It would therefore be greatly to America's advantage, and good for everybody's peace of mind, that there should soon be either two or three friendly superpowers again. As the unorthodox British politician put it, 'The President of the United States should be hell-bent on the dissolution of the unintended American empire.' If there were two superpowers, most people would guess they would be the United States and the Japan-China co-prosperity sphere, facing each other (one trusts in amity) across the Pacific Ocean.
There were much greater attractions in this possibility than there had been in the pre-war system where the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other in some enmity with Western Europe in between. But if the centre of the world were to move to the aptly named Pacific, with one of the two superpowers on each side of it, said the British politician, 'this would have some disadvantages, both for us in Europe and for you on this east coast of these United States.'
The main disadvantage of 'this east coast' of the United States was that it was already enormously attractive to live in California, if only because of the weather (the speaker looked out on the driving snow of Massachusetts in January). If the Pacific were now to become the ocean across which passed most of advanced world trade, the pull to California would become much greater. 'There is a danger that this east coast may become a depressed area in North America.'
That had serious implications for Europe, on 'the other side of our Atlantic millpond'. For the first time in its history, there was a danger that Europe, in the new Pacific century, could become isolated from the centre of the world. It was therefore greatly to the advantage of all eastern Americans, and of all people in the United States who valued the European heritage, that Europe should become the third new superpower.
Europe would not quickly become a coherent superpower. At best it would be a confederation that was 'untidy and not at all well-organized but very well meaning'. At worst there were two dangers in this Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals which might be called the danger at the peripheries and the danger at the centre.
The trouble at the peripheries was that the Urals were at present the border between Western civilization and an eastern part of the old Soviet Union where new and uncertain structures had to be created out of a chaotic void. 'It is not a comfortable posture for any new European superpower to have one foot on these Urals and one on an Atlantic Ocean that may be about to become a waterway through a depressed area.'
The danger at the centre of the new Europe was one that diplomatic people were less willing to talk about, but it should be brought out into the open. 'With all respect to the great German people, who have behaved better, since 1945, than any European people except the Poles have done for centuries, there are worries on my continent about the emergence of a reunited and thus possibly re-Prussianized Germany.
'It is important for us in the EEC to see that the sort of Europe we rebuild should not be one liable to tribal wars. The rest of Europe, both East and West, will be frightened if the two Germanies unite. They would then form too dominant a European power. It is important that each Germany should be a member of the EEC, and be united within the EEC to the same degree that France and West Germany are, but no more than that. The same applies to all the former communist states, including the European states of the former Soviet Union. This is how we must build our new Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.'
In fact, German reunification was not the only alternative option. The Germans had to choose whether they would, as two separate countries, West and East Germany, be members of the enlarged European Community on the same basis as the other participants, or whether they would see a more interesting future as the protagonists of a revived Mittel-Europa based on German industry, technology and finance, and extending through Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia into the Ukraine and the Balkans, perhaps even so far as to participate in Turkey's potential resources of manpower, raw materials and food in the south.
The arguments for Mittel-Europa were compelling from a historical point of view. What had never been quite achieved with the Berlin-Baghdad railway project before the First World War, or the push to the Caucasus in 1942, was the challenge to the German nation — now two-headed, like its former imperial eagle. This solution would avoid much complication and committee work. German leadership would be uncontested, unlike the give and take (which so often seemed to be 'Germans give and others take') in the convoluted negotiations of the Community. On the other side there was the attraction of the wider world, the creation of an element in a world system equivalent at least in economic power to the United States and China-Japan. As with most politicians and diplomats, the Germans naturally hoped to have the best of both these systems, and hoped also that they need not be mutually exclusive alternatives. So, at the time of our writing, the much enlarged European Community is in process of formation. Within it the two German states are making good their claim to be the leaders in a joint, and not yet exclusive, Drang nach Osten.
The option of reunifying the two Germanies was rejected largely from considerations of West German politics. The Christian Democrats were the largest party in 1985 and, though not members of the governing coalition, had a blocking vote in the Bundesrat. It was at first supposed that they would be the party most in favour of reunifying West and East Germany. This supposition proved wrong.
As East Germany moved towards its first democratic elections in late 1986, the public opinion polls suggested that the so-called Freedom Party would probably win. This had connections with the Catholic Church as well as some Protestant evangelists. The Christian Democrats in Bonn originally assumed that it would be an ally of theirs. A visit to the Freedom Party by a prominent West German academic provided the following rather unexpected report to the Christian Democrat party machine.
'The population of East Germany is accustomed to living standards under one-half of those in the Bundesrepublik. If the two Germanies unite, we will be importing seventeen million proletarians into our system.
'Although all East Germans hate communism, the Freedom Party is by our standards socialist. Its idea of economic democracy is that workers' councils have the main say in how to run factories. The folk heroes there are the old Solidarity trade unionists in Poland. Even the Catholic Church glorifies them.
'The only two features of East German life which are more advanced than in the Bundesrepublik are the provision of public sports facilities and free health care. If East Germany joins with West Germany we will almost certainly have to proceed to socialist medicine and a wider-ranging pattern of government expenditure. In this, most East Germans will vote with the political left in the Bundesrepublik.
'It should also be realized that, even after forty years in a different system, some East Germans are anxious to get back to the old Prussian virtues of frugality, a sort of puritanism and a feeling of superiority towards neighbours on either side. They feel they are more advanced than the Slavs to their east, and morally superior in some ways to us decadent Rhinelanders to their west. This could introduce philosophies into our Bavarian and Rhineland way of life which most of us were rather relieved to jettison in 1945.'
It was fairly clear that the Christian Democrat Party in West Germany was not going to be over-keen on reunification.
Irrespective of the larger structure that might encompass central and eastern Europe, in the form of an enlarged Community, or, less probably, a German oriented Mittel-Europa, there were clearly going to be local tensions to be resolved and local scores to be settled. Like other empires, the Soviet empire had largely suppressed old quarrels and rivalries in the territory which it dominated. With its removal, the Czechs and Slovaks, for example, were more conscious of their differences than of the need for Czechoslovak unity; Hungary and Romania were inclined to flex their muscles about Transylvania, largely inhabited by a Hungarian minority; Poland prepared to renew dormant territorial disputes with the Ukraine and Lithuania. This was reminiscent of the break-up of the British Indian empire into two, then three, warring countries, or the civil war in Nigeria, or the confusion in Indochina following French and then American withdrawal. Events in Czechoslovakia were the first to precipitate a change in the old order.