If there is one thing that Germany, wherever it lies and however you may wish to define it, certainly never was, then it is the steadfast and enduring core state at the heart of Europe standing firm against the storms of time like the proverbial oak, growing higher into heavens and deeper into the Earth. No, the Holy Roman Empire did not stand like a massive glacial erratic at the centre of the continent for a thousand years. It was much more a loosely structured association of the most diverse elements, tribes, city states and monasteries, held together after a fashion by the elected king and elected emperor, the Imperial Diet and the Imperial Courts – perhaps also for that reason so dynamic and so durable.
The German Confederation of the post-Napoleonic era fell apart in the Austro-Prussian War after only 52 years. Chancellor Bismarck’s greater Prussian, lesser German Reich – or Empire – flaunted its splendour for a few decades until the Great War, which ensued in no small part from its own problematical existence: not powerful enough to dominate Europe, not weak enough to submit itself to a coalition of the civilized countries of western Europe, not self-confident enough to attempt a democratic reform towards a constitutional monarchy. It lasted 47 years until its shabby end. The Weimar Republic withstood its enemies for fourteen years. Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich” descended into hell after twelve years.
The Federal Republic is sixty years old. Measured against the recurrent chaos and breathless change of our history, that represents a miracle of stability. Sixty years of peace in Europe are in themselves a miracle, one that our continent has probably experienced for the first time in the two millennia of our calendar – thanks to the “equilibrium of deterrence” between the two nuclear superpowers and, ultimately, the commonsense of their leaders, but above all to the pacification of Germany through its integration in the European Union and, in a broader setting, the Atlantic Alliance.
Looking to Europe
Building Europe was the raison d’être of the Federal Republic from its very first day – and has remained such until this jubilee year, which is also a year of great crisis, possibly a year in which the European Union will be tested to breaking point, a year in which the resilience of its institutions, its resistance to all forms of protectionism, the firmness of the euro and, above all, the solidarity of its members will have to prove themselves.
The integration of the second, socialist German state into the larger Federal Republic two decades ago was not, as some promoters of conservative resentment would lead us to believe, the “restoration of the Bismarckian German nation-state”. It is certainly not that, thank God. First of all, it is doubtful whether Bismarck’s “second Reich” fulfils the ideal of the “nation-state” on the model of the French Revolution (which was possibly only fully realized once: in France itself).
There is no Bismarckian state without Prussia, which the Allies eradicated with the stroke of a pen in 1947 because they considered it the breeding ground for Germany’s militaristic-nationalistic great power ambitions. They were certainly not as mistaken in this as we would like to be able to believe: one only needs to think of the Prussian nobility’s close involvement with the national-conservative resistance to democracy and its unconditional surrender to the “Hitler state”. Recent research has also shown that far more than half of all the male members of the nobility belonged to the Nazi party or one of its organizations. In the other German state, the Junkers, the land-owning aristocracy, lost the material foundation for any claim to social predominance following the expropriation of the land by the Soviet military government.
Membership of the European Union was a basic precondition for France’s consent to the GDR’s integration into an “all-German” Federal Republic. Moreover, President François Mitterrand coolly and clearly informed his friend, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, that he wished to strengthen Germany’s European ties through economic and monetary union. The Germans – as always gripped by fears about their sacred deutschmark – had no time for hesitation. Nevertheless, they managed to tighten the criteria for joining the circle of “euro countries” with such rigour that they were eventually rather relieved to be able to meet the conditions themselves. Furthermore, they secured – a decisive concession, mainly on the part of France – the complete political independence of the European Central Bank (following the strict model of the German Bundesbank).
Haven of hope
Nevertheless, the Germans regarded the replacement of their beloved deutschmark by the euro with some trepidation, and were not particularly inspired by the scepticism expressed by SPD Federal Chancellor Schröder (who even spoke of a “premature birth”). However, to the great surprise of the politicians and citizens themselves, the night of the changeover from 31 December 2001 to 1 January 2002 became a spontaneous popular festival. Suddenly, the Germans, French, Italians, Belgians, Dutch and – not least – Luxembourgers seemed to rediscover the fact that Europe remained a haven for all their hopes and expectations, although in the cut and thrust of everyday politics Brussels was treated as a kind of general scapegoat, responsible for all the errors and weaknesses of national governments and defamed by grumbling citizens as a regime of irritating technocrats.
Suddenly, they all – and particularly the Germans – again appeared convinced that Europe was a great project inherited from the millions of victims of totalitarian regimes and the Second World War – whether in the death camps, on the front lines, in the bombed cities or among the processions of exhausted refugees. The admonition “No more war!” was no longer enough. It was not only the economic benefits of the European Union that made membership appear a splendid aspiration for the freed peoples of the former Soviet empire. The concept of the “nation” seemed to them to have preserved a certain innocence as a form of inner refuge against the totality of complicity. They no longer felt the same urgency as the post-war generations of the west, when it had been imperative to create European institutions that would be able to guard against the destructive fury of nationalisms and totalitarian ideologies – if they should ever raise their heads again – by building a protective barrier of common interests and shared powers. It did not matter whether this would involve a European federal state or federation of states – or a new, revolutionary blend of both basic elements, which the European Union actually incorporates: an entirely new national and international legal entity that clearly demonstrates the productivity of the will for integration.
