Germany Steps Out of the Shadows

...In time the Germans earned a reputation as staunch, efficient members of their respective alliances, a bit humorless perhaps, but then again, there is little to laugh at in German history...

...Bonn also has ignored American and British objections to the newly-created Franco-German combat brigade, which is distinct from nato...

...No less than half of them were at first opposed, claiming that the step would sabotage peace efforts...

...The German question, as it used to be known, was then put on indefinite hold...

...But to the dismay of many of its nato allies, the reunified German state lately has stepped out of World War H's shadow and bluntly asserted its sovereignty...

...Belgrade has seized on this to accuse the present Germany of trying to form a "Fourth Reich" by supporting the rebel governments...

...International pressure brought Germany back into line, from the coalition's point of view, and secured billions of marks to help fund the Gulf operations...

...Greece feared territorial claims on its northern border region by Macedonia, another Yugoslav republic that has declared independence...

...One Dutch official remarked after the meeting, "It's clear that in this case, at least, the Germans don't give a damn about European Unity...

...The re-emergence of Germany as a foreign policy player has understandably elicited a growing number of references to the evil uses of German diplomacy in the past...

...Soviet troops were to stay put until 1995, and only after their withdrawal was complete would nato personnel be stationed in the East...

...The impact of domestic events related to reunification already had knocked the government off balance: Kohl's impossible promises on the pace and size of reconstruction in eastern Germany had forced him to boost taxes, inflation was rising, and scores of new citizens in the East were proving surprisingly brazen xenophobics...

...The new international stance, though, is largely the result of old thinking, inherited from previous postwar governments...

...If serious turbulence and movement of peoples begins in Eastern Europe, Germany sees no way to avoid consequences at home," a Foreign Office official told me...

...It poisoned the air at Yalta and Potsdam, and soon turned wartime allies against one another...

...German officials largely set the agenda for December's Common Market negotiations in Maastricht, and have angered the other members as well as the U.S...

...The announcement last fall that Bonn intended to recognize the republics and would take up their cause with the EC surprised and upset the rest of the member states...

...But the fact that Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher were willing to take such a gamble shows how sensitive they are to developments in Eastern Europe...

...The Christian Social Union, a coalition partner of Kohl's Christian Democratic Union, is made up of Bavaria's Catholic conservatives, who have long favored aid to their fellow faithful in Croatia and Slovenia...

...and former Soviet Union...

...But Germany's allies, once again particularly Britain and the U.S., treated Bonn's attempts to avoid participation in the conflict as ingratitude...

...The divergence of German, U.S...

...It was evident, however, that Bonn had already twisted several arms and was unlikely to back down from its threat to unilaterally back the republics if the EC declined...

...The Cold War's military alignment gave them a safe haven from their past: Acting in concert with their allies freed them to focus on domestic concerns and avoid foreign entanglements that might invite unseemly comparisons...

...its component parts became showcases for competing ideologies...

...Intense media coverage of anti-war demonstrations in some cities contributed to the problem, giving the erroneous impression that Germans uniformly opposed the war or possibly supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait...

...One well-connected Bonn newspaper, General Anzeiger, observed that the move was meant "to display growing German self-confidence...

...Our foreign policy must be a combination of strong principles and practical politics...

...Michael Moran, a previous contributor, is a free-lance writer based in Munich and a news editor at Radio Free Europe...

...To be sure, the far Right here has to be watched closely, and Europe must not provide an excuse for a German military buildup...

...A vocal Croatian community in Germany, whose ubiquitous restaurants serve roughly the same function as neighborhood hamburger joints in the U. S., also was influential...

...But the pressure, indelicately applied, engendered widespread resentment and led Germans to feel that despite reunification and the end of the Cold War, their sovereignty was less than complete...

...The fear that foreigners fleeing depressed economic conditions will overwhelm the country is palpable here, particularly in the western regions, where residents still consider eastern Germany a foreign land...

...Croatia has natural constituencies in Germany that do not exist elsewhere...

...The recognition of Croatia and Slovenia may or may not bring lasting peace—Serbiainitially warned it would respond to the move by escalating the fighting...

...Roland Freudenstein of the German Society for Foreign Policy, a think tank, predicts the Gulf War experience will have a long-term effect on the nation's diplomacy...

...Indeed, that appears to explain in significant measure the government's posture since the defeat of Saddam...

...and weathering a storm of innuendo about the country's Nazi past and its penchant for tampering in Balkan affairs...

...On the other hand, endlessly evoking the Nazi years while discussing unrelated issues creates unnecessary tension...

...Bonn's unsettling independent thrust became apparent in West Germany's last days, when Kohl and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev struck a deal on the departure of the USSR's forces from East Germany...

