministry. And straightaway she wrote a memo about it that the Élysée chief of staff, Jean-­ Louis Bianco, passed on to the president along with the French translation.14 What François Mitterrand read could only alarm him. In the upper right-hand corner of the first page of Guigou’s memo, Bianco had written: “This letter is negative.” And the note itself looked like a bill of indictment: “The letter itself says nothing about the Intergovernmental Conference.” “The letter talks only about the first phase of the Economic and Monetary Union, which involves no institutional change and can therefore be implemented without an Intergovernmental Conference.” “The 3rd paragraph makes no further mention of the European Council in Strasbourg.” “The opening of the Intergovernmental Conference is postponed until the beginning of 1991.” “This [first] paragraph is even more ambiguous than the rest.”15 The president interpreted the chancellor’s letter in the only way possible: Helmut Kohl—and thereby, in his eyes, Germany—was avoiding making a firm decision on EMU.  Granted, the chancellor continued to affirm these “European convictions” that he had displayed for quite some time, but what about his acts? It did not appear that the joint announcement of a schedule for the European work was his top priority: on November 28 he first announced the stages he had set for his own political project, Germany’s unity. Where was Germany’s journey taking him? Was Kohl going his own way, alone with his country? “The President is thoroughly preoccupied by Kohl’s attitude,” Bianco observed on November 29.16 But what else could he do? What else could his collaborators and government do? “Everything is ready for the meeting of an Intergovernmental Conference,” summarized a diplomat in a foreign ministry memo that day: “but it will not take place, at best, before the end of 1990.”17 Mitterrand himself gave a press conference in Athens, where he was on a state visit at the time, during which he again brought up the problem, as he had announced to Kohl on October 25: “But I’ll talk about it.” “I,” he declared in Athens, “deem it suitable to set this date

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as of now, set it for 1990 … I’m thinking of asking the question in those terms in Strasbourg in a few days. Everyone will have to make up their minds.”18 But in his response to the chancellor’s letter on November 1st, he let it be understood that he would be ready, if not on the form, at least on the content, to satisfy the chancellor’s requests in terms of schedule. As he wrote to Kohl, he was anxious that the question of the date for inaugurating the Intergovernmental Conference be brought up in Strasbourg. The chancellor knew that Mitterrand wanted “keenly” for them to decide “in Strasbourg, the opening of the Conference before the end of 1990.” But he would not be opposed to the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Conference taking place in December: It, too, was purely formal, and the “real work would not begin, in keeping with your wish, until early 1991.”19 On December 5, three days before the beginning of the Strasbourg summit, Kohl replied to Mitterrand by not talking about Mitterrand’s declared intention of “raising the question of the opening date of the intergovernmental conference in Strasbourg.” Nor did he accept the calendar proposed by the president. On the other hand, he suggested that “in Strasbourg we [decide on] the following things: The competent commissions must finalize a report during the year 1990 to prepare the Intergovernmental Conference...” This report would then be presented to the European Council in December 1990 and discussed by its members when the intergovernmental conference began. It was a schedule that was aligned on many points but reduced one of them to nothing: the idea that the opening of the intergovernmental conference might be decided immediately—in Strasbourg, three days later—without waiting for a year and the date of December 1990, when Kohl would have overcome his very difficult obstacle. That obstacle, of course, was the elections that drove him to declare quite frankly at the end of his letter to Mitterrand, commenting on the schedule that the latter proposed to him: “I would again like to stress here to what extent a structuring of the schedule for the coming year, such as I described it to you, takes on importance for me for reasons of domestic politics.”20

The Fall of the Wall François Mitterrand was by the side of the Germans when they launched their assault on the Wall that had deprived their nation of their freedom.21 The day after The fall of the Wall, the president was in Copenhagen and,

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before his return to Paris that evening, he gave a press conference in the Danish capital during which he immediately celebrated this “great people’s movement” in the name of freedom—and compared it with the French Revolution of 1789.22 At 11 o’clock that night, the Élysée duty officer received the message, passed on orally, from Secretary General Gorbachev, which he also sent to the American president, George H.W.  Bush, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and transmitted to the general secretary of the SED. That afternoon, Chancellor Kohl had received a similar message, the contents of which were however aimed more specifically at him as head of the West German government and did not, of course, contain the passage in which Gorbachev reminded the three Western powers of the responsibility they bore, along with the Soviet Union, for what was happening in Germany and Berlin.23 In his message, the secretary general warned against the establishment of a “chaotic situation” with unpredictable consequences”24 and expressed to President Mitterrand—as to Prime Minister Thatcher and President Bush—his hope that they, for their part, would give “[their] representative instructions allowing for preventing events from taking an undesirable turn.”25 Mitterrand, however, did not take advantage of Gorbachev’s fairly clear proposal that he respond to the East Germans’ movement toward their freedom by bringing into play the responsibility of the four powers. Mrs. Thatcher reacted differently, sending a written response to Gorbachev’s message and, on November 17, a copy to President Mitterrand through the Élysée chief of staff.26 In that response Thatcher declared: “We are fully willing to enter into contact with representatives of the Soviet Union in Berlin as you suggest. The contacts that have already been made between British civil servants in Berlin and the Soviet Union’s embassy have proved useful, and I hope they will continue. Our ambassador to Bonn is ready to meet the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the FRG at any time. In this regard, the British government sets store in the quadripartite agreement of 1971 on Berlin and attaches great importance to the arrangement that provides for the four interested governments’ endeavoring to eliminate tensions and prevent possible complications.”27 Let us place the Germans under guardianship—Mitterrand did not send this kind of response to the head of the Soviet Union. “I was informed of your verbal note,” he told Mikhail Gorbachev in a telephone conversation on November 14. What was going on in the GDR, he explained, was not unexpected. Admittedly, Gorbachev answered, affirming that he was also delighted by the change underway in the country but not with the

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“gesticulation in the FRG,” which doubtless designated the debate and efforts being carried out in view of reunification. He could understand that, replied Mitterrand, adding a sentence that, uttered at that moment, was weighty with significance: “France is Federal Germany’s friend.” It was necessary to take into account the “national reality” (the existence of the one German nation) but the “balance [of the European political system should not be] destroyed.” He suggested they have a two-hour meeting in a third country after the meeting between the secretary general and President Bush “in the Mediterranean.” That seemed useful to him. Western Europe should not be absent from this exchange, but clearly, Gorbachev could not yet separate himself from the events he had just mentioned. He came back to his fears: He deemed it essential to keep cool. What was happening was important for the future of Germany and brought the European countries closer together, but it was necessary to avoid any “artificial acceleration.” Mitterrand manifestly wanted to reassure Gorbachev by telling him that he was “in contact with Kohl” who, he assured the secretary general, had affirmed “that Federal Germany would respect its commitments.”28

November 18: The European Council Dinner After November 9, France had a particular responsibility to shoulder. Indeed, it was to France that the presidency of the European Community fell in those months. On all sides, the Community was asked to react to the upheavals and revolutions in Eastern Europe, which had brought about as major an event as the fall of the Berlin Wall.29 The member country of the Community in the best position to respond to this demand, by taking the adapted initiative, was the one exercising the presidency at the time: France. Three days after the fall of the Wall, on November 12, Foreign Minister Dumas wrote to President Mitterrand regarding this debate, proposing to take the initiative of an “informal dinner” of the heads of state and government of the EEC.30 Mitterrand immediately took up Dumas’ suggestion and, as president of the European Council, invited its members to an extraordinary meeting—during a dinner at the Élysée— and at the same time convened a meeting of the EEC’s foreign ministers on November 18  in Paris. An invitation to participate in the European Council meeting was also sent to the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, and the French prime minister, Michel Rocard.

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Mitterrand liked the idea of this exceptional meeting so much because it was for a very precise and, to his mind, essential reason. He could have set deliberations, which had henceforth become unarguably necessary within the Community, on the changes in Eastern Europe, on the agenda of the “regular” meeting of the European Council that would take place at the beginning of December in Strasbourg. He also could have chosen a closer date, in the month of November. He wanted neither. With the second option—if he had moved up the Strasbourg Summit—he reckoned they would have spoken exclusively, and too hastily, about the sole topic of German reunification.31 With the first—had the topic of “Eastern Europe” been added to the Strasbourg summit—too great a workload would have been imposed on it. “If I decided on an informal meeting, it was precisely not to encumber the Strasbourg Council whose primary task was completing the construction of Europe with the social charter, currency, etc.”32 The exceptional meeting of the European Council was preceded by some preliminary work in both Paris and Bonn.33 On November 16, Roland Dumas sent a ministerial telegram to the Élysée chief of staff in which he suggested topics to be discussed at the meeting,34 and, two days later, he followed up his telegram with a detailed note in which he defined goals of the deliberations in the circle of the European Council and European foreign ministers.35 Élisabeth Guigou passed on to the president, in the morning of November 18, a note on the significance of various proposals already made on the support presented concretely for change in Eastern Europe (and plans aimed at establishing a “European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,” a European foundation for professional training, an “Economic Council” to be created with Hungary and Poland, and the possible opening up of the EEC to Eastern European nations).36 When Mitterrand opened the political discussion on the agenda at the dinner, he was able to rely on that preliminary work and his own meticulous preparation. He couched what he wanted to say in the form of four questions: First, should they immediately help the countries of the East or wait for the democratization process to advance? Second, should the issue of borders be brought up? He felt not. (Over the coming months and years, Mitterrand often recalled, and forcefully, that Europe’s borders should not be touched. He was absolutely persuaded that whoever did so would set fire to a powder keg.) Third, what attitude should be adopted vis-à-vis Gorbachev? He answered that the latter should not be

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“destabilized.” And fourth, what can we do in the framework of the Community? For this question, too, he had the beginnings of an answer but did not pursue them to the end in the context of his inaugural contribution.37 At this point, Chancellor Kohl took the floor. “I speak to you as a German and as Chancellor,” he began, before giving a speech that the audience found quite long and whose main elements were as follows: “For most citizens of the FRG, reasons of state dictate that the FRG remain in the Community. I solemnly confirm my European commitment. I see two reasons for the change in the East: 1) the [Western] Alliance has remained stable thanks to the [implementation of the] double decision of 1983; 2) the Community is dynamic. The generating fact is Gorbachev. We wish his success. I must respect the will of the East Germans.” In the course of the lively discussion that followed, the head of the Spanish government, Felipe González, stressed that they should help Gorbachev and set up EMU; the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, warned against the temptation of raising the issue of borders and acting in the first wave of euphoria and feelings (warnings doubtless aimed in particular at Chancellor Kohl). Thatcher also expressed the idea that it was necessary to strengthen NATO as well as, temporarily, the Warsaw Pact. The Danish prime minister, Pouls Schlüter, the prime minister of Luxembourg, Jacques Santer, and the Greek head of state, Christos Sartzetakis, spoke in favor of the creation of a bank for the development of Eastern Europe. The Belgian and Irish prime ministers, Wilfried A.-E. Martens and Charles J. Haughey, also stressed the necessity of helping Gorbachev. For his part, the Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, felt that a development bank oriented specifically toward Eastern Europe was superfluous and, what’s more, as Martens and Haughey had done before him, congratulated Chancellor Kohl for his attitude in face of the events in the GDR. More attentive to the practical elements, Jacques Delors spoke about the situation in Poland, Hungary and the GDR and mentioned the agreements that the Community could sign with each of those countries; in all that, he concluded, under no circumstances should Yugoslavia be overlooked. When, after other practical considerations, President Mitterrand summed up the results of the deliberations, Prime Minister Thatcher spoke again, saying that she did not agree on including the plan for the development bank among the adopted points. As the president asked her if they could not at least study it, and as the other participants pressured

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her in that direction, she modified her position and finally approved this project like all the others. Immediately after this extraordinary meeting of the European Council at the Élysée, a press conference was held, which President Mitterrand opened with a declaration on the “work” that had been accomplished.38 Moreover, in a speech on November 22, Mitterrand informed the European Parliament39 and, on the 24th, communicated the results of the European Council’s informal meeting by letter to American President Bush, Secretary General Gorbachev and the president of the GDR State Council, Egon Krenz. Before leaving for the press conference, Mitterrand took two pages of notes. On the left, Mitterrand attributed a concept or a formula to each of the dinner participants, thereby clarifying in his memory the essential part of each speech, or what he deemed as particularly essential in the information he was preparing to give out. He thus wrote next to the name “Kohl” the concept of “solidarity”; next to “Mrs. Thatcher,” the phrase “totalitarianism is in crisis”; next to “Martens,” “bank,” and so on. The right-hand column took up Mitterrand’s personal reflections or, one might also say, his principles. He clearly wanted to have as much “presence of mind” as possible at the press conference and therefore prepared very carefully, in advance, the concepts he would use to express his thinking. As if formulating a mathematical law, Mitterrand took note, for instance, of this particular expression, a sort of response to the revolutionary year that 1989 had been: “The binomial: change in the East, construction in the West (European integration).” And he also wrote down another maxim: “The German question is a European question.”

The Announcement of the Ten-Point Plan From the point of view of the French president—and his government— certain important, and therefore particularly striking, points were missing from the “Ten-point plan aimed at overcoming the partition of Germany and Europe,” presented by Helmut Kohl on November 28.40 Like the American president and his closest collaborators, François Mitterrand regretted the absence of remarks on the international aspects of German reunification (especially on issues of security policy) as well as and above all on the question of borders of a unified Germany or, more precisely, the German-Polish border.41 The fact that this last point had been neglected was almost immediately criticized by members of the Bundestag when the

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plan was presented to them. Initially, the French president did not publicly express his regret over the “missing” points, but in February 1990, in a televised interview, he would say: “I’d have preferred immediately obtaining the assurances I was asking for.”42 During speeches given during that period and in interviews he granted since the summer, had he not, on several occasions, insistently indicated the European nature of the German question, that is, the natural interest that the other European states had in the way that German unification would come about and its consequences? What worried Mitterrand above all was the chancellor’s conduct. From this point of view, certain elements of the puzzle finally came together on November 28, 1989. On the one hand, there was the letter from Kohl that had arrived the day before, concerning the imminent Strasbourg summit and in which, to quote Élisabeth Guigou, he said “nothing about the intergovernmental conference,” thereby seeming to indicate that the Germans were no longer in much of a hurry to collaborate on the construction of Europe—now that they were embarking on their great national adventure. Moreover, the German chancellor went beyond the forms of relations between Bonn and Paris, those smoothly running rules considered de rigueur on both sides when they were not set by treaty. He acted as if they did not much concern him, as if he already imagined himself in another history than the one lived jointly up until then. The “ten-point plan,” born in a network of small informal circles that intersected around the chancellor,43 was elaborated and announced without anyone uttering so much as one word beforehand to the French ally— and friend. The French government, like the other allies and even Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Federal Germany’s minister of foreign affairs, did not learn of it until the day it was made public.44 Kohl later justified this process, arguing that the plan would “certainly have been reduced to crumbs” had he carried out “consultations” within the governmental coalition in Bonn (especially with the foreign minister) and “with our allies.”45 Peter Hartmann, a close collaborator of Kohl’s at the time, who participated in the elaboration of the plan, used very similar arguments in an interview with me on May 29, 1995: “In truth, Kohl did not want the Allies and the others to know anything about his ten-point plan before it was published. Otherwise, every objection imaginable would have been raised. Nor could we inform only the French in advance: in that case, we would have also had to tell the United States, Great Britain, etc.” But in the next sentence, Hartmann said something else: He expressed criticism

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of the process followed in the presentation of the “ten-point plan”; one might also say that it amounted to a disclaimer: “It wasn’t good,” he explained, “that journalists—briefed by [Horst] Teltschik—knew about the plan even before the news was communicated to governments that are our friends.”46 The French ambassador in Bonn, Serge Boidevaix, remembered the scene of his briefing by Teltschik at the chancellery in these terms: “At 10 a.m., (the chancellor) took the floor. At noon, the three ambassadors (France, United States, Great Britain) were addressed by Mr. Teltschik. The chancellor’s adviser, without any notes or documents, clearly showing that he knew the text by heart, laid out and commented on the ten points: creation of a community of interest between the two German states, which could lead one day to confederal structures and later “flow into” (einmünden) the unity of Germany. Of this meeting I remember questions asked on the possible reactions of the Soviet Union and the answers of Mr. Teltschik, very sure of himself: He had numerous, in-depth discussions with the Soviet ambassador, (Mr. Kwizinskij), dealing with all subjects. What ought to be explored was: Did Mr. Teltschik get a bit ahead of himself in his affirmations?”47 As late as November 3, during the final press conference following the Franco-German consultations in Bonn, the French president had said: “We do not usually learn of a German move from the press. Generally we are informed beforehand. That also happens in the other direction  – Paris, when appropriate, also informs Bonn.”48 After all, the treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the French Republic on Franco-German cooperation, dating from January 22, 1963, stipulated: “The two Governments will consult each other, prior to any decision, on all important questions of foreign policy, and in the first place on questions of common interest, with a view to arriving, insofar as possible, at a similar position.”49 On November 28, 1989, Franco-German relations hardly corresponded to that outline. “Since this morning, the press office has been flooded with calls concerning Chancellor Kohl’s speeches,” spokesperson Hubert Védrine announced to the president in a memo in which he took up some of the most frequently asked questions: Had the president of the Republic been informed by Chancellor Kohl about the content of his speech? Did the way in which Chancellor Kohl presented his reunification project not prove that he did not care about the demands and legitimate interests of the four powers and of his partners within the Community?

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Did all that not prove that the Twelve would have done better to discuss the reunification of Germany on November 18 in Paris and demand guarantees from Chancellor Kohl at that time? What’s more, on the first question, Védrine noted that Jean Daniel (editor in chief of Le Nouvel Observateur) had already put the question to Jacques Delors and Felipe González who told him they had been informed of nothing. Mitterrand received the note and wrote on it: “Let them speak – FM.”50 What did that mean? He seemed to refer to the federal chancellor’s going it alone with hindsight. The phrases remembered and formulated cautiously, which he voiced publicly on Kohl’s plan, at the November 29 Athens press conference, also corresponded to such an interpretation.51 But Jean-Louis Bianco, who saw Mitterrand inside the Élysée directly and on a daily basis, certainly did not have the impression of the president’s being relaxed or having enough distance on November 29 (1989): “The President is totally preoccupied by Kohl’s attitude.”52

“The Reversal of Alliances”: Two Unambiguous Conversations, November 30 That was indeed the case. The next day, François Mitterrand himself expressed the concern that haunted him and that Bianco had noticed—or, more precisely, the preoccupation that escaped him in the course of conversations with two visitors whom he received on November 30: the president of South Korea, Roh Tae Woo, and the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Roh Tae Woo and François Mitterrand discussed of course the latest changes in Europe. Mitterrand commented on them at length. “We are witnessing a development that, up until now, has not been bloody,” he first said, “which adds to its extraordinariness.” A popular upsurge had toppled a system. This was not lost on the USSR, and its leader— Gorbachev—were at the beginning of this movement. A few serious problems had arisen, and Mitterrand listed them then paused, before finally uttering this phrase: “There remains a burning question: Germany.” That people attempt to gather is normal, he explained. Borders were the result of international conventions. It was necessary to avoid brutal shocks. The German advance had to be responsible. He had said so in Strasbourg: The wish for German reunification should not “run contrary to the construction of Europe’s unity.” “If the paces are different, there will be an accident.”53

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But what could be done to prevent the paces from differing, so that the “accident” feared by the French president not occur? Roh Tae Woo asked the question, and Mitterrand gave him an answer, consisting of two phrases of clear logic that perfectly demonstrated what was the envisaged procedure and imagined chronology: First, important decisions must be made in Strasbourg on the situation of the EEC.  Then, the Germans, in agreement with the guarantor powers, must study a type of new relationship with East Germany.

(Speaking about “Germans,” Mitterrand was clearly designating West Germans here. As for “guarantor powers,” they were, naturally, the United States, USSR, France and Great Britain.) That the “paces” not diverge would depend on “Strasbourg.” If “important decisions” were made there, one could then begin negotiations between East and West Germany, as well as with the four powers. The problem of reunification, Mitterrand added, “does not have the same force inside the Community. The unification of these peoples is normal, legitimate; there is nothing surprising about it; it follows in the direction of history. But reunification must occur within a strong Europe.” Before speaking with his next visitor that day, the West German foreign minister, Mitterrand read a note written for him by Élisabeth Guigou in preparation for his “meeting with Mr. Genscher this afternoon.” She informed him that she had paid a visit that morning to Roland Dumas to show him the draft of a letter to Chancellor Kohl, which she had written the day before on an airplane concerning Mitterrand’s answer to Kohl’s letter of November 27.54 Dumas, who had seen Genscher at 11 o’clock, immediately told Guigou that he had not brought up the chancellor’s letter with the German minister; he thought that Genscher was aware of the letter’s existence but certainly unaware of its contents. Moreover, Dumas also thought it advisable to adopt a firm attitude toward the Germans, whose behavior was becoming increasingly “arrogant.” He deemed it necessary to confirm the president’s intention to the chancellor once more: raising the question, in Strasbourg, of the date for the intergovernmental conference and insisting that a decision be made to begin before the end of 1990. Dumas also indicated that Genscher had, “in private” a few days earlier, given his agreement that the first meeting of the intergovernmental conference take place in December 1990.55

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François Mitterrand was clearly not the only one worried, nor was Paris the sole place where “the accident”56 was feared. What exactly did he mean by that? He said it to the foreign minister of the FRG during their meeting this day, November 30, 1989. Neither the choice of interlocutor nor the moment was coincidental. Hans-Dietrich Genscher himself described this conversation in a fairly long passage in his memoirs. He had, he wrote, “over the years various discussions with President Mitterrand. But this one was the most important.”57 There was no doubt about it, for the “accident” that the French president projected, before the West German foreign minister, on the screen of their common historical memory, was indeed frightening; it was a chart made up of destructive political power struggles, being surrounded and war—the image of a Europe again in the throes of those old temptations, those terrible temptations that one year sufficed to recall: “1913”: Genscher:

We enter a process of competition, between the Western integration and movement of reform in the East. I am ­convinced that the Western process of unification lag behind. No doubts should emerge as to the German position. Mitterrand: If we want to advance in East-West relations without risk, a parallel progress of European integration is necessary. If Western integration stalls, it recedes. If it recedes, the situation in Europe would change profoundly and new privileged alliances would arise. It even can not be excluded that one would fall back to the perceptual world of 1913. In 1913, however, Europe was full of menaces. Reunification, once it comes, has to be absorbed by a European Community still consolidated. Otherwise, the European partners will look for new counterweights. Germany can hope for a reunification in being part of a strong community. One doesn’t need to be a psychologist to recognize that Federal Germany on the road to EMU at the moment slows things down. Federal Germany hitherto has always been a driving force in the process of European unification. Now it puts on the brakes. For me reunification is inescapable. This inescapable development has to be put into a framework. We do not live in the year 1913. We live in 1993 [sic]. I want to help you. But not at the detriment of Europa. The Germans face a most important choice.58

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It may be supposed, during those days, that Mitterrand would not have forgotten the response that he had given to Gorbachev in 1985. The secretary general of the CPSU had, at the time, tried to drag the French president into a separate alliance with the Soviet Union. Mitterrand spoke to Margaret Thatcher about it during a meeting that took place on November 18, 1985, explaining why he had rejected this Soviet approach. For Mitterrand, it came down to getting France out of the Western Alliance—such was the logic of Gorbachev’s offer. However, it was precisely on the basis of this logic that he did not want to commit himself: It led from one alliance (that of the West) to another (a Franco-Russian alliance to begin with)—which fell squarely within the old style of European political games, which he rejected. “[Gorbachev] wanted a particular agreement,” he explained to the British prime minister, and “I said no: not changing alliances.”59 But what about the Germans? Would they react the same way if Moscow were to make them an attractive offer? Or quite simply not resist changes that no one yet controlled? Might they not too hastily become involved in something that remained unpredictable? The European nations had never stopped doing this type of thing in spite of its political imprudence. And, according to Mitterrand, the German-Russian attraction to this temptation was especially powerful. “What must be feared, “said he on February 5, 1988, to Joe M. Rodgers, the U. S. ambassador to France, “is political history going faster and new situations being created that break the machine. For example, German-Soviet relations. I’m not suspecting the Germans, but it’s a reality.”60 From Mitterrand’s point of view, Kohl had not responded to his concerns with his ten-point plan. Did the Germans know this risk of “accident” that they alone could avoid? During a discussion with Prime Minister Thatcher, on January 20, 1990, he repeated the words he had spoken to Genscher and Kohl the previous autumn. He had described the possibility of an “accident,” namely a “reversal of alliances,” that could happen if German unification were not also a European unification: “I told Kohl and Genscher: One can sketch out what will happen. You reunite 80 million Germans: No problem; you then demand the adhesion of Austria (plus ten million); you do not reach a decision on the Oder-Neisse [border], then the Germans of Czechoslovakia, Belgium … You will have succeeded much better than your predecessor … But think of the consequences. Russia will send a diplomat to London, then to Paris: Let us understand each other. I will say yes. Then we will be in 1913. I told Kohl: I don’t want to ask you to give

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up the ideal of reunification. I understand the pressure. But you are not alone [underlined in the original].”61 At a conference held in Genshagen (near Berlin) in October 1996, Hans-Dietrich Genscher referred in his talk to his conversation with Mitterrand on November 30. The French president had told him then, he now recounted, that France might “reconsider its alliances,” if Germany would “turn aside from the path everyone expected it to follow.” In an interview after the talk I asked Genscher whether he had understood this statement as a “threat.” “No,” he replied, what he sensed in Mitterrand’s words was a “foreboding.”62 In an interview I had with her on October 8, 2003, Élisabeth Guigou formulated a sort of epilogue to the Mitterrand-Genscher meeting of November 30, 1989, which she had attended: If the president had been “angry” during that discussion, it was particularly because Chancellor Kohl had still not wanted to take a stand on the issue of the Oder-Neisse line. In response to my question, Guigou added that, with Mitterrand, being “angry” did not mean he was beside himself; in those cases, on the contrary, he always adopted a way of speaking that she described as “cold” and “unambiguous.” According to her, such was the case that evening. If the Germans continued like that, he asserted, and if the border problem were not settled clearly, “a serious crisis would affect Franco-German relations.” And he apparently added: “We will thereby fall back into the world of 1913.” To his advisers in the Élysée, Guigou reported furthermore, Mitterrand had shown maps of Europe on which national borders were marked, in expressing his “fear” about an “explosion of ethnicities.” The existing borders would be threatened by all kind of territorial “revendications.” Speaking in 2003, Guigou added that the Yugoslav War showed the rationality of Mitterrand’s fear.63

The Strasbourg Summit The members of the European Council met for an initial discussion on December 8 at the Palais de Musique et des Congrès in Strasbourg, where François Mitterrand greeted them from the top of the staircase leading to the second-floor Council Room. Mitterrand, president of the Council during that period, was the host of this meeting and had summed up in a letter, sent to them on December 5, the work that awaited them on that and the next day. “In a few days,” the letter began, “we shall have the pleasure of meeting in Strasbourg, where I shall have the honor of welcoming you for the formal meeting of the European Council under the

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French Presidency.” Everyone was aware, he went on, of the fact that the European Council in Strasbourg was taking place at a moment when our continent was going through a phase of its history of which it was still difficult to perceive all the driving forces and consequences. But it was well understood that the changes that would have to be implemented would depend strongly on the attraction exerted by the model of the European Community at the economic and political levels. It was thus in the interest of all Europeans that the Community strengthen itself and accelerate its march toward a European union. In the letter, after a few additional introductory words, the president had gone on to the date of the meeting, the agenda, and then proposed a precise unfolding of deliberations. According to this timetable, the first important step would be a working lunch at which “we [the EEC heads of state and government] shall tackle, with the ministers of foreign affairs, the question of Economic and Monetary Union.” It was, he added, “a fundamental dossier for the future of our Community”; the preparatory work agreed upon at the last meeting, in Madrid, had since been completed and had clearly brought out the issues for which the intergovernmental conference would have to provide responses so that a treaty be finalized. The French president thus called the European Council’s bluff. The next two sentences of his letter also went in this direction: “We now have to reach a decision on the date of convening the conference. This decision is already perceived as the clearest proof that we can furnish of our will to take a new step toward the Community.”64 Provide proof, accomplish an act of faith for Europe as in the former founding moments (like the one the French president had himself lived in the spring of 1983): From the formal point of view, this was the mission that Mitterrand’s letter of December 5 had assigned to all the members of the European Council for their meeting in Strasbourg. The president of the Republic, his foreign minister, and advisers had done their homework. They had assured themselves that their point of view on the intergovernmental conference was shared by a majority of the European governments concerned, so it was not the real objective of the mission. Nor was the British prime minister and her customary refusal on principle (which she often abandoned at the last minute, feeling too isolated) the target. No, the mission assigned by the December 5 letter concerned Helmut Kohl. Where did he stand? If we are to believe a story printed in the London Times the morning of that December 8, Kohl had not, to that day, deviated one iota from the attitude he had adopted until then regarding the

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intergovernmental conference—no more than Mitterrand had, for his part, renounced the intention of convening it before the end of 1990. Under the title “Bonn-Paris Split Grows as Summit Opens. French Hint of Hitting Back over German Unity,” the Times announced that Chancellor Kohl still intended to provoke President Mitterrand and most of the other heads of state and government at the European summit by blocking any attempt to set a definitive date for the beginning of the intergovernmental conference on monetary union. In response, Mitterrand allegedly let it be understood that France was thinking of opposing German reunification. It had supposedly been announced the evening before, in the circles of the federal chancellery in Bonn, that Mitterrand reluctantly preferred ceding on the date of the intergovernmental conference rather than endangering the whole summit. And Élisabeth Guigou allegedly told journalists in Paris that he would ask the other members of the European Council to make a definitive decision on the date of the intergovernmental conference.65 But the conflict announced by the London daily set for the beginning of the Strasbourg summit—German blockage, “French hitting back”— did not take place. This drama in the name of a misleading banality, “date of a governmental conference,” which was so extraordinary, was, on the contrary, headed toward the last act and, in a certain way, had already reached its end—except that the journalists did not know that. Here, then, was the truth: Two days earlier, on December 6, Chancellor Kohl had put an end to the confrontation on the intergovernmental conference, henceforth agreeing, as he made known to President Mitterrand through his advisers, to have the conference begin under the “Italian presidency”— before the end of 1990.66 If the European Council, as the French presidency proposed, raised the issue of EMU after its first meeting in Strasbourg, during the luncheon that followed at 1:30 at the Château des Rohan, it could turn toward the future: Kohl would utter the liberating word. On March 12, 1997, Élisabeth Guigou granted me an interview in her office near the Champs-Elysées, where she was working at the time, having left the French government for the consulting company she had founded, Europartenaires. Our topic was the Strasbourg summit, and we reviewed the Mitterrand-Kohl confrontation on the question of the governmental conference—from “Evian” to “Strasbourg.” How did the issue of reunification fit into that? I asked her. Had there been an agreement regarding the proper processes? An agreement to reunification on the one

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hand, and an agreement on the intergovernmental conference (monetary union in a close period of time) on the other? Her reaction was as clear as it was resolute: “In 1989, I was present at all the meetings that François Mitterrand had with Helmut Kohl on Germany and Europe. There was never any bargaining: approval of reunification in exchange for progress in the European sphere. The essential thing, for François Mitterrand, was to obtain from Helmut Kohl a firm schedule in the direction of a common currency.” And after thinking for a few moments, she added: “One may, of course, wonder whether, in Helmut Kohl’s mind, there was not a link in the direction of bargaining. But he alone can answer that question.”67 In any event, Kohl’s political behavior during those days in November– December 1989 corresponds perfectly to this methodological outline: I play a shot here, in response to your shot there. Thereby combining German reunification and European Economic and Monetary Union might appear completely natural—as in the telephone conversation between George Bush and Helmut Kohl on November 29. The day before, the chancellor had presented his ten-point plan, and now the American president wanted to discuss it with him. Kohl assured him on the phone that “we in Germany have an enormous responsibility of which I am well aware.” The chancellor further added: “The same is true of our European friends. A week from now, in Strasbourg, I will see to it that we make progress with respect to the Economic and Monetary Union. It is an iron law that there will be no going it alone in German policy. It is our responsibility that we are anchored in a general whole.”68 That was of course the “shot” he had just played—and even, if need be, playing first: renouncing the conflict in exchange for an agreement. Kohl did not immediately agree—awaited by the majority of the European Council, gathered around a lunch table at the Château des Rohan—regarding an inauguration of the intergovernmental conference before the end of 1990. If he stated that, it would bind him definitively— or, more exactly, bind Federal Germany definitively. But he would still have to state it, which he did not do immediately. It is true that these consultations around a laid table had not begun with a speech by François Mitterrand asking that the topic of EMU be brought up as planned. Mitterrand did not limit himself to his own agenda. On the contrary, by the choice of his topics, he provoked a heated discussion that might lead to verbal confrontation. A dynamic of dispute gripped the gathering, and a member of the German delegation later recalled that the French delegation had seen all its plans for the summit “tossed overboard.”69

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Mitterrand began with a long account of his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev a few days earlier in Kiev. He described the mood in which he had found the secretary general and his principal concerns. Gorbachev had seemed calm, relaxed and rested. Only one thing gave food for thought: the German problem and, in particular, the issue of borders. Mitterrand stressed this several times in his narrative, as if anxious to bring out that point. Kohl was the next speaker and embarked on detailed descriptions of the latest developments in the GDR, announcing various political and practical measures to respond to them. A large portion of the allotted time had thus already passed, and the gathering found itself caught up in an unexpected discussion that might result in growing disorder. Kohl, who was still speaking but inevitably with the growing impression of wasting his breath, finally came out with: “The German problems can only be resolved under a European roof. I have often said so, but perhaps you didn’t hear me.” Margaret Thatcher then intervened: She had seemed nervous for some time, and the Germans’ attitude made her angry: “The discussion that you began should lead us to a conclusion.” Then she threw out the question to the German delegation: “The modifications must remain within the current borders. Are Messrs Kohl and Genscher certain that that can be done?” “I wish to respond immediately,” Kohl reacted before uttering a few sentences on German democratic traditions. Then, concerning the borders, he said: “We have clear arrangements [on this point] in the Warsaw Treaty.” But, he added, he had the impression that when this issue was brought up, they were speaking more about the border between West and East Germany than the border traced by the Oder-­ Neisse line. And what’s more, he said, this problem of borders was not on the agenda. The essential thing was to make the European Community advance. That was the password that he had given himself. It was at that precise moment, in order to parry the demand to which they sought to subject him, that the German chancellor played his shot. In the atmosphere of confrontation that reigned within the European Council, he gave his agreement: “Today we must set a clear calendar for showing our will to forge ahead.”70 And indeed, this “clear” calendar was drawn up, deciding that the intergovernmental conference aimed at preparing a treaty on EMU would be set in 1990.71 There was no longer any temporal gap between (West) Germany and France on the main line of the European project; the European Community could henceforth also “advance” in constructing

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its unity while the Germans were marching toward their own. Something extraordinary had apparently occurred: Two historic changes had joined and adapted their “rate of change,” in keeping with what Mitterrand had imagined. If German reunification took place, it would happen in a Europe so reinforced that reunification could not shatter it. It would be the work of the German nation, in unison with the other European nations of the Community. The members of the European summit gathered at the Château des Rohan should have danced with joy. But the participants did not rise to the occasion.72 On the contrary, the summit turned even further into a sinuous and, in many regards, “uncontrolled” event. Two elements acted in this direction: On the one hand, since the arrival in Strasbourg, members of the German delegation had defended in conversations with other delegations the idea that the European Council should, in its final declaration, formally take a position on the Germans’ right to self-determination and thus their right to political unity.73 One “shot” should now follow the other. However, some participants saw, on the other hand, a great opportunity not only for expressing, unveiled, all the fears they felt regarding German reunification but also turning them into demands that would be made of the Germans in the form of a sort of ultimatum. It is not surprising that Thatcher was the leader of this movement, joined by the Dutch and Italian prime ministers, Ruud Lubbers, and Giulio Andreotti. On the French side, despite his friendly relations with his German colleague Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Foreign Minister Roland Dumas followed close on their heels. With regard to Germany’s reunification, Joachim Bitterlich and Élisabeth Guigou noted later, Roland Dumas was stirred by “anti-German emotions.”74 But Dumas “adapts” (s’adapte), Anne Lauvergeon, the deputy secretary general of the Élysée, observed, concerning the character of Roland Dumas.75 As Foreign Minister of France, in fact, Dumas dutifully complied with the policy determined by Mitterrand. So did he, in the end, at Strasbourg. The only ones to express a positive opinion on the wish of the German delegation were the president of the EEC Commission, Jacques Delors, and the Spanish prime minister, Felipe González.76 Mitterrand remained reserved, which could be justified formally by the neutrality imposed on him by his role as president of the assembly. But on the issue of borders— which continually arose—he was of course committed (being the first to demand guarantees on this point), and the confrontation certainly did not displease him. In addition, he had very fresh memories of Kohl’s ability to prevaricate when he did not feel like deciding.

