THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (106 page)

Instead of exploiting the increasing disarray within the Soviet bloc, the United States extended to the Soviet Union access to several multilateral institutions, offered financial aid and technical assistance for economic reform, and most importantly supported Gorbachev's obviously doomed efforts to hold the Soviet state together. Gorbachev's strategy now was to secure financial support for the Union, hoping that the republics would not wish to abandon a state that was their lifeline to economic assistance.
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During this period, Baker and his team devised a plan for effecting the reunification of Germany that had two important features: first, the Four Power Agreement would be used to create a “Two-plus-Four” negotiating framework, thus breaking out the two Germanys to negotiate with each other, and then presenting the results to the Four Powers, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union; second, Soviet consent would be sought for a new Germany within NATO. Both of these notions were highly controversial and there was strong opposition, within the Alliance and in Moscow, respectively, to both ideas. Baker, however, linked the two, realizing that by strengthening Kohl's position
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Gorbachev's the United States stood the best chance of achieving its Long War goals—that is, of anchoring German democracy to the West and bringing the Soviet Union into the society of parliamentary states.

Initially, British, French, and Soviet foreign ministers rejected the Two-plus-Four plan, preferring what might be called “Four-plus-Zero” instead. This would have provided that the four powers agree among themselves on a program for reunification and then present it to the FRG and the GDR. This would have posed an insurmountable problem of what is sometimes called “path dependence,” the idea that the order in which decisions are
taken affects their outcome. If an initial consensus among the Four Powers were required, the Soviet Union would be in a position to insist on a non-NATO Germany. But if the two Germany's themselves could reach consensus on a unification plan that permitted NATO membership, then the chancellor could bargain directly with Gorbachev and perhaps find a price for Soviet consent.
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Moreover, “Four-plus-Zero” was a reprise of what had happened at Versailles—the imposition of a constitutional order without first achieving a consensus that included the German leadership.

In December 1989, President Mitterand and Prime Minister Thatcher met privately to share their misgivings about German unification. Earlier Mrs. Thatcher had emphasized that German unification was, after all, “more than a matter of the sensitivities of the German states.” She stressed that “the feelings and interests of other European countries” had to be taken into account. In Paris a debate began about whether a reunified Germany would kill the European Union. The diplomatic commentator, Pierre Lelloche, wrote at the time that “[t]he French are beginning to realize that post-Yalta Europe may well signal the end of French dreams of grandeur and French-controlled European ‘federation.’”
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Baker, however, was able to persuade the British that “Four-plus-Zero” meant unacceptable delay and risked German unification by fait accompli. Without the British, the French could not afford to alienate German sensibilities by being the sole objector; in March the French Foreign Minister announced that France would not insist on a purely Four-Power agreement. In Ottawa on February 13, 1990, representatives of the Four Powers agreed on the “Two-plus-Four” plan.

Delivering “Two-plus-Four” cemented the U.S. relationship with Kohl, and in turn “enabled Kohl's government to persuade the Germans that a united Germany should stay loyal to NATO.”
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Now Baker turned to winning the approval of Gorbachev for German membership in the Atlantic alliance. If this could be accomplished, then any residual German doubts about the wisdom of remaining in NATO would be quieted. At the same time, Baker sought to couple Soviet consent with approval of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, making drastic cuts in troop levels and armaments deployed across the Central Front of divided Europe. The vast size of the Soviet forces would be dramatically reduced and a system of international inspections put in place to ensure transparency—a confidence-building measure by which strategic surprise and an unintended chain reaction of mobilization and even pre-emption are sought to be avoided. The NATO fear of a massed tank attack that only the use of
nuclear weapons could stop was abating. If Soviet consent could be won for “Two-plus-Four”
and
CFE, two parts of the three-part Paris Charter would be in place.

Chancellor Kohl now left for a hastily arranged meeting in the Caucasus with Gorbachev. About 3,000 East Germans were emigrating daily in addition to the 344,000 who had gone west in 1989. Kohl claimed that monetary union with the East was the only way of avoiding a complete East German collapse and a flood of refugees numbering in the millions. Gorbachev had continued to insist that a unified Germany would either have to be neutral or at least free of any foreign troops. The week of Kohl's visit, Yakovlev, Gorbachev's closest ally in the Politburo, asserted that Soviet troops would leave East Germany only when NATO left West Germany.

Three events beyond the Soviet Union, however, combined to change the Soviet position. First, at the Camp David summit in June Gorbachev had stressed his view that an American troop presence in Europe was a factor for stability. “I want you to know that I regard this as in your interest and in our interest,” he is reported to have told Bush, providing one more example of Gorbachev's increasing desire to become a part of a Europe-wide security system (within which, as many realized, Germany would sit uneasily as a nonnuclear power if the Soviet Union and not the United States were part of that system). Gorbachev had to be persuaded that the Soviet goal of a de-Americanized, denuclearized Germany was potentially catastrophic for Soviet interests: so long as Germany did not have nuclear weapons, the Americans would have to be present in Europe to provide a link to extended deterrence; if the Americans left, Germany was likely to acquire nuclear weapons for herself. Not two superpowers, half a globe apart, but the two largest armies in Europe would face each other, separated only by the Polish plain.

