Germany in a Semi-Gaullist Europe

Fritz Stern

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980

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Summary:  The Afghanistan crisis has dramatized and intensified antecedent changes and strains in the Western alliance. There was unanimous, if separate, condemnation of Soviet aggression, but there were also divergent, and often acrimoniously divergent, assessments of the causes of aggression and the nature of the challenge. The difficulties of orchestrating a common response or of at least preventing a discordant one suggest a new balance of forces within the alliance and a set of divergent interests.

Fritz Stern is Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, and the author of Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire and other works. He lectured and travelled in Western and Eastern Europe in early 1979 on a project for the Ford Foundation, and paid another long visit there in early 1980.

On the all-important question of Germany's future, my mind was made up. First of all, I believed that it would be unjust and dangerous to revise the de facto frontiers which the wars had imposed on her. . . . Furthermore, the right to possess or to manufacture atomic weapons-which in any case she had declared her intention to renounce-must in no circumstances be granted to her. This being so, I considered it essential that she should form an integral part of the organized system of cooperation between States which I envisaged for the whole of our continent. In this way the security of all nations between the Atlantic and the Urals would be guaranteed, and a change brought about in circumstances, attitudes and relationships which would doubtless ultimately permit the reunion of the three segments of the German people.

-Charles de Gaulle

Memoirs of Hope

The Afghanistan crisis has dramatized and intensified antecedent changes and strains in the Western alliance. There was unanimous, if separate, condemnation of Soviet aggression, but there were also divergent, and often acrimoniously divergent, assessments of the causes of aggression and the nature of the challenge. The difficulties of orchestrating a common response or of at least preventing a discordant one suggest a new balance of forces within the alliance and a set of divergent interests.

In essence, the leadership of a weakened America is being challenged by a more independent Europe, led by an ever more important Franco-German condominium. The European, especially the German, commitment to détente is formidable. The Federal Republic, closest ally of both America and France and at the same time the much-wooed, much-threatened, privileged partner of the U.S.S.R., clearly emerges as the principal actor next to the United States. With one overriding loyalty-to the Western alliance-it also feels the pull of its other and conflicting ties.

The balance between unity and discord is precarious. There are not only substantive differences between the United States and its European allies; there is-at least on the nongovernmental level-a growing impatience on both sides. The roots of discord go deep; to ignore or underestimate the shifts of power and attitudes might heighten the dangers of drifting apart. In the past, an external threat has always served to unite the alliance. Now we cannot count on the automatic reappearance of solidarity. As the alliance enters a period of likely crisis, it may be useful to try to assess some of the changes of power and spirit that have taken place on the West European side in the recent past.

II

The Western alliance is unprecedented in modern history. A voluntary association of unequal nations, it has survived three decades of intense change and crisis. The alliance reflects a fundamental reality of world politics: the U.S.S.R. presents a danger to Western Europe which only the United States can successfully deter. This has been the heart of the alliance, whatever the strains and competing interests within it.

The edifice of the alliance still seems solid; the ...

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