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That evening, the Council would share a dinner at the Prefecture of Strasbourg and, like others, the French president wanted the German chancellor to tell them quite precisely whether, for him, “the borders” (especially the Oder-Neisse border) were “inviolable.”77 Beforehand, Thatcher had enumerated, in a reproving tone, the “German minorities” in the USSR, Poland and Romania, precisely indicating their numbers and locales, as if the federal chancellor considered them his irredentists. And she had a personal talk with Mitterrand, at 6:45 p.m., before dinner. It was recorded by Élisabeth Guigou, on the French side, and by Charles Powell, on the British.78 The British document consists in a detailed letter from Charles Powell, whereas the French document comprises just scribbled jottings. Certain observations of the two interlocutors quoted in the first document suggest a conflation of views pointing at an alliance in opposition to Germany. Mitterrand spoke in a way, according to Powell’s letter, that couldn’t but please Margaret Thatcher. The French document, though, presents a different picture. Here, Mitterrand does evoke again “1913,” but then adds this crucial phrase that isn’t to be found in Powell’s letter: “However, the existence of the EEC [European Economic Community] changes all.” Well integrated with Europe, a unified Germany would not be, as Thatcher feared, a threat. But then, as Mitterrand had remarked to Chancellor Schmidt in October 1981, “Europe’s originality is not perceptible to her.”79 In any case, this quarrelsome European Council then formed a strange editorial committee. In keeping with the Germans’ idea, it was necessary to elaborate jointly, at dinner, a passage for the final declaration on German self-determination and unity. For quite some time, in numerous declarations and myriad documents, Federal Germany’s Western partners had claimed to be favorable to “the German people’s freely deciding its fate and regaining its unity.” After all, it was the NATO Council, during its Brussels meeting of May 29–30 of the same year, that had published a declaration also including this objective: “We seek a state of peace in Europe,” asserted the decisive phrase, “in which the German people regains its unity through free self-determination.”80 And there was, especially on this phrase, confrontation over almost every one of its words. As Helmut Kohl observed bitterly, more than one member at the gathering seemed to have forgotten what had been signed long before and whose resumption was presently being contested. Did the phrase on Germany’s self-determination not mean what it said, among Germany’s friends, at the very moment when historic events gave it meaning? Indeed, for some, this

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phrase did not have the sense it seemed to have—it had not really been made to be applied. Thatcher, who had the upper hand here, was acting with the firm intention of distinguishing between a “theoretical” principle and a “practical” principle as she had done on September 23 in Moscow during a two and a half hour discussion with Mikhail Gorbachev in St. Catherine’s hall in the Kremlin, followed by a working lunch. In recording—“nevertheless”—that part of the talks for which “it was agreed between the Prime Minister and Mr. Gorbachev that no notes should be taken,” Charles Powell, Thatcher’s Private Secretaray, wrote out on September 24, back at 10 Downing Street, what Thatcher had said: “The Prime Minister then asked Mr. Gorbachev’s assessment of the prospects in the GDR.  Surely there would be changes in the direction of greater democracy there as well. That would awaken fears in some quarters of German reunification. Although NATO traditionally made statements supporting Germany’s aspiration to be reunited, in practice we would not welcome it at all.”81 The dispute in the Prefecture of Strasbourg lasted and spread. “Is this paragraph accepted or not?” thundered the German chancellor. “For seven years I’ve been taking risks for Europe every day, and afterwards, these suspicions? My feelings at the moment: it’s not pretty!” But for his part, he obstinately refused to give way to the keen pressure exerted, in particular by Margaret Thatcher, for him to accept integrating a phrase on the “inviolability” of the German-Polish border into the final declaration. The tensions causing the dispute were well known before the Summit, as a note, written by Mitterrand’s adviser Loïc Hennekine on December 5, shows: The Germans have requested that a sentence be integrated [final declaration of the European Council] which will express an explicit endorsement of German unity. Hearing from this request other delegations have made objections. The Political Directors think it will be difficult to mention the question of reunification without taking up a position concerning the problem of the Western borders of Poland. This argument is likely to make the Germans think twice.82

Toward the end of the dinner in Strasbourg on December 8, 1989, it seemed that they finally had a text. Mitterrand commented mischievously: “It’s an excellent text, for it expresses everyone’s afterthoughts.” It still

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had to be formally accepted by everyone, as it was. As president of the assembly, Mitterrand forcefully demanded: It was necessary to “accept the whole thing”! Roland Dumas, who had taken on the role of copy editor, read the text once again as he had noted it down. And once again, Margaret Thatcher called the whole thing into question, protesting that there was nothing on “Helsinki” (on the OSCE agreements signed in the Finnish capital), nothing on the “borders” (on their inviolability in Europe as had been decided in Helsinki).83 Agreement of all was thus unthinkable. Mitterrand came up with the idea of delegating the writing of a text acceptable by all parties; he asked the minister of foreign affairs, Dumas, and with him, his counterpart, Genscher, to get down to the task with the help of their collaborators. They did so and, as Joachim Bitterlich, who was part of the German delegation, later noted, they “glued the pieces back together.”84 It took all night—hardly surprising when one thinks only of Dumas’ contradictory behavior, charged with carrying out the mission the president gave him (picking up the pieces and gluing them back together), but, just after dinner, he had again come down upon Helmut Kohl in company of Margaret Thatcher and, without concealing his personal skepticism, subjected him to a sort of interrogation on the question of reunification and the Oder-Neisse border.85 The British prime minister had, moreover, lobbied the participants since the beginning of the summit, to rant and rave against the Germans and their hopes of reunification, which set the other summit members against them.86 It was only on the morning of December 9 that the sought-after text was found—a “masterpiece” as Joachim Bitterlich later described it87— and which could be approved, first by Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, then by the other members of the European Council. It was integrated into the final declaration of the European Council in Strasbourg. There, one can read: We seek the strengthening of the state of peace in Europe in which the German people will regain its unity through free self-determination. This process should take place peacefully and democratically, in full respect of the relevant agreements and treaties and all the principles defined by the Helsinki Final Act in a context of dialogue and East-West cooperation. It also has to be placed in the perspective of European integration.88

With regard to the policy that was shaped for the likely event of a reunification of Germany, the function of leadership was, we may conclude, in

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view of Baker’s later claim, actually a matter of contention.89 The European Council that Mitterrand has presided over at Strasbourg chose, in any case, a policy formulation that distinctly echoes Mitterrand’s objectives and the words he used to express them.90 François Mitterrand did not leave Strasbourg without sending a bouquet of friendly words across the Rhine. During the press conference he held after the end of the summit with the Commission president, Jacques Delors, in the Erasmus Room of the Palais de la Musique et des Congrès, he was questioned about Franco-German relations and the crisis that could have affected them had they not reached an agreement for inaugurating the intergovernmental conference before the end of 1990. As if he no longer wanted to think about the agreement and to forget about the previous conflict, he answered in conciliatory words, ending with this phrase: “I am delighted that our friends, particularly our German friends, admitted that it was rather important that this decision be made.”91

Notes 1. CM, October 18, 1989. 2. Discours prononcé par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, devant le Parlement Européen de Strasbourg, October 25, 1989. 3. Account of Élisabeth Guigou recorded by Georgette Elgey, Paris, December 13, 1989. 4. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting on October 24, 1989. 5. Ibid. 6. Account of Élisabeth Guigou recorded by Georgette Elgey, Paris, December 13, 1989. 7. “Bonn in agreement with Paris on an EMU conference” titled, for example, La Tribune de l’Expansion on October 31, publishing an article the second half of which was however devoted to the “but” of the German junior minister. The reason I mention that article here is also because Élisabeth Guigou immediately sent a copy of it to President Mitterrand to inform him of Lutz Stavenhagen’s remarks. 8. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République (Objet: Conseil des Ministres du 2 novembre. Résultats des travaux du groupe sur l’Union Economique et Monétaire), November 1, 1989. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République (Objet: Votre entretien avec le Chancelier Kohl lors du Sommet franco-allemand. Questions européennes), Paris, November 1, 1989.

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9. Dok. Dt.Ein., 472. 10. Account of Élisabeth Guigou recorded by Georgette Elgey, Paris, December 13, 1989. 11. Dok. Dt.Ein, 472. 12. The text of the letter and its appendix, titled “Work Calendar for the Later Stages up Until 1993,” are reproduced in: Dok. Dt.Ein, 565–567. 13. Kaiser, Deutschlands Vereinigung, 165. 14. Federal Republic of Germany, the federal chancellor. Bonn, November 27, 1989. His Excellence, Mr. François Mitterrand, president of the French Republic, Paris. “Mister President, Dear François …,” and so on, and “Work calendar for the later stages up until 1993” (Letter from the federal chancellor with work calendar, in French translation). 15. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République (Objet: Lettre du Chancelier Kohl), November 27, 1989. 16. Personal note by Jean-Louis Bianco (PC). 17. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Directeur des Affaires Économiques et Financières, Note, A/s. Suite des travaux sur l‘Union Economique et Monétaire, November 29, 1989. 18. Conférence de presse du Président de la République à l’occasion de son déplacement à Athènes, in Politique étrangère de la France, Textes et Documents, November 1989, 107. 19. Letter from President Mitterrand to Chancellor Kohl (“Mister Chancellor, Dear Helmut …”) of December 1, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/EG/60). See also “Vorlage des Vortragenden Legationsrats I Bitterlich an Bundeskanzler Kohl, Bonn, 2/3. Dezember 1989, Betr.: Vorbereitung ER Strasbourg, hier: Antwort von Staatspräsident Mitterrand auf Ihr Schreiben vom 27. November 1989” in: Dok. Dt.Ein., 614–615. 20. Letter from Chancellor Kohl to François Mitterrand, Bonn, December 5, 1989, in: AN-AG/5(4)/EG/60 and Dok. Dt.Ein, 614–615. 21. On the events leading up to the fall of the Wall and on that particular event, see Schabowski, Der Absturz, 306–311; Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story. 22. Conférence de Presse de Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, lors de sa visite à Copenhague, November 10, 1989. 23. Message delivered orally on November 10, 1989 at 11 p.m. at the Duty Office. For the message of Gorbachev to Mitterrand, Thatcher and Bush, dated November 10, 1989, see: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/ document/111536.pdf?v=3e6fc3e296c4537928718d774c52b093 (accessed January 31, 2021). Message from the secretary general to Chancellor Kohl, delivered orally on November 10, 1989, in: Dok. Dt.Ein., 504–505.

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24. “Above all, Gorbachev feared that the henceforth unhindered efforts, in view of reunification might perturb the European evolution. He wanted to avoid any bloodshed,” wrote Anatoly Chernayev on the situation after the fall of the Wall (Die letzten Jahre, 266. See also 265, 268: “He wanted absolutely to avoid chaos.”) 25. Message delivered orally on 11-10-1989 at 11 p.m. at the Duty Office. 26. “Mr. President—Mrs. Thatcher sent me her response to Mr. Gorbachev – JLB,” wrote Élysée chief of staff Jean-Louis Bianco at the top of the first page of the official translation (into French) of Margaret Thatcher’s letter. After reading it, Mitterrand wrote “seen” on it. 27. Ibid. 28. Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev telephone conversation, November 14, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 29. At a special meeting on November 11, 1989, the West German Cabinet discussed at length the event and the conclusions to be drawn from it. See: KAB 1989, November 11. 30. Roland Dumas, Note pour le Président de la République, November 12, 1989. 31. A passage of the telephone conversation between Chancellor Kohl and President Bush on November 17 might reinforce this idea. During the discussion, the latter explained, according to the German report, that it was necessary to “avoid unpredictable reactions in the GDR or Soviet Union. Therefore grand rhetoric was to be avoided. It was also necessary to refrain from speaking about reunification or a calendar for the demolition of the Wall. People could not accept that the president of the United States find himself in a position where he should give in to the euphoric atmosphere” (Dok. Dt.Ein., p. 539). From this report the American one differs markedly: “The euphoric excitement in the U.S. runs the risk of forcing unforeseen action in the USSR or the GDR that would be very bad. We will not by making exhortations about unification or setting any timetables. We will not exacerbate the problem by having the President of the United States posturing on the Berlin Wall” (see: https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­telcons/1989-­11-­17%2D%2DKohl.pdf. Accessed February 5, 2021). 32. CM, November 15, 1989. In Bonn, in particular, another agenda was obviously envisaged for the Strasbourg summit. Again on November 12, the German chancellor told Polish President Jaruzelski: “At present, what the Germans of the FRG need is stability, a period of peace, a liberal evolution. It came down to,” he added, “a common European House... He knew quite well that the mistrust regarding the Germans also survived in the West … This is precisely the reason why he agreed, with President Mitterrand, on the fact that, taking into account the GDR’s evolution, the

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decisive point was henceforth that the European summit in Strasbourg, in early December, under Mitterrand’s presidency, be a success” (Dok. Dt.Ein., 528). However, in the “proposal for the meeting” written by Joachim Bitterlich and presented to Chancellor Kohl on November 17 in preparation for the “informal dinner” at the Elysée, it was said: “The invitation to this dinner might also conceal the intention to come back to the original conception for Strasbourg” ([underlined in the original] Dok. Dt.Ein., 542). According to his Memoirs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher seems to have understood the French president right away: “Given the dramatic events that were taking place in Europe, but especially in the GDR, President Mitterrand, acting president of the European Council, invited to a brief extraordinary summit in Paris on November 18, 1989. It was manifest: François Mitterrand wanted to encourage two changes: on the one hand, the reform movement in Central Europe … But, moreover, it was necessary to create a bank to aid development in the former Eastern countries … At the same time, Mitterrand wanted to pursue the process of European unification, the objective of the European Union” (Gensch., 662). 33. See Horst Teltschik’s report to Chancellor Kohl, Bonn, November 17, 1989: in Dok. Dt.Ein., 541–548. 34. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, TD Ministère 001, Message for Jean-­ Louis Bianco, signed by Roland Dumas, November 16, 1989. 35. Roland Dumas, Note pour le Président de la République, November 18, 1989. The main lines indicated by Roland Dumas were the following: the European Community must present itself as an open community in the process of consolidation, which goes beyond the lines of separation in Europe and demonstrates its solidarity with the states of Eastern Europe; it must show the western Allies as well as the USSR that the “Twelve” see themselves as the main players in the definition of a new European balance, are henceforth carrying out aid operations to the countries of Eastern Europe and stress the connection between a reinforcement of the Community and its opening to the East. 36. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République, November 18, 1989. 37. Documentary note: Information from Jacques Delors to Jean-Louis Bianco (PC). Quotations in the following paragraphs are from this memo. 38. Conférence de Presse à l’issue de la Réunion Informelle et du Dîner des Chefs d’État et de Gouvernement des Pays Membres de la Communauté Economique Européenne, November 18, 1989. 39. Allocution de Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, devant le Parlement Européen, November 22, 1989. 40. Chancellor Kohl presented his plan to the German Bundestag on November 28, 1989, during a budget debate. On the elaboration of the plan, see

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Auss.d.E., 97ff.; Kohl, Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit, 157ff.; Teltsch. 42ff. As to an English version of the text see: http://ghdi.ghi-­dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=223 (accessed February 10, 2021). 41. In A World Transformed (196), regarding the reaction of the American government, Brent Scowcroft writes: “Kohl’s ten points provided a basic approach to cooperation and possible reunification for the two Germanies, but from our perspective they ignored the international and security aspects, especially a united Germany’s relationship to NATO and the issue of boundaries.” Here, however, Mitterrand and Scowcroft had quite divergent positions, of course, regarding NATO. Whereas for the Americans the essential thing was that Germany, even unified, remain a member of NATO, the French president sought to use the upheavals of 1989–1990 to build a “European defense” as an alternative to NATO. In his memoirs, the American Secretary of State at the time, James A.  Baker, used the expression “relatively modest proposal” to describe Kohl’s plan “that called for the establishment of several joint environmental, economic, and other commissions” (Pol.Dipl., 166). Baker does not discuss the “missing” points. 42. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, à Madame Anne Sinclair dans le cadre de l’émission 7/7 sur TF1, March 25, 1990, 32. 43. Kohl, Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit, 158–160; Dipl.d.E., 98–101; Teltsch., 48–51. 44. American President Bush was somewhat favored; on November 28, he received a letter in which Kohl indicated, among other things: “I summarized in ten points, in front of the German Parliament, what the German government intends to do to move towards this goal” (Letter from Chancellor Kohl to President Bush, Bonn, November 18, 1989, for the text see: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/dc.html?doc=2755710-­Document-­10, accessed February 11, 2021). 45. Which he did, for example, in his article “Wir durften uns die Initiative zur Einheit nicht aus der Hand nehmen lassen,” FAZ, 261, November 9, 1999, 19, or else, previously and in similar terms, in Kohl, Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit, 167. 46. Interview with Peter Hartmann in Bonn, May 29, 1995. Teltschik (Teltsch., 53) himself related that he had informed twenty-three journalists on November 27 in the early evening at the chancellery: “All the major dailies, television stations and a few radios were present. After the greeting by Seiters, I commented on the speech that the chancellor would give the next day.” At the very moment that Chancellor Kohl was presenting the “ten-point plan” to the Bundestag, Teltschik was giving very general, direct information to the German and foreign media.

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47. The French ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, July 29, 1991. 48. Conférence de Presse conjointe de Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, et du Chancelier Helmut Kohl, à l’issue des 54e consultations franco-allemandes à Bonn, November 2–3, 1989, 7. 49. For the text of the treaty see: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ natosource/text-­of-­the-­elysee-­treaty-­joint-­declaration-­of-­francogerman-­ friendship/ (accessed February 13, 2021). 50. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, November 28, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/177, Dossier 1). 51. Conférence de Presse du Président de la République à l’occasion de son déplacement à Athènes, in Politique Étrangère de la France, p. 106: “A confederation—for the moment, I do not care to go into detail about the proposals that have been stated and deserve reflection, of Chancellor Kohl who has decided on a whole outline for the future. If these two states decide democratically to establish a confederation between them to deal jointly with a certain number of subjects, I don’t see who could forbid it. Moreover, we have a certain number of specific agreements with West Germany. No, this aspect of things does not shock me in the least.” 52. Personal note by Jean-Louis Bianco (PC). 53. Report of the Mitterrand-Roh Tae Woo meeting in Paris, November 30, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67). The following quotations are from this report. 54. As to that letter see p. 292. 55. Élisabeth Guigou, Note pour le Président de la République (Objet: Votre entretien avec M. Genscher cet après-midi. Compte rendu de mon entrevue avec R. Dumas ce matin), November 30, 1989. 56. In A World Transformed (242), George H.W.  Bush relates a discussion with the NATO secretary General, Manfred Wörner, on February 10, 1990, at Camp David, during which Wörner had warned him against the idea of reopening “the old Pandora’s box of competition and rivalry in Europe.” 57. Gensch., 679. 58. A French report does not appear to exist. For the German report, quoted here, see: Dipl.d.E., 57–59; translation by T.S. A few days earlier, on November 23, François Mitterrand said in a meeting with Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party: “Without the EEC, we would be in the pre-1914 situation with all those problems of nationalities” (Report of the Mitterrand-­ Kinnock meeting in Paris, November 23, 1989/ AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67.) 59. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in London, November 18, 1985 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75, Dossier 2).

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60. Report of the Mitterrand-Rodgers meeting in Paris, February 2, 1988. 61. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in Paris, January 20, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). François Mitterrand spoke in similar terms in his conversation with the president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, on March 19, 1990.: “Mr. Gorbachev, or someone else, will say to himself, that’s becoming dangerous, especially if Germany becomes interested in the nuclear. He will make contact with London; Mrs. Thatcher will say yes. Mr. Gorbachev will call me: I will answer yes, the Italians, too” (Report of the Mitterrand-Havel meeting in Paris, March 19, 1990/ AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 62. Interview with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, October 18, 1996. 63. Interview with Élisabeth Guigou in Paris, October 8, 2003. 64. Letter from President François Mitterrand to the members of the European Council, Paris, December 5, 1989. 65. The Times, December 8, 1989, 1, 22. 66. President Mitterrand received this information from Élisabeth Guigou, whose colleague at the chancellery, Joachim Bitterlich, had informed her by telephone. 67. Interview with Élisabeth Guigou in Paris, October 8, 2003. See also the interview Élisabeth Guigou gave to Frédéric Clavert on September 29, 2008, in which she affirms our story: https://www.cvce.eu/content/pub lication/2016/8/17/2ce69748-­3edc-­47e7-­8842-­d2cb14b1f0eb/publishable_fr.pdf,10. Accessed January 28, 2021). 68. https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­t elcons/1989-­1 1-­ 29%2D%2DKohl.pdf (accessed January 29, 2021). 69. Interview with Joachim Bitterlich in Bonn, August 17, 1998. 70. Report of the working lunch of the European Council in Strasbourg, December 8, 1989. 71. In the summit’s final declaration, we read precisely: “Following a discussion on the calling of an Intergovernmental Conference charged with preparing an amendment of the Treaty with a view to the final stages of EMU, the President of the European Council noted that the necessary majority existed for convening such a conference … That conference will meet under the auspices of the Italian authorities, before the end of 1990” (Conclusions of the Presidency—European Council—Strasbourg—8 and 9 December 1989) 72. Only Prime Minister Felipe González found brilliant formulations in the speech he gave toward the end of the luncheon at the Château des Rohan. 73. In the FAZ article already quoted, “Wir durften uns die Initiative zur Einheit nicht mehr aus der Hand nehmen lassen,” Helmut Kohl spoke about the “insistent pressure of the German delegation for the contents of the letter on German unity joined to the Moscow Treaty be […] integrated

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into the final joint declaration of the EEC summit in Strasbourg, early December 1989.” Helmut Kohl referred to the “Letter of the Federal German minister of foreign affairs, Walter Scheel, to his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, on the occasion of the signing of the GermanSoviet Treaty in Moscow, on August 12, 1970 (Letter on German unity)” in which they insisted on the fact that this treaty did not contradict the Federal Republic of Germany’s political objective: acting in favor of a state of peace in Europe within which the German people will regain its unity by freely deciding its fate (based on the text taken up in: Europa-Archiv, 17, 1970: D 399). On this point see also Gensch., 689–691; Auss.d.E., 146–148; La déc., vol. 3, 206–208. 74. Interview with Joachim Bitterlich on September 30, 2003; Interview with Élisabeth Guigou, October 8, 2003. In a text dating from June 13, 2020 Dumas openly attests his negative attitude toward “the Germans.” See: Dufourcq, Retour sur la fin de la guerre froide, 175–183. 75. Interview with Anne Lauvergeon, October 27, 1997. 76. Interview with Joachim Bitterlich on September 30, 2003. 77. Report of the European Council dinner in Strasbourg, September 8, 1989. 78. FM/Thatcher vendredi 8 déc. 89 à Strasbourg, 18  h45 (AN-AG/5(4)/ CD/75, dossier 2, sous dossier 15). Letter from Mr. Powell (Strasbourg) to Mr. Wall, 8 December 1989 (DBPO, 164–166. 79. Report of the Mitterrand-Schmidt meeting at Latche, October 8, 1981 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/72). 80. Declaration of the Heads of State and Government participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council, Brussels, 29–30 May 1989 (https://www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-­95/c890530a.htm, accessed January 15, 2021). 81. PREM 19–3175. A record of the conversation Thatcher-Gorbachev held in the archive of the Gorbachev Foundation, (Fond 1, Opis 1) renders Thatcher’s word otherwise: “Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the NATO communiqué may sound different, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany.” See: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/ NSAEBB422/ (Document 7, accessed January 15, 2021). 82. Loïc Hennekine, Note pour le Président de la République, 5 décembre 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/4160). 83. Report of the European Council dinner in Strasbourg, December 8, 1989. 84. Interview with Joachim Bitterlich in Bonn, August 17, 1998. 85. Thus did Élisabeth Guigou describe the scene for me during an interview in Paris on March 12, 1997. 86. According to Élisabeth Guigou’s account (interview in Paris, October 8, 2003).

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87. Interview with Joachim Bitterlich in Paris, September 30, 2003. 88. Conclusions of the Presidency—European Council—Strasbourg—8 and 9 December 1989 (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/strasbourg/st_en.pdf, 15. Accessed January 17, 2021). 89. See p. 338ff. 90. In a diplomatic telegram of the Quai d’Orsay, dated from December 14, 1989, the discussion is described that took place at the summit with regard to the wording of the paragraph on Germany’s reunification. While the Germans, it is reported, wished to have the phrasing used, without any changes made, that had been applied in the letter on German unity addressed to the Soviet government at the signing of the Treaty of Moscow, other delegations found it inappropriate, under the current circumstances. The Chair of the summit—Mitterrand, Dumas and their collaborators— took up the task then to combine the German text with a number of precisions, like the “peaceful and democratic character of the [reunification] process.” The end result, the report concludes, “illustrates the formula of the President” (Mitterrand). See: Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Le Directeur des Affaires Politiques, TD Diplomatie 26,102, December 14, 1989 (AN-­AG/5(4)/EG/59). 91. Conférence de Presse du Président de la République à l’issue du Conseil européen, Strasbourg, 9 décembre 1989, in: Politique Étrangère de la France, Textes et Documents, December 1989, 152.

CHAPTER 14

Germany’s Reunification Is Orchestrated by the Actors in the Workshop of World Politics

In the GDR, during the first half of December, the repressive apparatus of the old regime collapsed; demonstrators occupied the State Security (Stasi) offices, first on December 4  in Leipzig, Erfurt and Suhl, and the police (Volkspolizei), now on the side of the people, guarded the buildings; combat groups were also disarmed. At the NATO summit in Brussels, on December 4, the American president, George H.W.  Bush set his conditions for a reunification of Germany, calling them “principles”. On December 5, Hans-­ Dietrich Genscher, the West German minister of foreign affairs, was in Moscow for summit conversations; his interlocutors there categorically rejected the federal government’s ten-point plan. In Czechoslovakia, a new government was formed, of which most members are non-Communist. Erich Honecker and other high officials of the old regime were put under arrest in their exclusive residential neighborhood of Wandlitz. On December 8, Egon Krenz in turn resigned as president of the GDR State Council and the National Defense Council, duties he had taken up only forty-nine days earlier. His successor was Manfred Gerlach, president of the LPD.1 François Mitterrand and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Kiev. The “Monday demonstrations” continued in December, with the establishment of German unity being very clearly called for. On December 7, in the GDR, representatives of the SED, parties of the Bloc,2 mass organizations and opposition groups met for a “Roundtable”. They agreed to organize free elections on May 6, 1990, dissolve the Stasi and prepare a new GDR constitution. The Supreme Soviet of Lithuania decided to strike from the country’s constitution an article heretofore guaranteeing the monopoly

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of power to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). On December 8, the former East German prime minister, Willi Stoph, and the former minister of state security, Erich Mielke, were arrested; investigation proceedings began against them and Erich Honecker for abuse of power and corruption. At the request of the Soviets, and after eighteen years of interruption, the Allied Control Council met again in West Berlin. On December 12, still in West Berlin, American Secretary of State James Baker, gave a speech in which he outlined “the architecture of a new era” for Europe and transatlantic relations and again spoke about the “principles” that President Bush formulated for the reunification of Germany. On December 15, in Bonn, the federal government presented the Schengen Agreement but did not sign it, out of regard for the GDR. During a special congress of the CDU-East, the next day, Lothar de Maizière, deputy-prime minister of the GDR, was elected Party president; the Party voted in favor of German unity and a market economy. Presidents Mitterrand and Bush met at Saint Martin’s in the Caribbean. On December 18, the European Community Council of Ministers decided to pass a trade and cooperation agreement with the GDR, for which the European Commission drafted a proposal. The same day, the last “Monday demonstration” took place in Leipzig, in memory of the victims of Stalinism. On December 19, Chancellor Kohl went to Dresden; during the public speech he gave there, the crowd clearly demanded German unity. The chancellor and GDR prime minister, Hans Modrow, agreed that the two German states form a contractual community. The same day, Willy Brandt held a meeting in Magdeburg, and Rita Süssmuth held one in Heiligenstadt. The Lithuanian Communist Party proclaimed its independence vis-à-vis the CPSU. President Mitterrand visited the GDR from December 20 to 22. On December 22, the Brandenburg Gate was opened. On the 29th, Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia. On the occasion of his New Year’s speech, on December 31, François Mitterrand put forward his idea for a “European confederation”. On January 9, the GDR government completed a proposal to create a legal community from the two German states. On January 15, in East Berlin, several tens of thousands stormed the former Stasi central headquarters. Following anti-Armenian pogroms that had occurred on January 13, Mikhail Gorbachev sent Soviet troops to Azerbaijan; they entered Baku, the capital, on January 19. There were hundreds of deaths. Before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the president of the EEC, Jacques Delors, declared that the GDR has its place in the European Community should it so wish.

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Kiev On December 6, the French president travelled to Kiev where he was to meet with the leader of the Soviet Union. He judged intolerable the idea that, in the historical and global upheavals the world had to face, the two major powers might deliberate, just the two of them, on the planet’s future and that Europe not participate in their discussions. “Yalta,” which had formerly signified “the omnipotence of the two big ones,” was “over,” Mitterrand asserted during a conversation he had had the morning of December 9 in Strasbourg, for a brief finalizing with the main members of the French delegation.3 A few days earlier, on November 15, he had declared to the French cabinet, regarding the upcoming meeting between President Bush and General Secretary Gorbachev in Malta: “Tell me what can be said by the two main powers, which have an influence on the fate of Europe. (Aside from the veto that Gorbachev will repeat, naturally.) What is the difference compared to the era of Stalin or Brezhnev? Before the people’s movement, they had their own problems, with the affirmation of the [European] Community, the two majors are obliged to follow the crowd.”4 However, he regretted that they were still far from the moment when it would be impossible to organize this kind of meeting without “the presence of Europe.” He nonetheless agreed with Gorbachev, during their telephone conversation on November 14, to get together only after the Soviet leader’s meeting with the American president, “in the Mediterranean,” as Mitterrand said. The meeting took place a few days after the Malta “summit,”5 so that the secretary general might inform the French president about it with memories still fresh in his mind. Gorbachev devoted most of the first half of their two-hour-conversation to it, in the early evening of December 6 (followed by a working dinner in a larger group).6 According to Gorbachev’s report, Bush had discussed at length economic issues and problems linked to security policy.7 Having decided to broach other subjects, Gorbachev went on to the topic that was going to constitute the second half of the meeting with Mitterrand: Germany. And he became angry. Helmut Kohl was, he said, a provincial, and his ten-point plan was perfectly unacceptable. Gorbachev even accused Kohl of having issued a “diktat.” Just the day before, in Moscow, he had called Hans-Dietrich Genscher: “You tell me you agree with me, but your support for the Kohl plan and your whole career contradict that. After this plan you should

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resign.”8 Things went on like that for a while but the Soviet leader offered no constructive personal ideas on the subject. But, before, François Mitterrand had spoken, and had put the subject of Germany, which had so upset his guest, into the framework of a few considerations of principle. Admittedly, there were two sovereign German states, he explained, but the border separating two parts of one people was not the same thing as a border separating two states that mutually considered the other as foreign. Certainly, the Germans had to respect the principle of the inviolability of borders. One ought to acknowledge nevertheless: “There must be reunification.”9 Mitterrand expressed clear words: “I am not worried about the reunification of Germany. But it has to occur democratically and peacefully (Ja ne bojus’ vossodinenija Germanii. No nado, c ̌toby ono prochodilo demokratic ̌eski i mirno).10 And a moment later Mitterrand added, quite in line with his geopolitical thinking: “I adhere to my obligation to preserve the balance (balans) in Europe, and to preserve peace (mir).”11 A reunification of Germany need to occur “in the framework of a large Europe.” Reckless, unconsidered acts had to be avoided. “It [was] out of the question to go back to the Europe of 1913.”12 Mitterrand, it should be noted, refused, during this December 6 conversation with Gorbachev in Kiev, to conclude with the Soviet Union a pact directed against Germany and hence to initiate a “reversal of alliances.” The information that Mitterrand had just received from Bonn, that December 6, 1989, had certainly played a part: Chancellor Kohl was ready to relax his position on the question of the intergovernmental conference. And for the president of France, that signified that the European Community, which was protecting Europe from a return to the “1913” situation, was alive. In Kiev as elsewhere, the French president ignored the instruction that his Minister of Defense, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, had given him by a handwritten letter the day before his departure for Kiev. In discussing the German question with Gorbachev, Chevènement demanded, Mitterrand ought to exclude a unification of Germany in the name of Europe: “The right of Europe to security and peace is superior to the right of Germany to unify.”13 Both Mikhail Gorbachev and François Mitterrand told each other that they had had a similar reaction to the proclamation of the ten-point plan. Gorbachev explained that the Soviets had not been informed of it. “Nor we,” replied Mitterrand. As concerned France, it was necessary to add that, in addition, the 1963 Franco-German treaty provided for each

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government informing the other before any decision on important issues touching on foreign policy. This had not been done regarding the ten-­ point plan: the French government had not been informed.14 On the evening of December 6, at 10:15, the French president flew back to Paris. Beforehand, he held a half-hour press conference during which he spoke at length on the division of Germany and how to surmount it. He was henceforth counting on reunification—there was no doubt about that: “There must be reunification,” he had said that very afternoon to Gorbachev. He was already thinking about the following problem: figuring out in what circumstances, by what preliminaries, and with what conditions, the two separate parts of Germany could be put back together. He had long imagined something to this end, as he had imagined what France’s attitude might be as regards Germany, divided Germany and, above all, the Germany that was uniting. Let us therefore listen to what François Mitterrand said to the press in Kiev on that evening of December 6, 1989: I will remind you that France is the friend and ally of Federal Germany. It is obvious that France, which feels itself to be the friend of Federal Germany, cannot be indifferent to what is affecting the German people. France was itself divided not so long ago—in any case, in my generation. I therefore understand quite well what must be the feelings and aspirations of those who are experiencing a drama of this kind. The problem arises in precise terms, which I spelled out in Bonn a few weeks ago. There can be only a democratic process and there can only be a peaceful process. Let us pass on the democratic conditions that concern the internal developments in East Germany and the conditions in which the two Germanies would be brought to discuss this subject. Let us linger on the peaceful conditions. In fact, none of our countries in Europe—especially one whose weight is so heavy, whose geographic location being what it is—, no country in Europe can avoid acting without taking European balance into account, without taking the others into account, without taking the historical situation of the moment into account, which results from the last world war. Thus my response is that it is proper not to invert the order of factors and, in particular, not begin by raising the problems of borders. There is a great deal to be done.15

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“Now There Is an Alliance Doctrine” And retrospectively, we can say that much indeed had been done—the work accomplished was extraordinary. The actors in the German reunification drama built their scenario workshop, then elaborated the scenario, first everyone for himself (before presenting it as such in the workshop and to the public), then gradually bringing them closer together (in the course of increasingly intense cooperation in the workshop) and finally (after a diplomatic formalization of the workshop, which turned into the “two-­ plus-­ four negotiations”), by sharing them. Like members of a drama group they found themselves in the middle of a play they had to perform. But they had no script for the play nor even a synopsis. They were already acting the drama out, but had yet to begin with writing it. What was most extraordinary about this story was that the actors accomplished their mission and in fact performed the play they were meant to act, doing so in a way that was as creative as was required of them, making it a veritable opus, a magnificent piece of history. By writing the script and synopsis of the play as they went along, they acted it out and thereby began to control it. This orchestration of action during the action began between mid-­ November and mid-December 1989. It had, of course, already been thought about previously and, of course, they continued to think and discuss in order to know in what framework, by following which principles, according to what preconditions or rules, or under what conditions, a reassembling of the separate parts of Germany could take place if it had to take place. François Mitterrand was the first, in early July 1989 to formulate and publicly present his ideas on the rules for the birth of a unified Germany. It was not until mid-December 1989,16 then the months of January and February 1990 that the leadership of the Soviet Union examined and made public its ideas, questions and requirements regarding the reunification of Germany. In late January 1990—January 26 or 2717—the crucial musing took place in Moscow. Gorbachev had convened a small group of advisers for a meeting to discuss the “German problem.” Anatoly S.  Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s adviser for foreign and security policy, compiled a record of the meeting.18 In the Diary that he kept Chernyaev chronicled the meeting too, dating it on January 25.19 The group around Gorbachev, it seems, deliberated under the assumption that a reunification of Germany had to be considered and they ought to reflect upon their ways to influence and shape such an event. “We agreed in the end,”

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Gorbachev later wrote in his Memoirs,” that German reunification should be regarded as inevitable.”20 At his meeting in Moscow with Chancellor Kohl on February 10, Gorbachev explicitly gave, on behalf of the Soviet Union, the consent to Germany’s unification.21 Well before, in November 1989, Washington had begun to think about “the international context of German reunification,”22 then set to work on an American program. At the end of November, then in early December, first the Secretary of State, James A.  Baker, then President George H.W. Bush were able to announce in a very effective form the principles established by the Americans for implementing German unity. We shall come back to this point as well as to the Soviet “conceptions” and French “principles.” It is however necessary to first make a number of general remarks concerning them all. The actors in the scenario workshop tackled the task of producing a German reunification scenario with very different intentions and conceptions. Nonetheless, there was fundamental agreement among them as to what they wanted not only to produce but also, and above all, to avoid by stating these principles. Among the foreseeable events it was therefore necessary to exclude: [T]hat the Germans, going through an “unregulated unification”(unification sauvage) as it was called in France, acquire their unity by themselves (allying themselves to do so with such and such a calculating “partner”)23 and that, on this point as on the unification of Germany in general, an interplay of alliances and competition settled in among the powers of the European and transatlantic zone, an interplay that would propagate an “anarchy of reunification” (Gorbachev’s term) that, according to his prediction, would “sweep away” everything that had been obtained heretofore in the course of the European process;24 that there be “bloodshed”; that the error of a “new Versailles” be committed (that is, that the Germans be treated as they had been by the Versailles Treaty in 1919);25 that they fall back into the world of “1913”. The governments of Washington, Paris and Moscow reckoned that certain points were lacking in the “ten-point plan” presented by Chancellor Kohl and that these were the main points on the international context of a reunification of Germany. With the lists of principles they drew up, they very consciously filled those gaps.26

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The whole time that they worked in the scenario workshop, they also used terms other than “principles” that had to apply to a reunification of Germany. Thus, the Americans used the terms “points,” “guidelines,” or “conditions”; the French used, in addition to the word “principles,” the concepts of “rules,” “prerequisites,” or “conditions.” As for the Germans— above all Foreign Minister Genscher—they preferred in particular the concepts of Rahmen (framework) and Rahmenbedingungen (frame of conditions). President Mitterrand and his diplomatic adviser, Hubert Védrine, also readily used the verb “accompany,” which, in their mind, designated fairly precisely what they imagined: that Germany would travel the path toward its unity “accompanied.” But the various French actors did not all use the same vocabulary either: Mitterrand often used one term for another, sometimes talking about “rules,” then about “preconditions” or else “principles.” Clearly none of these terms was absolute. On the other hand, the motives for the choice of terms may be deduced from the context of each of his remarks. When a certain legal rigor seemed apposite to him (and this was not foreign to the president, holder of a law degree), he used the term “conditions.” If his appraisal of the situation inspired a more relaxed attitude, he used the word “rules” instead. Védrine, his closest adviser on the issue of German reunification, acted rather differently, constantly using the concept of “conditions” in a harder sense than that designated by the term “preconditions” and closer to the “conditions” imposed by the signing of a treaty. This is seen, for example, in the categorical sentence he wrote about the “principles” in his book Les mondes de François Mitterrand: “Basically, [Mitterrand] poses conditions, whereas [Thatcher] is against [the reunification of Germany].”27 In an interview in October 1996, Védrine explained that, to his mind, it was “perfectly normal” to talk about conditions in politics, that this term was used daily everywhere. What had Kohl done if not set conditions, he asked me, when the chancellor requested that the number of German deputies to the European Parliament be increased after reunification? But he was perhaps too lucid on this point, Védrine reckoned, adding that he did not know that, for the Germans, the term Bedingung had a harder, more cutting ring to it than the term “conditions,” its French translation.28 But it was clearly possible to give this term a more obliging meaning than Védrine’s (and even Mitterrand’s); in any event, that is what the Élysée chief of staff, Jean-Louis Bianco, did as regards the principles to be applied to German reunification as he explained to me in October

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1996. By conditions, in the context of German reunification, he had never meant but one thing: that it be put “on the right track.” During our conversation, Bianco explicitly stressed that the word “conditions” signified nothing more.29 But, of course, the image of “the right track” also implied the idea of a goal: a reunification that would be a success. From that objective, prerequisites quite logically ensued that would have to be set as conditions. Védrine described, as “soberly” as he wanted it, this goal that France was aiming at in the course of the reunification process. For him, it came down to following the track—or else applying the principles required by the goal, which it imposed in a certain way. “As for the actions of France run by François Mitterrand, all centered on a simple idea: a “shepherding” German reunification so that all of Europe would come out of it stronger and not weaker, and that there remain no “time bomb” later on.”30 In Washington, too, opinions diverged on the principles involved. Whereas the White House in general—under the influence of President Bush—had a rather conciliatory attitude, the State Department adopted a harder attitude that was shared by Brent Scowcroft, the president’s security adviser (against his softer advisers). Up until the month of November 1989, Scowcroft, as he related in A World Transformed, did not deem it judicious to encourage a reunification of Germany, and that opinion brought him closer to the position of the State Department than his own colleagues. For, in fact, no one outside “the Germanies”—and especially “among our European allies”—he wrote, had deemed German reunification a good idea. What was so bad about a partition of Germany, it was asked at the time, as long as the situation was stable? A reunification process could, on the contrary, turn out to be extremely destabilizing and even, in the long run, lead to a conflict. But, observing the revolutionary events of November in the GDR, he then understood that it was henceforth inevitable to envisage a reunification of Germany. One thing was certain from the outset for Bush’s security adviser: “It was important that Germany remain firmly within the alliance, not just because it was important to anchor that nation to the West and to assuage the fears of its neighbors, but also because it was crucial to NATO. Germany is the geographic center of the alliance and its second largest economy and military power. A Germany outside NATO would ‘gut’ the alliance. Its membership was also important to the United States for practical reasons. Without Germany and our bases there, our military presence in NATO, and in Europe, would be difficult if not impossible to maintain.”31

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It is the application of this principle, the conditio sine qua non imposed by the Americans—a reunified Germany’s belonging to NATO—that was going to set off the longest struggles in the course of 1990. At the beginning of that year, the Americans had, according to Hubert Védrine, a noticeably tougher attitude as regards the Germans than did the French during the previous confrontation, in the autumn of 1989, when there had been a question of harmonizing the European and German reunifications.32 With the general agreement about such a linkage at the Strasbourg European Summit, France had already obtained this precondition to German unification, the most important of all that President Mitterrand wanted to see fulfilled as regarded France. Only the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border would, in French eyes, have as much importance during the negotiations on the framework of reunification—and that issue would be the cause of a new, harsh conflict with Chancellor Kohl in February 1990. We have already inventoried France’s principles regarding the reunification of Germany. Here I would like to summarize them as clearly as possible, to compare with the American and Soviet lists and the ideas developed on the German side by the minister of foreign affairs, Hans-­ Dietrich Genscher: The French principles: The determining element is the will of the German people, their self-­ determination. (In the course of the December 13, 1989 Cabinet meeting, the French president stressed once more that reunification would take place when both parts of the German people, in the GDR and Federal Germany, so wished.)33 Reunification of Germany can only occur democratically and peacefully. The road leading to reunification is a European road. There can be no contradiction between German unification and European unification. (Federal) Germany has contracted commitments in view of the unification of Europe. These still apply to a reunified Germany. The formation of a reunified Germany in its European environment presupposes the agreement of its neighbors. The remodeling of Europe following a reunification of Germany must reestablish a balance of power in Europe. Along with the issue of German reunification, that of security in Europe must be settled. There can be no German neutrality.