...That question, taken quite literally, has vexed the world ever since Otto von Bismarck forged a nation from the scattered Germanic tribes of Central Europe in 1871...

...But the process was accelerated by the Gulf War, a crisis that caught Germany's leaders unprepared and left them feeling humiliated...

...He forgets his uncertainty and his scars when he becomes part of a group...

...Thus when the EC foreign ministers declared in December that they would decide on January 15 whether Slovenia and Croatia had met the necessary conditions to assure peace and democracy, it was not at all certain Germany would prevail...

...Actually, as in many of the countries involved, public opinion was divided...

...Yet the allies mostly held their tongues, sensing that Germany would react bitterly to any obstacles to reunification erected by the West...

...What changed is that the Germans stuck to their guns, they did not budge," an Irish diplomat here told me...

...France, Britain and Spain, who have their own domestic separatists to contend with, also wanted to avoid setting what they saw as a dangerous precedent...

...Nevertheless, championing Slovene and Croat independence required doing two things Germany had not done to any significant degree since the War: directly challenging the stated policies of the EC's preeminent political powers, Britain and France, not to mention the wishes of the U.S...

...Their misguided reaction was to seek curbs on refugees...

...The country was divided, rearmed and drafted into the service of rival blocs...

...During World War II, German soldiers and the Ustachi, forces of the Croatian puppet state established by the Nazis, mounted a genocidal campaign against Serbs and others throughout Yugoslavia...

...The arrangement was, in short, exactly what Washington and London had hoped to avoid...

...Germany quickly condemned the failed Soviet coup last August, and was the first major state to recognize the Baltics' independence...

...They showed little understanding for the pacifism that had taken root here, much of it as a result of efforts by the United States and Britain to prevent Germany from ever again menacing Europe...

...The Weimar factor could be observed last year when Right-wing extremists began attacking refugees from Eastern Europe...

...Because nothing creates refugees like a war, Bonn worries more than most governments about Yugoslavia's civil war spreading to neighboring Balkan states...

...The most basic precept of German politics since the War's end, what I call the Weimar factor, remains unchanged: domestic tranquillity at all costs—or, in the words of Bundesbank President Helmut Schlesinger, "the Kultur of stability...

...Bonn had no desire to complicate matters by equipping a military expedition to join the armies assembling in Saudi Arabia...

...Administration by raising domestic interest rates to combat inflation instead of reducing the cost of credit to stimulate the world economy...

...German politicians equated the influx with the hyperinflation of the 1930s, viewing it as a source of social conflict...

...It was the issue that the West failed to resolve at Versailles...

...In addition, millions of Germans vacation in Yugoslavia and were outraged at the shelling of cities like Split and Dubrovnik...

...The "concern" expressed by nameless officials in Washington and Paris about Bonn's new assertiveness, and the plainly stated fears of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, suggest a longing for the time when the U.S., Britain and France could meet and chart Germany's future...

...And the consequences are thought to be very unpredictable...

...Suddenly, the Germans found themselves painfully alone in their lack of enthusiasm for the hostilities...

...Having watched EC and UN peace efforts flounder, Germany was eager to apply pressure on Serbia, looked upon here as the aggressor...

...As V. S. Pritchett observed in 1964, "The German takes to mass life...

...They basically said, 'You want unity, then let's recognize them together.'" The debate over Yugoslavia was not the first event to alarm Germany's former Cold War allies, especially Britain and the U.S...

...It would seem more useful to recognize that, for better or worse, the answer to the German question is now in the hands of its people...

...The most dramatic in a series of recent events demonstrating this increasingly apparent attitude has been its successfully pressuring the European Community (EC) into recognizing Yugoslavia's breakaway republics, Croatia and Slovenia...

...Bonn's placing the country's perceived interest first in that instance foreshadows the direction its foreign policy can now be expected to take...

...In a November Cabinet meeting, Chancellor Helmut Kohl complained of "the despicable indifference displayed by the Western powers" toward Yugoslavia...

...But that time has passed...

...Nato members were wary of allowing the Soviet Army to remain in place for any extended period of time, and were afraid that Germany would submit to blackmail and prop up the Soviet Union with hard currency loans...

...What changed in the following month to prompt all 12 EC states to extend recognition...

...Germany has learned a lesson," he says...

...Germany favored continued negotiations with Iraq, and it was genuinely distressed when the bombing started...

...Rightly or wrongly, the instability of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) is viewed as having made the rise of Nazism possible...

...Unsurprisingly, opinion polls demonstrated that recognition was a very popular maneuver here...

...and Western European foreign policy interests was perhaps inevitable...

...The Germans further agreed to grant the USSR millions of marks worth of financial credit...

...Of course, there were a number of other considerations underlying the decision too...