The Cold War's Unlikeliest Couple

Secret documents smuggled out of Moscow proving a conspiracy between Thatcher and Gorbachev to stop German unification? Christmas has come three months early for Cold War junkies.

A cache of files copied by Pavel Stroilov, a young researcher at the Gorbachev foundation mere months before they were re-classified, have rocked England with revelations that despite her reputation as a hard line cold warrior and public support for German unity, Thatcher had actually reached out to the Soviet leader to prevent it.

In strict secrecy (recorded only by an unscrupulous Russian note-taker), she told Gorbachev:

“The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it.

We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

In the same way, a destabilisation of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests.

I can say that the President of the United States is of the same position”.

Today, the thought that Germany might cause another war in Europe is laughably quaint. Yet this was precisely the fear animating Thatcher, only 20 years ago which now seem like two centuries.

She even says: “All Europe is watching this not without a degree of fear, remembering very well who started the two world wars.”

Gorby himself worried about “the likelihood of new Bismarcks or Hitlers [appearing from the woodwork]”.

So what do these new documents tell us, apart from reinforcing the suspicions of being kept in the dark by our leaders?

For one thing, many of the fears expressed in the papers about German unification have come true.

Thatcher foresaw Germany quickly eclipsing Britain’s economy and destabilising Europe through its recognition of Croatia, which precipitated the Yugoslav war and led to all sorts of traumatic re-drawing of borders.

And Gorbachev’s prescient warning that “we won’t be able to explain it to our people if we lose the GDR” was proved right when he was taken out by an attempted hardline coup in 1991 from which neither he nor the USSR would recover.

In all this Byzantine mess, Gorbachev is the only statesman that comes out looking good and keeping his word.

At a time when Thatcher, Mitterand, Reagan and Bush were saying one thing publicly but scheming the exact opposite, he stood out (to the alarm of the others) by sticking true to his radical doctrine of non-intervention and de-militarisation.

As he told Bush in Malta: “The main principle which we have adopted and which we follow as part of our new thinking is the right of each country to choose, including the right to reconsider and change its original course. This is a very painful process, however this is a fundamental right.”

Though the USA did not keep its promises about Nato’s eastward expansion, Gorbachev kept his and removed all Soviet troops from German territory.

Gorbachev’s unyielding commitment to this rule sent shivers down the spine of France, whose foreign minister Jaques Attali told Gorbachev:

“A firm position of non-interference in internal matters of brother nations shown by the USSR during the events in the GDR have puzzled the French leadership. On the one hand, the French sincerely and with pleasure welcomed that fact that the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ has become a thing of the past. However, on the other hand, the French leadership raised a question whether this meant that the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it? This has caused a fear approaching panic. France by no means wants German re-unification”.

Indeed, faced with the looming possibility of the Wall’s collapse, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, far from getting ready to defend it at all costs, says: “We’d better take down the Wall ourselves’.

Gorbachev’s assessment that “Mr Kohl is hurrying, fussing, acting irresponsibly, not approaching things seriously”, and that “the theme of re-unification [is being] exploited for electioneering” was vindicated by the chancellor’s humiliating defeat in the 1993 local elections, at the hands of the ‘newly liberated’ former East Germans.

A newspaper at the time wrote:

“Mr Kohl’s promise then that the east would soon be a ‘blooming landscape’ returned to haunt him yesterday as the voters of Brandenburg, which in some parts has unemployment of more than 30 per cent, delivered their verdict. In addition to feeling deceived by the 1990 promises of swift prosperity for all, anti- CDU feeling was fuelled by the revelation last month that CDU leaders from west Germany who had come to run the government in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt had been improperly over-paying themselves”.

Sadly, Gorbachev was also proven right in his warning that, in the event of unification, the GDR “will be bought up whole… And when they reach world prices, living standards will fall immediately”.

Twenty years after the fall of the wall, “unemployment in the former East Germany remains double what it is in the west, and in some regions the number of women between the ages of 20 and 30 has dropped by more than 30 percent”.

Is there anything we have lost in this painful transition from a world of Berlin Walls and potential mutual nuclear annihilation, which now seems an entirely different planet from the one we currently inhabit?

If anything, it may have been the very ideal that allowed this transition to occur peacefully: Gorbachev’s principle that every country must be allowed to choose its own way.

Speaking frankly with George HW Bush at Malta, Gorbachev warned:

“It looks as though if in the past we were accused in ‘exporting the revolution’, today it is about the export of American values. The USA are committed to a particular social and economic system chosen by the American people. Let people of other countries also decide which god they want to pray to. The result will not be a copy of Swedish, British or Soviet model. No. They are looking for their own version which will provide them with better life”.

In their rush towards integration into ‘the West’, the newly independent states of Eastern Europe had forfeited this agency, emulating an economic and political system created by other people instead of plotting their own course according to their own unique idea of the good life.

The sudden end of East Germany has shown that no system is inevitable or immutable. Indeed, in the wake of the economic crisis, citizens of America and Western Europe must also ask whether the economic and political system they have inherited is one they would have chosen themselves; whether it really meets their needs for a better life.

Perhaps it’s time for a Perestroika of their own.