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The German unification process implies recognition of the Oder-Neisse border, in keeping with the principle of border inviolability stated in the “final act” of the Helsinki Conference.34 No territorial demands can be made. Unified Germany shall not possess atomic weapons. The American principles: There were four in all, almost identical to the French principles (with the exception of NATO).35 After the principles had been set out at the State Department and the White House, where they were brought up for discussion, it was Secretary of State James A. Baker, who first presented them to the public on November 29, 1989 at a meeting in Washington with accredited White House reporters. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed them “definitive” to a certain degree and in a slightly modified form, on December 4 at the NATO summit in Brussels. I shall first present them in the raw version as stated by Brent Scowcroft in A World Transformed, then in the polished version as announced by President Bush in Brussels. Brent Scowcroft: To be acceptable to the United States, unification must: respect the principle of self-determination no matter what the Germans chose; be consistent with Germany’s membership in NATO and the EC; be gradual and peaceful and regard the interests of the other Europeans; respect the principles of Helsinki regarding the inviolability of existing borders and allow the possibility of peaceful change.36

President Bush: First, self-determination must be pursued without prejudice to its outcome. We should not at this time endorse nor exclude any particular vision of unity. Second, unification should occur in the context of Germany’s continued commitment to NATO and an increasingly integrated European Community, and with due regard for the legal role and responsibilities of the Allied powers. Third, in the interests of general European stability, moves toward unification must be peaceful, gradual, and part of a step-by-step process. Last, on the question of borders we should reiterate our support for the principles of the Helsinki Final Act.”37

It was under the term Rahmenbedingungen (frame of conditions) that the West German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, summarized, at the period of nascent scenarios, the thoughts that had come to him on what form reunification might take. (Later, in 1996, however, he

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preferred the term “criteria.”)38 Setting aside the German people’s right to self-determination, which was considered natural, Genscher aimed at integrating the German question into the development of the European continent to ensure a unified Germany was a member of the European Community and NATO and determining a clear attitude on the issue of Germany’s eastern border:39 The Soviet principles: The Soviet Union’s foreign affairs minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, was the first to summarize them in his speech on December 18, 1989 in Brussels before the political commission of the European Parliament. According to what Shevardnadze said, the Soviet Union was asking for: We were interested, first of all, in political, legal, and material guarantees. Second, in the readiness of the united Germany to recognize the existing borders in Europe. Third, in the military and political status of the new Germany. Fourth, in coordinating the building of a unified Germany with the Helsinki process to overcome the division of Europe.40

Shevardnadze later wrote that, with this Brussels speech and, more concretely, with the ideas on reunification presented in it, Moscow was “put at the table on German reunification.”41 During that period, on February 21, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev, in an interview with Pravda, once again laid out a list of seven principles: The Germans were entitled to unity. They could decide themselves on the deadlines and forms of their unification. But the other states concerned by this had to participate. Nothing should threaten the interests of Germany’s neighbors. The borders that resulted from World War II were inviolable. The alliances [i.e., the Warsaw Pact and NATO] had to be preserved. Reunification had to be integrated organically into the European process.42

In mid-December, the actors in the workshop of world politics were already reflecting less about the question of German reunification than its orchestration—but not doing so in the same way: In the West, they were thinking about it in a targeted manner, in the Soviet Union in a somewhat diffuse way that, from the outside, appeared disjointed. What problems

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was reunification going to bring with it? Could one imagine solutions and therefore think up a process promising a reunification that would respect these principles? At the Cabinet meeting on December 20, President Mitterrand declared: “For the reunification of Germany and the conditions to which it must be subordinated, there is now a doctrine of the [Western] Alliance. If this reunification must result from the determination of two peoples, the Alliance is favorable to it.” He nonetheless noted in the same sentence: “But the reunification will have to respect current borders and international agreements.”43 During a meeting that took place in Basel on December 15 between François Mitterrand, the president of the Swiss Confederation, Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, and Chancellor Kohl, the latter, doubtless aware of the fact that the others might be afraid the Germans would brush off any misgivings, had already uttered reassuring words. He counted on “doing everything” so that changes in Germany “not go too fast” and had even said: “I’m trying to reduce the speed.”44 François Mitterrand also raised the problem of the appropriate pace to be set for German reunification during his December 16 meeting with George H.W. Bush on the island of Saint-Martin, in the Caribbean. There ought not to be a “time difference between European construction and reunification,” he said to Bush.45 “France is showing the most understanding for the Germans right now. As I said to Kohl, German reunification must not go forward any faster then the EC. Otherwise, the whole thing will end up in the ditch.”46 Moreover, he explained, a “strong Germany” did not frighten France, but he was worried about the issue of borders: Chancellor Kohl had “never” wanted to formally express himself on this point, either with Jaruzelski or with him. Admittedly, he did not say the contrary (that, to his mind, the existing borders and, in particular, the Oder-Neisse border, were not definitive), but neither did he say that he would not reconsider this question.47 In addition to the French president, his advisers were also observing quite attentively the behavior of the chancellor and other German politicians on the question of borders of a Germany that would reunify itself. The Agence France Presse (AFP) communiqués on this subject were immediately noted by the Élysée diplomatic team and chief of staff J.-L. Bianco, then brought to the president’s attention. So it was that on December 16—the same day that Mitterrand expressed to Bush his worry over Kohl’s attitude on the border issue—the AFP released the following information from Budapest: “The West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl,

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acknowledged implicitly and in a strictly personal capacity, Saturday in Budapest, the western border of Poland, while underlining that, as chancellor, he could not speak ‘for Germany as a whole.’”48 On the copy of this communiqué that then circulated at the Élysée, diplomatic adviser Loïc Hennekinne first wrote: “Reading by J. L. Bianco. The circumlocutions continue. Plainly speaking clearly burns his mouth. L.  H.” And Bianco added for his part, before the text was passed on to the president: “Indeed!” Another AFP dispatch from Bonn, dated December 29, reads: “Mr. Kohl’s government rejected a proposal of the president of the Bundestag, Rita Süssmuth (CDU), to confirm the Oder-Neisse line by a joint declaration of the two German states. Such a declaration ‘is not the government’s primary concern’ and could only intervene ‘in the distant future,’ declared the government spokesperson, Dieter Vogel.”49 This communiqué also aroused great interest at the Élysée. Loïc Hennekinne passed it on for reading with an express recommendation to the deputy chief of staff, Christian Sautter who, in turn, gave it to the president in adding a note. Mitterrand received from Jean-Louis Bianco, furthermore, the AFP communiqué of December 31, devoted to the attitude that the president of the Federal Constitutional Court, Roman Herzog, had adopted concerning the recognition of “Poland’s western border.” Herzog, reported the AFP dispatch, had declared to the German radio that he was “against the premature recognition in international law of the Oder-Neisse line as Poland’s western border.”50 On the Élysée’s copy, the three words “against the recognition” were underlined with a thick line.

The Schengen Affair In December 1989, Mitterrand reckoned that there was an “Alliance doctrine” on German reunification, and that the alliance “would accept it positively” if it ensued from the Germans’ self-determination. But during the same period, the perception of the two aforementioned problems, namely the borders and the synchronization between the German and European unifications, became sharper in connection with a third problem. François Mitterrand expressed it in the clearest possible manner during his conversation with Margaret Thatcher on January 20, 1990. Before saying anything further, it must be pointed out that the French president was still worried by the idea that Germany—or, more precisely, Chancellor Kohl—might, in a precipitous way and without dialogue, present his partners with faits accomplis regarding reunification and thereby disrupt or

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even threaten the very existence of this joint orchestration about which all had thought. This concern was triggered by the very precise behavior of the Kohl government on a matter that was seemingly rather technical and was not immediately attached to reunification: This was the “Schengen agreement.” Yet, it was indeed on this issue that the German government’s behavior alarmed the French president to the highest degree in December 1989. What was it all about? In June 1985, five members of the European Community—France, Federal Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium—had agreed to eliminate gradually checks on the circulation of persons at their common borders and to facilitate the movement of merchandise. The checks in question would, on the other hand, have to be made at the outer borders of the joint space thereby created—“the Schengen space”—and implemented according to joint principles.51 In the autumn of 1989, they were getting ready to sign the agreement in question formally—the commitment to create the “Schengen space,” which would be bounded by the outer borders of the five signatory states, including West Germany, with East Germany lying beyond West Germany’s “outer border.” In Paris, there was the impression that Germany was no longer playing the game. “Since 1985, our partners, and the FRG in particular, pushed us,” explained Roland Dumas at the December 20 Cabinet meeting. And suddenly, he added, “here is the signing of the Convention postponed ‘sine die.’”52 That was owing in part to the reservation of the Netherlands, where the government had run into the hostility of the parliament on this subject, as well as and above all owing to the attitude of West Germany. The latter had, in fact, demanded that a point should be added, either integrated into the agreement or appended to it. West Germany was asking that the checks planned for the “outer borders” not concern the GDR, which—this was the justification of the West German government—could not be considered a third country, that is, located beyond these outer borders. Chancellor Kohl, not having succeeded in getting this clause accepted by the other partners, had preferred postponing the signing of the whole treaty. “In Strasbourg, I [already] told you [to what extent] I had found revealing what happened on Schengen,” the French president told the British prime minister on January 20, 1990.53 This was only a beginning, he might have added, because another event, which was more than revealing, occurred on December 11–12. Indeed, on the 12th, the chancellery

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chief of staff, Lutz Stavenhagen, called Élisabeth Guigou at the Élysée to inform the French government, through her, that Chancellor Kohl henceforth wanted the Schengen agreements signed. As of the next day, Stavenhagen again called Paris—this time, the prime minister, Michel Rocard, and the goal of this call was exactly the opposite of the one the day before. He made Rocard understand that, ultimately, Federal Germany could not sign the Schengen agreement, as it did not take the GDR sufficiently into account.54 “We were quite surprised by this reversal in 24 hours,” Mitterrand admitted to Thatcher, to whom he was describing West Germany’s attempt to integrate East Germany into the “Schengen space.” “That disturbed me considerably. It was a national, expansionist argument. I spoke to Mr. Modrow [prime minister of the GDR] about it. He told me that no one had spoken to him [about the fact that the GDR would belong to the ‘Schengen space’].”55

The Trip to the GDR: Why? Since the summer of 1988, following Mitterrand’s re-election to a second seven-year term, plans were being made at the Élysée aimed at reviving France’s political and economic presence in Eastern Europe. On that subject, the president received a memo on July 13 outlining the overall concept of a French Ostpolitik—understood as a parallel to the West German Ostpolitik,56 and not without a sense of competition with regard to West Germany.57 A visit of the French president to the GDR was intended as the final act in the enhancement of France’s Ostpolitik, Hubert Védrine explained later in an interview.58 The president, therefore, was, when the visit indeed took place, accompanied by managers of major French business companies, and a number of governmental agreements with the GDR were prepared for being signed during his visit. Interestingly, the European Commissioner for External Relations and Trade, Frans Andriessen, was about, at the same time, to arrange a trade and cooperation agreement between the EEC and the GDR, as, again interestingly, Mitterrand was told on December 6 by an adviser’s note.59 In December 1991, Jean Musitelli, close collaborator of Mitterrand’s, summed up the president’s policy with regard to the USSR and Eastern Europe as follows: Everything can be viewed separately up until 1989, 1990. The President’s guiding idea during the first term is to go beyond Yalta and overcome an

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artificially imposed division of the world. Until 1985 and Gorbachev’s arrival in power, East-West relations undergo a blockage that replaces the period of détente that had reigned up until 1975 (SALT agreement, Helsinki). This blockage followed a chilling of détente resulting from the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan, the installation of the SS 20 Euromissiles in Eastern Europe and Jaruzelski’s coup d’état in Poland, all these events bringing a freeze in these relations, a sort of crystallization of the situation born at Yalta. For the President, there is no possible dialogue with the USSR that is seeking to intimidate the West. That is why he paid no visit there before 1984, and during that visit, he publicly brings up human rights and, in particular, utters Sakharov’s name. Up until that time, he had not advocated dialogue with the East, making a show of firmness, the priority of his action being the tightening of solidarity with the Westerners (speech at the Bundestag in 1983, approval of the installation of the Pershings). This attitude had resulted in a weakening of our relations with the East […], the effect of which, particularly on the economic level, was a reduction of exchanges with those countries: We are paying for our political firmness, and we see countries like Italy and Austria doing more business than us on the markets. The second phase of East-West relations begins in 1985 with the arrival in power of Gorbachev who travels to Paris to meet with FM [François Mitterrand], this being his first official visit to a Western leader. François Mitterrand immediately realizes that Gorbachev is quite different from his predecessors. The latter admits to him that he wants to rid himself of the problem, for the USSR, constituted by the Red Army’s occupation of Afghanistan. A real dialogue begins with the East, without “waffle”. Nonetheless, this change of attitude has no spectacular, immediate consequence, especially on the economic level because, at the same time, the domestic situation of the USSR is getting worse. Still, it seems that things are no longer frozen in the East as was the case for forty years. For François Mitterrand, it therefore comes down to preparing for this development by recovering the lost positions in the East (in parallel with the pressure that the Germans are exerting). Gradually, France then resumes relations with the countries of the East. In 1988, the President establishes a program of trips to all the Eastern countries: Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, GDR, all except Romania.60

At the Cabinet meeting of October 26, 1988, President Mitterrand thus did not settle for declaring that France had to “return in force to Eastern Europe”: He also announced his plan for traveling during the coming months to all the Eastern European countries,61 or almost: as Hubert

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Védrine later explained, he had no intention of going to Romania on account of Nicolae Ceauşescu.62 The first state visits were announced rapidly: on November 25–26, 1988 to the Soviet Union; December 8–9 to Czechoslovakia; and January 18–19 to Bulgaria. On February 12, 1989, in a television interview, the president made known that two other trips would follow before long: “I am going to Poland soon—I hope in the first half of this year—and then I’ll go to East Germany.”63 He did indeed make his state visit to Poland on June 14–16. Yet, France’s political return to Eastern Europe, which Hubert Védrine thought he could observe with satisfaction in the memo he sent to the president on April 3, 1989,64 came about in a totally different context: Eastern Europe was clearly no longer the same as it was at the outset—in particular, East Germany. How, then, would his trip to that country go? Beginning in the summer, when preparations for Mitterrand’s trip to the GDR had begun, scheduling problems had arisen. From the Élysée’s point of view at the time, these were “ordinary problems such as one encountered every time that this type of trip was organized.” The president’s East German visit had been postponed several times,65 but starting in mid-October, after Erich Honecker had been succeeded by Egon Krenz as the head of the country, discussions between East Berlin and Paris for finding a date advanced. On November 13, the French ambassador to East Berlin, Jöelle Timsit, met the East German foreign minister, Oskar Fischer, who, in the name of the GDR, approved Paris’s proposition: scheduling Mitterrand’s state visit for a period between December 12 and 20, even though December 15–17 had to be avoided, explained Fischer, owing to an extraordinary congress of the SED.66 Two days later, on November 15, Mitterrand sent Krenz a letter in which he once again emphasized his interest in visiting the GDR. In his reply, Krenz indicated that he would willingly receive the French president on the dates put forward by the Élysée: Wednesday the 20th, Thursday the 21st and Friday the 22nd of December.67 Whereupon, on November 21, the Élysée officially announced Mitterrand’s trip to the GDR on those days in December. In the meantime, however, revolution had broken out in the GDR, and as of late November, it was obvious that nothing would be as it had been before. “Now everything is going because something else is coming,” Mitterrand had exclaimed on October 25  in his speech before the Parliament in Strasbourg, celebrating the East German “people” who, “as in the great days of 1789, are showing the way to be taken by the waning century, which future times would follow.”68 So just where was Mitterrand

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going? To a state like any other? In the heart of an ancien régime fighting for its survival? To the heart of a revolution? In the German and French media alike, this projected trip became a subject of debate. What place did it take in these unstable circumstances? Was it not an anachronism? Was there any point? Or else did the French president have a personal intention? Was he preparing a strategic blow on the checkerboard of European politics? On the one hand, Mitterrand was stirred by a spirit of competition—like others, as we shall see shortly. During the European Summit at Strasbourg Elisabeth Guigou noted on a sheet of paper what she heard being said. Thus, she put down also this statement of the French president concerning East Germany: “One doesn’t leave it to the West Germans alone to be involved.”69 On the other hand, Mitterrand had doubts, which he clearly laid out to Helmut Kohl during their breakfast conversation in the Prefecture at Strasbourg on December 9. According to the report of the meeting, written by Hubert Védrine, their conversation went as follows: FM [François Mitterrand]: I would like to specify. My trip to the GDR on December 20 had been planned almost a year ago. It is the result of Honecker’s invitation, and I had answered oui (after informing you). Krenz reiterated the invitation, and I had no reason to refuse. Inform the German press. I am wondering about this trip.” K [Kohl]: It’s necessary to be cautious. Gerlach is filling in the interim.” FM: The trip is taking place December 20. That’s far off! K: The day you leave, you’ll phone. FM: If new events of major import were to occur, I would examine the question [of whether to make the trip or not]. But it’s difficult to back down now. K: You are like Richelieu with the Rhenish Confederation. If everything is like that, go ahead. Don’t change. FM: [This trip to the GDR] is picturesque but not vital. I wanted to see Honecker. Instead, I am the last one [to make a state visit to the GDR].70 On the German side, too, a report of this breakfast conversation in Strasbourg was made. In it, the passage regarding Richelieu takes this form: “The chancellor emphasizes that the situation is not changing in the GDR and sees no reason for the president of the Republic to cancel his

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visit.”71 The American president hadn’t a view different from the one of the chancellor. Just before Mitterrand departed for the GDR on December 20, he and George Bush talked with each other on the phone. After the exchange of greetings, Mitterrand said: “I am going in a few minutes to the German Democratic Republic.” Bush responded: “I know you are. It will be a very important trip.”72 The French leader flew to Berlin the afternoon of December 20 to make his state visit to the GDR.  At that morning’s Cabinet meeting, Roland Dumas declared: “This afternoon the President of the Republic is going to the GDR, where he was preceded by Chancellor Kohl. The trip will allow a hands-on-experience of the reality of relations between the two Germanies. The business people of the German Federal Republic are already very present in the GDR. For want of having it done on the political level, unification is in the process of occurring by osmosis.”73 Later on, Hubert Védrine explained to me that Mitterrand wished to continue with displaying France’s presence in Eastern Europe and therefore wanted to make the trip for that reason.74 He himself spoke several times afterward about this trip and his firm intention to make it, as in 1991, in a meeting with the Austrian chancellor, Franz Vranitzky: “I was invited by Honecker, then came Krenz and Modrow. I no longer even remember the name of the head of state at the time. Every time I consulted with Kohl, he told me to go.”75 In 1992, during a discussion with the minister-president of Saxony, Kurt Biedenkopf: “I had very good memories of the University of Leipzig. In France, I was criticized for having gone there. They said my objective was to prevent reunification. However, on the contrary, I always supported the legitimacy of this reunification. Kohl himself had encouraged me to go during the time of Honnecker [sic]. Then, with things changing quickly, I went during the Modrow era. It was a very interesting experience, and I’m glad to have seen your country during that period.”76 In a 1994 interview for L’Express, he stated: “I had already been invited months ago—first by Erich Honecker then by Egon Krenz and finally by Hans Modrow. The first act of the new leaders upon coming to power was to reiterate the invitation. When Honecker wrote me, I informed Helmut Kohl. And that interested me greatly. Don’t forget that France was one of the trusteeship powers. I don’t see why I’d have left the handling of these matters to the other three powers. The East German territory was not off-­ limits to me, and I wanted to make this known.”77 He had been stirred by a spirit of competition, like others, as we have observed already.

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The Trip to the GDR: The “Competition” It seems that a certain “competition” had indeed been taking place back in December 1989 between Western politicians as to who would be the most present and most active in the revolutionary events that were occurring on the GDR’s soil. It was allegedly to this phenomenon that correspond the considerable frictions, which appeared in late November between the West German chancellery and the Élysée over the date of Mitterrand’s trip to the GDR.78 At the Élysée, they attempted to calm them, but these vague impulses were quickly thwarted by the president’s health and personal schedule.79 Chancellor Kohl was counting on going to the GDR at approximately the same time as President Mitterrand80 and, in fact went to Dresden on December 19, to great effect. His trip to Dresden has since become one of the principle images of the memorials to reunification, which is already almost mythical—a veritable icon of reunification, which so overshadowed the competing images (e.g., the presence of Willy Brandt in Magdeburg the same date) that today hardly anyone sees the other ones.81 In any case, according to remarks he made subsequently, Secretary of State Baker also considered that there had been “competition” for the role of demiurge. In the passage of his book The Politics of Diplomacy where he begins to relate his own visit to Potsdam on December 12, 1989, he says, as a good no-nonsense Texan: “I knew President Mitterrand was planning to visit the GDR the next week, and I wanted to demonstrate American leadership [over the revolutionary events that were occurring there] by going there first.”82 We should point out that, prior to Baker’s trip to the GDR, there was within the American government discussion on it, whether to undertake it or not, Baker himself decided to make the trip only at the last minute, after having deliberated with Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher. They encouraged him to go forward with his trip to Potsdam. Genscher, at an interview with me, asserted even that Baker undertook the trip upon the “wish of the [German] Chancellery.”83 The American ambassador to the GDR, Richard C. Barkley also advised, almost pushed Baker to make the trip, with the argument that “the United States should not be on the sidelines” if Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand were present in East Germany.84 Only a day after his visit, at a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Brussels, and effectively having preceded Mitterrand, Baker offered, in addition to the claim of “leadership” this

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other rationale for his trip. He “had gone to Potsdam to lend Modrow [Prime Minister of the GDR] legitimacy.”85 In the evening of December 19, Margaret Thatcher and Douglas Hurd discussed a “Soviet suggestion that she might visit East Germany.” However, Thatcher told Hurd “that she did not favour an early visit which would smack of ‘me-tooism’ after the visits of Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand.” She “thought the Foreign Secretary ought to go early in the New Year.”86

The Trip to the GDR: Speaking About Reunification in Berlin and Leipzig After their arrival at 6:30 p.m. at Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport, where they were welcomed by the president of the GDR State Council, Manfred Gerlach, President Mitterrand and his team went to the State Council building in Berlin where, at 7:30 p.m., he and Gerlach began a discussion that would last more than an hour. One of Mitterrand’s advisers noted its content and, according to him, the conversation began as follows: MG: Your visit is a great event. This is the first time that a [French] president has come to the GDR. FM: I had planned to make this visit. Between the time it was decided upon and its taking place, there have been multiple events, but I had no reason to postpone it. These events have a historic impact. In any case, I wanted to come.87 In the course of their conversation, they examined (in very detailed fashion) the situation in the GDR, the construction of the European Community—and the way in which the GDR might find its place in the Community—as well as, between the two topics, the question of Germany’s reunification, about which they had this dialogue: MG: Everyone at the roundtable is against it. But there are hundreds of thousands in Leipzig and Dresden who are vehemently demanding the unification of Germany. The participants in the roundtable don’t have much influence over them. Those who are calling for unification are not doing so out of patriotism but to accede to the FRG’s standard of living.

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A confederal structure [between the two states] will be thought up; the future will tell. FM: The elections will be a deciding factor. MG: May 6 at the Volkskammer [the GDR Parliament]. FM: What is not known is what you’ll do with freedom … I’m not taking any hostile position on reunification. This is not a problem for France. (Je ne prends aucune position hostile sur la réunification. Ce n’est pas un pb [problème] pour la France.) We will adapt to 80 million inhabitants [of a united Germany].” What is more difficult to envisage is the disorder that it can bring with it. A questioning of borders would pose a difficult problem for the USSR. We have no interest in remaking the pre-1914 image: that is not a model. If the Germans want to reunite, one doesn’t go to war against them. With Bonn, I have always linked the development of the German problem with that of the EEC. One prepares the next century and not the last century.88 In the corridors of the GDR State Council, Mitterrand repeated what he had already been saying about reunification in his public speeches since October 1989 and what he was going to say on several occasions over the next two days of his GDR visit in speeches before Leipzig students—who “acclaimed him enthusiastically”89—and before the international press in Berlin, then in public during the coming months. Reunification? That was up to the Germans and the Germans alone to decide. But their decision would have international consequences and, regarding those consequences, the Germans should not decide alone but with the other states who, like them, took responsibility for Europe and a future of peace on the European continent. The next day, on December 21, Mitterrand spoke at length with the head of the East German government, Hans Modrow. According to the East German notetaker he emphasized two points regarding reunification: (1) Everything had to be done, by all parties concerned, for “not endangering Europe and not destroying the existing balance.” (2) France would “not be afraid of the problem of [German] unity. It is a historic reality.” And he added that warning which he continuously issued in the fall of 1989. The “historic reality” of Germany’s reunification ought by no means “co-occur with a general disorder in Europe.”90

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The French notetaker specified at first that the conversation with Modrow took place over breakfast, and recorded then the words of Mitterrand in this way: German unity responds without doubt to an historic desire. We should not refuse change, the longing for liberty. But if all falls over, it will be difficult to master what happens.91

On the same day Mitterrand met with Gregor Gysi, the chairperson of the “SED-PDS,” that is the old East German Communist Party in the process of shedding its skin. Concerning reunification he told Gysi, as taken down by the East German notetaker: “The position of France is: If elections in East [Germany] and West [Germany] produce the result that a majority of the German people votes for a reunification, no one can oppose it, no one can interfere.” But then “serious consequences” would follow, as “I have said to Kohl and Genscher.”92 Germany’s reunification, yes. But a return to “1913,” again evoked in the conversation with Gysi,93 had to be averted by all means. For the evening of December 21, Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture, had organized a dinner at the restaurant Ganymed in East Berlin, at which Mitterrand and his wife Danielle, Jack Lang and the president’s interpreter, Brigitte Sauzay, were joined by the East German writers Christa Wolf, Stephan Heym, and Heiner Müller. Mitterrand held during his visit, furthermore, conversations with Bärbel Bohley, Wolfgang Schnur, and Jens Reich, representatives of the dissident movement in the GDR, and with Manfred Stolpe and Friedrich Magirius, representatives of the Protestant Church there, as well. In Leipzig he met and conversed with Kurt Masur, the conductor of the renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig.94 On December 22, Mitterrand joined Manfred Gerlach and Hans Modrow for a concluding conversation. He told his two interlocutors: “The German people, the two German states, that’s the business of the Germans. No veto. But Europe, this is my business.”95 While giving a paper at Chatham House on November 17, 2009, Loïc Hennekine recalled the impressions with which the French delegation departed from East Berlin. “We ended this journey, which I still consider as useful indeed, without any illusion about the future of the GDR. As we waited on the tarmac before our departure, Hubert Védrine said to me while the East German national anthem was being played: ‘Listen carefully, because we will not hear it often again.’”96

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Latche “Germany and France in 1989–1990” was also found in the images François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl had of one another. Their relationship—in the political bond between the French president and the German federal chancellor—was based on the elementary principle of mutual trust. They had conceived it in October 1982. It deepened over the years, and gradually they discovered it constituted a source of common political strength. Jean-Louis Bianco, who, as Élysée chief of staff, was the witness to this political and personal relationship—and interaction—for many a year, later explained to me: “François Mitterrand based all his policy regarding German unification on his confidence in Helmut Kohl the man. He relied on the fact that Helmut Kohl would do what would be suitable [pursuing his goal of reunification]: in the relationship with the other three governments [the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain] as well as—and especially—in his relationship with [Mitterrand].”97 After the three difficult months during which their personal relationship was going to show singular solidity and resilience, Kohl and Mitterrand met on January 4, 1990 at the latter’s vacation home in Latche, for a meeting that had long been scheduled for this date. It was meant to be a real discussion during which they could bring up problems and discuss them in detail. Indeed, it lasted a bit more than three hours and was the theater for not only an exchange that clarified the situation and led to decisions but also a not-negligible agreement between them as they went over the topics one by one—as well as various individuals. So it was not by chance that, toward the end of the conversation, Chancellor Kohl described it as “very friendly” (a comment found in the German report of this meeting, but not the French report).98 It was German reunification that dominated most of the discussion, which centered on this prospect as if the event (already) had to be considered obvious. “Whether I like it or not, unification is a reality for me,” Mitterrand told Kohl in the course of this conversation.99 The question to be dealt with at present—and they both agreed on this point—was no longer reunification itself but its timing, its tempo. Mitterrand’s point of view, which reckoned that it was necessary to also advance—in parallel—toward European and German unity, was (according to the French report) “overwhelmingly” approved of by Kohl, who considered this principle as “the key.”100 Conversely, the French president spoke without the slightest ambiguity regarding the warning that the chancellor addressed to him as well as

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to Germany’s friends: “The Germans want to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” they want be able to nurture justified hope in their unification. Mitterrand replied: “It’s not I who will close the end of the tunnel.”101 Quite evidently, the president and chancellor trusted one another and considered the reunification of Germany as their common work. Mitterrand had, quite precisely, opened their conversation with this phrase: “We are caught up in happy winds,”102 for he clearly understood the chancellor’s remarks: It is necessary to help Gorbachev in order to stabilize him. Between now and the month of April, he [Kohl] would try to obtain a joint agreement between the two states. The German problems could only be resolved under the European aegis, but “that takes time” (as is said in very concise terms in the French report). “Reunification is not waiting at the corner; it will take years” (as is said in the German report). The anchoring of Federal Germany in the European Community is a “preliminary condition” for all the rest. The Germans do not want to get on the road leading to their unity “in an isolated way”. Their natural partner on this point is France. The Oder-Neisse border is not a problem—at very most, a problem of domestic politics (in Federal Germany). He [Kohl] wishes that, between the two of them and other persons, one [should] endeavor to set up a “schedule” for the questions in abeyance. As concerned the GDR and the evolution of that country—here he was thinking of the next ten years—, a Franco-German agenda will be necessary; the Americans will hold to it.103 As for the president, he clearly said to the German chancellor: The immediate evolution of Gorbachev’s experiment” was not compatible, without another form of process, with rapid progress on the German problem. The problems of reunification had been taken in hand—they should be decided upon by the Germans in both states. German unity must not “be done so that the Russians harden and that the sound of weapons is heard, the sound of boots, in the USSR”. “We are just on the edge.” This is the reason why the problem of a timetable is so important. And it is also for this that he [Mitterrand] links the two problems: the German problem and the Russian problem. If the USSR did not exist, it would be easy (to establish German unity). It is up to “them” (the chancellor and the Germans) to “show that the Polish border [was] not called into question”.

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But that would not be enough: It would also be necessary to supervise what was happening in Yugoslavia (keeping this problem in mind: we were in a combination of “1945-Europe” and “1919-Europe” but not yet in “1990-Europe”). Finally, the issue of alliances had to be settled. The risk on this point was the temptation to neutralize Germany.104

In their pre-1989 conversations, the two politicians readily entertained themselves by exchanging, in addition to state subjects, half-serious half-­ amused remarks on their craftsmanship. On January 4, 1990  in Latche they resumed this habit. Kohl was in the process of talking about his impressions of people in the GDR, and Mitterrand interrupted him to ask: “Would you be elected in the GDR?” And Kohl replied without hesitation, “No problem.”105 When they parted, Kohl not only suggested a new meeting at the end of the month or in early February; he also proposed that Mitterrand go on television “to show his sympathy for the German phenomenon and the march towards unity.”106 But the French president did not take up this offer any more than a similar proposal by Hubert Védrine a bit later, on January 26.107

Notes 1. Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschland. 2. Demokratischer Block. 3. With the president in a reception-meeting room of the Strasbourg prefecture were: Roland Dumas, Hubert Védrine, Elisabeth Guigou and Jacques Attali. See report of Mitterrand’s conversation with his collaborators, December 9, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73). 4. CM, November 15, 1989. At the Elysée, at the time, it was above all Hubert Védrine who devoted himself to analyses and plans dealing with the signification of this meeting in Malta and with the questions it raised for Europe. It was, of course, a matter of preparing the work for the president who used these preliminary studies. See Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République. A/s: Sommet de Malte et avenir de l’Europe, November 14, 1989; Note pour le Président de la République, a. S. rencontre de: Malte des 2 et 3 décembre, November 27, 1989; Note pour le Président de la République, A/s:préparatifs de Malte, December 1, 1989; Note pour le Président de la République, a.s. La sécurité de l’Europe après MALTE et la réunion de l’OTAN, December 6, 1989.

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5. The main planning elements, date and place were settled on as of November 23. 6. On the French side, the report is sketchy: AN-AG/5(4)/CD/177. The Russian report is fully written out and published, see: Germ.vop., 286–291. 7. See the American reports on the two meetings of Bush and Gorbachev on December 2 and 3: https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­ telcons/1989-­1 2-­0 2%2D%2DGorbachev%20Malta%20First%20 Expanded%20Bilateral%20Meeting%20GB%20and%20Gorbachev%20 in%20Malta.pdf; https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­ telcons/1989-­1 2-­0 2%2D%2DGorbachev%20Malta%20First%20 Restriced%20Bilateral.pdf; https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/ memcons-­t elcons/1989-­1 2-­0 2%2D%2DGorbachev%20Malta%20 Luncheon%20Meeting.pdf; https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/ memcons-­t elcons/1989-­1 2-­0 3%2D%2DGorbachev%20Malta%20 Second%20Expanded%20Bilateral.pdf; https://bush41library.tamu. edu/files/memcons-­t elcons/1989-­1 2-­0 3%2D%2DGorbachev%20 Malta%20Second%20Restricted%20Bilateral.pdf; (accessed February 25, 2021). For the Russian reports see: Germ.vop., 268–272. 8. See the text of this conversation between Gorbachev and Genscher at: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB296/doc05.pdf (accessed February 25, 2021). For his part, Hans-Dietrich Genscher related the conversation in: Gensch., 683–687. See also: Germ. Unif., 135–136. 9. French report: AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67, dossier 3. This statement does not appear in the Russian report. 10. Germ.vop., 287. 11. Germ.vop., 288. 12. Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting in Kiev, December 6, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/177). 13. Letter of Chevènement to Mitterrand, December 5, 198. 14. Ibid. 15. Conférence de Presse Conjointe de Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, et Monsieur Mikhaïl Gorbatchev, Président du Soviet Suprême de l’Union des Républiques Socialistes Soviétiques, Kiev, December 6, 1989, p. 9. 16. During a speech by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, on December 18, 1989, before the Political Commission of the European Parliament in Brussels. 17. See Sowj.Dok., 286, note 1. 18. Germ.vop., 307–311.

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19. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB317/chernyaev_ 1990.pdf (accessed February 27, 2021). 20. Gorbachev, Memoirs, 682. 21. Record of the meeting in: Dok. Dt.Ein., 795–807, here esp. 805–806. For contemporary media reports see: https://www.nytimes. com/1990/02/10/world/upheaval-­east-­gorbachev-­accepts-­deep-­cuts-­ europe-­if-­forces-­are-­equal-­baker-­hints.html, https://www.upi.com/ Archives/1990/02/10/Kohl-­p redicts-­G ermany-­w ill-­b e-­r eunited-­ soon/5206634626000/ (accessed February 27, 2021). 22. In A World Transformed (197), Brent Scowcroft writes: “We had been considering the international context of German reunification for several weeks, and Jim Baker and the State Department had drawn up four principles to frame our own approach to the issue.” For his part, James A. Baker relates in Pol.Dipl. (165): “The end of November ushered in a very contentious public debate over unification among Bonn, Berlin, Moscow, London, and Paris. At the same time, there was very little private discussion in diplomatic channels. This wasn’t altogether surprising. The shock of the Wall’s collapse had sent governments scurrying to review contingency plans, and the sheer emotionalism of the event had changed many people’s assumptions about German unification, so it was understandable that they wanted to develop their own thinking and form at least a government-wide consensus before raising ideas internationally.” See also: Germ. Unif., 113–114 and 132–133. 23. A fear that George H. W. Bush wrote about afterward, saying that he had never felt it. “I trusted Kohl not to lead the Germans down a special, separate path” (WorldTrans., 213). But in the same book, a bit further on, Bush’s security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, writes (ibid., 234): “We hoped that the President’s commitment to back Kohl would be our insurance that the Chancellor would insist on [a united Germany’s] membership in NATO, and on retaining U.S. forces [in Europe]. But there was always the danger he might feel compelled to strike a bargain with the Soviets: German neutrality in exchange for unification.” One will also note, in this regard, the following passage in: Beschloss/Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 188: “Bush and Baker were concerned that given a choice between staying in NATO and proceeding full throttle toward unification, Kohl might bid NATO good-bye. Hence they sought to create what Robert Blackwell privately called a ‘Western cocoon’ around Kohl.” James Baker also speaks about his fear of seeing “the Germans and the Soviets going off alone and cutting a private deal disadvantageous to Western interests (as they had with the agreements at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Rapallo in 1922, and the Molotov-­Ribbentrop Accord in 1939),” in: Pol.Dipl., 198.

