Adenauer on the Spot:
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
WHICH WAY GERMANY? Adenauer on the Spot By Richard C. Hottelet Bonn HISTORY HAS inscrutable ways. When the French National Assembly convened for the EDC debate, both the friends and the enemies...
...The hasty manifesto was indeed mainly designed to take some of the wind which was expected to blow into nationalist sails...
...And the Chancellor was ready to accept the loss of the Saar if that would smooth the path of European union...
...Beneath the seal of hope, complacency and self-delusion, natural forces have been at work to turn the pickled plan of four years ago into a vastly different product...
...Similarly, Chancellor Adenauer stressed that sovereignty would not mean license or open the way for a policy of opportunist oscillation between East and West...
...A sovereign, democratic Germany, not a satellite but self-reliant, must be rearmed and brought into a Western alliance as a bulwark of peace in Europe...
...He preached it on every occasion, campaigned with it from one end of the country to the other, forbade his officials even to entertain the possibility that it could fail...
...But underlying such favorable influences is the greater political maturity of the German people...
...Democracy was a tender shoot...
...The Allied High Commission's last remaining important function is to dissolve itself...
...The problem of Germany's place in the West remains to be solved...
...Economic recovery and expansion have been phenomenal...
...Then the Cabinet officially followed through, demanding the restoration of sovereignty and participation in Western defense without discrimination...
...Negotiations were suggested with Britain, the United States and the EDC countries without France...
...Each saw in his own course the best way to limit German strength and influence...
...When the French National Assembly convened for the EDC debate, both the friends and the enemies of the defense treaties shared one basic desire...
...For years, reporters in Germany, including myself, have coppered their description of the growth of German democracy with the reminder that the Bonn Republic had not yet undergone any real test...
...Foreign policy, such as it was, aimed to remove the restrictions which lay heavily all around and to establish normal relations with the Western world...
...and far from criticizing the Chancellor for having committed himself unconditionally to a dead duck, newspapers and speakers chided him for blaming France too sharply in his post mortems...
...Criticism of France was neither especially loud nor long...
...Today, Germany is not and does not feel like an occupied country...
...It could fairly be considered a hothouse plant which the Western allies had shielded and cultivated...
...Some observers give the bustling vacation season and the continuation of high prosperity a share of the credit...
...All concerned now see things much more clearly, but the fact that the European Defense Community has been swept away with its cobwebs of habit and illusion is a relief, not a solution...
...It has stood firm in the face of Soviet blandishments and Communist pressure...
...Germany was very modest and very frightened in those days after Korea...
...Yet the most likely result of the Paris decision will be to increase the strength of the new German Republic and to establish its influence in Western councils...
...The Socialists proposed a new Big Four conference on Germany and the concentration of German effort on reunification...
...Coming after a black summer which had seen Otto John and CDU Bundestag Deputy Schmidt-Wittmarck defect to the East, the first serious industrial strikes in postwar Germany and severe losses to the harvest, this buffet might have shaken the Government...
...the lid was lifted, not blown off...
...Like the majority of Germans, he believes Western unity and strength to be as necessary as ever for a variety of reasons...
...The currency is as stable as the Government, and both have won enormous respect around the world...
...The problems which beset the Western nations four years ago are still with us...
...Backed by German opinion and by Britain, the United States and Benelux, Dr...
...We would he well advised to begin with a solution while Adenauer is alive and in office...
...There followed no wave of nationalist reaction, no outburst of radical demands...
...In proposing a nine-power conference to consider the problem of German rearmament, Sir Winston Churchill quite deliberately discarded the old pattern of conversations between Western Germany on the one hand and the three Occupation Powers on the other...
...No one could have committed himself more enthusiastically to the cause of EDC than the German Chancellor...
...As soon as it became clear how little wind there was, the Chancellor and his ministers began to soften their line...
...When the French Assembly killed EDC, it knocked the bottom out of Adenauer's foreign policy...
...Chancellor Adenauer had little trouble in convincing the country that the concessions he had made were a small price to pay for German admission to the Western bloc...
...He took a decisive and politically risky step in subordinating the aim of German unity to the ideal of Western integration...
...Sovereignty under the Bonn Conventions was a friendly fiction in which Britain, France and the United States could reassume supreme authority any time they considered necessary...
...All in all, a gruff and perhaps threatening set of wishes...
...Economic revival seemed more good luck than a steady trend, and the way Germany was overdrawing in the European Payments Union there was no telling how long this luck would hold...
...He declared that rearmament without discrimination would not mean unlimited rearmament, but that Germany would accept reasonable restrictions and would always stand ready to merge its national armed forces with those of its neighbors in a joint defense effort...
