Frederic Bozo
The recent celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall have generated much historical interest—but not always historical accurateness. The release of documents on British policy towards German unification in 1989-90, in particular, has triggered a considerable flurry of “spin” aimed, it seems, at rewriting history itself. From over 500 pages, journalists have zoomed in on one apparent gem: that President Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, in early 1990, viewed the impending German unification with a shared angst—panic, even.
To the delight of commentators, a memo written by Charles Powell, Thatcher’s then private secretary, quoted Mitterrand using the H-word in a conversation with Thatcher on 20th January 1990. In their quick march to unification, Mitterrand said, the Germans were once more behaving as “bad” Germans. If nothing was done, he continued, they would swallow up a bigger chunk of Europe than their infamous predecessor. Mitterrand, it seems, was tormented by the resurgence of France’s Teutonic neighbour, and determined to prevent German unification from happening.
But was this really so? A closer look at the document shows that quotes from Powell’s memo have been taken out of context. Clearly, this historical parallel was less something Mitterrand adhered too than an argument (a ‘very blunt’, one, he recognized) that he was using with the Germans themselves in order to make them understand the need at this crucial juncture for a cautious approach of unification, both more controlled and less unilateral.
Likening his friend Helmut Kohl to Hitler was hardly Mitterrand’s style; what he was instead concerned about was a return to old style European alliances of “reinsurance” against Germany—similar, in other words, to the situation “back in 1913.” Even more critically, commentators have ignored the most important message that Mitterrand delivered to Thatcher that day: that Germans “had the right to self determination,” that “we had to accept that there was a logic to reunification,” and that “it would be stupid to say no.”
His message was in sharp contrast to Thatcher’s. She had come to the Elysée palace to ask Mitterrand to pursue a joint policy of postponing unification. Though she “accepted that in the end reunification would come about,” she thought they “must find a way to slow it down.” She “did not necessarily agree that there was nothing to be done.” But to no avail. The only concession Thatcher obtained from Mitterrand was that their respective foreign ministers, Douglas Hurd and Roland Dumas, would soon meet to review the options.
Nothing further came out of the foreign ministers’ meeting several days later. Evidently, Mitterrand and Thatcher had fundamentally different positions on unification and its consequences, and the meeting on 20th January 1990 exposed this. Thatcher rejected German unity as such, whilst Mitterrand’s uneasiness had to do with modalities. “Everything depends on the how and when,” he told Thatcher, emphasising the “reactions of the Soviet Union,” which he feared could be brutal. In other words, he wanted to control German unification, not to oppose it. For him, as also made clear by French documents recently released, the only sensible course of action was to make sure that a unified Germany be kept in a strong international— and especially European—framework.
In the end, the only thing that the conversation on 20th January confirmed was the illusory character of the Franco-British entente. Thatcher left the Elysée disappointed, certain that Mitterrand shared her own prejudices and only lacked the daring to express them. She had hoped, as she later wrote in her memoirs, to get him to overcome “his tendency to schizophrenia” and to cooperate in making use of “all the means available to slow down reunification.” But she recognised that “little or nothing in practical terms” came from the meeting. Persisting in her conviction that Mitterrand was not able to “match private words with public deeds,” she later conceded that he was nevertheless right, that “there was nothing we could do to halt German reunification.”
Mitterrand, it is said, was to some extent under the charm of Thatcher. Perhaps this led her to entertain illusions of a new entente cordiale against a resurgent Germany? As Helmut Kohl remarked in his memoirs, Thatcher “seemed always to hear what she wanted to hear.” But it was Hurd who got it most right: as he wrote years later, Mitterrand’s apparent concurrence with her was “just intellectual play.” His actual aim, the foreign minister understood, was by no means to block German unification, but instead to strengthen Franco-German cooperation and, even more vitally, to re-launch European integration. This, of course, was a cause to which the French president did not even dream of converting the Iron Lady. Within two months of German unification, she was out of Downing Street and spared the agony of signing the Maastricht Treaty, which Kohl and Mitterrand had jointly promoted as a response to it.
Frédéric Bozo is the author of “Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War and German Unification” published by Berghahn Books
David Goodhart
1989: "Ich war dabei"
I was there in Berlin on November 9th 1989. There is nothing special about this: it seems that half the world was there with me, although I don’t recall seeing them at the time. Daniel Johnson, the editor of a rival publication, even claims to have asked the vital question at an East Berlin press conference that led to the announcement that the wall was effectively defunct. But I think I am the only British journalist who witnessed that great evening in the company of pony-tailed American pop music impresarios.