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24. See Gorb.a., 92. 25. Brent Scowcroft spoke in these terms in A World Transformed (230): “It was essential that we avoid another Versailles-type settlement.” Mikhail Gorbachev declared publicly, when the “two-plus-four negotiations” were scheduled: “We do not envisage a document that discriminates against Germany or undermines the national dignity of the Germans. There is no question of a new Versailles” (Gorb.a., 126). Regarding the “two-plus-four” negotiations, Hans-Dietrich Genscher also writes in his memoirs (Gensch., 716): “This time, it was also necessary to avoid the humiliating treatment inflicted on the first German democracy during the peace treaty negotiations.” In a conversation with President Mitterrand on January 29, 1990 in Paris, the Italian head of state, Francisco Cossiga, explained: “There must be no attitude of refusal of German unification, so as not to create a post-­Versailles reaction” (Report of the MitterrandCossiga meeting in Paris, January 29, 1990/AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). The intention of avoiding a “new Versailles” was not, however, so easy to implement at the outset, as is shown by the meeting of the ambassadors to Germany from the United States, France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, convened once again in the buildings of the Control Council in Berlin on December 11, 1989. But this was the last event of its type. 26. On the principles set forth by the United States, Brent Scowcroft later wrote: “I thought the principles focused squarely on the issues Kohl had omitted” (WorldTrans., 197). And as of November 23, 1989, James Baker had declared in his Washington press conference: “And to close, I think, as concerns the issue of borders, which was not brought up in Kohl’s speech.” During his March 8, 1990 meeting with Willy Brandt, Mitterrand explained: “Gorbachev is furious with Kohl. Because of the absence of the eleventh point [on the issue of borders in his “ten-point plan” of November 29, 1989 on the unification of Germany]” (Report of the Mitterrand-Brandt meeting in Paris, March 8, 1990/AN-AG/5(4)/ CD/73, Dossier 1.) 27. Védr., 441. See also Védrine’s remarks on the “conditions” in: Sauzay/ von Thadden, Mitterrand und die Deutschen, 31–32. 28. Interview with Hubert Védrine in Paris, October 21, 1996. 29. Interview with Jean-Louis Bianco in Paris, October 23, 1996. 30. Védr., 457. 31. WorldTrans., 188–189, 196–197. 32. Interview with Hubert Védrine in Paris, October 21, 1996. 33. CM, December 13, 1989. 34. The Helsinki “final act” was signed in the Finnish capital on August 1, 1975, at the end of the “Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe” (CSCE), which was followed by “supplementary conferences,”

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opened on July 3, 1973. One can find the complete text of the Helsinki Final Act on the Internet at: http://www.hri.org/docs/Helsinki75. html. On the essential link between the political dynamic inferred by the “final act” and the events of 1989, see Gensch., 299ff. 35. That is what a December 15, 1989 memo, written by the “Secrétariat Général de la Défense Nationale” of the French government, noted (DGDN/EDS/AD/MO/DR, Note, Objet: Le discours du Secrétaire d’État américain J. Baker, du 12 décembre 1989, December 15, 1989), in which can be read, concerning the American principles in the form set out by Secretary of State Baker: “This American vision appears close to that expressed by the French authorities and confirmed during the closing speech of the European Council on Dec. 9 in Strasbourg.” 36. WorldTrans., 197. 37. Germ. Unif., 133. The “four points” presented on November 29 by Secretary of State James A. Baker—and from which, essentially, President Bush would not stray in Brussels—is found in: Pol.Dipl., 167–168. 38. Sauzay/von Thadden, Mitterrand und die Deutschen, 36–40. 39. Gensch., 675ff. and Dipl.d.E., 42, 66. 40. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, 136. 41. Ibid. 42. Gorb.a. 113ff. For the text of the interview in Russian: https://www. cvce.eu/en/obj/otvety_n_s_gorbacheva_na_voprosy_korrespondenta_ pravdy_moskva_21_fevralia_1990_g-­r u-­8 f fb25d3-­a 5f5-­4 bc6­868e-­2ba219df1a36.html and in French: https://www.cvce.eu/en/ obj/interview_de_mikhail_gorbatchev_au_sujet_de_la_reunification_ a l l e m a n d e _ m o s c o u _ 2 1 _ f e v r i e r _ 1 9 9 0 -­f r -­8 f f b 2 5 d 3 -­ a5f5-­4bc6-­868e-­2ba219df1a36.html (accessed March 5, 2021). 43. CM, December 20, 1989. 44. Report of the Mitterrand-Delamuraz-Kohl meeting in Basel, December 15, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67). 45. Report of the Mitterrand-Bush meeting in Saint-Martin, December 6, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/74). 46. According to the American report: https://bush41library.tamu.edu/ files/memcons-­telcons/1989-­12-­16%2D%2DMitterrand.pdf (accessed March 5, 2021). 47. See the report of the Mitterrand-Bush meeting in Saint-Martin on December 16, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/74). 48. AFP—JW 67/AFP 162155 Déc. 89. 49. AFP—QY 49/AFP 291706 Déc 89. 50. AFP—AA93/AFP 311309/Dec. 89. 51. Documentation on the “Schengen agreement” can be found on the Internet site: https://www.auswaertiges-­amt.de/en/einreiseundau fenthalt/-­/231202 (accessed March 5, 2021).

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52. CM, December 20, 1989. 53. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in Paris, January 20, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 54. Report written at the Élysée on Lutz Stavenhagen’s telephone calls. 55. Report of the Mitterrand-Thatcher meeting in Paris, January 20, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). On January 29, the president came back to the topic of Schengen with Italian President Francisco Cossiga: “The Germans have a tendency to consider that the GDR is already part of the organizations [to which Federal Germany belongs]. See the Schengen agreement” (Report of the Mitterrand-Cossiga meeting in Paris, January 29, 1990/AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). Mitterrand, during his meeting with Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey on February 15, 1990, again mentioned “the Schengen story” and explained that he did not understand the German government’s behavior: “As long as there are two states, we deal with two states” (Report of the Mitterrand-Haughey meeting in Paris, February 15, 1990.) 56. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République. Le développement de nos relations avec l’Europe de l’Est, July 13, 1988. 57. In The Downing Street Years Margaret Thatcher speaks of her “strategy towards the eastern bloc countries” begun in Hungary in 1974 (777). 58. Interview with Hubert Védrine, June 12, 1996. 59. Caroline de Margerie, Note pour le Président de la République, December 6, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/4160). See also Document No 144 concerning the relationships between the EC and the GDR, in: Dok. Dt.Ein., 705–706. 60. Jean Musitelli, Report: “The Eastern Countries,” December 13, 1991. 61. CM, October 26, 1988. 62. Interview with Hubert Védrine in Paris on April 21, 1995. 63. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République, à Madame Anne Sinclair dans le cadre de l’émission 7/7 sur TF1, February 12, 1989, 42. 64. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République. Objet: La RFA, la Pologne et nous, April 3, 1989. 65. Interview with Hubert Védrine in Paris on April 21, 1995. 66. Minstère des Affaires Étrangères, TD Berlin 3029, November 13, 1989. 67. Loïc Hennekinne, Note pour le Président de la République. OBJET: Voyage en RDA, November 17, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/177). 68. Discours prononcé par Monsieur François Mitterrand, Président de la République Française, devant le Parlement Européen de Strasbourg, October 25, 1989. 69. AN-AG/5(4)/EG/61.

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70. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Strasbourg, December 9, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73). At the top of the report the date “8 déc. 89” is given. But Mitterrand had arrived at Strasbourg only in the late morning of December 8. The conversations between Mitterrand and Kohl over breakfast at European Summits traditionally took place on the second day. 71. Dok. Dt.Ein., 628–631; here: 629. 72. https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­telcons/1989-­12-­20% 2D%2DMitterrand.pdf (our emphasis, accessed March 7, 2021). 73. CM, December 20, 1989. 74. Interview with Hubert Védrine in Paris, June 12, 1996. 75. Report of the Mitterrand-Vranitzky meeting in Paris, December 3, 1991. 76. Report of the Mitterrand-Biedenkopf meeting in Paris, July 15, 1992. 77. “L’Allemagne et nous, par François Mitterrand” in L’Express, July 21, 1994, 14–24 (quote: 19). 78. See Teltsch., 47, 60. In a conversation I had on July 18, 1994 with Horst Teltschik, he confirmed the origin of these “frictions” that he had already presented in his book: Mitterrand’s plans had thrown the chancellery into scheduling problems. “For the rest, we had always agreed with precision between Bonn and Paris—but not in this case. That irritated us.” 79. At the end of November, a visit by Mitterrand to Chancellor Kohl in Bonn was still envisaged at the Élysée, even before the president’s trip to the GDR, but this idea was rejected for three reasons: (1) The president would, in any case, meet the chancellor on December 15  in Basel. (2) Several dates already set for Mitterrand’s and Kohl’s trips would have made an additional date for a meeting of the two leaders in Bonn quite difficult. (3) Mitterrand’s personal physician at the Élysée, Claude Gubler, insisted that the president’s schedule not be filled further. This third reason naturally takes on greater weight today since we now know that Mitterrand was suffering from cancer at that time (and Mitterrand’s closest advisors were aware of his illness). See Loïc Hennekinne, Note pour J.-L. Bianco, J. Attali. Objet: Déplacement du Président à Bonn, November 28, 1989. 80. According to Teltsch., 60, Helmut Kohl “ought even to have gone to the GDR before Mitterrand.” 81. The fact remains that afterward, Kohl did not let Mitterrand off lightly on this point: “Mitterrand’s state visit went almost unnoticed,” he wrote in Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit (226)—and this, even though a glance at the German and international press of December 20–22, 1989, shows the contrary. 82. Pol.Dipl., 173. 83. Interview with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, August 1, 2006.

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84. Bortfeldt, Washington—Bonn—Berlin, 100. 85. Letter of Douglas Hurd to Ambassador Mallaby. DBPO, 172. See furthermore, ibid., 174. 86. Note of Charles Powell to Stephen Wall, December 20, 1989 (PREM-19-2696). 87. Report of the Mitterrand-Gerlach meeting in Berlin, December 20, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67). 88. Ibid. 89. See SZ, December 22, 1989, 1: “Der Französische Staatspräsident in Ostberlin und Leipzig,” where we can read “Before a thousand students at Leipzig’s Karl Marx University who enthusiastically acclaimed him |[die ihn begeistert feierten]”; see also FAZ, December 22, 1989, 2: “Mitterrand lobt den Umbruch in der DDR,” where we read: “The students, almost a thousand strong, gave the president an enthusiastic welcome [einen begeisterten Empfang].” 90. Report of the Mitterrand-Modrow meeting in Berlin, December 21, 1989, Die Einheit, 192. 91. AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67. 92. Report of the Mitterrand-Gysi meeting in Berlin, December 22, 1989, Die Einheit, 198. 93. Ibid., 199. 94. Under AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67 there is a handwritten note, dated December 21, 1989, with a few scibbles regarding the conversations with Kurt Masur, Friedrich Magirus, and Gregor Gysi. No documentary traces could be found regarding the conversations with Stolpe, Bohley, and Reich, Stolpe, however, spoke about and confirmed those conversations during a discussion period at a conference in Genshagen on October 18, 1996. I documented his remarks in a “field note,” now in my personal archive. 95. Ibid. 96. PC. 97. Interview with Jean-Louis Bianco in Paris, June 3, 1996. 98. See “Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Kohl mit Staatspräsident Mitterrand, Latche, 4. Januar 1990” in: Dok. Dt.Ein., 682–690, here 689. 99. According to the French report. See Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Latche, January 4, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73, Dossier 1). The German report does not mention it. 100. Dok. Dt.Ein., 687. 101. Ibid., 684. In the French report, these remarks are reproduced as follows: “Our friends must understand that the Germans have to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They will not accept not seeing this light” (Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Latche, January 4, 1990).

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102. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Latche, January 4, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73, Dossier 1). 103. Ibid. See also: Dok. Dt.Ein., 682–690. 104. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting at Latche, January 4, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73, Dossier 1). 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. See Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République: suggestions d’actions vis-à-vis de l’opinion ouest-allemande, January 26, 1990. Before sending the memo to the president, Jean-Louis Bianco wrote on the first page: “Excellent suggestions. To be done fairly quickly, it seems to me. – JLB.” After reading it, the president sent the memo back with this message: “Talk to me about it. FM.”

CHAPTER 15

Two Major Problems to Be Resolved: Germany’s Membership in NATO and the Question of Borders

Following a visit of the East German prime minister to Moscow on January 30, the secretary general, Mikhail Gorbachev, announced his consent for reunification, publicly observing that “no one would oppose the unification of the Germans on principle.” In this single month of January, 58,000 East Germans arrived in West Germany with the intention of staying there for the long term. Henceforth, the principal slogan of participants in Leipzig’s Monday demonstrations (the one on January 22 brought together a hundred thousand people) was: “Germany, united fatherland.” It was under this same motto that, on February 1, Hans Modrow placed a four-step plan for establishing German unity, according to which, united Germany will have the same status as a neutral state, militarily. On February 6, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl proposed the rapid establishment of economic and monetary union between Federal Germany and the GDR. On February 7, the plenum of the central committee of the CPSU approved the party’s program, proposed by Gorbachev, which abandoned the principle of sole direction exercised by the Communist Party and provided for the Soviet Union’s transition to a “presidential democratic regime.” On February 11–12, in Moscow, Chancellor Kohl and Secretary General Gorbachev held meetings on reunification. Gorbachev declared that the Soviet Union respects the Germans’ will to live in a single state and that it is up to them to determine the path they will take toward unity and the date on which they will do so. During a conference organized on February 12–14  in Ottawa between twenty-three NATO and Warsaw Pact nations, the foreign ministers of the four powers responsible for Germany (United States, USSR,

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France, Great Britain), as well as those of East and West Germany, began negotiations in the group they were forming as representatives of their countries, aimed at clarifying the diplomatic aspects of German reunification; this agreement would lead to the “two-plus-four negotiations,” at the end of which the united Germany would recover its full sovereignty. On March 8, the Bundestag, the West German parliament, passed a motion recognizing the German-Polish border and, moreover, proposed “that the two freely-elected German parliaments and governments adopt, as soon as possible after the elections in FRG [to be held on March 18], a declaration going in the same direction.” At the same time, the Bundestag expressed hope that Poland’s renunciation of reparations, a renunciation stated in August 1953, and the German-Polish agreement on the rights of the German minority in Poland, will apply for a united Germany too. On March 9, the Polish president, Wojciech Jaruzelski, his prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and minister of foreign affairs, Krzysztof Skubiszewski, held a meeting in Paris with François Mitterrand. The agenda was the western border of Poland and the role of this country in the two-plus-four negotiations. On March 11, the Lithuanian Parliament proclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union, sounding the beginning of the secession of a large number of Soviet republics. Following the establishment of a presidential constitution for the USSR, on March 13, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected president of the USSR the next day for a five-year mandate. On March 18, during the first free elections for the Volkskammer (or “people’s chamber,” the GDR Parliament), the “conservative alliance” (CDU, DSU and Demokratischer Aufbruch) won with 48.1% of the vote, against only 21.8% for the SPD. On April 12, for the first time in its history, the GDR Volkskammer invested a democratic government, and Lothar de Maizière (CDU) became prime minister. The American and French presidents, George H.W.  Bush and François Mitterrand, met on April 19 in Key Largo, Florida. On April 28, the extraordinary summit of the European Community in Dublin published a final declaration that retains the following principles: The Community forms the framework of German reunification; this can be achieved without renegotiation of the European treaties; the community must change before December 31, 1992 into a “political union”; to this end, a second intergovernmental conference must be convened along with the one in charge of EMU. At the end of this summit, Mitterrand declared that he wished for a “system of federal finality” for Europe.

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“Reunification Lies in the Facts” On January 4, President Mitterrand had said to Chancellor Kohl that, to his mind, German reunification was a reality. Such a declaration could obviously only please the chancellor, and we may suppose that the resolute style had been chosen in keeping with the latter’s personality rather than the president’s real intention on this point. What would Mitterrand have said were he speaking not to Helmut Kohl but to another state or governmental leader, for example, that of Turkey, Portugal, Jordan, or even members of his own government? Well, he would not have expressed himself otherwise. Even better, he in fact did not express himself otherwise. Let us study Mitterrand’s remarks on German reunification at that time, between January and March 1990, in which he stated, on several occasions and in variable terms, what he had formulated on January 16 during a meeting of the defense council: “It can be said that unification is certain.”1 On the same occasion, he explained that even three months earlier it would have sufficed for the great Soviet power to frown, and the whole world would have bent to its will. But the Germans were henceforth beginning to reckon that Russia no longer represented a threat. Two weeks later, on January 31, Roland Dumas explained at a Cabinet meeting that the rapprochement of the two Germanies had reached a new turning point, for “there was no longer a state” in the GDR, and this development had led Moscow to modify its position on the reunification of Germany. The day before, Gorbachev had “taken the bull by the horns,” declaring that no one could have doubts as to this reunification. (Dumas was referring to Gorbachev’s remarks on the occasion of Hans Modrow’s visit to Moscow.) The Soviet Union was following the crowd, swept along by the current that was becoming apparent in Germany, and approved the idea of reunification. Mitterrand commented on Dumas’ remarks with one phrase: “Reunification lies in the facts.”2 American President George H.W. Bush made a similar judgment, if we are to believe his memoirs, written after the fact. “For my part, it seemed pretty clear reunification was on its way and we had to work with it. By the end of January, with the inability of the East German government to regain control of affairs, I had accepted it as inevitable and welcomed it.”3 On January 29, 1990, the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, also

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explained to his American counterpart, James Baker, that he was impressed by the evolution of things, as the latter relates in his Memoirs: “There is virtually one German television, one German airline, and the most popular politician in East Germany is Helmut Kohl.”4 Even Margaret Thatcher was surprised in proclaiming the general opinion (in total contradiction with her words and actions at the Strasbourg summit and with remarks she made later in her memoirs, Downing Street Years). On February 18, in a public speech before representatives of British Jews, she asserted: “There is no doubt that this coming together of the two parts of Germany (German unification) is going to happen. The Western allies have always supported the principle of unification, provided that it comes about as the result of the freely-expressed choice of the people of the two German states.”5 The GDR was, as it were, “disappearing” in the reunification process— that was the impression of the actors in the workshop of world politics. On February 13, Mitterrand said to the Turkish prime minister, Turgut Özal: “East Germany is no longer anything.”6 A few days earlier, he had received information confirming that reunification had become a fact, about which he was already sure. In the course of the February 7 Cabinet meeting, Finance Minister Pierre Bérégovoy passed Mitterrand a handwritten note concerning the meeting he had had the day before with the deputy prime minister of Hungary who had asked him to convey three quite specific pieces of information to the French president. The third concerned German reunification, and the message was as follows: “German reunification disturbs, even if he [the Hungarian deputy prime minister] knows it is inevitable.”7 When François Mitterrand received King Hussein of Jordan on March 6 for a meeting at the Élysée, the latter also hoped to discuss reunification with him and know his thoughts about it. “The question of German reunification is not a problem in itself,” the French president replied laconically.8 In his March 19 meeting with the Czech leader, Václav Havel, Mitterrand came back once again to his historical analysis according to which reunification of Germany had been able to come about thanks to the collapse of the Soviet empire (and he had already fairly often predicted, beginning in 1981, that this type of cause was likely). “I told Kohl and Genscher,” he related to Havel, “that a Soviet collapse (although it is still a military power) would benefit Germany. It is reuniting since the Soviets cannot prevent it.”9 In March 1990, for Mitterrand, it had become

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a fact. On January 31, he had again declared at the Cabinet meeting that unification “lay” in the facts.10 On March 23, in a conversation with Portuguese Prime Minister Cavaco Silva, he stated: “The principal new fact is German reunification. The problem with unification is practically resolved, politically speaking.”11 How could the Soviet Union have opposed the movement toward the unity of Germany? It was collapsing, and Mitterrand knew it, of course, and was counting on it. During the winter of 1989–1990 and into the spring, calls for help from the Soviets in the workshop of world politics became increasingly loud. By their own admission, “the economic and social situation in the USSR is absolutely catastrophic,” wrote Hubert Védrine in a January 30 memo to the president, returning from a lunch he had had with Caroline de Margerie at the Soviet embassy in Paris.12 And other news of the same type followed. “They are coming to us like beggars,” said Mitterrand to George Bush on April 19, regarding the Soviets.13

Germany’s Membership in NATO With regard to the military status of a unified Germany, the French president fulfilled an exemplary deed of political leadership, in continuing to accomplish constructive work in the task of reunification. Significantly, during their Camp David meeting, on February 24, Chancellor Kohl told President Bush and Secretary Baker: “He [Mitterrand] has been holding firm,” whereas the project of reunification posed problems with Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Great Britain, as Kohl emphasized.14 For his part, George Bush concluded a letter that he sent Mitterrand on April 17, 199015with the words: “François. There is today no European leader whom I respect more than you.” As was seen more and more clearly in the spring of 1990, Washington and Bonn could perfectly count on Mitterrand regarding this problem concerning the unification of the two German states. It had absolutely to be clarified and was the most difficult to decide on: knowing what military status a united Germany should have. “The most important problem,” Mitterrand explained to the Italian head of state, Francesco Cossiga, in a meeting on January 28, “is what Germany’s status will be if it reunifies.”16 A bit later the same day, the president also spoke with the U.S. deputy secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, and that conversation focused exclusively on the radical transformation of the strategic-military situation

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in Europe. Eagleburger explained to Mitterrand that President Bush was “concerned with the current dynamism in the two Germanies”; the United States would have to withdraw from Europe if it had no legal basis for its presence in Germany (that is, if Germany did not remain linked to NATO). The French president then spoke with great resolve, saying that it was absolutely necessary to avoid the continual reduction of American troops in Europe from leading to German neutrality. In no event should trends toward Germany neutrality be encouraged. “Our action,” he explained, “must aim at preventing the delinking of Europe and the United States.” President Bush, he insisted, should clearly say so in his State of the Nation address the day after next: German neutrality was out of the question.17 To the Soviet Union’s resistance, often proclaimed vehemently, against a united Germany’s belonging to NATO, Mitterrand advanced an argument of strategic-political logic by which he believed he could suppose that Moscow would end up understanding where the true interests of the Soviet Union lay: It was better to have a united Germany integrated into NATO than a neutral Germany that would thereby find itself in a situation of total military detachment. In a discussion with Hubert Védrine and Jean-Louis Bianco, following the Cabinet meeting on January 31, the president said to his advisers: “It is not impossible that, in the long run, Gorbachev might prefer Germany’s integration into NATO to German autonomy.”18 The Soviet Union, he reckoned on February 15 in a discussion with Kohl, was no longer “in a position to lay down conditions.”19 On January 16 Mitterrand had convened Jean-Louis Bianco, Hubert Védrine, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, and Admiral Lanxade for an “ultra small” Council of Defense. Then he had pointed out what he discerned to be now the Soviet Union’s military-strategic weakness that “liberated” Germany: “Does Gorbachev have the means to prevent this unification? Three months ago the great Soviet power would have needed only a frown and everyone would have yielded. But the Germans begin to think that the Russian menace no longer exists.”20 Yet, a free-floating unified Germany could not be the result. In an interview that Mitterrand gave to several French newspapers on February 15, Mitterrand stressed that “neither West Germany nor the other member states of NATO would agree to connect the two terms ‘unification’ and ‘neutralisation.’”21 Védrine summed up in a long memo to the president on March 23 the state of discussions and negotiations carried out on this point in the workshop of world politics and wrote straight off: “It is likely that the Soviets will end up accepting that the united Germany—in fact, the enlarged

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FRG—remain in NATO.”22 A few days earlier, on March 19, the Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, had heard his American colleague, James Baker, state unequivocally: “We can’t retain a presence [in Europe], except if we have NATO.”23 This meant that if the Soviet Union did not want a neutral, “detached” Germany, it had to want NATO, and Germany within NATO.  Gorbachev had no choice, really, Kohl’s adviser Horst Teltschik and Mitterrand’s adviser Jacques Attali agreed on March 15, at a lunch in the Élysée’s staff dining room. If the “Allies of Germany will be sufficiently insistent,” they observed, “Germany will remain in NATO.”24 When François Mitterrand met with George Bush on April 19 in Key Largo, he most clearly made the point. He said to the American president, at their second conversation that day: “United Germany must remain in NATO.” Once again, we are struck by the firmness of tone, especially in relation to the subsequent remarks of the American president who was clearly not certain that Mitterrand’s postulate would in fact be accepted: “As concerns Germany, I think we’ll be able to convince the Soviets that it must be in NATO.” To which Mitterrand responded, as if he knew what “the Soviets” were thinking: “The [Soviets] are ready to understand you on this point.”25 At their first meeting Mitterrand had asserted: “The Soviet Union will prefer to have a unified Germany within NATO rather than have Germany exercising its own military sovereignty.”26 I just quoted from the French report. In the American report we can read: “The President: Regarding Germany, if we can convince the Soviets that it is in their interest to have Germany in NATO then the problem is solved. President Mitterrand: They are prepared to draw that conclusion.”27 At a session of the French-German Council of Defense and Security on April 17 in Paris Mitterrand heard Chancellor Kohl pronounce this dictum: “Unified Germany must he a member of NATO. For us, this is an existential question.”28 Mitterrand showed a great firmness of judgment—and therefore of his attitude on the military status of a unified Germany—when he brought up the issue with Mikhail Gorbachev on May 25 in Moscow. According to the French report, the Soviet leader said to him: “I told Baker: Germany must participate in the Warsaw Pact.” But the French president answered laconically: “That’s an illusion. You cannot prevent Germany from belonging to NATO.”29 Thus speaks someone who no longer has to convince his interlocutor but must give him the courage to decide to say what he is also convinced of. The Russian report renders Mitterrand’s words in a much

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less pointed way. It makes the French president more reflective, but has him contravene Gorbachev’s idea nonetheless: “I think Bush will be extremely astonished (Buš budet c ̌rezvyc ̌ajno udivlen), if you present him your suggestion. He is not prepared for that. Germany’s membership in two blocs will appear to him to be nonsensical (Ideja prinadležnosti Germanii k dvum blokam pokažetsya emu neskol’ko nesuraznoj). On the one hand, this gives Germany an unusually strong position, and the Germans themselves will reject it, on the other.”30 Presidents Bush and Mitterrand had remained in a tight relationship since their Key Largo discussion on Germany and its membership in NATO, Mitterrand and Thatcher had been in close touch as well.31 On the Western side, efforts were devoted to weaving an increasingly tight web of arguments around the Soviet Union, to which were also added an ever-­ greater quantity of gold threads, financial promises that produced their effect. It was a matter of leading the Soviets to accept, in negotiations on German unity, the ideas of the Western governments. Mitterrand and his chief of staff, Jean-Louis Bianco, thus received on April 23 a group of members of the Soviet Parliament to whom the president emphasized: “I am in touch with President Gorbachev; he knows my feelings and thoughts.” In the same spirit, Bianco then explained to his guests: “Germany’s presence within the EEC and NATO is a more satisfying context than a Germany alone.”32 Mitterrand’s and Bianco’s words were inspired by a geopolitical logic. In the middle of Europe there shouldn’t be, in military terms, a “free-floating” nation. The words that Charles Powell used in a note to Margaret Thatcher on May 31, 1990 evidently betrayed something else: “It is in everyone’s interest to have Germany firmly locked in an alliance.”33 President Bush, for his part, sent Mitterrand a letter on May 23 (shortly before the French leader’s leaving for Moscow) informing him, on the one hand, of the results of the conversations Secretary of State Baker had had during his recent Moscow visit (May 16–18). On the other hand, he informed him of the “consultations on German unification” that he had had the previous week with Helmut Kohl and in the course of which “we reaffirmed the West’s common goals and approaches, which you and I agreed to in the context of our Key Largo meetings: a united Germany should be a full member of NATO, including participation in its integrated military structure.”34 On April 19, 1990 the French and American presidents, if we are to believe the remarks of the latter in his letter, largely agreed that, in the

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imminent negotiations, full NATO membership of a unified Germany constituted a common objective, for them as for the West in general. By stating this in his letter, Bush doubtless also intended to reiterate in writing the agreement that he and Mitterrand had reached and therefore establish it in a reliable way. But it was true: Mitterrand had said explicitly to Bush on April 19 that “united Germany had to remain in NATO.” He continued this work of mutual instruction a few days after his own meetings in Moscow and, on May 28, wrote his American counterpart a two-­ page letter which began: “Dear George, as you know, I met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow on May 25 last. I had discussions with him lasting around five hours.” He then immediately spoke of Gorbachev’s resistance regarding unified Germany and NATO: “Much of this time was spent on problems resulting from German unification. His hostility to the presence of unified Germany in NATO seems to me neither feigned nor tactical. He is firm and determined on this subject.” However, Mitterrand wrote, he had tried to persuade Gorbachev of the opposite, and he listened to the argument: “I emphasized that it was not reasonable to think of a solution other than Germany’s participation in the Atlantic Alliance and indicated that, from the Western side, we would certainly not refuse to tidy up the guarantees that he would be entitled to expect for the security of his country. I indicated some of those possible guarantees, important in my eyes, starting from the conclusion of a peace settlement conforming to international law. Mr. Gorbachev proved to be ‘attentive’ to my presentation.”35 Chancellor Kohl was equally informed by Mitterrand on his discussion with Gorbachev. In a letter to Kohl, dated May 30, 1985, he restated the admonition he had given Gorbachev: “He seems to me to be firm and determined as regards his hostility against the association of unified Germany with NATO.  I have pointed out that it wasn’t reasonable to bethink any other solution than that of a membership of Germany in the Atlantic Alliance.”36 Gorbachev arrived in Washington on May 31, and that very afternoon, the net woven by the West closed around him. He and President Bush conversed in the Cabinet Room of the White House in the presence of their foreign secretaries and advisers. The American president talked about the last act of the Helsinki agreement, wherein it is stated that all countries are free to join an alliance of their choice. Did that not mean that the unified Germany could also decide what it wanted—whether or not to be in NATO? If asked the question in those terms, Gorbachev could only answer that it was true—since the USSR had signed the Helsinki Final Act. At the

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crucial moment of their conversation Bush proposed the following phrasing, according to the American record: “The United States is unequivocally in favor of united Germany’s membership in NATO, however, if it makes a different choice, we would not contest it, we will respect it.” Gorbachev acquiesced: “[A]gree. I accept your formulation.” The Russian record of this exchange is almost identical. Bush: “The United States clearly advocate a membership of unified Germany in NATO, however, if it makes another choice, we shall not contest it, but respect it” (SŠA odnoznac ̌no vystupaet za c ̌lenstvo ob”edinennoj Germanii v NATO, odnako, esli ona sdelaet drugoj vybor, my ne budem ego osparivat’, stanem uvažat’). Gorbachev: “I agree. I accept your formulation” (Soglasen. Beru vashu formulirovku).37 It quickly became known that this net had closed. As of June 3, all the journalists accompanying him for his annual hike to the Rock of Solutré in Burgundy38 heard François Mitterrand explain: “It would be ludicrous to want to dictate its position to a unified, sovereign Germany. Sovereign Germany will not be prevented from choosing its military policy.”39 It was now only a matter of the attention—essentially of a financial nature—with which one could and wanted to facilitate for the Soviets their acceptance of a Germany belonging to NATO. Mitterrand had also informed Margaret Thatcher of his long meeting with Gorbachev on May 25. On June 13, the British prime minister wrote him a letter to inform him of the discussions she had just had with Gorbachev who still resisted, but this resistance was accompanied by a request for aid: “I thank you,” wrote Thatcher to Mitterrand, “for the message you sent me at the end of May regarding your meetings with President Gorbachev. It was very helpful to me in preparing my own meetings last Friday. We spent most of our time talking about the security of Europe and the problem of Germany and NATO. On this subject, Gorbachev’s thinking continues to evolve. There are incoherencies and contradictions, but he was careful not to say at any moment in our discussions or joint press conference that a united Germany should not be a member of NATO. We have no need of striving unofficially to keep the Warsaw Pact alive. But at the same time, we could elaborate a declaration between member states of the two Alliances that would not imply equality but help the Russians to accept—as I believe they will do— the united Germany in NATO.”40 Charles Powell, Thatcher’s Private Secretary, wrote a report of her conversation with Gorbachev and recorded as to the topic “Germany and NATO”: “The Prime Minister continued that she was glad Gorbachev accepted the stabilising role that the United

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States played in Europe. Germany was just about the only place that American forces could be present in Europe in any significant numbers. And their presence there represented security not just for Europe but also for the Soviet Union. But that meant a unified Germany must be in NATO, otherwise there would be no justification for the presence of US forces.”41 This narrative of the close agreement, on the Western side, on the question of the unified Germany’s belonging to NATO, is certainly quite important in itself, but there is a special reason for talking about it. In books devoted to the history of German reunification, one largely finds the point of view according to which the meeting between Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev (and their respective advisers), which took place July 15–16, 1990  in the Caucasus, was necessary to arrive at a “breakthrough” on the question of the unified Germany’s NATO membership. This position has certainly been contested—it has even been called the “chimera of the Caucasus”42—but it is also the reason we must mention here the documents likely to bear witness to the course that history really followed.

The Question of Borders “This is the sole difficulty I had with Kohl [in the reunification process],” noted President Mitterrand regarding the borders during his meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister József Antal on June 22.43 However, he overlooked another difficulty, just as large, that appeared in the spring of 1989 between him and the German chancellor, which finally triggered a confrontation between them in the summer and fall of 1989: the issue of the date chosen for convening the intergovernmental conference on EMU.  Not until December of that year and the European summit in Strasbourg would the two men come to an agreement on this point. Yet, here was a new confrontation between them shaping up, this time on the issue of borders. Here was a typical element of Mitterrand’s ideas on this subject: He spoke of borders in the plural. He hailed these revolutionary transformations provoking the dismantlement of the Yalta order that had ruled Europe up until then. But he also feared that this order might give way to disorder or, more precisely, a breakup all over the European continent and especially in the eastern part, with ethnic and nationalist demands and upheavals on the political map of Europe. That was the “issue of borders” or even, in Mitterrand’s eyes, the prospect of new conflicts

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motivated by nationalism, and also, in all likelihood, wars. The history of Europe was teeming with them. Did it all have to start over again? No. During those revolutionary years of 1989–1990, Mitterrand, as if haunted by this idea, invoked peace in the European area, a peace that concretely signified the intangibility of existing borders in Europe. Admittedly, a large number of them had been imposed by force and represented known injustices. No one was more aware of that than François Mitterrand, who continually stressed it. But peace in the future was more important than any past, and it was for that very reason that the emergence of a united Germany, endowed with full sovereignty at the heart of a European political system should serve to preserve or, even better, deepen peace in Europe. In particular, unification work had to concern the European borders within which Germany was shaping itself, and this work had to be accomplished by all—Germans and their neighbors—in an agreement promising peace. Consequently, for Mitterrand, it was entirely logical that the question of the borders of a united Germany, in the thought process and then in negotiations that led to German unity, be treated and finally settled as an essential part of those discussions. Early on, beginning in the summer of 1989, he expressed his expectations in this area, first using the term peacefully, joined to the word democratically, to sum up in one maxim the course he wanted to see reunification take. Then, beginning in November 1989, he referred more and more explicitly to the fact that the reunification of Germany also raised the issue of borders and especially the German-­ Polish border, the Oder-Neisse line. He also asserted that this question had to be integrated into the discussions on Germany’s unity. He clearly expected the Germans, and Chancellor Kohl in particular, to understand on their own and not raise any difficulties on the border issue. But that was not the case: “When I tied the question of borders to that of unification, I encountered a reticence from the Germans that surprised me.”44 In a March 19 meeting with Václav Havel, he had previously expressed himself: “I always asked Kohl the question about the Oder-Neisse border, and he never answered me. Except at the most recent stage of evolution.”45 With this allusion, Mitterrand was no doubt thinking about the chancellor’s efforts to obtain the resolution on the German-Polish border, voted by the Bundestag on March 8, but he had doubtless not chosen the term “development” by chance, for from his point of view—based, in particular, on the very great vigilance of his Élysée advisers—Kohl was still far from abandoning his “reticence.” The response he awaited from the

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chancellor concerning the border had turned into a confrontation over the recognition of the Oder-Neisse line. “I’d have preferred immediately obtaining the assurances I was asking for,” Mitterrand explained on March 25 in a television interview. And he thus saw the truth emerge, putting it into these terms on March 6, during his conversation with King Hussein: “The question of German reunification is not a problem in itself. The problem is the respect of the borders.”46 Naturally, the French president was not the only one to think about this problem or, more precisely, about the connection between the issues of reunification and borders. When, on November 29, 1989—the very same day Chancellor Kohl announced his ten-point plan—the Secretary of State laid out the four American “principles” for the reunification of Germany in the Briefing Room at the White House, he declared unambiguously: “Lastly, with respect to the question of borders, which was not addressed in Chancellor Kohl’s speech, I think we should reiterate our support for the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, recognizing inviolability.”47 When President Bush officially proclaimed the American “principles” in Brussels, on December 4, this American demand on borders—taken up by Bush as the fourth principle—became, in a way, the official stance of the U.S. government.48 Baker confirmed this in a televised interview the same day, also explicitly confirming the American position on the issue of borders in his speech before the Press Club in West Berlin on December 12.49 Finally, during the two-plus-four negotiations, he clearly defined the borders of a unified Germany. As we stated above in the chapter on general conditions of a reunification, the recognition of the existing borders in Europe was also one of the “principles” laid out by the Soviet leadership. And, of course, the country most concerned by this aspect of a German reunification, Poland, was also preoccupied by the question of borders. In a speech before the Polish parliament on December 7, the Polish foreign minister, Krzysztof Skubiszewski, regretted that the ten-point plan did not include an “eleventh”: a stance on the issue of Poland’s western border. “The boundary along the Oder and Neisse rivers,” said he, “is a crucial part of the European order that plays a major role in the unification of Europe. [Kohl’s] program for German unification becomes unreal insofar as it ignores the territorial problems, and this silence creates an ambiguous situation.”50 In the coming months, the Polish government opened and pursued a diplomatic offensive, with the objective of concluding before reunification of Germany a German-Polish treaty definitively setting

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Poland’s western boundary, and the inclusion of this country in the negotiations on the external aspects of reunification—after the two-plus-four mechanism had been agreed upon—which would thereby take on, in a way, the role of a seventh state in the “two-plus-four” circle. But why did Kohl adopt this reticent attitude noticed by the president? Why did he behave as he did on the issue of the Oder-Neisse line? He himself provided various explanations of his motives, and several elements, constituting a complex motivation in their interaction, allegedly prompted him to act in that way. To begin with, the question of the Oder-Neisse boundary, he explained three years later, posed a “big, a very big problem” for Kohl himself. When asked if the definitive “end” of the former German regions in the East—Silesia, eastern Prussia and eastern Pomerania51—had moved him, he answered, “It moved me deeply. Those territories constituted one third of the Reich’s area—I’m not talking here of the conquests from the Hitler era and never understood how one could dispose of the problem so simply. That has absolutely nothing to do with nationalism or chauvinism. There is the injustice of expulsion, and you can’t find a single reasonable person today who would deny it. We know that this (obsessive) fear is especially horrible for the victims of those events because they were, in a way, held accountable for acts they did not commit. They have been made to bear the responsibility in the name of Germany and in the name of German history, as it were. That posed a big, a very big problem for me and, in the final analysis, I didn’t understand the discussions we had in late-1989, early-1990, when people continually repeated that I had immediately to recognize the Oder-Neisse border. It was a search for a cheap political effect; I constantly said to myself that I would be able to sign the treaty concerning the Oder-Neisse line only if I found myself faced with this alternative: if I don’t do it, if we refuse, I myself refuse 17 million of our compatriots in the GDR access to the unified Germany, peace and freedom.”52 Second, the German chancellor feared that a definitive setting of the western Polish border by treaty might strengthen the far-right in Federal Germany, given the electoral situation at the time. For the Berlin parliamentary elections in January 1989, 7.5% of the electors had voted for the “Republikaner,” a right-wing party.53 Kohl wanted to avoid other electoral successes of that party by opening up the CDU to its sympathizers by encouraging them to again vote for his party. His party and he especially, along with the government he headed, were therefore constrained to adopt a reticent attitude on the question of the Oder-Neisse border. In

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addition, the conservative wing in the CDU/CSU group objected to a renunciation of “German territories to the East” that would certified by international law, under the pretext that, from the legal point of view, the Germany of 1937 had never ceased to exist. The Bundestag’s resolution on Poland’s western border, according to which “the Polish people” should “know that we Germans are not questioning—either now or in the future—its right to live within guaranteed borders,” had admittedly been voted by 400 deputies on November 8, 1989, but twenty-six from the CDU/CSU group had refused to subscribe to it. “Is that what you want?” Kohl had asked his advisers at the chancellery when, in early 1990, the pressure aiming to secure a definitive renunciation of the former German territories beyond the Oder-Neisse-line had been reinforced from inside as well as from outside Federal Germany. “Do you want to have seventy voices [of the CDU/CSU group] against us at the Bundestag?” According to Joachim Bitterlich, who related this episode to me, Kohl knew that it was necessary to “advance very carefully.” In the end—in the March 8 election—only seven negative voices were counted in the CDU/CSU group.54 Third, the chancellor wanted to preserve the possibility of negotiating all these questions (Oder-Neisse border, reparations to Poland, rights of the German minority in Poland) for the day the German people in its entirety regained its sovereignty, that is after reunification. It would be up to the united Germany to negotiate the territorial renunciation—with the definitive setting of the Oder-Neisse border—and a regularization of the rights of the German minority in Poland. To justify this position, Kohl—in particular in his speech at the International Conference Center in Paris on January 17, 199055—differentiated between a legal side and a political side. During the speech, he explained in detail what he meant by that and spoke more briefly on this point in an interview given to the ARD television station on February 25, after the end of his discussions with President Bush at Camp David: “This decision [on the western boundary of Poland] can only be made by the sovereign German people. I wish to speak about the definitive decision that can only be made by a freely-elected German parliament and government. Obviously, the Poles are also anxious that a treaty be made possible by a truly competent organ … The border issue will be definitively settled by a freely elected government and parliament representing all Germans. I have always said, and I also said it here [on the legal aspect]. And I repeat here [on the political aspect] what I already said in January in Paris and even before that: No one wants to associate the

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unity of the nation, the German nation, with a shifting of existing borders. It seems to me that this indication is clear, and everyone, in this situation, must be satisfied with it until we have a parliament representing all Germans.”56 It was obvious: the German chancellor was not listening to the exhortations of the French and American presidents concerning the Oder-Neisse border. In his January 17 speech in Paris, Kohl declared that it was “the reunited, sovereign German people” that had to make a definitive decision on that boundary, whereas François Mitterrand had told him, during their conversation at Latche on January 4, that he was anxious for “them” to “make it understood” that the Polish boundary would never be questioned. He made the same declaration on February 25 in the terms that we have just quoted and which “made understood” only his own point of view. However, ten days earlier, on February 15, at the end of a long discussion with Mitterrand at an Élysée dinner, they arrived at a common point of view (according to the French report of this meeting but not according to the German report): The definitive nature of the Oder-­ Neisse boundary should not be sealed by a unilateral legal act (between Germany and Poland alone) but by an international legal act.57 “The most important question [regarding reunification] is the Oder-­ Neisse,” Mitterrand had said to his guest during that dinner. Reunified Germany would confirm the borders, Kohl had replied, which incited Mitterrand to remark: “Politically, it would have been useful to confirm the Oder Neisse border.” But he had added that, from the legal point of view, he understood that this recognition could not take place before reunification. It was a very annoyed chancellor (the French report mentions, in parentheses, after the letter “K,” indicating that it is the chancellor speaking: “very red”) who then launched into a long rebuttal: “I want to talk about the Oder-Neisse [border]. This issue has been blown up. It should not have existed like that. It is a large wound. Normally, one treats wounds with balm and not with boiling oil. That doesn’t help.” After calming down, the chancellor also explained that they would achieve nothing if they tacked these questions of borders onto the problem of German unity: “It must not be demanded as a preliminary condition.” Mitterrand replied laconically that he was not demanding it (which he repeated a few sentences later) and continued to explain what he thought about the Oder-Neisse border: it had been imposed by Stalin and was a consequence of the war—a typical “bad treaty”—but the situation was what it was: it existed.

