Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Giancarlo Elia Valori
Currently the material break, rather than the real fall, of the Berlin Wall is at the core of many strategic and historical misrepresentations.
The naive rhetoric of “global democracy” that broke into Potsdam for the will of the conscious people – just to use an old definition of Communist propaganda – or the inevitable victory of the famous Western values over everything else.
Nonsense. The negotiation, which also led President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Thatcher to use the single EU currency, namely the Euro, as strategic blackmail against the unified German Mark, was geopolitical and military strategy.
Meanwhile, the shrewdest leaders in Western Europe struggled to say they did not want unification – but it was just so.
Giulio Andreotti’s witty remark is now well-known, “I love Germany so much that I want two of them”, but also Prime Minister Thatcher and President Mitterrand had many doubts, which were never dispelled.
The French Socialist President was clearly against German unification. Probably his aides were not fully against it. They imagined a united Germany, although without military protection, but President Mitterrand was certainly against it.
All what I heard from the agents of the French intelligence Services and the many friends I had in France agree on this point.
For a moment, President Mitterrand’s France even thought of its own geopolitical and military shield for the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and anyway invited Erich Honecker, the GDR leader for a State visit to France, in which he was treated as a Head of State.
At the time no one treated the GDR leaders like that.
The French idea was to stop reunification indefinitely and then negotiate . from a position of strength – the ways and timeline of a democratic “federation” between the two Germanies.
The role of the two Germanies in the EU remained unknown, but it was clear that the future French presence in the German Democratic Republic was France’s decision-making axis, also from an economic viewpoint.
The German Democratic Republic was by no means a collapsing State. Until July 1, 1990, the day of its dissolution, it had paid all its international debts.
Probably Krenz and Hohnecker’s heirs – politicians of the old world – thought that the USSR would continue to support them and the day before July 1, 1990, it was West Germany that decided a one-to-one exchange rate.
Beforehand, the exchange rate between the two Germanies was 1 to 4.44, and – as we can easily imagine – it was a real disaster for the German Democratic Republic.
It obviously lost all the Soviet COMECON markets and then – as an Italy ante litteram – it also lost Western markets.
Production in East Germany collapsed by 30% in a short lapse of time. After the elections in West Germany, East Germany was on its last legs and agreed to reform some laws: unemployment ceased to be unconstitutional, in a country that had the Compass and the Hammer, two Masonic symbols, in its national coat of arms. Later Potsdam’s Germany entered the West as a whole of regions, not as an autonomous State.
The West Treuhandanstalt privatized companies in a superficial way, but those that had been destroyed by the one-to-one exchange rate – decided overnight – were sold at budget-friendly prices.
With specific reference to private homes, 2.17 million lawsuits were initiated, but it was President Gorbachev himself, with a destroyed State budget, who accepted the economic and political destruction of the old East Germany to get credits from West Germany.
He also accepted reunification within NATO, again to plug the Soviet budget holes, but even gave Chancellor Kohl free rein on the treatment of the old GDR leaders.
This is how the story went.
However, the French President, who wanted above all a moderate approach to German reunification, was not – in principle – against reunification, but wanted it without destabilizing President Gorbachev, in particular, while Prime Minister Thatcher’s Great Britain was always explicitly opposed to reunification.
The Iron Lady, in fact, fully supported President Gorbachev’s project in the USSR. She did not want destabilisation in Eastern Europe and finally she did not want the US costly acquisition of the old Soviet Union, with possible unpredictable effects.
The “grocer’s daughter” – as Queen Elizabeth II snobbishly called her – thought that, in a different context, there would also be a fully British part in the sharing of the spoils of the collapsing USSR.
Acquisition estimated by Jeffrey Sachs at 10,000 billion US dollars in business terms, which then generated all the vouchers distributed to USSR citizens that later Yeltsin’s government probably produced in greater quantities than needed.
As foreseeable, during the economic and food crisis of 1992-1993 many vouchers got into the wrong hands – those of the future “oligarchs”.
By their very nature, however, the German events happened when someone (possibly the USA or the Soviet Union) strongly stepped up the pace of riots in the GDR streets so as to reach an immediate and irrational reunification.
What, in fact, could be the rationale of an USSR that, at the end of its Communist history, gave up the pearl of the Soviet Empire, namely East Germany?
I remember that when we talked about it, the former Italian President, Francesco Cossiga, was convinced that the Soviet Union had offered to the West that big poisoned chalice, namely reunited Germany, to block it and make it uncontrollable.
The German bite was too big to be swallowed and digested calmly and quietly.
Prime Minister Thatcher knew all too well that united Germany would decide the future of the Eurasian peninsula.
However, Chancellor Kohl, who was very clever, made President Gorbachev understand that Germany would easily bear the costs for the return back home of the Soviet troops stationed in East Germany, while Kohl himself easily won the 1990 German election he would probably lose without the prospect of reunification.
Despicable – and I say so without pretence – was instead Angela Merkel (who owes his political career to Chancellor Kohl that discovered and sponsored her) who, at the funeral of the great German leader, while Helmut Kohl’s wife tried to hug her, retracted by saying “keep your distance”.
Without Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel would have been just an ordinary immigrant from the GDR, with a Protestant theologian father inevitably compromised with the Communist regime, and she herself the youth leader of the Eastern Party, SED. No one has ever fully investigated Merkel’s role in the GDR intelligence services.
As a strategist born, Francesco Cossiga knew what the real stake with reunification was and endeavoured with Kohl to slow it down, but not to avoid it, by promoting a phase of integration between the two Germanies that would be decided – in an ad hoc Conference – by the other European nations, as well as by the USA.