The East German regime had been looking vulnerable for several weeks—even since the big East German outflow through Hungary—and we (at the Financial Times where I was working) were taking every opportunity to get into the country to gauge popular feeling. So when the opportunity came to attend a conference on rock music promotion in East Germany at a swanky East Berlin hotel from November 9th to 10th I grabbed it.
The East German government was keenly aware of the importance of rock music in keeping its young people happy and it used to attract a stream of the best bands in the world. It also had quite a thriving rock music industry of its own and was keen to export bands—at least those who could be relied upon to return. As I sat rather bored listening to East German cultural bureaucrats debating with the pony-tailed Americans I remember someone coming into the hall, in the early evening, and saying that the wall had opened.
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Elizabeth Kirkwood
The Brandenburg Gate, 10th November 1989
To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall we’ve made several articles from Prospect’s archive free to read online.
For an overview of the complex cross-currents that fed into the collapse of the Soviet Union see historian Victor Sebestyen’s profile of its last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in “The accidental hero of 1989”. A man of huge and fascinating contradictions, Gorbachev, and his particular form of communism, played a far greater role in the end of the USSR than the western powers of the time may have cared to admit. And while he is revered in the west as a hero, this reputation is based on failure: his failure to reform the system he passionately believed in.
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Victor Sebestyen
In an interview with a reporter not long ago, Mikhail Gorbachev reminisced about his years at the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union. Once in flow, it is normally hard to stop him talking. But on this occasion he hesitated, was silent for a long time and stared at his interviewer disconcertingly with those piercing eyes. “You know, I could still be there now, in the Kremlin,” he said. “If I was motivated solely by personal power I might still be possessing it… If I had simply done nothing, changed almost nothing in the Soviet Union as it then was, just sat there and carried on like those before, who knows…” Then he laughed. If he felt bitterness, he hid it well.
Part of this was the usual self-delusion of retired, defeated or ousted leaders. But Gorbachev has a more profound point, especially relevant this year—the 20th anniversary of 1989, the beginning of the end of his rule. Even with hindsight, it does not seem inevitable that the Soviet empire—that vast monolith that two generations in the west were brought up to fear—would disappear overnight. Analysts thought the USSR could limp on for decades trying and failing to reform communism: Upper Volta with nukes, but a serious power.
Gorbachev is still a fit-looking 78, an age when most of his predecessors were considered in their prime. In the 1980s a general secretary of the Soviet Communist party had virtually dictatorial powers if he chose to use them. Gorbachev could have harnessed them to tinker at the edges. He could have introduced minor reforms to a system that in fundamentals had not changed since Stalin and taken no chances with the place of the Warsaw pact states in central and eastern Europe. But he was too ambitious for that. His aim was to save and renew communism—the “real” communism of the founders of the faith that he believed in. With equal passion he believed in his country—not Russia, but the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Yet it was Gorbachev who did more than anyone else to kill communism.
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Tom Chatfield
A new China: part of the world's highest railway, between Beijing and Lhasa
This month, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the climax of the Tiananmen student protests, Prospect features three very different articles on their legacy and the nature of modern China. In our first piece, author Diane Wei Liang describes how she was herself a student protester in 1989—but how her subsequent experiences of returning to Beijing have convinced her that, while Tiananmen should not be forgotten, “we should also recognise that expecting China to collectively atone for the sins of Tiananmen Square is neither realistic, desirable, nor necessary.”
In our second piece, Ian Buruma—who ten years after the Tiananmen massacre wrote a book, Bad Elements, about the fate of the protesters—revisits them once more, and argues that China’s rulers today have more to fear from the economic crisis than they do from democratic dissidents. Was the democracy movement in vain, he asks; “was I wrong to detected a whiff of decay in the authoritarian one-party state when I traveled in the People’s Republic of China ten years ago?”
Finally, Parag Khanna, author of The Second World, takes us with him on a journey across the new terrain in which modern China is being forged: its western frontier, and the remote, rebellious provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang. On a 3,000-mile trek through some of China’s least-visited areas, Khanna discovers a rebellious region rich with natural resources that Beijing is determined to control; and a growing Chinese dominance in central Asia that is set to have massive strategic importance as the 21st century unfolds.
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