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And Mitterrand then explained what, from his point of view, had to be done henceforth. When Kohl said that the parliament of the unified Germany would affirm “these are our borders,” it was not a matter of a purely unilateral act. Yet, according to Mitterrand, an “international decision of the countries concerned” by this point was necessary: “It will take an international act.” According to the French report of this conversation, the chancellor had then answered: “Yes, alright”; but in the German report—as in the one published in the edition of chancellery documents from 1989–1990—there is no mention of that reply.58 At a meeting in Suresnes in November 2009 I discussed the issue of the Order-Neisse border with Betrand Dufourcq, the head of the French delegation at the two-plus-four negotiations. He told me then that he had talked with Horst Teltschik about the issue at a Munich Security Conference in Munich. In Teltschik’s view, Dufourcq reported, one should “be glad about the pressure the French had exerted on Kohl.”59 It had led the chancellor to take the step “finally to accept what was required of him and to regulate the issue of the Order-Neisse border.” On March 9, the Polish leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski, his prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and his foreign minister, Krzysztof Skubiszewski, were received at the Élysée by President Mitterrand. Their conversation, in which French Prime Minister Michel Rocard and Foreign Minister Dumas participated, lasted nearly a half a day, with a long meeting from 12:30 to 2 p.m., which was prolonged during a lunch from 2 to 3 and followed by a final discussion between 3:15 and 4:30. This lengthy discussion dealt essentially with German reunification. Among the questions the Polish delegation had come to discuss concerning reunification, there was also, of course, that of the Oder-Neisse border. President Jaruzelski explained that it should be one of the first points dealt with in the two-plus-four negotiations, and “the Polish government [hoped] that Poland might participate in this part of the negotiations as soon as possible.” In his (long) response to Jaruzelski’s (long) declaration, Mitterrand reckoned, concerning the borders: “The unification of the two [German] states depends on the will of the citizens of both states but can only be exercised in the framework of the current boundaries of these two states.” He had already spoken with the chancellor, he said, on November 3, 1989, before the fall of the Wall, and had brought up the topic of the inviolability of the Oder-Neisse border at each of their subsequent meetings. Others, too, had spoken to him about it, but with “great perseverance,” the chancellor had maintained the same behavior.

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“Of course,” he replied in personal conversations, but he never said anything of the sort in public. “You are going to run into a serious crisis,” Mitterrand told Kohl at the time. “Aren’t you in the process of arousing all suspicions?” France, the president explained again in his discussion with his Polish visitors, had a clear, explicit stand on the question of the Oder-Neisse border. Without a guarantee on this point, France would not be able to participate in the next stages of the German unity process. Was it possible to remain at the stage of unilateral German declarations (Mitterrand was referring in particular to the German parliament’s resolution on the western boundary of Poland, which had been voted the day before)? “Our answer is non,” said the French leader. And when he, Rocard and Dumas met that March 9 afternoon for a final discussion with the Polish representatives, he summed up, in this spirit, the result that they would endeavor to obtain on the border issue: “It is necessary for both Germanies and Poland to enter into negotiations for a settlement on the border before unification. It is [also] necessary that the Four [France, the US, the USSR and Great Britain] take public stands along these lines.”60 That is exactly the result the president informed the chancellor of when he related his discussion with the Polish leaders, on March 14: “With the Poles, we came to an agreement on two points: the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border. Negotiations must be begun immediately. They cannot be concluded only after unification. The presence of the Poles in the [two-plus-four] negotiations: I don’t want to turn the six-party negotiations into seven parties. But I want the Poles to be associated. The only thing that is really urgent is the border.”61 The Élysée advisers were informed on March 15 by Horst Teltschik, who had come to Paris for a working meeting and luncheon, about the plans being prepared in Bonn for resolving the border issue and, in general, bringing German reunification to a successful conclusion. Caroline de Margerie wrote a memo on this discussion between Kohl’s personal diplomat and Mitterrand’s advisers,62 and according to her, Teltschik spoke about the Oder-Neisse border “with an insistence akin to brutality.” He told his French interlocutors: “The vote of the Bundestag resolution was a great success for Chancellor Kohl. How was that not understood in France? German opinion was quite amazed at how little store was set by this solemn resolution. If the Germans have the impression that they’re not trusted, that will be serious.” Teltschik, de Margerie summed up, reeled off the familiar outline: joint declaration by the two parliaments

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and two governments. As for the Polish outline, it is not tenable, either legally or politically. “Let France make the Poles understand that they must not insist.” And Kohl’s adviser finally declared, regarding the OderNeisse border: “It is out of the question that the Four guarantee, in any way, a German-Polish treaty on this single issue.” De Margerie, who has Polish ancestors, was dismayed, as she later said, by Teltschik’s evident contempt for the Polish requests concerning the Oder-Neisse-Border. And Hubert Védrine experienced Teltschik during the period of Germany’s reunification as a “German nationalist,” in offering, as a possible explanation, Teltschik’s origins in the Sudetenland.63 Years later, Teltschik apparently held a different view on the issue of the border, as could be reported a few paragraphs above. Without being asked, Teltschik—in March 1990—explained to Mitterand’s advisers the conceptions on reunification that he had brought from the chancellery, evidently with a very precise idea in mind. According to the “chancellor’s schedule,” the economic and social unification of the two states should be implemented immediately; the two-plus-four negotiations should be finished before the CSCE summit in November. Elections would then be held in the GDR in December 1990, and in January 1991, unification should be carried out according to Article 23 of the German Basic Law. As concerned the “security question,” said Kohl’s envoy, “Gorbachev knows he’ll not obtain a neutral Germany, and if Germany’s allies are sufficiently insistent about it, Germany will remain in NATO.” The “real hard point” would “probably [be] Germany’s denuclearization.” But George Bush had told Helmut Kohl: “No Nukes, no troops.” It was therefore necessary to “offer the Soviets an overall package compensating for staying in NATO and allowing them to save face.” That meant: • a certain institutionalization of the CSCE; • no nuclear artillery in Germany, but airborne nuclear weapons; • reduced levels of Western troops in the FRG; • Soviet troops on the territory of the former GDR for a duration to be decided; • and above all, very strong economic and financial cooperation. As concerned the last—but least decisive—point, the “financial compensation” for the USSR, Teltschik added explicitly that those payments should be assumed by the European Community, “for the Americans won’t do it.”

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Notes 1. CD, January 16, 1990. 2. CM, January 31, 1990. 3. WorldTrans., 213. 4. Pol.Dipl., 199. 5. Speech to Board of Deputies of British Jews, in: Freedman, Europe Transformed. 485–487. 6. Report of the Mitterrand-Özal meeting in Paris, February 13, 1990. 7. Note from Pierre Bérégovoy to President Mitterrand, February 7, 1990. 8. Report of the Mitterrand-King Hussein meeting in Paris, March 6, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 9. Report of the Mitterrand-Havel meeting in Paris, March 19, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/68). 10. CM, January 31, 1990. 11. Report of the Mitterrand-Silva meeting in Paris, March 23, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/68). 12. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, January 30, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/HV/9, dossier 1). 13. According to the American report it was “Eastern Europe” on which Mitterrand was speaking: “Eastern Europe is all alone, poor and humiliated. … They will come with their hats in hand like beggars” (https:// bush41librar y.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­t elcons/1990-­0 4-­1 9%2 D%2DMitterrand%20[2].pdf. Accessed March 10, 2021). 14. https://bush41librar y.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­t elcons/1990­02-­24%2D%2DKohl.pdf (accessed March 10, 2021). 15. Letter from George Bush to François Mitterrand, April 17, 1990. 16. Report of the Mitterrand-Cossiga meeting in Paris, January 29, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 17. Report of the Mitterrand-Eagleburger meeting in Paris, January 29, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/74). 18. Conversation between Mitterrand, Hubert Védrine and Jean-Louis Bianco after the Cabinet Meeting (Documentary note by JLB, PC). 19. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Paris, February 15, 1990 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/73, Dossier 1). 20. CD, January 16, 1990. 21. Le Monde, February 15, 1990, 2. 22. Hubert Védrine, Note pour Monsieur le Président, March 23, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/73, Dossier 1). 23. See Pol.Dipl., 238; WorldTrans., 196 f. 24. Report of the Teltschik-Attali meeting, March 15, 1990.

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25. Report of the Mitterrand-Bush meeting at Key Largo (Florida), April 19, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 26. h t t p s : / / b u s h 4 1 l i b r a r y . t a m u . e d u / f i l e s / m e m c o n s -­ telcons/1990-­04-­19%2D%2DMitterrand%20[1].pdf, 3 (accessed March 11, 2021). 27. https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­t elcons/1990-­0 4­19%2D%2DMitterrand%20[2].pdf, 4 (accessed March 11, 2021). 28. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. Le Directeur des Affaires Politiques, Conseil de Défense et de Sécurité Franco-Allemand, 3ième session, April 26, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CDM/34). 29. Report of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting in Moscow, May 25, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/76, Dossier 3). What’s more, Mitterrand deemed as unrealistic the idea cherished for a while by Moscow: a united Germany belonging to both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. “Two alliances for one country—that can’t last long,” he had said to Helmut Kohl on February 15 (Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Paris, February 15, 1990/ AN-AG/5(4)/CD/73, Dossier 1). 30. Germ.vop., 460. 31. See Mitterrand’s letter of April 24, 1990 to Thatcher (PREM 19–3348). 32. Loïc Hennekinne, Délégation soviétique chez Jean-Louis Bianco avec le Président, April 23, 1990. 33. PREM-19-3175. 34. Letter from George H. W. Bush to François Mitterrand, May 23, 1990. 35. For the almost identical passage in the “Unofficial Translation” held in the Bush Presidential Library, see: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4325697/Document-­20-­Letter-­from-­Francois-­Mitterrand-­to.pdf (accessed March 20, 2021). 36. Letter of François Mitterrand to Helmut Kohl, May 30, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CDM/33). 37. See the reports of that fascinating afternoon in: WorldTrans., 282–283, and Pol.Dipl. 252–254. For the records see: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB320/11.pdf, 9 (accessed March 15, 2021). and: Germ.vop., 466–476. 38. See: https://digitalcosmonaut.com/2012/the-­rock-­of-­solutre/ (accessed March 15, 2021). 39. Solutré 1990. Extraits des propos tenus par le Président. 40. Letter from Margaret Thatcher to François Mitterrand, June 13, 1990. 41. PREM-19-3176. 42. See Andreas Rödder, “‘Breakthrough in the Caucasus?’ German Reunification as a Challenge to Contemporary Historiography,” in: German Historical Institute, London, Bulletin, XXIV, 2, November 2002, 7–35.

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43. Report of the Mitterrand-Antal meeting in Paris, June 22, 1990 ­(AN-­AG/5(4)/CD/68). 44. Report of the Mitterrand-Mazowiecki meeting in Paris, May 28, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 45. Report of the Mitterrand-Havel meeting in Paris, March 19, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/68). Mitterrand had already made the same remark on December 16, 1989 to George Bush; see above, p. 335, note 46. 46. Report of the Mitterrand-King Hussein meeting in Paris, March 6, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/68). 47. Statement by Secretary of State James A. Baker III on German Reunification on November 29, 1989, in: Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 25, 39: 1842 f. See: https://books.google.de/books?id=cxiT0HaTHz0C &pg=PA1842&lpg=PA1842&dq=James+Baker+on+German+reunificatio n+November+29,+1989&source=bl&ots=2Lqpul-­1pY&sig=ACfU3U1V DStBIpnZNqixinfbia4s_3FuHg&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_sPfjpaju AhVp7OAKHaufCQA4FBDoATADegQIAhAC#v=onepage&q=Ja mes%20Baker%20on%20German%20reunification%20November%20 29%2C%201,989&f=false (accessed March 8, 2021). 48. See https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/outline-­remarks-­the-­ north-­atlantic-­treaty-­organization-­headquarters-­brussels (accessed March 8, 2021). 49. See: http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=fil e&item=690688 (accessed March 8, 2021). 50. Quoted from Jan B. de Weydenthal, The Politics of the Oder-Neisse Line, RAD Background Report/217, December 15, 1989. 51. Three regions where, prior to 1945, large German populations lived and who were expulsed and displaced after the war. 52. Kohl, Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit, 300–302, 312ff., 321–327. At his meeting with George Bush on February 24, 1990 Helmut Kohl also articulated at great length his reasoning concerning the question of the German-­Polish border. See: https://bush41library.tamu.edu/ files/memcons-­telcons/1990-­02-­24%2D%2DKohl.pdf (accessed March 11, 2021). 53. The “Republikaner” was a right-wing group. 54. Interview with Joachim Bitterlich in Bonn, May 28, 1995. 55. See https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/0018ea81-­ 0f2f-­4184-­92d0-­54c99ef0f63f/publishable_de.pdf (accessed March 11, 2021). 56. BPA-Nachrichtenabteilung, Ref. II A 5, Rundf.  – Ausw. Deutschland, 27.21990 (Kohl), 0225–8: Tagesschau, Zur Westgrenze Polens.

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57. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting in Paris, February 15, 1990 (ANAG/5(4)/CD/7010). For the German report of this meeting, see Dok. Dt.Ein., 842–852. 58. Dok. Dt.Ein., 849. 59. Interview with Bertrand Dufourcq, November 6, 2009. 60. Report of the Mitterrand/Dumas/Rocard-Jaruzelski/Mazowiecki/ Skubiszewski meeting in Paris, March 9, 1990 (AN AG/5(4)/CD/68). 61. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl telephone conversation of March 14, 1990. On the German report of this discussion, see Dok. Dt.Ein., 943–947. 62. See Caroline de Margerie, Compte rendu du déjeuner de Jacques Attali avec Horst Teltschik, March 15, 1990 (the following quotes are from this source/AN-AG/5/4)/CDM/33). 63. Interview with Caroline de Margerie, April 12, 1999, Interview with Hubert Védrine on April 21, 1995.

CHAPTER 16

France in the Two-Plus-Four Negotiations

On May 5, in Bonn, the foreign ministers of the Four Powers responsible for Germany and the two German states began their two-plus-four negotiations. The finance ministers of Federal Germany and the GDR signed the state treaty on economic, monetary and social union between the two German states on May 18. A week later, Mikhail Gorbachev received François Mitterrand in Moscow. On May 29, Boris Yeltsin became president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, within the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation declared its sovereignty on June 12. The next day, in Berlin, the definitive razing of the 47 kilometers of the Wall began. On June 17, the good-neighborly relations and friendly cooperation treaty was signed between Germany and Poland. During the European summit that was held in Dublin on June 25–26, it was decided to convene the intergovernmental conference for December 15, 1990, which will turn the European Community into a European Economic and Monetary Union. The new European treaty had to be ratified before the end of 1992. On July 1, the monetary, economic and social union between Federal Germany and the GDR went into effect; the GDR’s currency was no longer valid, and the Deutschmark became the sole currency in the GDR.  Since January 1, 190,973 people had left the GDR to lead a new life in Federal Germany. On July 15 and 16, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher met the Soviet head of state, Gorbachev, and his foreign minister, Shevardnadze in Moscow and the Caucasus. They reached an overall agreement on the questions raised by German reunification. On July 16, Ukraine proclaimed its sovereignty. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4_16

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On August 2, Iraq attacked Kuwait. The GDR Volkskammer decided in an extraordinary session on August 23, that the GDR would adhere to the FRG on October 3. In East Berlin, on August 31, the “treaty on the establishment of the unity of Germany” was concluded between the FRG and the GDR.  With a fourth and final conference the two-plus-four negotiations were closed on September 12 in Moscow. On October 1 ended the rights and responsibilities of the Four Powers in relation to Berlin and Germany as a whole. Two days later, the two German states reunify, and Germany acquired full sovereignty.

France and the Concept of the Four-Plus-Two/ Two-Plus-Four Negotiations A French diplomat was the first person who put into writing the concept that was first expressed by the formula “four-plus-two negotiations,” later became the “two-plus-four negotiations,” and implied a design for the settlement of Germany’s unity. A settlement through negotiations between the two German states and the Four Powers holding the ultimate authority over the whole of Germany, France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. In a note dated October 19, 1989, Henri Reynaud wrote: “Rather than play a hypothetical and problematic ‘German card’  – reunification in exchange for neutrality  – the Soviets could be interested in getting away from the post-war period by codifying the existing ‘acquis’ within the framework of a peace treaty that could be negotiated between the Allies and the two German states.”1 At the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs they knew, it seems, how to handle, legally and diplomatically, the question of a reunification of Germany. A further note of the Quai d’Orsay, dated October 24, made two critical points. One concerned the “principle of German unity” that defined, in legal terms, the past and, in particular, the present role of the Four Allies as to Germany’s situation. “Germany, as on May 18, 1945,” the note stated, “continues to exist in the joint quadripartite action of the Allies acting in the name of their commitments subscribed during and after the war. The existence of two Germans states in Germany, along with a special entity, Greater Berlin, constitute only a temporary situation. In other words, the Allies, by exercising or reserving on each occasion since 1945 their quadripartite rights and responsibilities, ensured the preservation of the principle of German unity.”2

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The second point made by the note was an outlook that, for the mere reason of the note, clearly was not deemed by its author to be unrealistic. What was Germany’s situation in October 1989? A “temporary” and not, such the crucial point, a “definitive” one. A change would come through “the signature of the Peace Treaty to be concluded between the four Allies and Germany or the two German states.”3 Only a few days had passed since this note had been drawn up, when Jacques Blot, Head of the Direction d’Europe at the Quai d’Orsay, discussed in a note, dated October 30, an “international conference” on Germany, and proposed for its preparation “explorative consultations between the Four Allies and the two German states.”4 The documents of the Quai d’Orsay just studied soon became of course part of the Élysée’s files on the question of Germany’s unity. To Mitterrand, the avid reader of documents, a formula “four-plus-two/two-plus-four” was, as it seems, known when he spoke on December 21 with Hans Modrow, head of the East German government. In his view, though, an adoption of such a formula was pending, probably because it was not clear yet, what it precisely implied. To him, the West German government appeared to be hesitant. “We have to deliberate with our friends in the FRG,” he therefore said to Modrow, “since I am not sure whether they would accept the participation of the two Germanies in meetings with the four [Allies].”5 Mitterrand’s comment still implied a preponderance of the Four Allied Powers, deduced from their “quadripartite rights and responsibilities” as to Germany, and very much, at that time, favored at Moscow and London (with Paris oscillating). Hubert Védrine in 1991 recalled that Chancellor Kohl flatly refused at first a “group of six,” “influenced” by his adviser Horst Teltschik.6 Germany couldn’t accept to find itself, when its unification was negotiated, put at the “Katzentisch” (side table).This was also Genscher’s resolute view.7 Within the next few weeks, more thoughts were given to the four-plus-­ two/two-plus-four issue. In early February the hesitations at Bonn concerning the whole concept had not subsided. Foreign Minister Genscher did not reject it entirely, but thought that it had to be examined carefully.8 At the Élysée the various ideas of Genscher as to the best concept were known and discussed. West Germany’s Foreign Minister, Hubert Védrine observed on February 6 in a note, was “envisioning” a unification of the two Germanies “without external interference.” Then, a CSCE conference in the fall of 1990 would acknowledge the process and confide to a small group of states the mission to “discharge the past.” This group

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would be composed of the FRG, the GDR (or already a unified Germany), the United States, the USSR, France, and perhaps some states neighboring Germany. Védrine didn’t seem to be won over by these ideas, however. The USSR or Great Britain or “we” might well want, he wrote further, to “inverse the order of the elements,” in thinking that a reunion of “6 (4+2)” would have to take place as soon as possible.9 Two days later, on February 8, 1990 Védrine formally set out, in a memo to the president, the proposal of using four-plus-two/two-plus-­ four negotiations to come close to a solution to the international questions raised by reunification.10 “How could the reserved rights of the Allies in Germany be terminated?” he asked. The response that he proposed was: “This question concerns, stricto sensu, the Four (United States, USSR, Great Britain, France) and the two German states.” Mitterrand learned by the same memo that Foreign Minister Dumas had responded to his wish and formed a working group at the Quai d’Orsay that would deal with the following topics, linked to the establishment of German unity: responsibility of the four powers; Berlin; issue of the borders; alliances (the military status of a united Germany); atomic weapons (confirmation of Germany’s renunciation of possessing them).11 During the first half of February Dumas actively involved himself in the diplomatic efforts toward determining a concept for negotiating the external aspects of Germany’s unification. He supported the “two-plus-four” instead of the “four-plus-two” formula. In Moscow, too, the formula “four-plus-two/two-plus-four” emerged, through Anatoly Chernyaev, as he tells in his Diary. While describing there a discussion in late January 1990 on the German question conducted by Gorbachev and a few of his advisers, Chernyaev has himself bring up the notion of “the six players.” In specifying whom he meant then he writes: “the US, Great Britain, France, USSR, plus Kohl and Modrow, i.e. the winners and losers of the war.” Manifestly, Chernyaev’s selection is a logical choice. Those who won and those who lost in World War II, are indeed the players to be thought of as to that drama to be played out: an end to the division of Germany. “Everyone agreed with the ‘six players.’” Chernyaev notes in his Diary. Before, he had argued that the “German unification process” could not be “stopped” and therefore the “six players” had to be convened “to come to an agreement.”12 Chernyaev produced also a formal verbatim of the discussion. It quite differs from his diary entry. The formula he proposed according to the verbatim is not as catching as the one he introduced in the diary. Here

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“four winners and two German states” are designated. Besides, while the diary entry portrays Chernyaev as the leader of the discussion in its first part, it is Gorbachev presented in that role by the verbatim. Chernyaev simply interrupts Gorbachev who is puzzling over the rights of the Four Allies, Helmut Kohl being displeased that France is among the winners, and gathers his words this way: “Well. Now a reality other than the one in 1945 prevails.” Only to add the interjection: “Let us assemble not ‘4’ but ‘5’, under your participation Kohl” (I davaj soberem ne “4”, a “5”—s tvoim, Kol’, uc ̌astiem. …). At that moment, Chernyaev intervenes with the correcting remark: “Mikhail Sergeyevich, in my view, not ‘5’ but ‘6’ have to be convened—four of the winners and two of the German states” (Michail Sergeevic ̌, po-moemu, nado sobirat’ ne “5″, a “6″—c ̌etyrech ot pobeditelej i dvuch ot nemeckich gosudarstv). Gorbachev, as his summary of the discussion shows, took up Chernyaev’s formula.13 At a meeting of the British Cabinet on February 22, 1990 Douglas Hurd stated that “the United Kingdom had played a major part in creating the framework for dealing with the problems posed by German unification.”14 This is an exaggeration. An origination of the “four-plus-­two/ two-plus-four” formula in London is not known. Still, Margaret Thatcher followed “the telegrams about German reunification very closely,” as her Private Secretary, Charles Powell wrote on February 6 to the Private Secretary of Douglas Hurd, Stephen J. Wall. “She would not object to a meeting of the Four Powers plus the two Germanies,” Powell stated.15 As the phrasing of this statement shows, Thatcher clung to the idea of a preponderance of the “Four Powers,” there were first the “Four” and then the “two.” This becomes still more evident by the formulation “the Berlin Four plus the two Germanies” that Powell used in another letter to Wall on February 8,16 while knowing certainly that the “Four” still had prerogative rights as to Berlin. Indeed, a Memorandum by the Policy Staff, sent on February 9 to Wall, ends with the sentence: “We would need to make clear that the six did not replace the Four Powers. The latter should continue in existence, if only for discussion of Berlin matters.”17 The gestation of a formula “two-plus-four”—and not “four-plus-­ two”—in Washington has been described, as was the diplomatic consultation that Secretary of State Baker pursued on account of the formula with Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, Hurd, Kohl and Genscher.18 On February 12–14, 1990, Foreign Ministers of NATO and Warsaw Treaty Organisation countries, with observers from other CSCE states, met in Ottawa for an “Open Skies” Conference to deliberate on a regime in which the

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participants would voluntarily open their airspace on a reciprocal basis.19 The Foreign Ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and West Germany used their presence at Ottawa, though, from the morning of February 12 onward, to reach an agreement on adopting the formula “two-plus-four” for settling Germany’s unification. They reached that agreement in the late morning of February 13, after hours of intensive deliberations, from meeting to meeting, one-to-one, or in small groups. This hectic, yet creative activity, culminating in the final decision to launch the two-plus-four negotiations, was immediately afterward recounted by two witnesses, Brian J.P.  Fall, the British High Commissioner in Ottawa, and Jeremy K.B. Kinsman, a Canadian diplomat.20 The report of Kinsman, typically registered under the heading Observations on the corridor conversations, is by far the more telling one. The Foreign Ministers of the West, that is the United States, Great Britain, West Germany, and France, clearly had the upper hand during those deliberations. Hans-Dietrich Genscher was “adamant” that his East German colleague, Oskar Fischer, was kept off the conversations. This die-­ hard communist representing a vanishing regime, had, in Genscher’s view, no role to play in a process leading to a novel Germany. Everyone thought, besides: The “GDR becomes academic.” Symbolically, the exclusion of Fischer augured badly for the East German delegation at the two-plus-­ four negotiations. It participated, but hardly partook, being not really accepted as a partner, in what was done and decided. Genscher, as to the perception of the others, appeared to be “driven by [the] historic feat of achieving unification.” He impressed his colleagues by his “emotional” speeches, through which he expressed his country’s and his own—as a German born in Halle, East Germany—personal “gratitude” toward the manifest support they now received for their goal of unification. Very striking indeed is the image of the Soviet Union that emerges from the tidings told by Eduard Shevardnadze, its Foreign Minister. At a breakfast in the morning of February 12, to which Brian Mulroney, Canada’s prime minister, had invited him and Jim Baker, Mulroney noticed an air of anxiety and surrender about him. “He appeared to be somewhat morose. He is greatly troubled by German reunification though resigned to it,” Mulroney confided to his personal journal. 21 In the conversations later with his colleagues, Shevardnaze characterized the situation of the Soviet Union with alarming expressions: “unpredictability,” “instability,” “complex,” “urgent,” “dangerous.” The Gorbachev

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government fears, he stressed, that the USSR is “imploding,” and its critics in the Central Committee of the CPSU regard the unification of Germany as “by far the most explosive development.” Shevardnaze pleaded with Baker, at one of their private meetings, to have the Soviets accorded at the intended negotiations the status of “participants and not of victims.” As for Baker, he had nothing like this in his mind. A “sensitivity to USSR interests,” he told the greater group of Foreign Ministers, was indeed precisely the “driving reason” behind the two-plus-four formula, it should of course establish for the Soviet Union a status of “dignity.” Yes, but intentions and experience often differ. When among the Western ministers the question was considered whether or not the two-­ plus-­four negotiations could be used also “to pre-negotiate relationship of unified Germany to NATO,” a strain of strong realism was perceived. Its cause was an argument expected from the “French.” Bertrand Dufourcq, later head of the French delegation at the negotiations, had already made to Canadian diplomats this lethal point: “There was nothing to negotiate with the USSR on issue [membership of unified Germany NATO and related security questions], since they had no leverage.” Brian Fall, the British High Commissioner, opened his report in speaking still of a “meeting of the Four Plus Two,” while adding in brackets: “or as the Germans would prefer it, the Two plus Four.” The French equally continued to oscillate between “four-plus-two” and “two-plus-­ four.”22 A peculiar distinction was drawn by Mitterrand while talking on the phone with Bush on February 26: “When we speak of German unity, it is 2+4. When we speak of borders, it is 4+2.”23 Roland Dumas as Foreign Minister of France, fully concurred, as I noted already, with 2+4, though. While talking on February 12 with Shevardnaze he pointed out to his Soviet colleague, as a French diplomatic wire of February 14 reported, that the “mechanism 2+4 should be used rapidly.” Shevardnaze agreed, and “committed himself to consult Moscow immediately.” A day later, on February 13, he “made the agreement of the Soviet government known.”24 Genscher, in the name also of Chancellor Kohl (with whom he was in close contact by phone),25 firmly rejected at Ottawa the four-plus-two format. There could be no other format than the two-plus-four. The German people was about to use its right to self-determination. It would be wrong to supplant this universal right by the purely juridical authority the Four Allies still held as to the “whole” of Germany. The measure of Germany’s unification should not be a legal fiction but the rights of nations.

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A few days before the conference at Ottawa, on February 11, Genscher had already told Shevardnaze in Moscow that “we could not agree with a conference at which the Four would sit in judgment over us. Every people has its dignity. We wish to speak with the Four. A way has to be found as to how the two German states could deliberate with the Four Powers. We have still to consider all this. “But, then, after a few further words, Genscher added that “the formula two-plus-four ‘would be’ conceivable” for him. He intended, Genscher continued, “to speak about that with his three Western colleagues at Ottawa.” “Perhaps,” he said to Shevardnaze, “an opportunity will arise to resume at Ottawa our exchange.“26 Curiously, the French news agency Agence France Press issued on February 13 a message that designated the “Head of West German diplomacy, Mr. Hans-­Dietrich Genscher” as the person who had “launched that formula” (two-plus-four).27 However that may be, at Ottawa the format “two-plus-four” was formally adopted.28

France in the Two-Plus-Four Negotiations The first meeting, which marked the beginning of the negotiations, took place at the level of the political directors of the six states, on March 14, 1990, in Bonn; France was represented by the political director of the Foreign Ministry, Bertrand Dufourcq, and other members of the French delegation, Thierry Dana and Denis Gauer.29 The French delegation, according to Dufourcq, did not receive any “instructions” from the nominal representative of France, Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. The reports that he received from the delegation about the progress and details of the negotiations were “returned without annotation by him, or even any sign indicating that he had taken notice of the notes.”30 France therefore was an actor during the two-plus-four negotiations through Betrand Dufourcq and his collaborators. Besides, Dumas “did not really get along” with his American counterpart, Secretary of State James Baker.31 The results of the first session of the negotiations were recorded and summarized, on the French side, in a three-page report, which first presented the procedural rules that had been agreed upon: meeting of the political directors alternately in Bonn and East Berlin; revolving presidency among the Six (in German alphabetical order); first meeting at the ministerial level after the second meeting of the political directors; secretariat support taken care of by the host country; and participation of

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Poland when it came to the issue of borders. Second, the report tackled the content and observed that they had come to an agreement on dealing with the following four areas during deliberations—in keeping with what Federal Germany had proposed: the border issue; the questions of military policy; the problem of Berlin; the rights and responsibilities of the four powers “and their extinction” (but this last phrase had been removed at the request of the Soviets). On the East German side, additional topics had been proposed, such as a synchronization of the rapprochement of the two German states and the overall European process; and a safeguard for the property claims linked to expropriations in East Germany after 1945. However, this latter topic had been refused by Federal Germany, as was the Soviet Union’s proposal to provide for a formal peace treaty. It was agreed to postpone the discussion of topics that had not been unanimously accepted to other meetings.32 In a note from Caroline de Margerie to the Élysée, based on information provided directly by the French delegation, one finds certain other interesting details on this first meeting of the political directors. There had been a “very good atmosphere”; as concerned the integration of Poland in the negotiations, the United States had not been satisfied with the wording, which allowed “participation”; the USSR had proposed that they should discuss not only Poland’s western border but also “Polish interests,” which designated reparations, as was then explained in private conversations; and the United States had deplored the fact that the French and West German foreign ministers had, on the night before, agreed on the wording of an invitation to Poland, which had then indeed been unanimously adopted: “As soon as the discussions […] deal primarily with the borders of Poland, the Poles will be invited.”33 In the course of the second meeting of political directors, on April 30 in East Berlin, a very long debate began—in particular between Federal Germany and the Soviets—on the concept of peace that the Soviet delegation wanted to impose as the key for the structure of the treaty that was being negotiated: It would be a peace treaty. On the other hand, the West German delegation wanted to avoid this designation—and achieved its aim. At the end of the discussions, it was decided to set as the objective of the negotiations the “final settlement of international law and [the] cessation of the four’s rights and responsibilities.” During the debate, strictly speaking, the French delegation had declared that it was not set on the peace concept but, nevertheless, could imagine nothing but a legal act respecting international law. With its other demand, aimed at

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“synchronizing […] the realization of German unity and the pan-European process,” the USSR found itself completely isolated. In the end, the head of the Soviet delegation, Alexander Bondarenko, indicated that this issue would henceforth be dealt with by the Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, who would have to decide whether to present it again at the first ministerial conference of the two-plus-four negotiations.34 This took place on May 5 in Bonn and was therefore opened by the West German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who then provided a few explanations, according to the French report of the conference.35 Germany, he confirmed, had no kind of territorial claim, and Poland’s participation in the negotiations was opening the way for a “recognition, in international law, of the western border of Poland by the united Germany.” German unification was occurring in the “exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination as set out in international law and in the principles of the Helsinki Final Act.” Henceforth, the internal implementation of reunification was the business of the Germans and of them alone. As Genscher explicitly stressed, they wanted a European Germany and not the opposite (a “German Europe”). Unified Germany had to belong to the Atlantic Alliance and, in keeping with the Helsinki Final Act, this was the identical principle of sovereignty that had to be applied, according to which all states were free “to be parties to alliance treaties or not”; generally speaking, the Act excluded all discrimination or singularization. (Genscher thereby rejected the idea of imposing on a united Germany membership in a determined alliance or renunciation of any membership—which would have been an imposed neutrality.) Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze then took the floor and began by emphasizing the fact that, for the Soviet Union, relations with Germany constituted “the central, essential question of its history.” Granted, to define the objective of the negotiations carried out in this assembly, he reused the expression chosen on April 30 (“final settlement of international law”), but this did not prevent him from recalling that he preferred a “peace treaty” and categorically refused—thereby confirming the Soviet Union’s earlier point of view—a united Germany’s belonging to NATO. From his point of view, the internal and external aspects of reunification should not be settled at the same time; it would even be necessary for a few more years to maintain precautions adapted for the external aspects. Maintaining the rights and responsibilities of the Four and the presence of troops of the “Allied powers” in Germany would constitute a

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stabilizing element during reunification. Once again, Shevardnadze brought up the theme of a “synchronization between the solution to the German question and the development of new pan-European security structures,” which was presented by the Soviets on March 14, at the first conference of political directors, then on April 30 at the second, but not accepted by the other delegations. The American Secretary of State spoke after the Soviet minister, much more briefly and making very precise observations. As soon as “a united, democratic Germany [existed] in mutually recognized boundaries,” explained James Baker, the “four powers would have fully assumed their responsibilities, and the basis for all special residual rights would no longer exist.” The primary objective of the group of Six would therefore be to pass on all the rights and responsibilities of the four powers to a perfectly sovereign Germany. This Germany, united Germany, should be “made up of the FRG, the GDR and Berlin, nothing more, nothing less.” The cessation of the four powers’ rights and responsibilities had to occur quickly, without any intermediary step and in a way constituting a legal obligation. Germany should not be “singularized.” The group of Six had to be considered as a steering group that would pass on those topics not dealt with by them to be decided by competent forums (e.g., the CSCE for negotiations on measures likely to establish confidence, negotiations on shortrange weapons, etc.). The French foreign minister, Roland Dumas, spoke only after the declarations of the British and East German ministers, Douglas Hurd and Markus Meckel respectively, when the continuation of the agenda had to be decided. Shevardnadze had once again expressed his country’s wish to retain the theme of “synchronization,” putting it in these terms: “political-­ military issues and coordination between the European process and that of unification.” A long debate then took place on this point, with several breaks in the session. Finally the ministers—including the Soviets—came to an agreement on phrasing proposed by Dumas: “political-military issues keeping in mind approaches of appropriate security structures in Europe.” In the final discussion, Secretary of State Baker observed a general agreement on the idea that unified Germany should “bring together Federal Germany, the GDR and Berlin.” On the next part of the process, it was decided that the two German states and Poland should come to a bilateral agreement, if possible before the next ministerial conference. Baker declared that, from the American point of view, the existence of

