FEATURES:
Helmut Kohl, Giant

By Jeffrey Gedmin

His Cold War, his Germany, his Europe

RONALD REAGAN,  Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II all enjoy firmly established reputations as giants of the late twentieth century. Each will be remembered for unwavering stands that hastened the demise of the Soviet Union and its global empire of anti-democratic power and ideology. When the history of the period is fully sorted out, though, there is a fourth central figure, a leader far less acclaimed in his own time, who is certain to get his due. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s legacy is truly remarkable — so much so that history will likely regard him as one of the most influential figures of modern Europe.

But Helmut Kohl’s influence throughout this period was equally important. In a showdown over the deployment of U.S. intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the early 1980s, Kohl reaffirmed Germany’s tie to the West at a critical moment in Cold War history. His stand helped reinvigorate Western resolve, which in turn contributed to the Soviet Union’s "new thinking" in the mid-1980s. Kohl also unified his country — peacefully, with Soviet consent, as a member of NATO, and all within a year of the breach of the Berlin Wall. Finally, Kohl more than anyone else set on course the historic process of Europe’s economic and political integration. Even if the endpoint of European unification remains unclear — and the benefits still very much a matter of doubt — the process is under way, and its implications will be profound.

The jaundiced German view

PERHAPS THE PLACE Kohl will get his full and complete due will be in his home country. Kohl’s entire career had been one of bumbling, stumbling, and bad breaks; of being tactically outmaneuvered and dismissed by opponents and experts as a dilettante. Franz-Josef Strauss, the legendary and sharp-tongued governor of Bavaria, once said that he was fascinated by Kohl’s television appearances because they gave "the impression that anybody could be chancellor."

The missile test

KOHL'S LONGETIVITY AS CHANCELLOR owed much to his approach to power. He was, in a word, ruthless. Within the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), rivals were politically extinguished or exiled to provincial posts. Kohl insisted on complete party discipline and loyalty. He always valued loyalty, he often said, over being liked. Even when backbenchers traveled abroad, the chancellor personally signed off on the trip and knew precisely where they were going and with whom they were meeting.

By the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in what was accepted at the time as a key measure of global nuclear strength: strategic launchers. Soviet expansion was on the march. Pro-Moscow regimes were sprouting like mushrooms from East Asia to Africa to Latin America. President Carter was contemptuously dismissing America’s "inordinate fear" of communism, while his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, explained that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the American president shared "similar dreams" for their nations. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was preparing to gain an additional edge by deploying a new generation of intermediate-range weapons: the ss-20 missile, capable of striking the United States’ NATO allies. The West was in retreat. Literally. A Presidential Review Memorandum leaked to the press in August 1977 suggested that, in the case of a Warsaw Pact attack, NATO troops might need to fall back to the Rhine before regrouping for a counterattack.

Kohl’s predecessor, Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, recognized the threat and helped coordinate a response to the increasing imbalance. Schmidt was one of the originators of a two-track strategy to deal with the ss-20s, according to which the new American missiles would be deployed while negotiators simultaneously sought the reduction or elimination of this class of weapon. NATO’s 1979 decision to deploy some 500 cruise and Pershing missiles quickly emerged as the focal point of a ferocious debate in Western Europe. As Josef Joffe of the German daily Süddeustche Zeitung puts it, the debate may have been argued in the "language of nuclear weapons" but was, at its core, about politics.

While Jimmy Carter led the United States, the Europeans were wallowing in their own malaise. The supposed "moral equivalence" of the two superpowers was the intellectual fashion of the day. And in the front-line state, Germany, there was massive resistance to the deployment of new American missiles. Leading German intellectuals urged their country to become the peacemaker between East and West — to drive for independence from the two opposing blocs. Significant segments of public opinion across Europe were becoming convinced that their continent would turn into "a shooting gallery" for the superpowers. Millions of protesters took to the streets. Nowhere was the intensity of debate as raw, nor the stakes as high, as they were in Germany. Hundreds of thousands descended on Bonn in 1981 and 1982. Their ranks included trade unionists, church activists, doctors, lawyers, even delegations from the German military and groups from Kohl’s CDU.