If we are not greatly mistaken, the eastern European member states are also in the process of reconciling their traditional understanding of the nation with their sense of Europeanness. They are acknowledging that the long faded reality of “sovereignty” – the idea at the very heart of the nation-state – can only regain a limited actuality through its transfer to the union of Europe.
The Preamble of the Basic Law of 1949 states: “The entire German people is called on to achieve by free self-determination the unity and freedom of Germany.” Reunification represented the fulfilment of this constitutional duty of German citizens. It was certainly not achieved by the national grandiloquence politicians used in their attempts to meet their rhetorical Sunday obligation, but much more by Willy Brandt’s strategy of “small steps” towards eastern Europe that began almost imperceptibly to dissolve the initially impenetrable fabric of the “people’s democracies”. It was achieved by the Helsinki Accords. By the courage to engage in partial disarmament that eventually translated into a will for “detente”. And, of course, by the attraction of the “European Union”, which, thanks to the Schengen Agreement, granted its citizens the yearned-for dream of the people behind the Wall: (almost) unrestricted freedom of travel and movement.
Building Europe
After completing their “national” mission of reunification, the purposeful construction and development of Europe remains the Germans’ fundamental obligation – as it has always been since 1945. Kurt Schumacher, the post-war SPD leader, had not understood (and not been able to understand) in the isolation of his 10-year imprisonment that German nationalism had burnt itself out for an unforeseeable period, perhaps (and ideally) for ever, with the twilight of the false gods of the Third Reich. He also found it difficult to appreciate that the nation-state – at least in Europe – had been terribly discredited as a historical ideal and was actually finished. It had proved to be a fatal mistake, at best only suitable for organizing the social existence of a people, certainly not the guarantor of a European peace order, since it tended to act as a cause of smouldering conflicts. It is rightly said of Konrad Adenauer that the formation of his political culture reached back far beyond the Bismarck era – and that is precisely why he was ahead of his time. The Rhinelander certainly did not consider himself a “Prussian”. The “separatism” of which he was accused as Mayor of Cologne during the days of the Weimar Republic aimed at separation from Prussia, not from the German republic. His gaze, that goes without saying for him, was always directed westward. His European federalism joined most fortuitously with the ideas of Robert Schuman, the politician from Lorraine who left his mark on French foreign policy during those years, with those of the northern Italian Alcide de Gasperi and the Belgian socialist Paul Henri Spaak. Nevertheless, the creative force of these founding fathers of Europe was still eclipsed by the visionary realism of Jean Monnet, the man who had been responsible for securing fresh supplies for General de Gaulle’s troops in Washington during the war.
Long before the guns were silent, this sober thinker from an old Cognac family sketched out plans for Europe with his brilliant American assistants (among them, the later Under Secretary of State George Ball) that from the very start subjected his fellow Frenchmen to the same conditions as the vanquished Germans. That was the key to the success of his daring plans, such as the shared control of the European coal and steel industries, later then the chemical industry (without which a war cannot be waged).
The Europeanization of Germany
No, the dreams of this technocrat had nothing in common with the chimera of a “Carolingian-Catholic West” that is falsely attributed to Adenauer. Monnet may have failed in his grand plan for a European Defence Community due to efforts of a neo-nationalist alliance of Gaullists and communists. Yet even de Gaulle when he returned to power could not and would not abolish the Europe of the Treaties of Rome. He understood with incredible sensitivity that Chancellor Adenauer viewed the integration of the German majority into the European Community not only as a political, but also as a intellectual-cultural decision. That was not something to be taken for granted. Even Thomas Mann during the First World War (in Reflections of an Unpolitical Man) had mobilized the pernicious fallacy that western “civilization” was contrary to the German concept of “Kultur”, the only “home of the soul” that blocked the path of rational “progress”. Literature versus fiction. Music versus dramatics. Folkish order versus democracy. The outlook of the German bourgeoisie remained in the thrall of superstition for a long time after Thomas Mann had renounced their sham values. It was he who eventually coined the astute adage that the mission was not the Germanification of Europe, but the Europeanization of Germany.
That is what we are celebrating in the 60th anniversary year of the Federal Republic and two decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We know well enough that the project has not yet been completed. Neither will it be finished with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon. What we need in the face of the crisis more urgently than ever before is a kind of economic and financial government that will do what it takes to defend the open market and the cohesion of the eurozone. And naturally we need the common foreign and security policy of the European Union, which – linked with the United States within a steadfast Alliance – must have access to its own instruments of power. In other words, we must not let the European Constitution wait any longer.
Klaus Harpprecht
is one of the most renowned German journalists and a writer of diverse literary works. Harpprecht, who was born in 1927, was ZDF correspondent in Washington for many years, publisher at S. Fischer Verlag and speechwriter and adviser to Willy Brandt. He is author of more than 20 books and co-publisher of the highly acclaimed series “Die Andere Bibliothek” (The Other Library). Born in Stuttgart, he now lives in the south of France.