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such an agreement would allow for “renouncing quadripartite rights and responsibilities relative to the borders.” Hans-Dietrich Genscher again explained in detail that an agreement had been reached with Poland on the Oder-Neisse border and on the principle of a treaty between the unified Germany and Poland; the two German parliaments would adopt resolutions on Poland’s western border beforehand—in June. The French foreign minister expressed his agreement on this procedure but nonetheless asserted that if discussions between Poland and the two Germanies were not completed by July, the Six would have to intervene to find a solution acceptable to both Germany and Poland. On May 9, four days after the ministerial conference, Dumas informed the Cabinet meeting on the progress of the two-plus-four negotiations; Finance Minister Pierre Bérégovoy, who spoke next, added a thoroughly remarkable observation. During the recent G7 meeting of the ministers of the economy, he had noted how preoccupied Federal Germany was by the Soviet Union’s problems. He had the impression that, for Germany, during the two-plus-four negotiations, the economic issues could constitute a “bargaining element with the USSR.” In the course of the Cabinet meeting, President Mitterrand also commented on the negotiations, stressing that, during those discussions, the more the Soviet Union practiced a reasonable evaluation of its possibilities for opposing German unification, the more it retreated; it now realized it could no longer proffer a real threat to it and revealed an opportunism that was not devoid of skill. The new Germany, Mitterrand emphasized explicitly, “will be a state with stable, recognized, guaranteed borders. This evolution must be favored and will give the German people recognized borders.”36 The third meeting of the group of Six at the political director level took place on May 22 in Bonn under French presidency, and France also proposed a preliminary draft for a “final settlement” since that was its objective. This draft was marked in particular by the desire of the United States, France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union to give a “legally binding character” to this “settlement” as a whole. By presenting this pilot study, France also sought to put pressure on the Soviet Union. All the issues (borders, Berlin, rights of the four powers), with the exception of the so-­ called political-military issues, had to be settled as quickly as possible, which would accentuate Moscow’s responsibility if the USSR blocked the progress of negotiations with its demands on the “political-military issue.” And following this strategy, France supposed that the Soviets would not be able to “allow themselves to appear so negative for very long.”37

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During the following (fourth) round of negotiations between political directors on June 9 in Berlin, the question of borders was discussed, for the most part, in a relaxed atmosphere. It was not the question itself that was under discussion but the way and form of recognition (basically that of Poland’s western border). France deemed too weak the proposal made by West Germany, which wanted the four powers to be informed of the decisions of the two German states and their agreements with Poland. The head of the French delegation, Dufourcq, recalled that it had already been agreed to proceed in two steps: the first being the bilateral agreement between the two German states and Poland that would lead to the signing of a German-Polish treaty; later on, the four powers would “formally record” (which was not just “being informed” of) this agreement. Then, once this was accomplished by the two Germanies or by the unified Germany, the rights of the four powers regarding the boundaries could be abolished.38 The political directors held their fifth meeting on June 20  in Bonn. From the French point of view, it was particularly disappointing even though the tone of the negotiations remained friendly. The Soviet and West German delegations doubtless confronted each other over the border issue and the USSR’s demand of changing or completely omitting the preamble and Articles 23 and 116 of the Basic Law (the Federal German Constitution). The USSR deemed it necessary to guarantee that there would not be any basis for an exhaustive interpretation of the concept of “German nationality” (that is within the 1937 borders of Germany). The Soviets clearly feared that if Germany again gave itself a new constitution in the wake of reunification (which was possible at the time), it might be tempted to thereby return to an extensive definition of German nationality. Four hours of discussions finally produced a compromise that, as the head of the French delegation observed afterward, was based “solely on a translation of ambiguity.” According to this agreement, the governments of the two German states had to make sure that the constitution of the unified Germany not contain clauses incompatible with the planned legal agreement. Even though this round of negotiations was disappointing (from the French point of view), this was also because it did not permit going further in the project for the definitive settlement. The head of the French delegation, Bertrand Dufourcq, was nonetheless able to convey two recommendations to his West German counterpart, Dieter Kastrup: It would be useful, for the two-plus-four negotiations, if the Franco-German

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bilateral negotiations made decisive progress between now and July 17 (the date scheduled for the third conference at the ministerial level). Moreover, in order to satisfy the Poles, it was recommended to change a few texts of the German legislation in which the 1937 borders were still mentioned. Kastrup then mentioned to Dufourcq that a commission had been formed for that precise aim at the Ministry of the Interior in Bonn.39 And on June 21—the fact bears repeating—the Bundestag and the Volkskammer promulgated an identical resolution in which they reiterated their desire to confirm, by a treaty of international law with Poland, the Oder-Neisse line as the definitive border between Poland and Germany. The French foreign minister was thus able to express, at the second ministerial conference of the Six, on June 22 in Berlin, his gratitude and joy at the resolution of the two German parliaments and observed that this decisive act now allowed for definitively settling the issue of the Oder-­ Neisse border. But, he pointed out, not everything had yet been discussed in detail. It was still necessary to ensure “total legal security” and hear out the representatives of Poland during the meeting of the political directors on July 4 and at the next ministerial meeting on the 17th. During these debates—which were positive from the French point of view—that were held to finalize a “definitive settlement,” all the delegations agreed on the fact that the institution of German unity and Germany’s return to full sovereignty should progress in a parallel and complementary way. To advance in the work undertaken, Dumas proposed distinguishing between the points on which they were in agreement, those which were still a stumbling block, and those which would be best dealt with in other negotiations. The ministers accepted this proposal, in particular because the French delegation combined it with a refined proposal for the “definitive settlement.” In the remainder of the debates, the French draft constituted the alternative to the one presented by the Russian delegation, and, facing the latter, played an increasingly important role in the results at which the ministerial group arrived.40 “The meeting was not conclusive on any of the topics,” it had been noted in the French report of the sixth meeting of the political directors, on July 3–4 in Berlin.41 So there had been little progress, and they still did not know what would be the list of points of the “definitive settlement” or which points would be passed on to other authorities. Granted, a wording had been found for “Germany’s renunciation of NBC [nuclear, biological or chemical] weapons,” which was to be affirmed: “The two German states declare that unified Germany will make a corresponding

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[renunciation] declaration, and that the declaration of the two Germanies will be recorded formally in the framework of the final settlement.” But this phrasing had been difficult to find, for Dufourcq initially insisted that the explicit and certain legal term “formally record” be integrated into this wording. It was explained in another French report that, at the beginning of the discussion, the West German delegation had in fact “forcefully declared that the renunciation of nuclear weapons was a decision that was up to Germany to make and that the Allies should not be mixed up in it.” As we learn in this report, that stirred up no reaction in either the American or the British delegations, and the Soviet delegation gave up “the fight very quickly.” It was otherwise with the French representatives (let us point out that the phrase we quote here was underlined in the French report): “The French delegation was the only one to say that the final settlement had to contain a reference to the German renunciation of ABC [atomic, biological or chemical] weapons.”42 In the final analysis, the head of the French delegation imposed his point of view, but there remained— as the French report regrets43—an ambiguity of translation: it came down to only the making of NBC weapons, and the text absolutely failed to resolve the issue of the possible use of this kind of weapon. In the course of the second half of the meeting, to which the Polish political director had been invited, the group had no more success in settling the questions that again arose concerning the borders. The head of the German delegation rejected the proposals presented by Poland’s representative, and the American or British delegates did not accept them; on the other hand, Dufourcq stated his understanding of the Polish points of view. There followed a discussion described in a French report as “rough,” according to which things went as follows: The German delegation defended the point of view according to which: (a) the declarations of the two German parliaments on the Oder-Neisse border had given the Poles “all necessary assurances”; and (b) Germany, after its reunification, would negotiate a bilateral treaty with the Poles “that should focus on all the questions in abeyance between the two countries.” The French delegation saw therein the intention—which seemed new to it—of connecting the border question with the problems to which the Germans attached particular importance, especially that of the rights of the German minorities in Poland. But from the French point of view, such an approach “would complicate” the two-plus-four negotiations and “slow down the settling of the border issue until Polish acceptance of all the German demands in all areas.” There again, the French delegation was the only one to say “that a specific bilateral German-Polish treaty on the borders is necessary,

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without combining it with other problems,” and that “this treaty had to be prepared as of now in order to be ready for signing once unification was completed”; but also “that the Six would formally record it in the final settlement.”44 The watershed in the two-plus-four negotiations was the third ministerial conference on July 17 in Paris. On the Western side, it had been preceded by an exchange of dispatches in which the military status of the unified Germany was dealt with once again or, more concretely, unified Germany’s belonging to NATO as wished by Federal Germany, France, the United States, and Great Britain. From the French contribution to this exchange, it is clearly seen on what hypothesis it was based: The USSR is willing to accept—with certain conditions—that Germany become a member of NATO. It is no longer necessary to demand its agreement, just make the task easier for it. President Mitterrand was logically informed on June 6, by a note from Hubert Védrine, about the “nine principles” that had been drawn up in Washington following the “American-Soviet summit” at the end of May, “so that Moscow accept unified Germany’s integration into NATO more easily.” These principles, which naturally reflected the joint thinking, the results of prior discussions carried out between Bonn, Washington, Paris and London, were as follows: –– No NATO troops on the current East German territory. –– Soviet troops will be allowed to remain on this territory for a transitional period. –– Germany will have no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. –– Germany will be made up of the current territories of the FRG, GDR and Berlin. –– Germany will provide economic aid to the USSR (to save NATO, the United States applies promises already made by the FRG to the USSR). –– NATO strategy is to be reviewed in keeping with the reduced threat of the Warsaw Pact. –– New negotiations on the reduction of conventional forces in Europe will be held after those that must end in Vienna this year. –– Negotiations on the reduction of tactical nuclear weapons will open “in the near future.” –– The CSCE, which brings together thirty-five European countries plus the United States and Canada, will be given a permanent structure.

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Germany, wrote Védrine at the end of his memo, should therefore be induced (and it “requested nothing more”) to “make the most ‘gestures’ possible, likely to assuage the USSR” so that Gorbachev “end up resigning himself to Germany’s belonging to NATO.” The mixture of firmness and seduction practiced by the Westerners produced a growing effect. In another memo dated June 6, written later in the day, Védrine was able to announce to the president: “According to the first information that I have received, Mr. Baker indicated to the French, German and English foreign ministers this afternoon in Scotland that the USSR was ready to accept that unified Germany belong to NATO on condition that German armed forces be reduced to a very low level. This information is, for the moment, absolutely confidential since Mr. Baker did not talk about it to the other allies and that the so-called quadripartite meeting [United States, France, Great Britain and West Germany], in the course of which this information was given, is not supposed to exist. Moreover, it is not yet known whether this compromise, which Mr. Shevardnadze allegedly accepted, will be ratified by Mr. Gorbachev.”45 But Gorbachev was on the right track for going over to the Western conceptions. In a letter dated June 18, the Élysée and the Quai d’Orsay received fresh information from the French embassy in Moscow on the topic “The USSR, Germany and the Alliances.” “The Soviet approach to the German question underwent a reorientation on the occasion of the Soviet-American summit in Washington” [held in late May], began the eleven-page memorandum. Further on, one reads: the “Soviet Head of State and Mr. Shevardnadze were in fact led to awareness of the firmness of the Europeans and Americans on the principle of Germany’s belonging to NATO.” In Moscow, the text continues, they knew, in addition, that time was working against the Soviet Union and that it would soon no longer be able to get as much out of the Germans as at present. “Soviet diplomacy is obviously sensitive to the pressure of time in the context of the German unification process. The calculation existed here that the West Germans, by marking the hope of completing reunification as quickly as possible, were offering a certain vulnerability. The Soviet experts also know that beyond a certain threshold […] time will play against Moscow whose rare cards (quadripartite responsibilities, military presence) will dwindle. There may then be a convergence of interests between Germans and Soviets for finding a rapid solution (see: intensification of Shevardnadze-Genscher contacts).”46

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Interlude: “To Buy Soviet Acquiescence on Politico-Military Issues” It was precisely on these “contacts” and “German-Soviet negotiations” in the broader sense that Caroline de Margerie wrote a long, detailed memo to President Mitterrand on June 21. “Bonn is tending to negotiate more and more directly with Moscow,” the president’s diplomatic adviser, Loïc Hennekinne, had written the day before. At present, de Margerie was giving Mitterrand such exceptional information on the activities of the German foreign minister that one might have said she was there. According to her evaluation, Genscher was carrying out, in the name of Germany and in parallel to the two-plus-four negotiations, his own “one-plus-one negotiations” with his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze: “A week after their Brest-Litovsk meetings, Messrs Shevardnadze and Genscher met in Münster on June 18 and agreed to see each other again after the 4+2 ministerial meeting that is being held tomorrow, Friday, in Berlin. These 1+1 meetings constitute in a way a parallel negotiation to what is going on more formally with the Six—and it is perhaps there, bilaterally, that the ‘package’ allowing the Soviet Union to consent to German unification is being put together.” The financial and economic offers were, of course, part of this package, and regarding them, de Margerie noted, last but not least: “In fine, it must be emphasized that the German-Soviet negotiations include a more discreet section, that of economic cooperation.”47 But naturally, the seduction maneuver itself (unlike the overall offer) did not remain discreet within the workshop where they were continuing to write the scenario of German reunification; they were currently on the last act. The “dealing,” as Bérégovoy had termed it with a certain lack of elegance on May 9, took place, from the Western point of view, in the form of “aid” to the Soviet Union, jointly provided for, in order to facilitate the USSR’s task when it would approve German unification in keeping with the West’s ideas.48 Chancellor Kohl therefore informed President Mitterrand of his strategy aimed at obtaining Gorbachev’s consent in a letter dated June 18 (to which, moreover, de Margerie refers in her June 21 memo).49 For several months already, wrote Kohl, information was accumulating according to which the Soviet economy was going through a particularly difficult phase. Mitterrand was aware of it. On March 13, he had received a note on the “financial situation of the USSR” from Anne Lauvergeon who followed for him international financial affairs. The picture she drew, on the basis of precise statistical information, was

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disastrous. The mood among leading economic actors in the USSR she described with this word of one of them: “After all, why should one pay one’s debts, if so many countries don’t do it?”50 Gorbachev now was talking openly about the difficulties of the Soviet economy and had gone to seek the support of the Western countries in the form of long-term loans, among other things. He had also asked for short-­ term loans, which would be granted by German banks and guaranteed by the German government. This request by the Soviet president was examined with favorable consideration by the German government. In this context, Kohl “insisted” that “on its side, the Soviet Union adopt a constructive attitude on the questions raised by German unification—this applied in particular to the rooting of a future united Germany within the North Atlantic Alliance and the European Community.” In other words, the Soviet Union would obtain the loans it was asking for a bit more easily if, on the issue of the unified Germany’s belonging to NATO, it maintained its earlier attitude without the slightest ambiguity as regards Germany and the rich West: Give us a lot, and we’ll be there. (Shortly before the G7 World Economy Summit in Houston on July 9–11, for example, Gorbachev sent Mitterrand a real financial petition.)51 Kohl’s government apparently had no money problems. “You have deep pockets,” Bush said to Kohl on February 21, when the chancellor observed that the Soviets “will want to get something in return, if Germany remains in NATO.”52 On June 18, Percy Cradock, Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, had been in Bonn for a day, “seeing a number of junior ministers and senior officials, including Teltschik.” The next day he wrote a report to Thatcher. Under the heading “Aid for the Soviet Union” he noted: “Teltschik spoke of the need for very large sums, many billions of dollars.” Teltschik did not hide anything, as Cradock could further note. “One object he admitted would be to buy Soviet acquiescence on politico-­ military issues, another to preserve Gorbachev and orderly reform.”53 The British appeared to be keen observers. On June 22 a British diplomatic telegram was dispatched from East Berlin that related a short conversation between Douglas Hurd and James Baker on the subject of “economic help for the Soviet Union.” It noted: “The Secretary of State had a brief word with Baker in Berlin today about economic help for the Soviet Union. The Secretary of State said that the difficulties the Russians were making at the 2+4 (negotiations) might in the end boil down to a demand for money.”54 In July Germany had problems with the United States, though. “The KOHL/MITTERRAND proposal of economic aid to the USSR can

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soften the Soviet position,” said the German minister, Gerhard Stoltenberg, on July 7 to his French colleague, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, “but the USA is hesitating because of domestic budgetary problems.” Granted, but the Soviet Union’s financial problems were so much greater that they had to be dealt with immediately. If the Soviets were thinking of the benefits that the end of negotiations on German unity promised to bring them, unification could not come too soon. Why, then, raise further obstacles? “What can they do?” asked Chevènement of his German colleague. “They can’t oppose reunification. I think instead that they will look for an agreement.”55

The Decisive Moment of the Negotiations With the third ministerial conference, on July 17  in Paris, the decisive moment of the two-plus-four negotiations came about: In the course of the previous two days, Chancellor Kohl and Foreign Minister Genscher had negotiated the German-Soviet package in Moscow and the Caucasus with President Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, and they had only to convey it to the Group of Six. As concerned François Mitterrand, Kohl did so immediately, on July 17, in the form of a six-page letter, which began: “With this letter, I’d like to inform you personally of the meetings I had with President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow and the Caucasus.” Those meetings, he wrote, constituted a leap forward toward German unity. He had carried out his discussions with Gorbachev on a “common philosophical basis.” Both belonging to the generation that had lived through the war and its consequences, they had wanted to seize this considerable—and perhaps unique—opportunity to put an end to the division of Europe and ensure a future of peace, security and freedom for the European continent. “I am delighted,” Kohl first said, regarding the results obtained, “that we have succeeded in defining the position of the united Germany from the point of view of the security policy in keeping with the demands we had been jointly making for some time now.” This was, of course, a reference to the question of unified Germany’s military status or its planned membership in NATO and would considerably ease the two-plus-four negotiations and their ultimate success. The chancellor had publicly summarized the results of his discussions with President Gorbachev, with the express approval of the latter. Kohl presented them in ten points in his letter, at the end of which he stressed the fact that it had been possible to

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achieve the described success only with the help of “the firm attitude and constant support of our friends.” “Allow me, dear François, to also send these thanks to you in particular,” he concluded.56 On July 17, even before the beginning of the Group of Six’s ministerial conference, when the foreign ministers of France, Great Britain, the United States and Federal Germany met for a joint breakfast—and, of course, a preliminary first meeting—Roland Dumas immediately questioned his German counterpart on this good news: “I think that the person who has most to say is Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who has just returned from the Soviet Union.” This was indeed the case, and the West German foreign minister said a good deal about it in two sentences: “Let me first express the gratitude of Federal Germany for the help given it by its three allies. We [the West] have achieved our objective.”57 In the French report on the July 17 conference, there is explicit mention of a “turning point in the group’s work,” first owing to the Soviets’ withdrawing of their veto to unified Germany’s belonging to NATO. Then owing to the agreement found—and supported by the Polish foreign minister, present at the meeting—on the Oder-Neisse border. The Paris meeting, it was observed at the end of the report, allowed for a “synthesis” between the concerns: • of the Germans, who wanted to avoid any obstacle to recovering their sovereignty; • of the Poles, whom we [France] have supported since the beginning in their legitimate aspiration to see the question of their border with Germany settled; • and finally, of the four powers, who intended to assume their specific responsibilities in regard to the borders. “The solution to this central question [about borders] of the ‘4+2’ exercise,” the French report concluded, “was found in Paris. Combined with the change in the Soviet attitude, it allows for considering that the principal political problems linked to the external aspects of unification are henceforth settled. This agreement remains to be translated into legal terms of a definitive settlement.”58

It was precisely to this end that the French foreign minister, as president of the session, formally observed the agreement obtained during the meeting, and so gave the political directors the duty of writing the text of a

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“definitive settlement.” The agreements reached on the question of the Oder-Neisse border during the second part of the conference, in which the Polish foreign minister, Krzysztof Skubiszewski had participated, could be included in it. In view of these agreements, Genscher had made three declarations: First, the joint resolution of the two German parliaments regarding the border was the biggest commitment that the Germans could make before unification; second, the German-Polish treaty on the border would be signed and presented to the parliament of the unified Germany as soon as possible following reunification; and third, it was necessary to integrate into the “definitive settlement” the principle by which the “confirmation of the definitive nature of the [German] borders constituted an essential element of peaceful order in Europe.” Skubiszewski had welcomed these declarations with satisfaction, in particular the fact that Genscher had announced the signing of the German-Polish treaty as soon as possible after reunification. Responding to a German request, Skubiszewski had for his part formally added that Poland did not consider the four powers’ declaration on the end of their rights as regards Germany’s borders a “border guarantee” in the legal sense. In the end, Dumas suggested giving a “precise, formal” form to the agreements reached by listing them in a protocol, and after a lively discussion, this proposal was finally adopted.59 At the meeting of the British Cabinet on July 19, Douglas Hurd could report: “The main issues had been settled during the 2+4 Ministerial meeting on 17 July.”60 We [the West] have achieved our objective. This was a bold phrase that the West German foreign minister uttered in the name of the West. There is a vignette from the story it conceals: the first part of the meeting that Shevardnadze had the day after this sentence was uttered, on July 18, with President Mitterrand at the Élysée.61 Once again, the “German problem” or, more precisely, Germany’s military situation, constituted the heart of the story, and this vignette shows, almost like an anecdote, that a stage had been reached which in fact had already been reached for some time now. But it was seen that a certain amount of time was called for to understand it: Meeting of the President of the Republic with Mr. Shevardnadze, Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs (Wednesday July 18, 1990 at 11:30 a. m.) The President: Your person, the circumstances and the role you play give the meeting its value.

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Mr. Shevardnadze: Very pleased with the meeting of the Six in Paris. As regards German reunification, we have made progress. For France and the USSR, the German problem is sensitive. But we have seen—Mr. Gorbachev gave me the responsibility of telling you—that hindering this process is impossible. And moreover, it is not humane, fifty years after the end of the Second World War. As concerns Germany’s status, it is its sovereign right that is being exercised. The President: This was already provided for in the Helsinki agreements. Mr. Shevardnadze: There were great discussions in the USSR.  No entente. Not everyone is familiar with the Helsinki Final Act. The President: Yes, yes, it’s difficult.

On July 19, only two days after the success of the ministerial conference, the political directors again met in Bonn. The boost given by the conference enabled them, for one thing, to settle points that had not yet been settled: the future military status of East Germany; the military power of unified Germany; the presence of military forces of the four powers on the unified German territory. Moreover, they wrote the text of the “definitive settlement” and to do so, agreed to divide up the work between the delegations. France was in charge of the part concerning the borders.62 At the end of their work on the “definitive settlement,” the political directors gathered for their eighth and final meeting in Berlin, which took place from September 4 to 7. The ministers of the Group of Six had to finish writing the treaty before the scheduled signing on September 12 in Moscow. However, in the middle of this concluding work, “at the last minute” (as stated in the French report), the Soviet Union brought up new proposals or new demands in the politicalmilitary sphere, aimed at placing the unified Germany “under lasting control” and “inscribing a long-term obstacle on the whole defense system of which Germany is or could be part.” Moreover, in a discussion between the four Western political directors before the opening of the session, it turned out that “the Germans were particularly willing to accept the Soviet demand for a clause of definitive non-crossing of the [earlier] inter-German border by Western forces.” This German position provoked a decided reaction from the British and Americans. The head of the American delegation, Robert Zoellick, demanded that the West German delegation “maintain unwavering opposition to the Soviet project” until the ministers’ meeting in Moscow.

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The political directors were able to accomplish their mission after all, as laborious as it had been, and not least because of a Soviet delegation that “often [seemed] paralyzed by lack of instructions.”63 “As planned,” the ministers of the Group of Six were able to sign on September 12, 1990 at their Moscow meeting, “the treaty making definitive settlement concerning Germany” (in the terms of the French report).64 As concerned the “last minute” demand made by the Soviet Union, the following solution was agreed upon: In the definitive settlement treaty, it was decided that foreign troops would not be deployed in the eastern part of Germany, but in an appended protocol, also signed by the ministers, it was noted that Germany had to use this clause “reasonably and responsibly, taking everyone’s security interests into account.” The possibility was thereby opened, we read in the French report, of organizing “on a low scale” maneuvers involving foreign troops in eastern Germany after the departure of Soviet troops.65

Negotiations Accomplished: French Prompt Appraisals “All the signatories expressed their great satisfaction in Moscow,” wrote the head of the French delegation, Bertrand Dufourcq, in his final report of September 17 on the result of the two-plus-four negotiations, and at the end of this text he drew up the following assessment: The content of the FRG authorities is most understandable. Their wish to see Germany recover its sovereignty, beginning with unification, long thought unachievable, has been fulfilled. The last Soviet soldier will have left German soil by the end of 1994, and the ban on deployment on East German territory will then concern only foreign forces. Less than a half-­ century after the Second World War, the German people again finds its place in the concert of nations without any further discrimination imposed on it. The GDR disappears, like a bad memory that one is already trying to erase from memory.66

Roland Dumas and François Mitterrand had formulated their appraisals already on July 18, 1990, at the weekly Cabinet meeting. Dumas, according to the official record of the meeting, stated:

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Germany doesn’t triumph. It obtains what was the essential for it: membership in the Atlantic Alliance and the waiving of the rights of the [four] allied Powers over Germany. The problem of the German-Polish border was worked out by the conference of the “4 + 2“; this is the result of six months of efforts. In fact, at the European summit in Strasbourg in 1989, Chancellor Kohl didn’t want to commit himself to recognize the Oder-Neisse border before the completion of the process of unification. An intervention of the President of the European Council, that is of President Mitterrand, supported by the British Prime Minister, was necessary to sway Chancellor Kohl.

Mitterrand, as the author of the record, the Secretary General of the Government, noted, declared: Germany is a great country with a long history. With the paralysis of the Soviet Union it recovers its natural path, on the way of its reunification, after a period in which a separation into two states was rightfully imposed on it. Unified Germany will belong to the Atlantic Alliance. France has been among the first states that affirmed the necessity of this association. For the neutral status of Germany was unimaginable. The President of the Republic has championed the membership of unified Germany in NATO, at Kiev in the month of December, before the media, while M. Gorbachev supported in public the opposite hypothesis. Today we affirm that unified Germany will be a member of the Atlantic Alliance. As regards the Western border of Poland, there were conflicting views between France and the FRG. Chancellor Kohl has yielded at the French-­ German summit in June. A border is fixed again where the Slavic world and the Germanic world meet. Every Soviet retreat in Europe is an advance of Germany. In front of a Soviet Union close to disintegration, Germany shows herself quite reasonable. Chancellor Kohl proved to be lucid and audacious. The major objective of German diplomacy, the removal of the last traces of the defeat in 1945, is achieved. But France was the most vigilant state for having kept the consequences of unification limited to the union of the two German states, as constituted now, as well as for having Germany forego other ambitions and to commit itself accordingly.67

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Notes 1. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Direction d’Europe, Sous-Direction d’URSS, Rédacteur H[enri] Reynaud, A/s: La politique allemande de l’URSS, October 19, 1989, 8 (AN- AG/5(4)/EG/212). 2. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Direction des Affaires Juridiques, Note: A/S: De l’Allemagne, October 24, 1989 (AN-AG/5(4)/EG/212). 3. Ibid. 4. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Direction d’Europe, Le Directeur, Reflexions sur la question allemande, October 30, 1989, 55 (AN-AG/5(4)/ EG/212). 5. AN-AG/5(4)/CD/67. At his press conference in East Berlin on December 22 Mitterrand referred to discussions of the Four Powers with the Germans as well. 6. Account of Hubert Védrine, recorded by Françoise Carle, July 19, 1990 (PC). 7. See Elbe, Kiessler, A round table, 85 f., DBPO, 253, 258 8. See Dok. Dt.Ein., 760 f. 9. Hubert Védrine, Note pour Monsieur le Président, February 6, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/HV/9, dossier 1). 10. Hubert Védrine, Note pour Monsieur le Président, February 8, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/HV/9, dossier 1). 11. 136. Ibid. 12. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB317/chernyaev_1990. pdf, 10 (accessed April 2, 2021). 13. Germ.vop., 308. 14. CAB 128-96-7, 8. 15. DBPO, 264. 16. DBPO, 272. 17. DBPO, 281. 18. See: Germ. Unif., 167–195, 418–424; DBPO, XX-XXIV; Zelikow, A Diplomatic History, 337–381; Friedman, Thomas. L. 1990. Accord on Europe. Anatomy of a Decision. NYT, February 15. 19. See “Open Skies Conference: Documents” at: https://gac.canadiana.ca/ view/ooe.b2292270E/151?r=0&s=1 (accessed April 2, 2021). 20. Documents 143 and 145 (PREM-19-2997); No. USS0039. Ottawa Conference: East-West Relations, Telegram, Observations on the corridor conversations during the Open Skies Conference in Ottawa in February 1990 (dodis.ch/52939). 21. Memoirs, 722. 22. See, for example, Védr., 451, ou https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Trait%C3%A9_de_Moscou_(1990), https://www.diploweb.com/forum/ rupnikbazin07051.htm (both accessed May 5, 2021).

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23. https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­telcons/1990-­02-­26% 2D%2DMitterrand.pdf (accessed April 4, 2021). 24. TD Diplomatie 3170, Entretien entre le Ministre d’État et M. Chevardnaze, Ottawa, le 12 février, February 14, 1990. 25. On March 27, 2021, by an e-mail message to the author, Horst Teltschik explicitly affirmed the complete agreement between Genscher and Kohl as to the “two-plus-four” format. 26. Dipl.d.E., 104. 27. AFP-DZ22, Vers des discussions à six sur l’unification de l’Allemagne, Ottawa, February 13, 1990. 28. See the communiqué issued by the six foreign ministers at Ottawa on February 13, 1990, in: A round table, 232. As to legal assessments of the two-plus-four negotiations and Germany’s unification in general see: Randelzhofer, Albrecht. 1991. German Unification: Constitutional and International Implications. Michigan Journal of International Law 13: 122–143 (https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol13/iss1/4); Frowein, Jochen Abr. 1992. The Reunification of Germany. The American Journal of International Law 86: 152–163 (http://endofcoldwarforum.org/sites/default/files/docs/germany/Frowein. pdf, accessed April 7, 2021). 29. See http://www.persee.fr/doc/polit_0032-­342x_2000_num_65_2_ 4952, 467–484, for Durfourcq’s own account of the negotiations (accessed February 16, 2021). 30. Interview with Bertrand Dufourcq, November 6, 2009. 31. According to Bob Kimmit, member of the American delegation at the negotiations. See: Dufourcq, Retour sur la fin de la guerre froide, 80. In an interview with me a French diplomat and adviser of Mitterrand, Jean Lévy, observed the same (interview on October 27, 1992). 32. Report: 1re réunion à “Six” du 14 mars 1990. Résultats. 33. Caroline de Margerie, Compte rendu de la réunion des directeurs politiques 4+2 à Bonn le mercredi 14 mars 1990, March 15, 1990. 34. Report: 2e réunion à “Six” au niveau des directeurs: Résultats, Berlin, 30 avril 1990.—TD Berlin 1172, Objet: Deuxième Réunion du groupe d’Ottawa au niveau des directeurs politiques (Berlin, 30 avril 1990), Berlin, May 1, 1990. 35. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Compte Rendu, A.  S.—Première session ministérielle du Groupe des Six. Bonn (5 mai 1990), May 17, 1990. Quotations in the following paragraphs are from this source. 36. CM, May 9, 1990. 37. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Note pour le Ministre d’État, A/S: Réunion du groupe des six (Bonn le 22 mai), May 24, 1990.

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38. TD 11451, Objet: Unification Allemande. Travaux du Groupe d’Ottawa, June 11, 1990. 39. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Note pour le Ministre d’État a. S. Réunion du groupe d’Ottawa (Bonn 20 juin), June 21, 1990. 40. TD 12716, Objet: Deuxième réunion ministérielle du groupe à Six (Berlin, 22 juin 1990), [Paris], June 25, 1990. 41. TD London 1159, Objet: Groupe des Six: Réunion des directeurs politiques (Berlin 3 et 4 juillet 1990), July 5, 1990. 42. Caroline de Margerie, Note pour le Président de la République. Objet. Négociations 4+2: la renonciation de l’Allemagne aux armes ABC et les frontières, July 5, 1990. 43. TD London 1159, Objet: Groupe des Six: Réunion des directeurs politiques (Berlin 3 et 4 juillet 1990), July 5, 1990. 44. Caroline de Margerie, Note pour le Président de la République. Objet. Négociations 4+2: la renonciation de l’Allemagne aux armes ABC et les frontières, July 5, 1990. 45. Hubert Védrine, Note pour le Président de la République, June 6, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/HV/9, dossier 1). 46. Embassy of France in the USSR, Note, l’URSS, l’Allemagne et les Alliances, Moscow, June 18, 1990. 47. Loïc Hennekinne, Note pour le Président de la République, OBJET: Entretiens avec le Chancelier KOHL. Unification de l’Allemagne, June 20, 1990. Caroline de Margerie, Note pour le Président de la République. Objet. Négociations germano-soviétiques et prochains sommets (OTAN-CSCE), June 21, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CDM/33). 48. See Mueller, Wolfgang. 2016. Die Lage gleitet uns aus den Händen: Motive und Faktoren in Gorbatschows Entscheidungsprozess zur Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands. Zeitschrift des Forschungsverbundes SED-­ Staat 39: 3–28. 49. Letter from Chancellor Helmut Kohl to President François Mitterrand, June 18, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/JLB/87). 50. Anne Lauvergeon, Note pour Monsieur le Président, March 13, 1990. 51. Mister President, I am very grateful to you … for your constructive reaction to the economic and financial questions that we discussed at our last meeting … Without wanting to dramatize the situation, I would frankly say that right now the USSR is going through what is by far the most important step of perestroika … I will not hide the fact that, under current conditions, we need not only urgent and free financial loans to redress the balance of payments and buy articles necessary for satisfying the population’s needs. To resolve the tasks linked to the more energetic implementation of reforms, we will need more wide-ranging credit programs having

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the support and guarantees of government organs. As you know, appropriate contacts have already taken place. I would be grateful to you for your support (and help) during the study of these issues at the next meetings of the Western leaders. (oral message from Mikhail Gorbachev, early July 1990—date unspecified) 52. https://bush41librar y.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­t elcons/1990­02-­24%2D%2DKohl.pdf (accessed April 15, 2021). 53. PREM-19-2997. 54. PREM-19-3183. 55. Report of the Chevènement-Stoltenberg meeting, July 9, 1990. 56. Letter from Chancellor Kohl to President Mitterrand, dated July 17, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CDM/33). 57. Compte rendu de la réunion du QUAD (Paris, 17 juillet 1990/ AN-AG/5(4)/CDM/36). 58. TD Diplomatie 14,436, Objet: Groupe des Six: Session Ministérielle de Paris du 17 juillet, July 18, 1990. 59. On all that, see: TD Diplomatie 14,436, Objet: Groupe des Six: Session Ministérielle de Paris du 17 juillet, July 18, 1990. 60. CAB-128-97-7. 61. Report of the Mitterrand-Shevardnadze in Paris, July 18, 1990 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/76). 62. See TD Diplomatie 14,436, Objet: Réunion des directeurs politiques du groupe des six (Bonn, 19 juillet), July 23, 1990. 63. See TD Berlin, Objet: Rédaction finale du règlement définitive concernant l’Allemagne, September 7, 1990. 64. TD Diplomatie 18,448, Objet: Signature du traité portent règlement définitive concernant l’Allemagne (Moscou, 12 septembre 1990), September 13, 1990. For the treaty text, see: http://ghdi.ghi-­dc.org/sub_document. cfm?document_id=176 (accessed April 15, 2021). 65. TD Diplomatie 18,448, Objet: Signature du traité portent règlement définitive concernant l’Allemagne (Moscou, 12 septembre 1990), September 13, 1990. 66. TD Diplomatie 18,803, Objet: Traité portent règlement définitive concernant l’Allemagne: Bilan de la négociation à “4 + 2,” September 17, 1990 67. CM, July 18, 1990.

CHAPTER 17

Epilogue

On May 29, 1990, Boris Yeltsin is elected president of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Under his leadership, the RSFSR proclaims its sovereignty on June 12. On August 2, the Iraqi army invades Kuwait. In the framework of a state visit to Paris by Mikhail Gorbachev, on October 28–29, France and the USSR sign an “entente and cooperation treaty.” A “friendship and cooperation treaty” between Germany and the USSR is signed on November 9 during a state visit by Gorbachev to Bonn. In Warsaw, on November 14, the signing of the treaty on the German-Polish border, confirming and proclaiming the existing border (the “Oder-Neisse Line”) inviolable, takes place; Germany and Poland proclaim their mutual renunciation of any territorial claims. On November 19–21, the second meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) is held in Paris; the thirty-four member states of the CSCE adopt the “Paris Charter for a New Europe” in which they hail the end of the “era of confrontation and division” and pledge “to build, consolidate and strengthen democracy as the only system of government of our nations.” On November 22, Margaret Thatcher resigns as British prime minister, having held the position since 1979; John Major succeeds her on November 27. In the course of free general elections, Lech Walesa is elected president of Poland. The French National Assembly ratifies the two-plus-four treaty on December 13. On December 15, the European Union prepares itself: the two intergovernmental conferences— on economic and monetary union and on political union—begin work. On

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January 16, 1991, the air offensive of the multinational military forces begins against Iraq (Operation “Desert Storm”). Hostilities in Kuwait and Iraq end on February 28; negotiations in view of a ceasefire between Allies and Iraq begin on March 3. On April 1, the military alliance of the Warsaw Pact Organization is dissolved. In May, conflicts foreshadowing war begin to break out between the Yugoslav republics; on June 25, Croatia and Slovenia declare their independence. August 1991: the United States and the European Community recognize the independence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The breakup of the Soviet Union continues: the parliaments of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan vote for the independence of their countries. The Federal Yugoslav army goes to war against Croatia; on August 19, a “state of emergency committee,” made up of eight people, launches a putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev, an attempt that fails on the 21st. In September, Croatia and Slovenia formally leave the Yugoslav Confederation. At the European Council meeting of October 9–10  in Maastricht, the treaty instituting European Economic and Monetary Union is signed. On November 8, at a summit meeting in Rome, NATO adopts a new strategic concept; the “graduated response” doctrine, in effect up until then, is abandoned. The Minsk Agreement, on December 8, between Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia, constitutes the decisive step toward the dissolution of the USSR, founded in 1922. On December 23, Germany recognizes the independence of Croatia and Slovenia. On December 25, Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as president of the Soviet Union. It is the end of the USSR. On January 15, 1992, the European Community recognizes Slovenia and Croatia as independent states. On February 7, in Maastricht, the foreign ministers of the European Community sign the treaty permitting the evolution of the EEC into a European Union. In April, the Bosnian Serbs proclaim the “Serbian Republic of Bosnia.” In May, Serbia begins the siege of Sarajevo. In September, a severe monetary crisis shakes the European Monetary System. On September 17, the Italian lira and the British pound withdraw from the European Monetary System. In a referendum organized in France on September 20, 51.05% of the voters approve the Maastricht Treaty. On June 1, 1993, the founding clauses of a unified European market go into effect. In March, China anchors the “Socialist market society” in its constitution. In May, the United Nations Security Council establishes a tribunal with its seat in The Hague, to judge war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. On September 13  in Washington, Yasser Arafat and Itzhak

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Rabin sign the Oslo Agreement for the peace process in the Near East. In December, the North Atlantic Cooperation Council meets in Brussels; the proceedings are attended by the NATO states and nineteen countries from Central and Eastern Europe. On February 5, 1994, the Serbian artillery bombs the Sarajevo market; sixty-eight civilians are killed. In February, NATO carries out its first military operation since its founding, against Serbian military aircraft in Bosnia. In Rwanda, the April 6 attack against President J. Habyarimana triggers a civil war between Hutus and Tutsis resulting in genocidal massacres. In May, Nelson Mandela becomes president of South Africa. On July 12, the German Constitutional Court authorizes the participation of the Bundeswehr in international peacekeeping military operations outside the NATO zone, under the aegis of the United Nations. On July 14, the Eurocorps—a European military unit including Bundeswehr soldiers— marches down the Champs-Elysées, participating in the annual Bastille Day parade. Forty-nine years after the end of World War II, on August 31, the departure of the last Russian soldiers from Berlin is solemnly observed; on September 8, the three western Allies officially leave the city in a ceremony in which François Mitterrand participates. Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty in Washington on October 26. On New Year’s Day 1995, Austria, Sweden and Finland become full-­ fledged members of the European Union. In January, Russian troops enter Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. In May, the Schengen Agreement goes into effect: border checks are done away with between France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain. On July 11, the Srebrenica security zone is taken by the Serbs, and more than 7000 Muslims killed. In Washington, on September 28, Israel and the PLO agree on the next steps of the peace process. On November 4, Itzhak Rabin is assassinated by a Jewish extremist. On December 15, the agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio and Paris is signed with a view to ending the wars in the former Yugoslavia. NATO is put in charge of supervising the respect of those agreements.