Margaret Thatcher was firmly opposed to it.
The real turning point was the end by self-destruction of Gorbachev’s regime in the USSR, which allowed the fast and irrational reunification, seen above all – as Kohl wanted – as an “enlargement” of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).
The USA had no idea on which to work.
There were those who, in the State Department, thought of a more solid Europe, with the old GDR unified with the FRG, against everything was rising in the old USSR. There was also CIA, which rightly saw how useful was, for the United States, a new weak Europe to allow the non-competitive penetration of the US capital into Russia and Central Asia.
One of the most attentive U.S. analysts was John Mearsheimer, according to whom the end of the Cold War had put an end to the great powers that had dominated the Eurasian peninsula until that time, starting from the end of World War II.
This meant that, from then on, world instability would probably return to the heart of Europe – a strategic dream of which the USA had never ceased to dream.
The US decision-makers still recalled a classic piece by Walt Whitman, the author of Leaves of Grass, who wrote:
“I see the European headsman;
He stands masked, clothed in red, with huge legs, and strong naked arms, And leans on a ponderous axe.
Whom have you slaughtered lately, European headsman?
Whose is that blood upon you, so wet and sticky?”
Hence to interpret the current US global strategy for Europe, even Walt Whitman would be enough.
Let us analyze the geoeconomic and strategic determinants of German reunification.
Before committing suicide with his family, after having heard of the Morgenthau Plan, which provided for the forced ruralisation of Germany, Goebbels said: “They want to turn my country into a potato field”.
It was a plan that, inter alia, envisaged peaceful collaboration, not the future Cold War with the USSR.
The US directive JCS 1067, however, signed on May 10, 1945, provided exactly for the full entry into force of the Morgenthau Plan.
350 factories, still in perfect working order, which had to be moved to France or the Soviet Union, were dismantled ab ovo and many German patents were also transferred, including that of aspirin.
The fact underlying the nationalization of the German occupied allied areas was that the cost of maintaining a population impoverished of any factory, technology and productive income was too heavy to bear, precisely by the occupiers themselves.
The reconstruction business, the esoteric solve et coagula of the U.S. speculative post-conflict strategy, was in crisis, because the surviving Germans could not pay for the goods that the Americans wanted to sell them.
The speech delivered by General George C. Marshall at Harvard in 1947, before 15,000 students of the prestigious U.S. University, was in fact designed primarily for the USSR. It had been written by Chip Bohlen, an expert on Soviet affairs, and spoke of “millions of European citizens starving and even dying”.
The city-country relationship, designed by Marshall in his famous speech, was the design of a correlation with the Europe of cities, namely the European and Western one, which finally reached the eternal Eurasian granaries, since the Journey of the Argonauts on a quest for the “golden fleece”, i.e. the huge expanses of wheat fields of the East.
Another assessment made by the United States was that widespread anger among Germans, after World War II, would lead to the same political results of the First World War after the unfair Agreements of Versailles, opposed by Keynes in vain.
Moreover, the planned process of West Germany’s impoverishment would have brought wind also in the USSR sails and, considering its productive dimension, it would also have stopped the relaunch of the rest of Western Europe freed by the Allies.
It was precisely the fear of the “Communist contagion” that made it possible for the United States to fund the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) which, as from 1943 – four years before Marshall’s speech at Harvard – tied the German territories to itself in order to avoid them falling into the coils of the Communist regime, according to the certainly correct US plans.
To some extents, however, this triggered Stalin’s foreseeable reaction. It was exactly the United States that asked Great British and France to unify – under its own protection – all the Western Allies’ control zones in Germany. It should be recalled that the French occupation zone was a source of primary information for the Communist penetration into the rest of the West.
The deutschemark was in circulation at the time – a currency revalued as against the old mark and printed directly in the United States.
Hence the USSR-controlled zone was flooded by huge requests for goods to be bought with the deutschemark, considering that they were at capped and supervised prices.
At that juncture, Stalin ordered to stop the inflow of food into Germany and into the USSR-controlled area, but it was impossible and hence he tried to make the deutschemark not valid in the USSR-controlled areas.
The rest is recent history, including the German reunification.
Reverting to Mearsheimer, we can better understand – as the US analyst said – that since then the United States has been “the peacemaker of the European region”.
Going back to our previous considerations, the greatest coldness for German reunification was expressed precisely by Prime Minister Thatcher, who stopped in Moscow after her State visit to Tokyo in September 1989, where she spoke to Gorbachev in private, in the Hall of Saint Catherine at the Kremlin.
The Iron Lady clearly told Gorbachev that she did not want German unification at all, because she thought that “the post-war equilibria would be undermined by the new territorial changes”.
She was perfectly right.
Just because of its inevitably pluralistic and equal partnership logic, Europe could not contain a Great and New Germany that, alone, represented all the “European plain” that was the plain where – as Raymond Aron maintained – the final war of the Worlds between East and West would be waged – a war also planned as early as 1995, at least by the heirs of the former USSR.
Regimes disappear, but the objective laws of geopolitics do not.
Hence Prime Minister Thatcher told Gorbachev that “NATO would not endeavour for the end of the Warsaw Pact”.
We must also recall Operation Unthinkable, which envisaged the penetration – from the Balkans – of the Allies and, above all, of Great Britain, to block the direct passage of the Red Army to Germany and to directly control the whole European continent, after the end of the hostilities, with or without the US involvement.
The plan advocated by Churchill was not implemented.
GIANCARLO ELIA VALORI
Honorable de l’Académie des Sciences de l’Institut de France
President of International World Group
November 2019