Then the Americans had proposed at the London NATO Council meeting on July 6 that the Soviet Union no longer be treated as an “enemy and that NATO should be transformed from a primarily military alliance to a primarily political institution.” Bush wrote to Gorbachev, “I want you to know that [the London Declaration] was written with you importantly in mind.” Having floated this offer scarcely a week in advance of the Kohl-Gorbachev meeting, the Americans waited anxiously for a reply.
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Finally, on the day before Kohl left for Moscow, the West Germans announced they were sending the Russians food aid worth about $130 million. Against the background of these three events, on July 15 it was announced that Gorbachev and Kohl had agreed to a cut in German armed forces, a German subsidy to Soviet troops during the period of transition, and a Soviet undertaking to renounce all restrictions on the exercise of German sovereignty, including Germany's right to choose its own alliances. Kohl promised a broad program of economic assistance to the Soviet Union.
The Soviets had abandoned their long-standing policy of forcing a German choice between unification with neutrality or continued German division with West German membership in NATO.
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While Gorbachev and Kohl were celebrating their agreement, Ukraine became the seventh Soviet republic to declare its sovereignty. Like the Russian Federation, it chose for the moment to remain within the Union but it revoked the right of Soviet troops to remain on Ukrainian territory. Now the Soviets could hardly refuse to sign the CFE Treaty: in promising to remove troops from forward areas they were only conceding what would soon be forced on them. From the U.S. point of view, however, CFE established a precedent that would subsequently be used to govern agreements with Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian Federation. There remained only the final piece, the commitment to parliamentarianism itself.

On September 3 Baker gave a summary of his goals: “to cast our vision beyond the prevention of war… to the actual building of peace. To prevent war, we must continue to deter aggression… To build the peace, however, America's role must go beyond balancing itself against remaining Soviet power.”

The “first task” on this agenda, he said, was

He then proposed free elections as the qualifying standard for every state, and outlined a CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) process to monitor such elections. This proposal was formalized in the Copenhagen Declaration, which was then ratified by the Charter of Paris and formed one of the crucial documentary elements of the Peace of Paris. When Gorbachev was temporarily overthrown in a coup d‘état, this provision was given such dramatic emphasis that the subsequent Moscow Declaration, the final document in the Peace of Paris suite, explicitly provided that democratic regimes were to be guaranteed by the state system and that the sovereignty of any state was forfeited if it failed to uphold the parliamentary model. The Long War was ending, and a new constitution for the society of states was being put in place.

In form, the Charter of Paris is more or less explicitly an amendment and extension of the Charter of the United Nations, which is reaffirmed in the text of the Charter of Paris. Indeed the Peace of Paris, which includes the Charter of Paris, can be seen as an amendment to Versailles (and San
Francisco, which had promulgated the United Nations Charter). The final amendments to the Versailles/San Francisco system include the series of political agreements made by the participating states of the CSCE, beginning with the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, the Charter of Paris in 1990,
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as well as the Copenhagen and Moscow Documents, which bracketed that Charter. These signified the end of the Long War by recognizing Germany, and created the instruments by which Russia was formally admitted to the society of parliamentary nation-states. Taken together, these agreements provide the texts of the constitution of the society of nation-states. As Judge Thomas Buergenthal wrote in 1992, the process I have called the Peace of Paris “has transformed into a new order for the world.”
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For three days in Paris in late November 1990, the heads of state or government from thirty-four nation-states—including the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France—met for the second time since the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. The Paris summit was neither one of the follow-up meetings contemplated by the Helsinki Final Act, however, nor one of the minor meetings provided for on specific subjects. Indeed a “summit of this nature was, in fact, not envisaged by previous CSCE decisions.”
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Gorbachev proposed this reconvening of the parties that had first met at Helsinki in order to give the blessing of the society of European states to the “Two-plus-Four” agreements that unified Germany.
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It was also felt that such a forum might encompass the signing of the CFE Treaty among twenty-two of the CSCE members, confirming for the entire European community an arms control agreement to which only some members were parties. Finally, the meeting in Paris would formalize the adoption of free elections in all member countries. The linking of these three subjects is significant for our study. Only when one variant of the nation-state had achieved consensus could the Long War end, unifying Germany and demilitarizing the central front. The commitment to parliamentary forms of election was thus a precondition, not a consequence, of the success of the other two issues to which it was joined in Paris.

The core provisions of the Charter of Paris that issued from this congress are contained in its first chapter, “A New Era of Democracy, Peace and Unity.” It declares that

This charter then affirms the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, welcomes the new CFE Treaty, and concludes with an explicit approval of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990, which united Germany. Thus the title of the chapter: “Democracy [the provision for free elections and human rights], Peace [the endorsement of CFE], and Unity [the recognition of Germany].”
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