It Is a New Germany That Is Reappearing On the first day of its unity, the French president bowed to that country. As every Wednesday, François Mitterrand presided over the Cabinet meeting. The Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic,

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and the City of Berlin were able, on October 3, 1990, to reassemble to form a Germany that, along with its unity, regained full sovereignty. When, in keeping with the Cabinet meeting’s agenda, the part devoted to foreign policy was taken up, the president began to speak. He did so solemnly, formulating words to pay tribute to Germany; he wished it good luck and commented with hope on its new presence among European nations. He said he had already sent a telegram of congratulations to the president of Germany, Richard von Weizsäcker, and another to Chancellor Helmut Kohl.1 But at present Mitterrand would like to speak for History (and thus he asked the government spokesperson to put his words in the official record of the Cabinet meeting): “It is appropriate to hail German unity. It is a new Germany that is appearing, different from all the forms that it has had in the course of history; it is a vast democratic nation. This event must be celebrated, and Germany’s unity is an important element of European reality. The President and the government jointly express their wishes to unified Germany.”2 The words are equal to the occasion. For that day, Mitterrand stopped; he would not speak about German unification again during that meeting, but the subject preoccupied him. Barely had the path leading to a unified Germany been marked out; barely had the latter emerged for the general perception at the end of this path when he was already beginning to think about the event. What is to be thought of it, especially outside of Germany? What is the right way to consider it? How had Germany’s unification come about, what were the essential conditions? What did France do for that? What does the event signify—for France, for Europe, for geopolitical relations in the European world, and, of course, for Germany itself? After October 3, 1990, François Mitterrand was still ruminating over Germany’s unity. It continued—or, more exactly, began once again—to rouse his curiosity and provide matter for reflection. Beginning early in the summer of 1990, in a large number of presidential conversations, Mitterrand resumed speaking about “Germany and its unity”—under the new given circumstances, of course. And he would continue to do so until the end of his second presidential term in May 1995.

“It’s a Deep-Seated Legend, But Not Innocent” Let us begin with the historical point of view. The secular opportunity offered to Europe to give itself a different order, a far better one than what had been decreed in 1945, was born of immediate history, the period of

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the 1989 European revolutions. François Mitterrand quickly detected misinterpretations that displeased him because, to his mind, they were already weighing as so many mortgages on the construction of the new order of Europe. Of course, what irritated him in particular was what he heard said about France, that is, on its behavior during the period that had just ended and in which the process leading to Germany’s unification had occurred. That touched him considerably and even extraordinarily for in it he saw the seeds of a fallacious writing of history. He refused to accept it and reacted in two different ways: On the one hand, he refuted the criticism of himself and of France; on the other, he set out to provide corrections to the distorted image in which he saw himself represented so that it might more closely resemble the picture that he remembered. This comes through quite clearly in the following passage of the interview that he gave to the magazine L’Expansion on October 17, 1991: If we call a spade a spade, in Kiev and elsewhere, you gave the impression of not being enthusiastic about German reunification. Am I wrong? The President: It’s a deep-seated legend but not innocent. What? When Germany unifies, France and Russia don’t have to talk about it? Well … they still have a lot of other things to say to each other, and I’ll watch over that. Is it known that France was the first to declare the legitimacy of German aspirations? That, at every step, it discussed with the Germans, found solutions with them and with our other partners in the so-called 4+2 group, in particular on the major issue of borders? The truth is that German reunification was conducted by all the interested countries with imagination and sangfroid.3 L’Expansion:

He often heard it said that he would have preferred there not being a unified Germany and, just as often, he refuted this assertion as in the above-­ quoted interview or in the conversation he had on July 15, 1992 with Kurt Biedenkopf, minister-president of Saxony, and during which he again declared: “It has been said that my objective was to hinder unification. Yet, on the contrary, I always supported the legitimacy of this reunification.”4 This was not a matter of a cold page of history whose effect on human life had ceased long ago. History was unfolding in current events; France

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and its president were actors therein, and it was necessary that erroneous interpretations of their actions not persist. The present required that the past be viewed correctly, so it was not a coincidence that Mitterrand, at the Cabinet meeting of August 16, 1992, established an association of ideas between the war in Yugoslavia and German reunification. His “own position on Yugoslavia, and that of the government,” he deplored, “are presented in a thoroughly distorted way.” And he went on as follows: “Already, as regards the reunification of Germany, France’s position has been caricatured. The President of the Republic was the first, along with the President of the United States, to accept the unification of Germany, beginning in the month of July 1989, well before the fall of the Berlin wall. Nonetheless, at the same time, the President of the Republic asked that Germany recognize the Eastern European borders. And, by a distortion of his position, he was accused of being hostile to the unification of the two Germanies owing to the fact that he imposed this condition. Yet, among the four major tutelary powers of the Germany of 1945, it was Great Britain and the Soviet Union that manifested real hostility to unification.”5 One of the most interesting moments in the historiographical criticism with Mitterrand was the discussion he had with Helmut Kohl on October 13, 1993 regarding Margaret Thatcher’s memoir The Downing Street Years. They had found passages about German unification and exchanged a few words on the subject. Both clearly doubted her veracity, with Kohl dismissing it out of hand, and Mitterrand questioning it. He found that Thatcher related many things but passed over what she might really have said: H[elmut] Kohl: Did you read Thatcher’s memoirs, of which the advance sheets are circulating a bit everywhere? Der Spiegel printed large excerpts from them, and I found it completely insane. The President: For the reunification, it is quite instructive. If what she says is true, it’s the proof that she lacked courage because she always ended up giving in. Since she was so hostile to German reunification, why did she end up accepting it?6

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“… But France Has Known Germany for a Thousand Years” Was a unified Germany really to be feared? And did France not have singular cause to be afraid of it? Not everyone who asked the question— and numerous people did—was doing so with the sole intention of provoking fits of Germanophobia.7 Mitterrand sometimes lost his patience when asked if it would not be better to be afraid of Germany or regard it with suspicion. He had a very precise answer to this question that skillfully captured the excitement, expectation and curiosity of those who questioned him about the unified Germany. He would then take on an air of placidity that presented an incontestable realism in a detached way. Of course, he replied, it was necessary to think about “unified Germany” and watch out for such and such a point, in particular, the “borders,” but with the hindsight of history, there was nothing worrisome about it. “I’d be quite interested to know what you think of the repercussion of German unification on the construction of Europe,” the heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, asked him on December 17, 1990, and the president replied: “I don’t think that complicates matters. Instead of 62 M[illion], we’ll have 78 M[illion] Germans. For four or five years, Germany will be weighed down by the cost of modernizing East Germany. I think that France will have the necessary energy to face up to it.” Clearly, the prince was not entirely satisfied with that answer. Speaking about Germany and referring to memories as well as to Germany’s concrete current events, he added: “People who experienced two world wars are anxious. But the democratic march is encouraging.” Still using his detached tone but on the historical mode this time, Mitterrand responded: “It is a borderless country, in perpetual motion. But over the last forty years, democracy has given rise to institutions that seem successful to me. They are again in direct contact with the Slavic world. We needn’t be too worried. We’ve existed for a thousand years.”8 Wisdom was something other than sensationalism or resentment. When he ran up against this type of attitude, Mitterrand retaliated. A scene like that occurred during an interview he gave on December 5, 1991 to the Dutch television channel NOS-RTV. It began when the journalist interviewing him reckoned that, for the time being, it was “especially Germany, this large Germany that is now unified,” that posed a problem. It was sometimes said: “It is a matter of weaving a web to envelop Germany.”9 Perhaps, responded Mitterrand. I don’t know. “Speak to those who are

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saying that.” The journalist ignored this reply, clearly following another agenda: making the president confirm his own opinions. He thus reminded him of the period, which was doubtless “bad,” that he had experienced with the Germans: “Because you lived through the war.” In all likelihood, the journalist expected the president to answer that, in fact, it was necessary to be wary of Germany, especially now that it had become “big” again. But what did François Mitterrand do? He gave a history lesson that certainly had nothing to do with what the Dutch journalist would have wanted to hear: I have no complex of this type. You know, I had the opportunity to say so several times, so you will forgive me if I repeat myself, but France has known Germany for a thousand years. There are periods when Germany was a considerable power, imperial and dominant. Every schoolboy in France has learned the Battle of Bouvines. It was a victory of Philippe Auguste, King of France [over an Anglo-German-Flemish coalition led by Otto IV, in 1214]. Every school child has heard about François I and Charles V and the moment when France was defeated and Charles V represented a tremendous power. And we experienced two world wars! And before that, for France, we were subjected to the defeat of 1870 and the Reich built by Bismarck! There were good moments and bad moments, victories and defeats. All that is the history of Europe but, if I may say so, we know that. Well, even when Germany was a very powerful country, France always survived! With 58 million inhabitants in France and 78 million inhabitants in Germany, we don’t feel in a position of inferiority to that degree. And in terms of our daily life, everyone agrees that France’s economic situation and capacity for development are currently quite successful in the framework of the Community. It is not a matter of fighting, but of the legitimate, peaceful competition in which we are engaged, our strong points are considerable and they will succeed. At least such is my conviction for France. So why do you want me to be afraid of Germany?

The French president firmly limited himself to this history lesson when he answered this kind of question on other occasions. It also happened, as in an interview on French television, on July 14, 1994, that he sharply put in their place journalists who questioned him when he had had enough of the clichés that they served him on unified Germany: “I wouldn’t at all want to shock you, because I respect you, but that is talking for the sake of talking.”10

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“We Must Get Used to the Idea That the World Is a Huge Disorder” In the workshop of world politics, too, François Mitterrand resorted to this kind of history lesson. Such was the case at the G7 summit of July 15, 1991 in London. British Prime Minister John Major had opened the afternoon session at 2 o’clock with a brief introduction, then turned over the floor to the French president (“President Mitterrand is going to launch the debate”).11 He then spoke for twenty-five minutes about “last year’s events,” the “change in the world map and the map of Europe,” and his speech impressed. John Major described it as a “dazzling introduction,” and George Bush had to admit that he would need some time to assimilate it: “I didn’t have time to digest François Mitterrand’s speech. Your allocution was fascinating.” What had Mitterrand done? He had set the bar as high as possible: “I am asking you to take care of world history at this end of the 20th century.” And, concerning the European world, he had uttered this warning: “Anarchy must be avoided.” Just yesterday, he said, an empire had dominated vast parts of Europe. And the order that it had imposed was one of iron: “When empires exist, the rule of force maintains unity.” Yet, that was all gone now. What to do? What to do for the “destinies of Europe in the years to come?” There was a way, but only one: “Federation will be found only through democracy and dialogue. That is the only method.” In his thinking, Mitterrand had a clear idea of the natural state of the human universe: “We must get used to the idea that the world is a huge disorder.” In February 1990, while developing this thesis before the president of Brazil, Fernando Collor de Mello, to whom he threw out the phrase we have just quoted, it ruled all this thoughts.12 Openly and publicly, “an old order that we didn’t like” was in the process of falling, but it would be a “disaster” if the disorder that affected the natural course of human things should impose itself in place of the former order, however bad that had been. “Peoples, ethnic groups regain a freedom of action that will make the Empires regretted until a superior order has been found again,” explained Mitterrand in a discussion with the Austrian chancellor, Franz Vranitzky, on December 3, 1991.13 That day, they spoke especially about the conflict in Yugoslavia, where the political malady was propagating, the malady that strikes people when they don’t have a structure that curbs their behavior: a huge mess. Mitterrand feared, as he said on November 1990 to Felipe González, the Spanish prime minister, or on

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April 12, 1995 to Manfred Stolpe, the minister-president of Brandenburg, that this illness might affect all of Europe: “I am worried about the explosion of Europe into diverse nationalities.”14 “What is being observed in Yugoslavia, we could see happen elsewhere in Europe.”15 By contrast, one could therefore be pleased with the fact that Germany received, with the result of the two-plus-four negotiations, a solid geographical identity in an atmosphere of unanimity. Mitterrand saw this as a secular break; Germany seemed to him, in his historical awareness, “a borderless country in perpetual motion.” Another Germany was now emerging from this image, as he expressed it at the Cabinet meeting on May 9, 1990: “Today it appears that the new Germany will be a state with stable, recognized and guaranteed borders.”16 And “everyone” approved of the process out of which came this “new Germany,” as he stressed at the NATO summit on November 8, 1991  in Rome: “The unification of Germany occurred in conditions in keeping with the respect of the sovereignty of that country and of the others, as we had all wished it.”17

“Personally, I Think of the Future” If one sticks to Mitterrand’s maxim, it is necessary to think about the way to counter a breakup of political orders, those creations that are opposed to the natural state of the human universe, disorder, and above all, constructively implement the results of this reflection. Among the modes of this type of creative politics one also—and in particular—finds ritual. How might the good relations between France and unified Germany be brought out even more clearly and thereby continue to be encouraged? By a symbolic act, especially when it resembles what the president thought up for Bastille Day 1994. That day he invited the Eurocorps to participate in the annual French military parade down the Champs-Elysées. German units were part of this European unit and were therefore also invited to participate. Seeing German soldiers marching down the Champs-Elysées? Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand’s predecessor, broke down in tears on television at the idea. A polemic broke out. Was the president totally lacking in tact? Was he violating France’s honor? Or was he demonstrating the courage to accomplish an act that ought to have been normal? The parade did take place with soldiers of the Bundeswehr, and in the traditional televised interview that the president gives on July 14, Mitterrand was asked what he had felt. “Emotion,” he replied, “and I was happy that we were able to choose between the past and the future in favor

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of the future.” But that was not enough for the two journalists interviewing him; they wanted to talk about the “polemic,” the argument developed by conservative politician Charles Pasqua, according to which participation of different nationalities in the parade was certainly a good idea, but not, precisely, for the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings: “It was a bit incongruous.” The president had just developed creative thinking about the future, but apparently the journalists had not perceived it, so he repeated himself, but in cutting, acerbic terms: “Monsieur Pasqua belonged to the Résistance, and as chance would have it, I knew his father, who was in the same movement as me. So we have the same memories but we don’t have the same reactions. He thinks of the past, I think of the future.”18

“They’re Learning Again, in a Clumsy, Confused Way, What a Great Power Is” As if it were a matter of correcting this image, the French president also discerned a weakness in the Germany of the early years following reunification that again made it look like a country having difficulties with itself and trouble defining its action in the world. Mitterrand thought he detected this weakness in Germany—it does not know exactly where it stands; it does not know precisely what it should do; it is not acting in a sensible, coherent way—and he expressed this view in various meetings. During his March 14, 1991 lunch with George Bush in Martinique, he brought up the future of NATO, and the question of a European defense organization, and explained what, according to him, some member states of NATO thought about it: “Your British friend is not terribly enthusiastic, nor is the Netherlands; Ireland is neutral.” He paused before adding: “As for the Germans, since they’ve become big, they no longer know what to do.”19 On June 23, 1993, at a Cabinet meeting, the security zones that the Western nations had created in Bosnia were discussed. On that occasion, Mitterrand spoke very critically of the lack of involvement of the European Community member states: “Let every country in the Community pledge to participate in the defense of these zones. But many countries invoke pretexts for not going.” And he gave an example: “Germany says it cannot send men.” A few minutes later, he resumed, in general terms, coming back to the country whose refusal to become militarily involved in Bosnia

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surprised him singularly: “The Germans say: Our constitution forbids us to do so! But that constitution does not prevent sending peacekeeping forces. They’re learning again, in a clumsy, confused way, what a great power is.”20

“It’s Still Far from Being a Veritable Unification” The economic situation in united Germany did not seem good, which was noted with attention within the French government, because France had no interest in Germany’s doing poorly or that its economic strength be exhausted in the effort to consolidate its unity. At the Élysée, it was reckoned that such a development would have consequences that France did not wish for. This was expressed in the Cabinet meeting on December 5, 1990, shortly after reunification. Recalling “the very high interest rate practiced in Germany,” Finance Minister Pierre Bérégovoy declared: “That brings with it a certain destabilization of the franc in the EMS. Germany needs a lot of money to finance the consequences of unification, with a resulting heavy budget deficit that it cannot finance by taxes but by borrowing. Hence the increase in interest rates. By so doing, Germany seems to be ignoring its European responsibilities.”21 During the following period, this interest mixed with worry over unified Germany’s economic problems did not diminish in Paris since the news from Germany, and the points of view drawn from it, was not improving. “German unification is going badly,” announced Bérégovoy at the Cabinet meeting on March 20, 1991: “There are three million unemployed in the former GDR.  German unification contrasts not only two economies but also two cultures and two traditions.” Then he insisted on the huge financial burden that Germany had to bear for its unity, comparing its total with the costs resulting from the Gulf War (1991) and immediately recalling the restraint Germany had demonstrated when it was necessary to participate (in addition to the rest) in these expenses: “The cost for Germany [resulting from unification] is far greater than what the Gulf War cost the coalition, hence its reticence faced with the Gulf War contribution being asked of Germany.”22 In a discussion that took place at a Cabinet meeting a year later, on April 29, 1992, regarding the “crisis” that was shaping up in Germany, Mitterrand stressed the fact that it was “also economic” and gave an explanation for this: “The German economic machine is out of order … The weight of the Eastern lands [sic!] is too heavy: they consume twice what they produce, and the financial transfer

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from West to East puts a strain on public finances.” There was actually a good bit to worry about. But Germany should not be alone in facing its problems if one were to believe the French president when he said “It can be thought that Germany will turn increasingly towards France and that we’ll have to do everything to help Germany at this point in time.”23 The Germans had been mistaken in their economic calculations. From the economic point of view: “Yes,” Kurt Biedenkopf told Mitterrand on July 15, 1992 at the Élysée, “the reconstruction [of Saxony] will take at least fifteen years.” To which Mitterrand replied: “West Germany did not fully measure the difficulties it was going to encounter.”24 Nor had the distance that had to be covered before arriving at a mental unification of the two Germanies been understood. “The Berlin wall fell,” noted Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Boross on February 23, 1994, in a discussion with Mitterrand at the Élysée, “but it’s still far from being a veritable unification.” What could his host reply other than “Indeed!” The latter related this anecdote: “One day I had a discussion with some East German democrats who told me: Careful! We’ll have a lot of trouble getting along with the West Germans, even though we fought dictatorships. Even though we disapproved of them, we are ‘marked’!”25

“I Have a Great Deal of Sympathy for the Germans” On November 30, 1994, unified Germany and France met through their highest representatives: Roman Herzog, president of Federal Germany, received French President François Mitterrand in Bonn, and they had a long discussion as equals. How long have you been in office? Mitterrand asked Herzog. For five months, he answered, whereupon Mitterrand, who had occupied the Élysée for more than thirteen years, replied, as if wanting to pass on his experience: “It goes quickly.” He supposed that the job no longer has “any secrets for you,” and Herzog responded that he wasn’t so sure, and that his task, he was forced to admit, was “easier than yours.” The French president replied, as if wanting to appear less important than he had been, “I’m used to it now.” François Mitterrand was nearing the end of his mandate and found himself in the transitional period between acts and the memory of those acts, the time separating presence and farewells, when the only important thing remains to assimilate the wisdom of this point of view: “Moreover, I’m coming to the end. But I’m not complaining. Everything has a beginning and an end.”

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Just after uttering those words, he brought the discussion back to current events, bringing up major subjects such as the expansion of the European Union, the relationship of Europe with Turkey, the problem of fundamentalism in the Arab world, and the Middle East conflict. They were at the heart of their discussion on this last topic when Herzog directed the conversation toward its end, choosing words that allowed for the birth of a Franco-German dialogue in which Germany and France found each other, bound as by a union made of testament and promise. The president of Germany said to the president of France: “I am very grateful, Mr. President, for your action in favor of German reunification. I have great admiration for you.” And the president of France responded: “And I have great deal of sympathy for the Germans. It is a great people that climbed up from the bottom of the abyss thanks to its exceptional politics and moral courage.”26

Notes 1. The texts of the two telegrams can be found at: AN-AG/5(4)/CDM/33. 2. CM, October 3, 1990. 3. https://www.vie-­p ublique.fr/ressources/mots-­c les/mitterrand-­ francois?page=65 (accessed April 15, 2021). 4. Report of the Mitterrand-Biedenkopf meeting, July 15, 1992. 5. CM, August 16, 1992. 6. Report of the Mitterrand-Kohl meeting, October 13, 1993. 7. See the inexcusable article by Serge-Christophe Kolm, La “teutomanie” et le pari de Pascal, Le Monde: February 21, 1990, 2. https://archive.org/ stream/LeMondeDiplomatique1990FranceFrench/Feb%2021%20 1990%2C%20Le%20Monde%20Diplomatique%2C%20 %2314018%2C%20France%20%28fr%29_djvu.txt (accessed April 30, 2021). 8. Report of the Mitterrand-Prince Charles meeting, December 17, 1990 (AN-AG/5(4)/CD/75). Dossier 2. 9. Interview accordée par M. le Président de la République à la télévision néerlandaise NOS-RTV Pays-Bas, December 5, 1991 (for this quote and the following). 10. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, le Président de la République, à Monsieur Patrick Poivre d’Arvor (TF1) et Monsieur Alain Duhamel (France 2), July 14, 1994. 11. Report of the G7 meeting in London on July 15, 1991 (for this quote and the following).

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12. Report of the Mitterrand-Collor de Mello meeting, February 6, 1990. 13. Report of the Mitterrand-Vranitzky meeting, December 3, 1991. 14. Report of the Mitterrand-González meeting, November 13, 1990. 15. Report of the Mitterrand-Stolpe meeting, April 12, 1995. 16. CM, May 9, 1990. 17. Report of the NATO summit, November 8, 1991 18. Interview accordée par Monsieur François Mitterrand, le Président de la République, à Monsieur Patrick Poivre d’Arvor (TF1) et Monsieur Alain Duhamel (France 2), July 14, 1994. 19. Report of the Mitterrand-Bush meeting, March 14, 1991. The American report of the meeting does not include this passage, except, in a different context, the sentence: “Now that they are unified, they don’t know what they want to be” (https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-­telcon s/1991-­03-­14%2D%2DMitterrand.pdf. Accessed May 2, 2021). 20. CM, June 23, 1993. 21. CM, December 5, 1990 22. CM, March 20, 1991. 23. CM, April 29, 1992. 24. Report of the Mitterrand-Biedenkopf meeting, July 15, 1992. 25. Report of the Mitterrand-Boross meeting, February 23, 1994 (AN-­ AG/5(4)/CD/92). 26. Report of the Mitterrand-Herzog meeting, November 30, 1994.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Archives Archive Présidentielle, Élysée (entire period of the Mitterrand presidency)   CD Council of Defense (Conseil de défense)   CM Council of Ministers (Conseil des ministres) Archives Nationales, Paris (Pierrefitte), Fonds Mitterrand   For further details, as to both archives, see Chap. 1: Introduction. Bundesarchiv, Federal Republic of Germany https://www.bundesarchiv.de   https://www.bundesarchiv.de   KAB Cabinet Minutes of the German Federal Government Diplomatische Dokumente der Schweiz https://dodis.ch   https://dodis.ch George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum (Digital Collections)   https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/ National Security Archive, Washington, D.C. (Digital Collections)   nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/index.html The National Archives, Kew, Richmond   CAB Cabinet Office   PREM Prime Minister’s Office Wilson Center, Washington, D.C. (Digital Collections)   https://www.wilsoncenter.org

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4

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Author’s Interviews Jean-Louis Bianco  Paris, June, 25, 1993   Paris, June 3, 1996   Paris, October 23, 1996   Paris, January 2, 1997   Paris, March 26, 2000   Paris, July 20. 2006 Joachim Bitterlich  Bonn, May 28, 1995   Bonn, August 17, 1998   Paris, March 20, 2003   Paris, September 30, 2003 Bertrand Dufourcq  Suresnes, November 6, 2009 Roland Dumas  Paris, March 29, 2007 Hans-Dietrich Genscher  Genshagen, October 18, 1996   Berchtesgaden, August 1, 2006 Élisabeth Guigou  Paris, March 12, 1997   Paris, October 8, 2003   Paris, July 20, 2006 Peter Hartmann  Bonn, May 29, 1995 Anne Lauvergeon  Paris, October, 27, 1997 Jean Lévy  Paris, October 27, 1992 Caroline de Margerie  Paris, April 12, 1999 François Mitterrand  Paris, June 15, 1993   Paris, March 17, 1994 Jean Musitelli  Paris, October 20, 1992   Paris, October 28, 1992   Paris, February 16, 1993   Paris, June 24, 1993   Paris, March 10, 1994 Horst Teltschik  Munich, July 18, 1994   Rottach-Egern, January 9, 2017 Hubert Védrine  Paris, April 21, 1995   Paris, June 12, 1996   Paris, October 21, 1996   Paris, March 29, 2000   Paris, March 29, 2006   Paris, October 2, 2007

The records of the interviews are placed in the author’s archive.

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Index of Names1

A Adenauer, Konrad, 32, 37 Allen, Richard V., 29 Al-Sabah, Jaber al-Ahmad, 80, 252 Altenburg, Wolfgang, 170, 172, 174 Alyev, Heydar, 31, 60n16 Andreotti, Giulio, 271, 273, 282n13, 310 Andriessen, Frans, 338 Andropov, Yuri, 31 Antal, József, 369, 380n43 Apel, Hans, 162 Arafat, Yasser, 414 Arendt, Hannah, 39, 44n35 Aristotle, 93 Attali, Jacques, 69, 110, 112, 123n28, 123n37, 125n53, 125n54, 125n56, 126n67, 167, 168, 242, 349n3, 365 Auguste, Philippe, 420

1

B Bahr, Egon, 278, 283n21 Baker, James A., 1, 187, 188, 209n17, 279, 283n26, 283n28, 314, 318n41, 324, 329, 333, 343, 351n22, 351n23, 352n26, 353n35, 353n37, 362, 363, 365, 366, 371, 387, 390, 393, 399, 401 Balladur, Édouard, 97, 98 Barkley, Richard C., 343 Barre, Raymond, 115 Bérégovoy, Pierre, 378n7, 14, 100, 102, 118, 125n54, 166, 234n24, 242, 270–272, 362, 394, 400, 424 Beschloss, Michael R., 279, 283n28, 351n23 Bianco, Jean-Louis, 43n3, 69, 107, 110, 112, 113, 125n53, 125n54,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4

439

440 

INDEX OF NAMES

125n60, 125n61, 126n63, 126n67, 147n11, 171, 174, 175, 178, 181n50, 181n51, 219, 234n19, 278, 292, 301, 315n16, 316n26, 317n34, 319n52, 330, 331, 335, 336, 347, 352n29, 356n97, 357n107, 364, 366, 378n18 Biedenkopf, Kurt, 342, 355n76, 417, 425, 426n4, 427n24 Bismarck, Otto von, 225, 258 Bitterlich, Joachim, 177, 178, 182n61, 242, 244–246, 262n5, 274, 310, 313, 317n32, 320n66, 320n69, 321n74, 321n76, 321n84, 322n87, 373, 380n54 Blot, Jacques, 385 Bohley, Bärbel, 346, 356n94 Boidevaix, Serge, 300 Bondarenko, Alexander, 392 Boross, Péter, 425, 427n25 Boudier, Marc, 120 Brandt, Willy, 44n32, 154, 178n3, 212, 324, 343, 352n26 Brezhnev, Leonid, 26, 27, 30, 31, 38, 88n25, 325 Brinkley, Douglas, 39 Brown, Harold, 27 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 30, 267 Burt, Richard, 69 Bush, George H.W., v, viii, 1, 8, 44n36, 69, 143, 149n48, 183, 184, 187, 188, 197, 209n17, 209n22, 214, 231, 232, 233n8, 237, 255, 257, 260, 261, 264n33, 264n42, 264n43, 264n44, 279, 283n26, 283n28, 286, 294, 295, 298, 308, 315n23, 316n31, 318n44, 319n56, 323–325, 329, 331, 333, 335, 342, 351n23, 353n37, 353n45, 353n47, 360, 361, 363–368, 371, 373, 377, 378n15, 379n25, 379n34, 380n45, 380n52, 389, 401, 421, 423, 427n19

C Carter, Jimmy, 30, 267 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 75, 340 Charles V, Emperor, 18, 420 Charles, Prince of Wales, 419, 426n8 Chernenko, Konstantin, 29, 31, 60n16, 75 Chernyaev, Anatoly S., 328, 386, 387 Chervonenko, Stepan Vassilyevich, 60n12, 135, 148n14 Chevènement, Jean-Pierre, 104, 105, 121, 125n54, 175, 244, 275, 278, 283n22, 326, 350n13, 364, 402, 411n55 Cheysson, Claude, 69, 113, 125n62, 155, 162, 282n8 Chirac, Jacques, 147n11, 191, 225, 226 Churchill, Winston, 64 Collor de Mello, Fernando, 421, 427n12 Colombani, Jean-Marie, 259 Connan, Christian, 267 Cooper, Barry, 10 Cossiga, Francesco, 233n5, 352n25, 354n55, 363, 378n16 Cradock, Percy, 401 Cresson, Edith, 270 D Dana, Thierry, 390 Danielle, Mitterrand, 346 Debray, Régis, 54–57 Debré, Michel, 269 De Gaulle, Charles, 7, 62n34, 140, 145, 158, 159, 269 Delamuraz, Jean-Pascal, 335, 353n44 Delamuraz, Jean-Paul, 6 Delors, Jacques, 40, 102–107, 111–115, 122n23, 123n37, 123n40, 124n45, 125n54, 125n58, 126n62, 128, 225, 226, 237, 239, 240, 249, 250, 262n5, 295, 297, 301, 310, 314, 324 De Mita, Cirio, 262n4, 239, 243, 263n11

  INDEX OF NAMES 

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich, 30 Dregger, Alfred, 278 Dufourcq, Betrand, 375, 381n59, 389, 390, 395–397, 406, 409n30 Dumas, Roland, 85, 117–119, 188, 216, 236n53, 243, 244, 246, 247, 260, 263n23, 270–272, 274, 275, 295, 296, 302, 310, 313, 317n34, 317n35, 321n74, 322n90, 337, 342, 349n3, 361, 375, 376, 381n60, 386, 389, 390, 393, 394, 396, 403, 404, 406 E Eagleburger, Lawrence, 282n18, 363, 364, 378n17 Eanes, António, 50, 57, 59n4, 60n8, 62n30, 62n31, 62n32, 142, 149n39 Elgey, Georgette, 272, 274, 282n14, 314n3, 314n6, 315n10 F Fall, Brian J.P., 388, 389 Fanfani, Amintore, 127 Favier, Pierre, 114, 122n23 Fischer, Oskar, 87n16, 71, 86, 340, 388 Flaubert, Gustave, 33, 264n41 Fleury, Jean, 175 Fontaine, André, 259 Forray, Gilbert, 170–174 François I, 420 Frederick II, 258 G Gauer, Denis, 390 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 1, 6, 16, 20n8, 20n11, 36, 44n23, 44n30, 68, 73, 78, 85, 86, 87n9, 87n21,

441

88n31, 88n32, 89n45, 117, 118, 125–126n62, 127, 131, 147n8, 147n10, 155, 159, 161, 162, 179n15, 179n19, 188, 191, 208n10, 219, 226, 235n36, 244, 246, 263n23, 275, 291, 299, 301–305, 309, 310, 313, 317n32, 319n58, 320n62, 323, 325, 330, 332–334, 343, 346, 352n25, 355n83, 362, 383, 385, 387–390, 392, 394, 399, 400, 402–404, 409n25 Gerlach, Manfred, 323, 344, 346, 356n87 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 40, 42, 154, 158, 166, 191, 228, 234n15, 235n44, 422 González, Felipe, 5, 127, 130, 143, 147n6, 149n29, 149n45, 159, 179n14, 207n1, 207n4, 221, 234n25, 238, 249, 250, 262n3, 273, 297, 301, 310, 320n72, 421, 427n14 Gorbachev, Mikhail, v, viii, 1, 2, 6–8, 31, 35, 36, 39, 44n33, 44n36, 58, 60n11, 60n16, 61n21, 62n29, 62n34, 64, 65, 74–82, 85, 86, 86n1, 86n2, 88n25, 88n31, 88n38, 94–96, 131, 138, 148n22, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192, 195, 209n17, 216, 219, 225, 228, 231, 233n8, 235n40, 235n49, 238, 252, 253, 255–257, 261, 265–270, 275, 277, 278, 281n2, 283n28, 285, 286, 294–298, 301, 304, 309, 312, 315n23, 316n24, 316n26, 316n28, 320n61, 321n81, 323–329, 334, 339, 348, 350n12, 352n25, 352n26, 359–361, 364–369, 377, 379n29, 383, 386–388, 399–402, 405, 407, 411n51, 413, 414 Gorbacheva, Raissa, 76, 77

442 

INDEX OF NAMES

Gromyko, Andrei, 30, 31, 60n16, 79, 321n73 Guigou, Élisabeth, 54, 86n3, 107, 109, 110, 114, 124n45, 125n54, 167, 168, 175, 239–242, 244–249, 262n5, 262n6, 263n18, 263n22, 272–274, 282n14, 288–292, 296, 299, 302, 305, 307, 310, 311, 314n3, 314n6, 314n7, 315n10, 320n63, 320n66, 320n67, 321n74, 321n85, 321n86, 338, 341, 349n3 Guofeng, Hua, 51, 60n13 Gysi, Gregor, 346, 356n92, 356n94 H Habyarimana, J. (President), 415 Haig, Alexander, 28, 29 Hannoun, Hervé, 115, 116, 126n71 Hartmann, Peter, 299, 318n46 Haughey, Charles J., 297, 354n55 Havel, Václav, 195, 320n61, 324, 362, 370, 378n9, 380n45 Hennekine, Loïc, 312, 321n82, 346 Hernu, Charles, 155, 162, 164 Herzog, Roman, 336, 425, 426, 427n26 Heym, Stephan, 346 Hitler, Adolf, 258, 260, 372 Honecker, Erich, 66, 75, 87n3, 198, 254, 255, 266, 275, 287, 323, 324, 340, 342 Hurd, Douglas, 1, 188, 232, 236n57, 344, 361, 387, 393, 401, 404 Hussein, King, 24, 362, 371, 378n8, 380n46 J Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 70, 75, 87n15, 164, 180n27, 316n32, 335, 339, 360, 375, 381n60

Jobert, Michel, 106 Junejo, Mohammad Khan, 77, 88n30 Jung, Louis, 220, 224, 234n21, 235n30 K Kádár, Janos, 75 Kastrup, Dieter, 395, 396 Kennan, George F., 229, 235n45 Khaled, King (Saudi Arabia), 49, 59n1 Khrushchev, Nikita, 31 Kinsman, Jeremy K.B., 388 Kissinger, Henry, 25, 26, 31, 32, 36, 43n4, 43n19, 44n21, 44n31, 50, 60n7, 60n16, 69, 70, 74, 75, 87n14, 156, 207n10, 216, 217, 233n13, 234n15, 279, 283n27, 283n28 Kitonov, 30 Kohl, Helmut, v, viii, 1, 8, 16, 28, 50, 73, 94, 127, 154, 185, 213, 238, 271, 285–322, 324, 359, 383, 416 Krenz, Egon, 237, 266, 285–287, 298, 323, 340, 342 Kwizinskij, Julij, 300 L Lafontaine, Oskar, 219 Lahnstein, Manfred, 166 Laird, Melvin, 27 Lang, Jack, 234n29, 346 Lanxade, Jacques, 175–178, 182n58, 278, 364 Lauvergeon, Anne, 310, 321n75, 400, 410n50 Lee Kuan Yew, 25, 26 Léotard, Francois, 191 Ligachev, Egor Kuzmich, 139, 148n23, 159, 179n16 Lubbers, Ruud, 250, 297, 310

  INDEX OF NAMES 

M Machiavelli, Niccolò, vi Magirius, Friedrich, 346 Maizière, Lothar de, 324, 360 Major, John, 413, 421 Mandela, Nelson, 415 Margerie, Caroline de, 363, 376, 377, 381n63, 391, 400 Martens, Wilfried A.-E., 140, 141, 143–145, 148n29, 149n35, 149n37, 149n46, 273, 297, 298 Martin-Roland, Michel, 114, 122n23 Masur, Kurt, 346, 356n94 Mauroy, Pierre, 30, 40, 100–102, 104, 122n17, 124n47, 125n54, 155, 156 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 207n1, 360, 375, 380n44, 381n60 McFarlane, Robert, 69 McNamara, Robert, 27 Mease, Edwin, 29 Meckel, Markus, 207n8, 393 Méhaignerie, Pierre, 191 Mendès-France, Pierre, 38 Mielke, Erich, 324 Mitterrand, François, v, viii, 1, 7, 23, 47, 63, 95, 127, 152, 185, 211, 215, 237, 252–261, 267, 285–323, 360, 383, 415 experiment, 98 foreign policy, 47–50, 231, 256, 260, 275 strategic thinking, 131, 133–135, 138, 144 Modrow, Hans, 285, 286, 324, 338, 342, 344–346, 356n90, 359, 361, 385, 386 Mojsov, Lazar, 219, 234n20 Morel, Pierre, 186, 190–196, 209n21 Müller, Heiner, 346 Mulroney, Brian, 207n1, 257, 260, 264n37, 264n40, 388 Musitelli, Jean, 10n1, 175, 227, 338, 354n60

