The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (95 page)

Although many Germans fret about the economic prospects for their country by the early twenty-first century, that can hardly be regarded as the major concern (especially as compared with the economic difficulties facing other societies). While its total labor force is only a little higher than Britain’s or France’s, its GNP is significantly larger, reflecting an economy whose long-term productive growth has been extremely impressive. It is the largest producer in the EEC of steel, chemicals, electrical goods, automobiles, tractors, and (given Britain’s decline) even merchant ships and coal. Because of a remarkably low level both of inflation and of labor disputes, it has kept its export prices competitive, despite the frequent upward valuations of the deutsche mark—which are, after all, merely belated acknowledgments by other nations of West Germany’s better economic performance. A heavy emphasis upon engineering and design in the German management tradition (as opposed to the American emphasis upon finance) has given it an international reputation for quality products. Year after year, the German economy has notched up a surplus in its
trade balances second only to Japan’s. Its international reserves are larger than those of any other country in the world (except, presumably, those of Japan after the latter’s recent surge), and the deutsche mark is often used by other nations as a reserve currency.

As against all this, one can point to those factors which give the Germans cause for
Angst
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The EEC’s agricultural price-support system, long a drain for the German taxpayer, redistributes resources from the most competitive to the least competitive sectors of the economy—and not just in the Federal Republic itself (where there are a surprisingly large number of small farms), but to the peasantry of southern Europe. This has obvious social value, but it is a burden proportionately much larger than the protection given to American and perhaps even to Japanese agriculture. The persistently high level of unemployment, a sign that the Federal Republic still has too large a proportion of its work force in older industries, is also a major drain upon the economy, keeping social-security payments at a very high proportion of GDP; and while unemployment among the youth can be alleviated by the impressively broad level of training and apprenticeships, and will also be eased by the rapid aging of the German population, this latter trend is perhaps regarded with the greatest unease of all. If it is clearly an exaggeration to believe that the German race will “die out,” the steep decline in the birth rate will have obvious repercussions upon the German economy when an even larger share of the population consists of old-age pensioners. Along with this demographic fear goes the much less tangible worry that the “successor generation” will not want to work as earnestly as those who rebuilt Germany from the wartime ashes, and that with higher wage costs and far shorter working weeks than the Japanese, even German productivity growth will not keep up with the challenge from the Pacific basin.

Even so, none of those problems are insuperable, provided the Germans can maintain their “package” of low inflation, quality goods, high investment in new technology, superior design and salesmanship, and labor peace. (At the very least, one can say that if the problems named above affect the German economy, how much more will they hurt the economies of most of its less competitive neighbors!) What is much more difficult to forecast is whether the extraordinarily complex and quite unique contours of the “German question” as they have existed since the late 1940s will continue unchanged into the twenty-first century: that is, whether there will continue to be two “Germanies,” separated by hostile alliances, despite the growing intimacy between them; whether the NATO alliance (of which the Federal Republic is such a central part) can defend the German lands without destroying them, should East-West relations worsen into hostilities; and whether, in the event of a diminution in American power and a reduction of its forces in Europe, Germany and its major EEC/NATO
partners can provide an adequate substitute for the U.S. strategic umbrella which has served so well for the past forty years. None of these interrelated issues are crying out for an immediate solution, but all of them are giving thoughtful observers grounds for concern.

The “German-German” relationship will probably seem, at this time, the most hypothetical of the cluster. As has been made clear in the preceding chapters, the proper place of the German people within the European states system has troubled statesmen for at least the past century and a half.
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If all those speaking the German tongue are brought together as one nation-state—as has been the European norm for nearly two centuries—the resultant concentration of population and industrial might would always make Germany the economic power center of west-central Europe. That itself need not
necessarily
turn it into the dominant military-territorial force in Europe as well, in the way that the imperialism of both the Wilhelmine and (even more) the Nazi eras led to a German bid for hegemony. In a bipolar world which, militarily, is still dominated by Washington and Moscow, in an age when major Great Power aggressions run the risk of triggering a nuclear war, and with a post-1945 “de-Nazified” generation of German politicians running affairs in Bonn and East Berlin, the notion of any future Germanic bid for “mastery in Europe” seems anachronistic. Even were it attempted, the balance of European (let alone global) power would prevail against it. In abstract terms, therefore, there is surely nothing wrong
and a lot that is right
with permitting the 62 million “West” Germans and 17 million “East” Germans to reunite, particularly when each population increasingly perceives that it has more in common with the other than with its superpower guardian.

Yet the tragic fact is that however logical that solution is in one sense—and however much the two German peoples are showing signs (despite the ideological gulf) of their common inheritance and culture—the present political realities speak against it, even if it took the form of a loose Germanic federation on the nineteenth-century model, as has been ingeniously suggested.
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For the blunt fact is that East Germany serves as a strategical barrier for the Soviet control over the buffer states of eastern Europe (not to say the jump-off position for a move to the west); and since the men in the Kremlin still think in terms of imperialist
Realpolitik
, letting the German Democratic Republic gravitate toward (and into) the Federal Republic would be regarded as a major blow. As one authority has recently pointed out, based on present forces alone, a unified Germany could field over 660,000 regular troops plus 1.5 million paramilitary and reservists. The USSR could not view with equanimity a unified German nation with an army of 2 million on its western flank.
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On the other hand, it seems difficult to see why a
peacefully
united Germany should want to maintain armed forces of that size, forces which reflect present Cold War tensions. It
is also difficult to believe that despite its heavy-handed emphasis upon the lessons of the Second World War, even the Soviet leadership accepts its own propaganda about German revanchism and neo-Nazism (which has been an increasingly difficult position to maintain since Willy Brandt’s period of office). But what is also clear is that Moscow has a congenital dislike of withdrawing from
anywhere
, and also worries deeply about the political consequences of a reunited Germany. Not only would it be a formidable economic Power in its own right—with a total GNP dangerously close to the USSR’s own, at least in formal dollar-equivalent terms—but it also would act as a trading magnet for all of its eastern European neighbors. Even more fundamental a point: how could Russia withdraw from East Germany without provoking the question of a similar withdrawal from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland—leaving as the USSR’s western frontier the dubious Polish/Ukrainian borderline, which is temptingly close for the fifty million Ukrainians?

