A United Germany

A revolution is taking place in Germany. It is a revolution that will have profound ramifications not only for the two German states, but for Europe as a whole. To be sure, the dramatic events of 1989 in the German Democratic Republic are part of the political avalanche that has swept across Eastern Europe, toppling communist regimes from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Yet nowhere are the ramifications more far-reaching than in the G.D.R., where the collapse of communist power has raised the issue of German unification and questions about the future security arrangements of the continent. Throughout the postwar period European security has rested on the partition of Germany and of Europe. Now the overcoming of those divisions obviously will have profound implications for the continent's future.

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The political earthquake that has shaken the G.D.R. has simultaneously revolutionized thinking on the German Question. Less than a year ago statesmen in East and West seemed in firm agreement that the German Question was not on the East-West agenda and that movement toward overcoming the German partition could only take place in a historical context and as part of a gradual process of overcoming the division of Europe as a whole.

The reason why the rapid emergence of the unification issue has caught so many observers off guard lies in three assumptions that until recently constituted conventional wisdom on the German Question in both East and West. The first of these assumptions was that the G.D.R. was relatively stable, in many ways the last country in Eastern Europe likely to undergo radical political change. East Germans seemed to be the most unlikely initiators of a democratic revolution from below.

Second, in West Germany a firm consensus had emerged that there was no alternative to former Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, a policy of small steps in accommodating the G.D.R. Successive West German governments had accepted what seemed to be the reality of communist rule and increasingly adopted policies aimed foremost at ameliorating the costs of partition.

The third assumption was that the final guarantor of German partition was Moscow, where Soviet definitions of ideology, security and international prestige for most of the postwar period clearly had been intertwined with Germany's division.