443

N Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 127 Napoleon I, 216 O Ockrent, Christine, 242 Otto IV, Emperor, 420 Owen, David, 144, 149n49 Özal, Turgut, 362, 378n6 P Pasqua, Charles, 423 Pirandello, Luigi, viii Plato, 13 Pöhl, Karl-Otto, 118, 245, 262n5 Pompidou, Georges, 154, 178n3 Powell, Charles, 174, 221, 235n49, 311, 312, 356n86, 366, 368, 387 Q Quilès, Paul, 172, 181n45 R Rabin, Itzhak, 143, 149n44, 414, 415 Raimond, Jean-Bernard, 77 Rau, Johannes, 158, 179n11 Reagan, Nancy, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 26–30, 35, 39, 41, 42, 43n4, 50, 56, 60n9, 66, 67, 69, 74, 76, 87n6, 87n12, 127, 130–132, 142, 143, 146n1 Reich, Jens, 346, 356n94, 372, 420 Reynaud, Henri, 384, 408n1 Richelieu, Duke of (Cardinal), 341 Rocard, Michel, 381n60, 103, 104, 122n26, 125n54, 295, 338, 375, 376 Rodgers, Joe M., 304, 320n60 Roh Tae Woo, 301, 302, 319n53 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 64

444 

INDEX OF NAMES

S Sakharov, Andrei, 60n16, 339 Santer, Jacques, 297 Sarney, José, 76, 88n26 Sartzetakis, Christos, 297 Saulnier, Jean, 170, 172, 173 Sautter, Christian, 106, 108–110, 125n54, 336 Sauzay, Brigitte, 346 Schabert, Ina, xn1 Schabert, Tilo, v–x Schiwkow, Todor, 75 Schlesinger, James, 27 Schlüter, Pouls, 297 Schmidt, Helmut, 23, 25–31, 40, 43n1, 43n5, 43n12, 43n15, 43n17, 44n38, 45n39, 50, 51, 53–57, 60n5, 60n10, 61n22, 62n28, 62n33, 66, 67, 75, 82, 84, 87n8, 88n42, 96, 100–102, 121n6, 122n16, 122n17, 148n17, 152, 154, 161, 162, 166, 168, 178n1, 178n4, 180n21, 180n22, 229, 260, 311, 321n79 Schmitt, Maurice, 175 Schnur, Wolfgang, 346 Schreckenberger, Waldemar, 20n20, 112, 125n60 Schulz, George, 69 Schuman, Robert, 37, 38 Scowcroft, Brent, 214, 233n8, 279, 283n26, 283n28, 318n41, 331, 333, 351n22, 351n23, 352n25, 352n26 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 1, 81, 85, 86, 89n45, 188, 209n17, 266, 334, 350n16, 365, 383, 387, 388, 392, 393, 399, 400, 402, 404, 405, 411n61 Shultz, George, 25, 26, 138, 148n20, 158, 179n6, 179n10

Silva, Cavaco, 80, 88n34, 363, 378n11 Skubiszewski, Krzysztof, 360, 371, 375, 381n60, 404 Soares, Mario, 282n17, 192, 198, 274, 279 Stalin, Joseph, 64, 254, 325, 374 Stasse, François-Xavier, 110, 125n54 Stavenhagen, Lutz, 290, 314n7, 338, 354n54 Steel, David, 144, 149n49 Stolpe, Manfred, 346, 356n94, 422, 427n15 Stoltenberg, Gerhard, 113, 118, 124n45, 125n62, 234n24, 271, 402, 411n55 Stoph, Willi, 286, 287, 324 Strauss, Franz Josef, 32 Suslov, Mikhail, 30 Süssmuth, Rita, 324, 336 T Talbott, Strobe, 279, 283n28, 351n23 Teltschik, Horst, 167, 168, 174, 177, 221, 242, 262n2, 284n28, 300, 318n46, 355n78, 365, 375–377, 385, 401, 409n25 Thatcher, Margaret, v, viii, 1, 6, 8, 32, 36, 51, 68, 76, 77, 80, 87n10, 88n28, 88n35, 88n36, 127–134, 138–140, 142, 143, 146n1, 148n19, 148n24, 149n34, 157, 158, 161, 174, 179n6, 179n9, 179n12, 188, 221, 230–232, 236n51, 249, 272, 273, 286, 294, 297, 298, 304, 309–313, 315n23, 316n26, 319n59, 320n61, 321n81, 330, 336, 338, 344, 354n53, 354n55, 354n57, 362, 366, 368, 379m31, 379n40, 387, 401, 413, 418

  INDEX OF NAMES 

445

Timsit, Jöelle, 340 Tolstoy, Leo, 30 Trudeau, Pierre, 26 Turgenev, Ivan, 30 Tuttle, John Tyler, 9, 10

Vorontsov, Yuli, 82, 88n37, 140, 144, 145, 149n31, 212, 233n4 Vranitzky, Franz, 118, 126n75, 342, 355n75, 421, 427n13

U Ustinov, Dmitriy, 30, 31, 60n16

W Wahl, Jacques, 166 Waigel, Theo, 242, 285, 291 Walesa, Lech, 413 Wall, Stephen J., 387 Walters, Vernon (General), 69 Weinberger, Caspar, 27, 69 Weizsäcker, Richard von, 416 Wellershoff, Dieter, 174–176, 178 Wilhelm, King, 258, 260 Wolf, Christa, 346 Wörner, Manfred, 8, 142, 155, 162, 164, 165, 167, 207n1, 212, 233n2, 319n56

V Védrine, Hubert, vii, 10n1, 20n20, 54, 66, 69, 86n3, 87n5, 88n25, 147n11, 167–169, 171, 175, 176, 180n25, 181n38, 185, 211, 234n29, 242, 275–278, 280, 281, 288, 300, 301, 330–332, 338–342, 346, 349, 349n3, 349n4, 352n28, 352n32, 354n58, 354n62, 354n65, 355n74, 363, 364, 377, 378n18, 381n63, 385, 386, 398, 399, 408n6 Vernier-Palliez, Bernard, 69 Vogel, Dieter, 336 Vogel, Hans-Jochen, 75, 87n23, 127, 129, 141, 142, 147n5, 149n38, 149n42, 158, 179n13, 217, 220, 234n16, 234n22, 234n23, 278

Y Yeltsin, Boris, 383, 413 Z Zoellick, Robert, 405 Zola, 37

Index of Subjects1

A Act of faith, 227, 228, 231, 306 Act of faith on behalf of Europe, 7 Actors’ tale, 4–5 America, 25, 26, 29, 58, 132, 138, 141, 142, 144, 187, 283n27 American government, 27–29, 56, 229, 318n41, 343 American nuclear protection of Germany, 155 American scenario, 184, 186, 189 Anarchy of reunification, 329 Architecture of European security, 184 Archives Nationales, 3, 4 Arms race, 58, 76, 81, 137 Art of government, x Art of hermeneutics, 5 Art of political leadership, 3 Art of politics, 39 Atlantic Alliance, 121, 136, 137, 141, 153, 157, 159, 367, 392, 407

Austerity plan, 115 Austria, 118, 119, 237, 265, 276, 304, 339, 415 Austria-Hungary, 280 Awakening of nationalism, 259 B Balance of payments, 107, 115, 410n51 Balance of power, 17, 18, 48, 51, 55, 58, 82, 119, 135, 137, 138, 200, 216, 222, 223, 230, 260, 270, 281 Balance of power, in Europe, 16, 59, 64, 218, 255, 332 Balance of trade, 107 Basic Law (the Federal German Constitution), 395 The black star of nuclear terror, 134 Brezhnev doctrine, 265

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Schabert, France and the Reunification of Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80763-4

447

448 

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Bulgaria, 237, 339, 340 Bundestag, 73, 116, 117, 125n56, 182n57, 191, 219, 241, 286, 298, 317n40, 318n46, 336, 339, 360, 370, 373, 376, 396 Business of government, 39 Business of politics, vii C Cabinet meetings (Paris), 3, 15–18, 43n4, 56, 71, 72, 95, 101, 104, 105, 115, 119–121, 126n65, 127, 131, 138, 140, 142, 145, 171, 175, 216, 218, 219, 221, 222, 226, 233n14, 234n24, 251, 252, 256, 270, 273, 274, 278–280, 287, 332, 335, 337, 339, 342, 361–364, 378n18, 394, 406, 415, 416, 418, 422–424 Canada, 25, 26, 207n1, 260, 388, 398 Center of Europe, 59, 62n34, 64, 70, 222, 228 Central Europe, 16, 172, 173, 281, 317n32 Chancellery (Bonn), 4, 112, 125n60, 166, 207n10, 242, 244, 262n5, 263n23, 282n18, 290, 291, 300, 307, 318n46, 320n66, 337, 343, 355n78, 373, 375, 377 Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), 125n56, 278, 279, 336, 360, 372, 373 Cold War, v, viii, 213 Collapse of the Soviet empire, 215, 252, 362 Collapse of the Soviet Union, 14, 15 Common currency, 221, 238, 241, 308

Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 74, 76, 80, 138, 139, 238, 304, 324, 359, 389 Communist regime, 253, 277 Conception of history, 213, 214 Concert of European nations, 222 Conditions of Yalta, viii Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 24, 25, 86, 89n45, 188, 208n8, 352n34, 377, 385, 387, 393, 398, 413 Confidence, vii, viii, x, 25, 28, 30, 39, 79, 104, 156, 160, 162, 174, 179n17, 347, 393 Configurative field of creative movements, 22 Consultation mechanism, 166, 170, 172 Consultations on nuclear weapons, 169 Conversation, 3, 4, 8, 12, 15, 16, 21–24, 26, 29, 31–33, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43n4, 55, 57, 58, 60n12, 60n16, 61n20, 62n29, 69–71, 83, 95, 96, 118, 127–129, 135, 142, 144, 145, 146n1, 149n48, 152, 165, 169, 171, 209n17, 231, 232, 239, 255, 257, 260, 261, 268, 282n18, 283n28, 294, 301–305, 308, 310, 316n31, 320n61, 321n81, 323, 325, 326, 331, 336, 341, 344, 346–349, 349n3, 352n25, 355n70, 355n78, 356n94, 363, 365, 366, 368, 371, 374–376, 388, 391, 401, 416, 417, 426 CPSU, 58 Creative energy of politics, 35, 74 Creative politics, 40, 94, 218, 422 Creative power, 11, 12, 36

  INDEX OF SUBJECTS 

Creativity of political power, x Creativity unto leadership, 2 Currency crisis, 102 Czechoslovakia, 143, 158, 179n6, 195, 237, 285, 304, 320n61, 323, 324, 339, 340 D Defense policy, 169 Delors Commission, 238–240, 249 Delors Report, 239, 241, 244, 245, 249–251, 262n5, 271, 273 Desire for reunification, 195, 253, 255, 256 Deterrence, 121, 130, 132, 139–141, 144, 146, 148n29, 151, 152, 157, 158, 160, 163, 164, 167, 168, 171, 174, 177 Deutsche Bundesbank, 109 Deutsche Mark, 108, 110–113, 123n39 Deutschmark, 219–223, 271, 281, 383 Diplomacy, viii, 69, 81, 201, 390, 399, 407 Disappearance of the Soviet Union, 14 Disarmament, 32, 38, 58, 59, 128, 129, 131, 133, 135, 281 Disintegration of the Soviet empire, 14, 407 Dismantlement of the Yalta order, 369 Dissuasion, 57, 81, 147n10, 160, 164 Division of Germany, 83, 119, 252, 286, 327, 386 Dominant pole in the center of Europe, 59, 64, 228 E The East, 9, 24, 58, 62n31, 66, 71–74, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 128, 129, 133, 135, 146n2, 192,

449

204, 214, 215, 217–219, 222, 224, 256, 260, 267, 270, 274, 276, 279, 286, 296–298, 317n35, 339, 372, 373, 425 East Berlin, 6, 204, 227, 254, 266, 285, 324, 340, 346, 384, 390, 391, 401, 408n5 Eastern Europe, 5, 17, 75, 120, 184, 196, 199, 201–203, 205, 214, 261, 270, 275–277, 279, 281, 286, 288, 295–297, 317n35, 338–340, 342, 415 Eastern European countries, 136, 317n35 Eastern Europe’s ancien régime, 201 East Germany, 6, 66, 83, 158, 178n3, 179n6, 186, 190, 193, 195, 198, 202, 203, 219, 253, 255, 265, 267, 281, 302, 309, 327, 337, 338, 340, 341, 343, 344, 362, 388, 391, 405, 419 East-West relations, 23, 25–27, 29, 30, 80, 135, 339 Economic and monetary policy, 103, 243 Economic and monetary sovereignty, 8 Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), 237–251, 259, 262n5, 262n6, 263n23, 271, 288–292, 297, 303, 306–309, 314n7, 320n71, 359, 360, 369, 383, 413 Economic austerity policy, 105 Economic partnership with Germany, 99, 227 Economic reality, 105, 106 Economic situation in France, 8, 98, 102, 107–109, 122n28, 420 of Soviet Union, 8 Economy of France, 7

450 

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Élysée, vi, vii, x, 3, 4, 8, 11–20, 40, 43n3, 43n4, 47, 49, 58, 60n11, 60n12, 69–71, 78, 85, 87n8, 88n25, 100, 102, 107, 108, 110, 120, 121, 125n54, 129, 131, 138–140, 142, 144, 148n17, 149n50, 152, 160, 162, 166, 167, 169–171, 174, 177, 178, 180n22, 192–195, 198–199, 213, 216–219, 231, 239, 241–245, 267, 268, 272, 274–281, 286, 288–292, 294–296, 298, 301, 305, 310, 316n26, 317n32, 330, 335, 336, 338, 340, 343, 347, 349n4, 354n54, 355n79, 362, 365, 370, 374–376, 385, 391, 399, 404, 424, 425 Élysée Treaty, 161, 182n57, 214 England, 18, 24, 33, 178n3, 206, 260, 268 Eurocorps, 415, 422 Euromissiles, 68, 96, 339 Europe, 1, 15, 17, 25, 50, 64, 96, 131, 158, 186, 189, 211–237, 268, 285, 324, 360, 393, 416 in freedom, 64 originality, 51, 311 security, 141, 144 unification, 6, 227 at a variable geometry, 40 European act of faith, 228 European Community, 6, 17, 24, 32, 51, 52, 110, 113, 118, 192, 196, 198–199, 201, 210n22, 219, 220, 226, 227, 229, 232, 237–239, 241, 242, 252, 253, 262n6, 265, 271–273, 275, 281, 286–288, 295, 306, 309, 317n35, 324–326, 333, 334, 337, 344, 348, 360, 377, 383, 401, 414, 423

European Council, vi, 52, 69, 73, 74, 113, 140, 202, 203, 225, 238–240, 244, 246, 247, 249–251, 262n5, 271, 287, 288, 290, 292, 293, 295–298, 305–314, 317n32, 320n71, 407, 414 European Council in Strasbourg, 247, 271, 290, 292, 306, 313 European currency, 225, 226, 262n6 European defense, 129, 141, 318n41, 423 European Economic and Monetary Union, 239, 308, 383, 414 European Economic Community (EEC), 50, 281, 290, 295, 296, 302, 306, 310, 311, 321n73, 324, 338, 345, 366, 414 European faith, 227 European geopolitics, 7, 218 European Germany, 392 European history, v, 6 European integration, 267, 298, 313 European Monetary System, 100, 102, 103, 105–115, 124n45, 262n6, 414 European Parliament, 199, 203, 285, 286, 288, 290, 298, 324, 330, 334, 350n16 European passion, 223–232 European political world, 5, 269, 270 European politics, 47–89, 111, 185, 203, 253, 259, 267, 270, 341 European project, 7, 50, 111, 227, 231, 242, 309 European Summit (Strasbourg), 7, 232, 317n32, 332, 341, 369, 407 European Union, 189, 207n4, 225, 266, 306, 317n32, 413–415, 426 European unity, ix, 51, 152, 206, 260 European vision, 190

  INDEX OF SUBJECTS 

European work, 190, 227, 228, 247, 273, 292 Evian agreement, 238, 240, 242, 262n2 Exercises in political hermeneutics, 22, 28 External aspects of unification, 386, 403 F Fall of the Berlin Wall, v, viii, x, 2, 14, 295, 418 Fate of Europe, ix, 325 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), 8, 50, 57, 66, 67, 86n3, 93, 97, 103, 116, 117, 119, 142, 155, 158, 159, 161, 162, 167, 171–173, 175, 179n6, 183, 195, 208, 216, 217, 219, 222, 243, 256, 261, 271, 274, 278, 281, 294, 295, 297, 300, 303, 315n14, 316n32, 321n73, 337, 344, 360, 365, 377, 384–386, 393, 398, 406, 407, 415 Field of international politics, 23 Financial situation of the USSR, 8, 400 Flexible response, 128, 129, 141–143, 146n2, 147n11 Foreign policy, 7, 24, 27, 38, 47–50, 62n34, 70, 86n3, 88n31, 111, 124n47, 144, 212, 229, 231, 244, 256, 260, 275, 278, 300, 327, 401, 416 Four Allied Powers, 268, 385, 407 Four Allies, 384, 385, 387, 389 Four-plus-two negotiations, 384 Four powers, 187, 188, 204, 206, 207n1, 278, 294, 300, 302, 359, 383, 384, 386, 387, 390, 391, 393–395, 403–405

451

Framework of reunification, 269, 332 Franc, 100, 102, 107–110, 112, 113, 122n22, 123n39, 274, 424 France, vi, vii, ix, x, 3, 7, 8, 12, 15–19, 26, 29, 30, 36–38, 40, 41, 43n4, 47, 49–51, 53, 55–59, 66–71, 79, 81, 85, 86n2, 87n6, 91–126, 129–131, 133, 134, 137–141, 144–146, 151–182, 185, 186, 190–195, 197, 200, 202, 205, 206, 211, 213, 216–218, 220–228, 230–232, 234n24, 237–261, 263n23, 265, 268, 270, 271, 273–276, 278, 282n8, 284n28, 287, 291, 295, 300, 302, 304, 305, 307, 309, 310, 326, 327, 329, 331, 332, 335, 337–340, 342, 345–348, 352n25, 360, 376, 377, 383–411, 413–420, 422, 424–426 nuclear military power, 94, 96 security policy, 54, 163 tactical nuclear weapons, 57, 163, 164, 168, 172 Franco-American relations, 49 Franco-German, 52–55, 67, 79, 95, 98, 100, 112, 115, 118, 120, 131, 147, 157, 160–163, 165–170, 172, 173, 176, 177, 182n57, 191, 226, 240, 241, 243, 267, 271, 274, 285, 290, 300, 326, 348, 395, 426 (Franco-German) Defense Council, 248 Franco-German partnership, 97, 117, 120, 225 Franco-German relationship, 29, 37, 40, 53–56, 58, 80, 93–95, 117–121, 152, 154, 164, 168, 177, 178, 180n25, 221, 223, 241, 247, 256, 300, 305, 314

452 

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Franco-German treaty (January 22, 1963), 157, 161, 162, 326 Franco-Russian alliance, 304 Freedom, 2, 9, 31, 38, 48, 55, 60n16, 61n21, 64, 71, 73, 74, 82, 83, 86, 92, 138, 151, 152, 165, 171, 187, 192, 193, 195–205, 212–215, 228, 233n8, 253, 255, 270, 275, 279, 280, 285, 288, 293, 294, 345, 372, 402, 421 French nuclear doctrine, 56 French nuclear force, 8, 130, 145, 158, 160 French nuclear protection, 155, 159 French nuclear war doctrine, 134 French patriotism, 212 French pre-strategic nuclear weapons, 172, 178 French scenario, 184, 186, 190–195 French sovereignty, 96 French strategy of dissuasion, 81 French tactical nuclear weapons, 164, 168 Friendship, 41, 53, 79, 94, 145, 152, 162, 195, 197, 225, 270, 413 Fundamental geopolitical principle, 16 Future of Europe, ix, 205, 288 G GDR People’s Chamber, 266, 286 Geography, 59, 119, 120, 129, 214–219, 222 Geopolitical logic, 216, 366 Geostrategic balance in the world, 136 German anguish, 160 German Bundestag, 73, 182n57 German character, 230 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 32, 34, 86, 87n5, 93, 153, 158, 172, 178n3, 183, 184, 187, 195, 198, 204, 206, 208n15, 227,

229, 237, 254, 255, 264n32, 265–267, 270, 275, 277, 278, 280, 281, 282n8, 282n18, 284n28, 285, 286, 288, 294, 297, 298, 309, 312, 316n31, 317n32, 323, 324, 331, 332, 337–346, 348, 349, 354n55, 355n79, 355n80, 359–362, 372, 377, 383, 384, 386, 388, 393, 398, 406, 415, 424 German economy, 55, 100 German history, 6, 82, 84, 260, 372 German minorities in Poland, 360, 373, 397 German nation, 86n3, 92, 164, 219, 275, 295, 310, 374 German national character, 6 German nationalism, 68 German nationality, 395 German neutrality, 194, 332, 351n23, 364 Germanophobia, 419 German participation in the nuclear decision, 154, 155 German patriotism, 212 German people’s self-­ determination, 269 German-Polish border, 2, 7, 298, 312, 360, 370, 407, 413 German-Polish treaty, 371, 377, 395, 397, 404 German problem, ix, 17, 53, 58, 59, 64–66, 68–70, 195, 196, 205, 206, 212, 220, 228, 230, 231, 260, 268, 276, 309, 328, 345, 348, 404, 405 German question, ix, 7, 16, 17, 24, 64, 66, 67, 71, 83, 84, 86, 92, 93, 166, 189, 207n7, 218, 219, 231, 278, 280, 281, 282n8, 284n28, 286, 298, 299, 326, 334, 386, 393, 399

  INDEX OF SUBJECTS 

German reunification, 5, 7, 96, 98, 99, 195, 204, 207n4, 212, 227–229, 233n8, 252, 253, 259, 268, 270, 276, 279, 282n8, 283n26, 284n28, 296, 298, 301, 307, 308, 310, 312, 328–332, 334–336, 347, 351n22, 360–363, 369, 371, 375, 376, 383, 387, 388, 400, 405, 417, 418, 426 Germans’ desire for reunification, 195 German-Soviet relations, 256, 304 German unity, 40, 48, 58, 82, 83, 92–94, 99, 185, 187–192, 196, 199, 205, 206, 207n1, 228, 232, 279, 283n28, 307, 312, 321n73, 322n90, 323, 324, 329, 345–348, 359, 366, 370, 374, 376, 384, 386, 389, 392, 396, 402, 416, 422 Germany, vi, 3, 14, 17, 22, 48, 64, 92, 129, 151–211, 237–264, 267, 286, 323–357, 359–381, 383, 413 economic strength, 94–96, 424 geographical position, 217, 218 membership in NATO, 333, 351n23, 359–381 neutrality, 194, 196, 332, 351n23, 364 security, 29, 56, 57, 156, 160, 169 security problems, 156 self-determination, 194, 269, 282n8, 310, 311, 336 unification, vii, 6, 14, 98, 99, 185, 187–191, 194–198, 206, 217, 228, 269, 270, 279, 299, 304, 329, 332, 333, 347, 351n22, 352n25, 362, 366, 367, 371, 386–389, 392, 394, 399–401, 409n28, 416–419, 424 Germany and France relationship, 94, 98, 119, 146 Gorbachev’s persona, 78, 80

453

Great Britain, 30, 33, 131, 154, 165, 166, 169, 171, 172, 230, 232, 249, 299, 300, 302, 347, 352n25, 360, 363, 376, 384, 386, 388, 394, 398, 399, 403, 418 Greater Berlin, 384 Great moments of 1789, 199–202, 288 Great Revolution of 1789, 200 H Hadès missiles, 164, 167, 179n6, 180n25 Helsinki Final Act, 210n22, 313, 333, 367, 371, 392, 405 Hermeneutic network, 22 Hermeneutics, vii, 5, 22, 27, 28, 32 Historical era (1989–1990), 3 Historical reality, 38, 83 History, v, vi, viii–x, 1–10, 13–15, 18, 38, 44n33, 52, 59, 82–84, 99, 129, 183–191, 193, 195, 198–201, 203, 207n4, 207n7, 212–217, 221, 229, 256, 260, 266, 272, 276, 291, 299, 302, 304, 306, 328, 360, 369, 372, 392, 407, 416, 417, 419–421 History of Europe, vi, 83, 203, 370, 420 Hungary, 202, 254, 265, 270, 274, 280, 285, 296, 297, 339, 362 I Idea of the workshop, viii Intergovernmental conference, 240, 242, 244, 246, 247, 249–251, 261n23, 271–274, 287, 289–293, 299, 302, 306–309, 314, 320n71, 326, 360, 369, 383, 413 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 105–115

454 

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

International politics, x, 2, 22, 23, 191, 198, 252 International relations, viii, 22, 229 International strategic relations, 136 Iron Curtain, 86, 237 K Kremlin, 73–75, 77, 231, 312 L Leadership, viii, 2, 9, 31, 54, 187, 227, 237, 253, 266, 285–322, 328, 343, 363, 413 Leadership of the Soviet Union, 7, 25, 75, 328, 371 Legends, vii, ix, 416–418 Legitimacy of German aspirations, 417 Liberty, 73, 82, 92, 199, 203–204, 212, 346 “Limited” nuclear war, 128, 140, 142, 147 Lithuania, 323, 414 Logic of French deterrence, 151, 164 M Maastricht Treaty, 239, 414 Madrid summit, 242, 244, 246, 247, 250, 251 Market economy, 100, 324 Marxism-Leninism, 76 Mechanism of power, vi Military cooperation between France and West Germany, 116, 170 Military strategy, 57, 130, 140, 147n11, 151 Ministry of Defense, 3, 27 Ministry of Economy, 3

Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Quai d’Orsay), 3, 322n90, 384–386, 399 Mirror of a prince, 76 Mirror of Princes, 9 Modern Prince, vi Monetary policy, 100, 103, 243, 244 Monetary readjustments, 107 Monetary union, 243, 244, 249, 263n18, 281, 287, 307, 308, 359, 413 Movements of politics, 35 N National borders, 2, 305 National character, 6, 230 Nationalism, 6, 9, 67, 68, 233n8, 259, 370, 372 Nationalist Germany, 70, 217 Nationalities, 213–215, 267, 395, 422, 423 Nations, 23, 32, 41, 54, 56, 91–99, 109, 116, 164, 200, 211, 213, 214, 219, 222, 227, 256, 262n5, 270, 275, 276, 282n18, 286, 293, 295, 304, 310, 331, 359, 366, 374, 389, 406, 413, 416, 423 NATO, 7, 8, 25, 62n31, 67, 95, 129, 137, 138, 141, 145, 146n2, 152, 153, 166, 169, 171, 172, 174, 178n3, 187–189, 197, 207n1, 208n15, 210n22, 212, 237, 297, 311, 312, 318n14, 319n56, 321n81, 323, 328, 331–334, 351n23, 359–381, 387, 389, 392, 398, 399, 401–403, 407, 414, 415, 422, 423 NATO Council, 237, 311 Nature of nuclear war, 133 Nazis, 34, 231, 258

  INDEX OF SUBJECTS 

Necessity of Europe, 50 Neutral Germany, 364, 377 New Germany, 334, 394, 415–416, 422 Nuclear armament, 24, 25 “Nuclear consultations,” 174–176 Nuclear deterrence, 121, 130, 132, 140, 148n29, 158 Nuclear dissuasion, 147n10, 160 Nuclear force, 8, 55, 79, 81, 130, 134, 140, 141, 143–146, 154, 157, 158, 160, 166, 168, 172, 174, 175, 208n15, 219–223 Nuclear strategy, 9, 134, 142, 160, 163 Nuclear strategy of France, 8 Nuclear threat, 132, 143 Nuclear war, 53, 55, 57, 58, 93, 127–149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159–161, 174, 177, 218, 244 Nuclear weapons, 54, 56, 57, 85, 95, 120, 128, 129, 139, 140, 145, 146n3, 148n29, 153–160, 163–170, 172–174, 177, 178, 194, 196, 218, 223, 377, 397, 398 Nuclear weapons policy, 166 O Oder-Neisse border, 48, 191, 194, 259, 286, 311, 313, 332, 333, 335, 348, 370, 372–377, 394, 396, 397, 403, 404, 407 Offices of the president of France, 3 “Open Skies” Conference, 387 Order, 40 Organization and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), v, 313 Ostpolitik, 66, 87n5, 212, 281, 338

455

P Pacifism, 67, 68, 87n5 Paradigmatic practice of political leadership, 9 Partition of Europe, 65 Partition of Germany, 65, 278, 291, 298, 331 Partnership between France and Germany, 115 Peace, 18, 19, 31, 38, 52, 55, 59, 65, 71, 86n2, 131, 135–141, 187, 203–204, 206, 222, 261n1, 265, 311, 313, 316n32, 321n73, 326, 345, 352n25, 367, 370, 372, 384, 391, 392, 402, 415 Peacefully and democratically, 269, 513 Pershing missiles, 67 Pershings, 62n31, 67, 68, 138, 339 Plurality of scenarios, ix Pluton missiles, 163, 164 Poland, 16, 24, 25, 30, 51, 70–73, 158, 202, 207n1, 237, 274, 276, 280, 288, 296, 297, 311, 312, 336, 339, 340, 360, 371–376, 383, 391–397, 404, 407, 413 “Political characterology,” 24 Political creativity, 1–2, 9, 39, 40, 95, 168, 208n10 Political decision-making, vi Political hermeneutics, 22, 27, 28 Political leadership, 3, 7, 9, 363 Political partnership with Federal Germany, 111 Political power, x, 12, 13, 39, 55, 57, 104, 170, 214, 220, 221, 234n24, 243, 303 Political reality, 9, 35, 41, 54, 59, 65, 74, 215 Political science, 1–10, 92 Political world of humans, 34

456 

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Politics, vii–x, 1, 2, 9, 11, 21–45, 47–89, 92–94, 109, 111, 120, 137, 139, 143, 157, 163, 177, 183–185, 191, 198, 203, 208n10, 212, 213, 216, 218, 228, 240, 252, 253, 259, 260, 267, 270, 293, 323–357, 362–364, 421, 422, 426 Potential battlefield, 154 Potential theater for a nuclear war, 151 Presence of politics, 35 President, 3, 12, 21, 49, 63, 99, 127, 152, 185, 192, 211, 237, 266, 286, 323, 360, 383, 413 Primacy of persons, in conduct of politics, 9 Principle of a freedom, 48 Principles of foreign policy, 47–50 Process of government, 21 Prussia, 258, 260, 372 Q Question of nuclear war, 55, 127–149, 152, 161, 177 R Refrain of the exhorter, 211–223 Reign of freedom, 215 Resources of political power, 170 Reunification, ix, x, 5, 11, 23, 80, 84, 85, 94–96, 98, 120, 177, 212, 216, 219, 230, 231, 233n8, 268, 270, 274–280, 283n26, 283n27, 284n28, 285, 295, 296, 298, 300, 302, 305, 307, 308, 310, 312, 316n24, 316n31, 318n41, 322n90, 347, 359–363, 369, 372–377, 383, 386–388, 393, 395, 397, 399, 400, 402, 404, 405, 407, 417, 423, 424, 426

of Europe, 193 of Germany, v, vi, 3, 7, 15, 22, 23, 39, 64, 68, 82, 84, 88n38, 98, 119, 183–211, 213, 227–229, 232, 252–261, 267, 269, 274–280, 282n8, 286, 287, 301, 313, 323–357, 361, 362, 370, 371, 384, 418 internal and external aspects of, 392 Revaluation of the Deutsche Mark, 108, 110–112 Reversal of alliances, 192, 196, 201, 270, 301–305, 326 Revolution, 5, 9, 77, 200, 202, 205, 279, 288, 295, 340, 341, 417 Revolutionary events in Europe (1989–1990), 2 Revolutionary surge in Eastern Europe, 5 Revolutionary upheavals, 5, 39, 196 Revolutionary uprising of the people in East Germany, 195 Revolutions of freedom in Eastern Europe, 279 Romania, 75, 311, 339, 340 Romantic Socialism, 108, 114, 123n37 Russia, 18, 32, 33, 58, 59, 242, 255, 304, 361, 414, 417 Russian bellicosity, 69 Russian Federation, 383 S Scenario, v, vii–ix, 1, 112, 183–210, 286, 328–330, 333, 400 Scénario français, ix Scenario workshop, 185, 190, 208n10, 328–330 Schabertian hermeneutics, vii Schengen agreement, 324, 337, 338, 354n55, 415

  INDEX OF SUBJECTS 

Science of politics, 9 Search for meaning, 5 Secret agreements, 166 Security policy, 27, 47, 54, 56, 145, 155, 161, 163, 165, 167, 298, 325, 328, 402 Self-determination, 187, 194, 195, 209n22, 233n8, 261n1, 265, 268, 269, 282n8, 285, 310, 311, 313, 332–334, 336, 389, 392 Slavic world, 407, 419 Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 127, 129, 217, 261, 278, 285, 360 Socialist experience of France, 102 Socialist regime, 100 Social situation in France, 102 Song of freedom, 197–198, 228, 279 Song of the rebel, 211–223 Soviet economy, 77, 400, 401 Soviet empire, 8, 14, 16, 82–86, 212–215, 252, 269, 270, 275–277, 362 military force, 34 Soviet SS 20s, 58, 66 Soviet Union (USSR), 6, 8, 9, 14–16, 24, 27, 34, 49, 54, 59, 64, 68, 69, 72–81, 85, 86, 86n2, 88n25, 95, 98, 119, 120, 130, 131, 135–138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 187, 188, 193, 198, 202, 206, 209n17, 212–214, 216, 217, 219, 229, 233n8, 233n14, 252, 253, 255, 256, 259, 264n32, 265–268, 270, 275–277, 281, 282n8, 284n28, 294, 300–302, 304, 311, 316n31, 317n35, 325, 326, 328, 329, 334, 338–340, 345, 347, 348, 352n25, 359–361, 363–367, 369, 376, 377, 383, 384, 386, 388, 389, 391, 392, 394, 395, 398–403, 405–407, 413, 414, 418 Space of political creativity, 39

457

Spectacle of power, 12 SS 20, 59, 137, 138, 148n17, 339 Stage of world politics, 1 State of war in Poland, 71, 72 State Security (Stasi), 323 Strategic conversations, 39 Strategic thinking of Mitterrand, 135 Study of politics, 9 T Tactical weapons, 137, 155, 164, 179n6 Ten-point plan, 185, 191, 286, 291, 298–301, 304, 308, 318n46, 323, 325–327, 329, 352n26, 371 Terror of nuclear force, 143 Thinking through dialogue, 11–13 Time, v–ix, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 13–15, 18, 23, 24, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 42, 47, 53, 55, 58, 61n21, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 75, 78, 81, 83–85, 87n5, 89n45, 95, 97, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 123n37, 127–129, 132, 143, 144, 147n11, 155, 160–166, 169, 170, 176, 177, 183, 184, 187, 188, 192, 193, 198–204, 207n4, 209n17, 209n22, 211–213, 215, 218, 221, 223–225, 227, 229, 232, 234n24, 237, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 259, 262n5, 262n6, 268, 270–272, 275, 277, 279, 280, 284n28, 285, 287–289, 291, 292, 294, 295, 299, 301, 304, 307–309, 311, 317n32, 318n41, 330, 331, 333, 335, 338–340, 342–344, 348, 349n4, 351n22, 352n25, 355n79, 360, 361, 367–369, 372, 376, 385, 392, 395, 399, 402, 404, 418–421, 425 Treaty of Rome, 108, 227

458 

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Triumph of democracy, 276 Trust, 38, 39, 175, 184, 347 2 plus 4 mechanism, 188, 372 Two-plus-four negotiations, 7, 186, 205, 206, 328, 352n25, 360, 371, 375–377, 383–411, 422 U Unification, ix, 3, 7, 14, 15, 40, 187, 189, 193–196, 205, 210n22, 218, 219, 224, 227, 228, 231, 232, 239, 253, 279, 302, 303, 316n31, 317n32, 333, 334, 336, 342, 344, 347, 348, 351n22, 351n23, 359, 361–364, 370, 375–377, 385, 388, 393, 398, 402–404, 406, 407, 417, 418, 424–425 Unification of Europe, 6, 111, 193, 196, 227, 332, 371 United States, 1, 15, 25, 27, 28, 31, 54, 57–59, 62n31, 67, 69, 70, 73, 79, 85, 96, 98, 107, 130–132, 135, 137, 138, 141–144, 152, 154, 165–169, 171, 172, 178n3, 186, 188, 189, 206, 207n10, 208n15, 209n17, 213, 216, 217, 229, 230, 248, 268, 275, 279, 282n8, 284n28, 299, 300, 302, 316n31, 331, 333, 343, 347, 352n25, 352n26, 359, 364, 368, 369, 376, 384, 386, 388, 391, 394, 398, 399, 401–403, 414, 418 Unregulated unification (unification sauvage), 329 V Venice summit, 128, 130, 131 Visionary realism, 215 Volkskammer, 345, 360, 384, 396

W War, 16, 17, 30, 34, 37–39, 52, 57, 59, 61n19, 69, 71, 72, 95, 114, 121, 129–134, 138–144, 147n10, 148n29, 153, 155, 163, 169, 175, 177, 193, 206, 218, 224, 254, 260, 303, 327, 345, 370, 374, 384, 386, 402, 414, 415, 418–420 Warsaw Pact, 136, 179n6, 265, 281, 297, 334, 359, 365, 368, 379n29, 398, 414 Weapons, 54, 56–58, 62n29, 67, 72, 85, 89n45, 95, 120, 129, 130, 133, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 146n3, 147n11, 148n29, 153–160, 163–170, 172–178, 179n6, 194, 196, 208n15, 218, 222, 223, 229, 333, 348, 377, 386, 393, 396–398 West, 8, 9, 24, 25, 58, 66, 69, 71, 73, 74, 80–82, 86, 128, 129, 133, 135, 165, 204, 214, 215, 217–219, 222, 256, 261, 270, 276, 277, 279, 280, 286, 298, 304, 316n32, 331, 334, 339, 366, 367, 388, 401, 403, 404, 425 Western civilization, 9 Western Europe, 50, 59, 69, 137, 201, 215, 281, 295, 321n81 Western integration, 303 West Germany, 8, 23, 43n2, 54, 66, 67, 97, 116, 131, 132, 134, 152–156, 158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 168, 170, 174, 176, 177, 217, 220–223, 237, 238, 241, 243, 244, 261, 265, 274, 278, 286, 302, 309, 319n51, 337, 338, 359, 360, 364, 385, 388, 395, 399, 425 security, 169

  INDEX OF SUBJECTS 

Workshop, vii, viii, 2, 21–24, 26, 28–30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39–42, 57, 74, 76, 137, 143, 185, 186, 190, 228, 271, 272, 281, 328–330, 400 Workshop of world politics, 2, 21–45, 68, 70, 74, 157, 208n10, 213, 252, 260, 323–357, 362–364, 421 World of government, 21, 102 World politics, viii, 1, 2, 9, 21–45, 47–89, 137, 143, 157, 183, 212,

459

213, 228, 252, 260, 323–357, 362–364, 421 World War II, 2, 17, 38, 65, 77, 158, 202, 224, 229, 266, 334, 386, 405, 406, 415 Y Yalta, viii, 7, 17, 65, 71, 82, 83, 193, 200, 202, 212, 215, 276, 325, 338, 339 Yalta order, 7, 64, 71, 73, 212, 259, 369