Because of his pro-missile stance, Schmidt was becoming isolated within his own party. Members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had fallen prey to Soviet and East German propaganda, which pleaded with Germans to protect the continent from "a nuclear Auschwitz." In turn, leading Social Democrats advocated unilateral disarmament and a nuclear-free Europe. Schmidt’s party colleague Egon Bahr called for a "security partnership" with the Soviet Union. In the run-up to the 1983 general elections, the Social Democrats experimented with the anti-missile slogan "In the German Interest," suggesting a direct clash with American and NATO interests. While Schmidt argued vehemently that no authentic peace policy could "overlook the contradiction between the system of free democracies and Communist dictatorship," his party turned a deaf ear. Schmidt’s demise came about, at least in part, because he was unable to stem the sprawling anti-nuclear revolt.

Yet Kohl remained unyielding in the conviction that the missiles were necessary. They were needed for military reasons, as a countermeasure to the Soviet ss-20s. They were also needed, however, as an unmistakable affirmation of Germany’s commitment to the Alliance and the Federal Republic’s integration in the West. In standing firm, Kohl confronted the Soviets — and the Social Democrats, the Greens, the peace movement, the intellectuals and academics, the nationalists on the German Right, and the media. He had to face down dissent in his own party, too, as some CDU members had themselves become agitated about public opinion. He insisted there was a difference between a populist movement and a popular majority. Germany would be governed from the Bundestag, and not from the streets, he repeated adamantly.

In his memoirs, Kohl remembers the euromissile debate as "one of the most dramatic in German postwar history." It was also one of the most dramatic in Cold War history. The deployment meant that the Soviets had lost a crucial opportunity. "We knew how sorely tested West Germany’s loyalty to NATO was at that time," East German spymaster Markus Wolf recalls in his autobiography. According to Kohl, "Gorbachev himself" would later tell the German leader "that the steadfastness of NATO in this decision substantially contributed to the ‘new thinking’ in the Kremlin." It was one of many factors, to be sure. The Soviet economy was imploding by the mid-1980s. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was vexing the Kremlin. It is nearly certain, though, that had the alliance split over the euromissiles, NATO would have suffered a devastating, perhaps fatal, blow, and the Cold War would have taken a dangerously inauspicious turn.

The road to unification

MARGARET THATCHER HAD A HABIT of lecturing Helmut Kohl. Endlessly, according to him. He could never get a word in edgewise, Kohl recounts in his memoirs. In her eyes, Kohl was guilty of an "exaggerated" coziness. He was too gemütlich, she thought. What’s more, he was rude. Thatcher was apparently forever miffed after a meeting with Kohl once in Salzburg, when he suddenly informed her that he had to interrupt their conversation to dash to another appointment. A few minutes later, Thatcher is said to have spotted the chancellor sitting in a sidewalk cafe drinking his coffee and devouring a mammoth cream pastry.

Unification quickly gained unstoppable momentum. By winter, 3 million to 5 million East Germans were sitting on packed suitcases, West German authorities estimated, ready to come west if German democracy and the D-mark did not come to them. In the end, they drove the process. They determined the pace. But it had been Kohl who had made unification politically conceivable and acceptable. He did so by keeping his country in NATO and by making it clear over the next few months that he would wrap the new Germany as tightly as he could in the mantle of Europe. The Soviets pushed hard against NATO membership for the united Germany. Kohl’s foreign minister may have had his own ideas; the U.S. had intelligence reports suggesting that Genscher envisaged, with Germany’s coming unification, the end of the alliance. But Kohl prevailed.

Kohl’s "Europapolitik"

IF OTHER EUROPEANS were wary of a united Germany, it was a wariness shared first and foremost by Kohl himself. He was keenly concerned that the devils of his country’s past might re-emerge. He never really trusted Germany. And he saw the only possible solution as Germany’s elaborate and manifold integration into Europe. This was Kohl’s Europapolitik, the political project closest to his heart and the progress toward which was probably his proudest achievement in office.

