Germany in the New Europe

Yes, Germany is becoming more assertive in foreign policy. This is all to the good for the United States.

It is not that German instincts will prove any more infallible than American instincts. Bonn will be right in some cases, such as pressing for destruction of all battlefield nuclear weapons and recognizing Slovenia and Croatia as a means to help end the fighting in Yugoslavia. It will be wrong or irritating in other cases, such as raising German interest rates to record heights at a time of world recession.

More important than the compatibility of specific German judgments—and the interests of the world’s two largest exporters should, in fact, often coincide—is the general German assumption of some of the American burden of leadership in Europe. This, as much as declining military expenditures, should free Washington to get on with its own post-Cold War domestic agenda.

II

Germany’s lightning unification was, in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s phrase, a catalyst for Europe. It gave urgency to west European integration as the only way to provide neighbors with leverage over the new German colossus. It combined with the plans for "1992" to revive a dynamism the continent had lost to the United States and the Soviet Union. It furthermore paved the way for the reentry of eastern Europe into Europe proper, and it clarified the eventual terms for any entry into Europe by the Russian outsider.

Unification thus promoted both European integration and trans-Atlantic comity rather than hindering them. The Federal Republic is leading the way toward the European future not only because it is finally converting its economic weight into political power, but also because it made the original conceptual leap to a post-national European identity four decades ago. The Germans were forced to surrender their sovereignty and tribal patriotism in 1945; their social glue has long since passed beyond heroic chauvinism to the more humdrum—but safer—cohesion of prosperity and constitutional legitimacy. Today’s policymakers in Bonn were inoculated against national hubris in their formative years, when they discovered that their parents had tolerated Hitler’s industrial murder of Jews and gypsies in the name of Germany. The much more nationalistic French and English, having been spared such shame, still face the painful loss of narrow patriotism as the European Community (EC) assumes more authority.