...Adenauer has a good chance of winning Western consent for his new program...
...Four years ago, when EDC began as the Pleven Plan, Western Germany was and felt like an occupied country...
...Such reasonable extenuation of Germany's new policy does not alter the fact that the Chancellor will press for sovereignty and rearmament at the coming international conferences...
...But the German people accepted the debacle with their customary placidity...
...In short, Germany today is a healthy, functioning, democratic state, with a new self-assurance and no mean idea of its own worth...
...He affirmed that Germany is part of the West and would freely surrender her functions of sovereignty to international organizations...
...When the Bonn Conventions and the treaty creating a European Defense Community were signed in May 1952, satisfaction in Germany was genuine...
...Adenauer gave emphatic public assurance of his devotion to the European cause, said that he still hoped for some kind of European defense community and expressed the conviction that the pressure of circumstances would bring one about sooner or later...
...The German Cabinet seemed no more certain of this maturity than other observers when it rushed forward to claim sovereignty and the right to rearm...
...In such strongholds of nationalist feeling as Lower Saxony, he publicly and at electiontime justified French fears, criticism and open abuse as a natural consequence of German misbehavior in the past...
...Although he has weathered the EDC storm remarkably well, there is a limit to the number of conferences from which any politician can return empty-handed...
...Those who had thought that history could be preserved and stored for future use now find themselves very much mistaken...
...Disappointment and bitterness at France's failure to rise to the need of the hour were freely expressed, but the grim forebodings about what would ensue have not been realized...
...It is important that he should...
...As an immediate solution, he favors membership in NATO, with some smaller European grouping inside NATO a more distant but still desirable objective...
...Not only is self-defense a vital function of democracy but a German contribution could, by increasing Western power and influence, help lead to a peaceful reunification of Germany by agreement with the Soviet Union...
...In 1950, German internal politics had not had time to settle down to a predictable system...
...There was no Foreign Office...
...Small wonder then that the German Government replied sharply to the blow from Paris...
...The new slate of Western Europe was recognized at once by Great Britain...
...In this connection it is known that Bonn is prepared to abide by the old EDC maximum of twelve divisions with limited war production and severe restrictions on atomic weapons even if a German national army is admitted to NATO...
...The collapse of Chancellor Adenauer's European policy under the weight of French suspicion seemed to be the kind of defeat which the Chancellor and his brand of civilized restraint might not survive...
...By great good fortune the new mixture is not explosive...
...The revised Occupation Statute is still in force, but its few residual restrictions are more nuisance than hindrance...
...Hottelet filed this dispatch before the Schleswig-Holstein elections in which Adenauer's party lost ground.—Ed.] In the time that has elapsed since the Paris decision, there has been no sign of a rise in isolationism or neutralism in Germany, much less any movement to turn away from an unreceptive West and seek solace in Moscow...
...The demise of EDC has created an entirely new situation...
...Free elections have swept radicalism out of German public life...
...Four eventful years and the frustration of patching up a crazy quilt of treaties, conventions, protocols, guarantees, supplementary agreements and executive interpretations have changed not only the British outlook but the German even more...
...Only a handful of consuls, agents and minor diplomats represented Germany in those countries which had gotten around to recognizing the Bonn Republic...
...Almost anything, the mere fact that the Occupation Powers invited Germans to discuss the possibility of joining in the common defense, was a reassuring step forward...
...The Bonn Republic has demonstrated that it is willing and able to manage its affairs and consolidate democracy...
...Adenauer felt strong enough to counterattack by rejecting a meeting with the Soviet Union at this time as hopeless and the SPD suggestion as outrageous...
...Neither his prestige nor his program seemed to suffer in the least...
...A return either to the old forms or to the old means of contriving a solution whereby the German army would be larger than the Russian and smaller than the French is now unthinkable...
...The icy blast of economic depression or some serious political setback could well destroy an organism which had still to be considered delicate...
...To start with, it made known that the Bonn Conventions now killed by the French Assembly would remain dead for Germany...
...The Federal Government was barely a year old and very much coddled, supervised and suspected by the Allied High Commissioners who retained supreme authority...
...The presence of foreign troops on German soil was to be regulated by special treaties...
...He disclaimed any intention of isolating France and stressed Franco-German friendship as the only foundation of a united Europe...
...Direct contact with the outside world was haphazard...
...Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden came to Bonn on his round of consultations as a matter of course...
...Foreign observers cocked their ears for rumbles of warning that the bitter shock of EDC might knock German politics off the rails of moderation...
...German public opinion's imperturbable response is one of the clarifying and hopeful by-products of the EDC crisis and the melancholy summer of 1954...
Vol. 37 • September 1954 • No. 39