"Ever closer" union had been always part of the European Community’s ethos. In fact, European unity had been the idea of princes and poets, statesmen and philosophers for centuries. If Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman were the architects of the modern post-World War II quest for European unification, then François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl became the men who translated the design into reality. For Kohl, German unification and European unification were, as he liked to put it, two sides of the same coin.

Bismarck once said that he often found the word "Europe" in "the mouths of those politicians who wanted from other powers something they did not dare to demand in their own name." And so it was to an extent in modern Europe, too. For some, European unity was the continent’s answer, for example, to globalization. As the nation-state withered away, went the logic, a European Union (E.U.) that pooled resources and sovereignty would become a formidable transnational actor well positioned to represent Europe’s political and economic interests in the world. For others, such as Europe’s smaller countries, European unity was the key to maximizing their own leverage and influence. They feared being overrun or ignored by the major powers on the continent, especially Germany and to a lesser degree France, the UK, and Italy. They believed that a unified Europe would at least assure them a place at the table.

For the French, ceding sovereignty to supranational European institutions represented an immense gamble. To avoid being dominated by its neighbor across the Rhine, Paris has made the calculation that it will gain a net advantage in its relationship with Berlin, the Germans having relinquished their cherished D-mark in this European bargain and given up the hegemony of the Bundesbank. European Commission President Jacques Delors wrote once that "creating Europe is a way of regaining that room for maneuver necessary for ‘a certain idea of France.’ "

For his part, Kohl always accepted French vanity and ambition, just as he felt obliged to respect European, especially French, fears about Germany. Adenauer had once counseled Kohl that in dealing with France he should always bow once to the German flag and twice to the French. And so Kohl would argue that deeper integration would indeed embed Germany in Europe, prevent the re-nationalization of German foreign policy, and, in turn, make German power more palatable for its neighbors.

This did not mean relinquishing German national interests. On the contrary, it meant that the postwar Federal Republic of Germany had become particularly adept at pursuing its interests, as Timothy Garton Ash argues in his book, In Europe’s Name. In fact, Kohl made European economic and political union a priority for German foreign policy a decade ago precisely because he understood Germany’s ceding of sovereignty as a necessary price to pay for national unity.

The campaign for a single European currency — an initiative that had always been seen by virtually all its proponents as a step toward greater political integration — formally began in 1969. But it was the Maastricht Treaty, negotiated in 1991 and promoted by Kohl and his French allies, that pushed the process and accompanying debate to center stage.

Once again, Kohl was swimming against the stream. True, unlike the euromissile debate, Kohl’s campaign for economic and political union faced no appreciable resistance from any of the mainstream political parties in Germany. But not everyone could understand why Germany, or for that matter others, would give up so much for an uncertain future. In France, the Maastricht Treaty passed by referendum, but it did so by a wafer-thin margin. In Denmark, it failed. In Germany, it would have likely failed as well, had it ever been put to the test. "D-mark nationalism" had become a permissible sort of ersatz patriotism for the Germans after the trauma of the Holocaust and World War II. They loved the mighty mark as a symbol of achievement, rebuilding, and stability. Kohl faced formidable criticism in the media. A range of publications, from the tabloids to popular magazines like Der Spiegel to the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, traditionally very pro-Kohl, all raised questions about the chancellor’s ambition to trade the stable D-mark for a new and untested European currency. It was no surprise that Italians in great number favored giving up the lira. They wanted to import monetary virtue and export traditional Italian vice. The Germans feared just the opposite. Not surprisingly, Germany’s central bankers started as reluctant participants in Kohl’s politically motivated project.

In Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher emerged as the strongest opponent of "Europe." Thatcher feared that a stronger, more deeply integrated E.U. would reflect German and French preferences in economic matters and be at fundamental odds with Anglo-Saxon tastes. She also contended, more importantly perhaps, that Germany would inevitably dominate such a union, and that such dominance would invariably give rise to the malign nationalism Helmut Kohl sought to make extinct. Kohl was unpersuaded; he remained unwavering in his commitment to economic and political union. Step by step, he outmaneuvered the British prime minister.