What remains, therefore, is a state of suspended animation. Intra-German trade relations are likely to grow (clouded only by the occasional tension between the superpowers); each German state is likely to become relatively more productive and richer than its neighbors; each will swear loyalty to its supranational military (NATO/Warsaw Pact) and economic (EEC/Comecon) organizations while making special arrangements with its Germanic sister state. It is impossible to forecast how Bonn would react should the Soviet Union itself be shaken and upset from within—and should that coincide with serious unrest in the German Democratic Republic. It is also impossible to forecast how the “East” Germans would react if there was to be a Warsaw-Pact offensive westward. Certainly, the special Soviet “control” arrangements over the Democratic Republic’s army, and the shadowing of every one of its divisions by a Russian motor-rifle division, suggest that even the grim men in the Kremlin worry about setting German against German—as well they should.

But the more concrete and immediate problem which the Federal Republic faces—and has faced since its existence—has been to discover a viable defense policy in the event of a war in Europe. From the beginning (see pp. 378–79), the apprehension that a vastly superior Red Army could strike westward without much hindrance led both the Germans and their fellow Europeans to rely upon the U.S. nuclear deterrent as their chief security. Ever since the USSR acquired the capacity to hit the American homeland with its own ICBMs, however, that strategy has been in doubt—would Washington really begin a nuclear interchange in response to a Russian conventional attack on the northern German plain?—even if it has never been officially abandoned. This is also true of the related question of whether the United States would unleash strategic nuclear attacks against the Soviet Union
(again, inviting reprisals upon its own cities) if the Russians contented themselves with firing short- or
intermediate-
range missiles (SS-20s) solely at European targets. There has been, to be sure, no lack of proposals for creating a “credible deterrent” to meet such contingencies: installing Pershing II and various forms of cruise-missile systems to counter the Russian SS-20s; producing an enhanced-radiation (or “neutron”) bomb, intended to kill off invading Warsaw Pact troops without damage to buildings and infrastructure; and—in the French case—reliance upon a Paris-controlled deterrent force as an alternative to an uncertain American defense system. All of these, however, have their own attendant problems;
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and, quite apart from the political reactions which they provoke, each of them points to the uniquely contradictory nature of nuclear weapon systems—that having recourse to them is more than likely to lead to the destruction of that which one wishes to defend.

It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that while successive West German administrations have paid lip service to the value of NATO’s nuclear-deterrence strategy, and have foresworn the acquisition of nuclear weapons for themselves, they have been to the fore in the creation of a strong
conventional
defense system. As it is, the Bundeswehr has not only the largest of the NATO armies in Europe (335,000 troops, with 645,000 trained reserves)
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but also one of extremely high quality and with good equipment; provided it did not lose command of the air, it would give an impressive account of itself. On the other hand, the steeply declining birthrate makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the Bundeswehr at full strength, while the government’s desire to keep defense spending down to 3.5 to 4 percent of GNP means that it will be difficult for the armed services to procure as much new equipment as they need.
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At the end of the day, such weakness can be overcome—just as the deficiencies in the less-well-equipped Allied armies stationed in West Germany could be overcome, given the political will. However, this still leaves the Germans facing the uncomfortable (for some, intolerable) dilemma that any outbreak of large-scale hostilities in central Europe would lead to incalculable bloodshed and material loss on their territory.

It is not surprising, therefore, that since at least the time of Willy Brandt’s chancellorship the government in Bonn has been to the fore in its pursuit of
détente
in Europe—and not merely with its German sister state, but also with eastern European nations and with the USSR itself, in an endeavor to calm their traditional fears of a too-strong Germany; and that it, more than all its NATO partners, has partaken in and financed East-West trade in the Cobdenite belief that economic interdependence makes war more difficult (and also no doubt because West German banks and industries are so favorably placed to take advantage of that commerce). This does not imply a move into “neutralism”
for the two Germanies—as is sometimes proposed by left-wing Social Democrats and the Green Party—for that would depend upon securing Moscow’s consent to East German neutralism as well, which is highly unlikely. What it does mean is that West Germany sees its security problem concentrated almost exclusively in Europe and shuns any “out-of-area” capability—let alone the occasional extra-European actions in which the French and British still indulge. By extension, therefore, it dislikes being forced to take a position on the (in its view) distracting and distant issues in the Near East and farther afield, and that in turn leads it into disagreements with a U.S. government which feels that the preservation of western security cannot be so neatly limited to central Europe. In its relationship to Moscow and East Berlin on the one hand and to non-European issues on the other, West Germany finds it difficult if not impossible to conduct a merely bilateral diplomacy; it must, instead, have regard for the reactions of Washington (and, often, of Paris). That, too, is a price which has to be paid for its awkward and unique position in the international power system.
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