Thatcher worked assiduously and in detail to block Kohl’s plans. She tried to create tactical alliances, including with members of Kohl’s own euro-skeptical Bundesbank. Karl Otto Pöhl, the Bundesbank’s president, from time to time was outspokenly critical of European monetary union. By quoting Pöhl at one European Community meeting, Thatcher was successful in getting mention of a European Central Bank removed from the text of a communiqué. Even such little victories were hard for her to achieve. Thatcher disliked Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, but failed to convince Kohl or the French to favor her candidate for the Commission, the Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, who shared at least some of Thatcher’s Euro-skepticism. In the 1980s, she had tried to block reference to European Monetary Union in the Single European Act. Her efforts were in vain. Later, she would also oppose the establishment of an E.U. committee to report on monetary union and try, once again unsuccessfully, to undermine its formation.

All the while, Kohl was winning support from the United States and, more important, working closely in tandem with the French, whose political clout is central to E.U. decision making. He never gave up trying to persuade Thatcher of the logic of his design. On a private visit once to Kohl’s home near Ludwigshafen — an invitation that Kohl had pressed on the British prime minister — Thatcher’s foreign affairs advisor Charles Powell became the object of Kohl’s sermon. Kohl wanted Thatcher to see him on his home ground, close to the border of France, deep in the heart of continental European history and conflict. And on an excursion to the cathedral in Speyer, Kohl took Powell aside, behind a tomb in the crypt, to explain his case for merging Germany’s identity into that of a wider Europe. Kohl really was a good European, he wanted to explain. No one could doubt the sincerity of Kohl’s objectives. As Henrik Bering writes in his new biography of the German leader, Helmut Kohl, his "goal was [always] to break the pattern of destructive nationalism and war in Europe."

Kohl never convinced Thatcher of this means. Powell says he was prepared to report the conversation to Prime Minister Thatcher when they got on the plane, but stopped when Mrs. Thatcher flopped onto her seat, flung off her shoes, and proclaimed: "My God is he German!" By May 1998, it simply didn’t matter any more. Thatcher was gone, the German public — and the Bundesbank — had reconciled to the coming reality of a single European currency, and across Europe, Kohl had his allies firmly in place. Whether the euro succeeds over time economically or politically, it was another remarkable achievement for Kohl.

Abroad and at home

MONETARY UNION was also an achievement about which, at the time he stood for election last year, scarcely an ordinary German seemed to care. While settling the big strategic questions, Kohl had failed to tackle other issues. In 1998, questions about the euro and any eventual political union remained distant, abstract and overly complicated for most Germans.

Kohl’s domestic record, on the other hand, was not complicated at all, and the facts were catching up with him. Under his leadership, Germany moved from economic pacesetter in the 1980s to battered and bloated welfare state in the 1990s. Kohl repeatedly failed to introduce reforms in the Germany economy that industry and the younger mavericks of his own CDU were urging on him. Germany was saddled with double-digit unemployment. The welfare state needed slimming down. Adding insult to injury, poor Helmut Kohl had to endure the wrath of his struggling countrymen in eastern Germany. He had led them out of communism and into the Western fold; but had also prematurely promised "blooming landscapes" in the east within three or four years of unification. Amidst rumors of the unthinkable — a revolt against the chancellor within the CDU — Kohl’s perennial and formidable campaign machine this time visibly staggered toward the finish line of his last election.

And so it was that Kohl’s career as chancellor finished, in a sense, as it began. When he arrived at CDU headquarters in Bonn on election night last September, the halls were packed with the party faithful, drinking their beer and nibbling on snacks. The outcome was already clear. The feeling was anti-climactic. The mood was, well, upbeat. It was as if they had known in advance and were already prepared to move on.

Lackluster and stumbling a bit, Der Dicke ("the fat one") had run out of gas. His concession speech referred to the big battles of the past. In truth, Kohl had lost the skirmishes, many of them. He had stumbled at times, terribly. But he tackled the big things mightily. Kohl had helped win the Cold War. He reunified his country. He won the battle over the euro. It was a remarkable run, those 16 years. In time, the world, the historians, even the Germans themselves will come to acknowledge the greatness of Helmut Kohl.