The Downing Street Years (135 page)

A week before I went to Frankfurt I had talked through the problem with Jim Baker over lunch at Chequers. I told him that I still considered that Chancellor Kohl was a courageous man and a strong supporter of the United States: the problem was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who normally favoured a softer, more accommodating approach to the Soviets. I predicted that a number of other governments would be inclined to waver on SNF, because the opinion polls showed that people no longer believed in the Soviet threat. It was therefore vital that the United States and Britain should stand firm. Jim Baker said he very much agreed with my line. The Administration needed an assurance on deployment or it would not get funding from Congress to develop a successor to LANCE. But he wondered whether the price of German agreement would have to be the acceptance of vague language on negotiations on SNF. I replied that though there was scope for NATO to make unilateral reductions in its holdings of nuclear artillery, we could not negotiate on SNF without getting trapped into another ‘zero’. Jim Baker was clearly more anxious about handling German sensitivities than I was, but I still believed that we saw things in the same way.

Consequently, when I met Chancellor Kohl in Frankfurt I was quite direct. I said that in putting the case for SNF to his people he should simply ask the fundamental question whether they valued their freedom. Freedom for the German people had started on the day the Second World War had ended and NATO had preserved it for forty years. The Soviet Union continued to represent a military threat. Britain, Germany and the United States represented the real strength of NATO. I understood his difficulties in dealing with German public opinion but I believed that he and I were fundamentally in agreement. NATO had to modernize its weapons, otherwise the United States would sooner or later start to withdraw its troops from Germany. Britain and Germany together should give a lead. In spite of the
pressure the Federal Chancellor was under, I came away from Frankfurt feeling that the agreed line on SNF might still hold.

Certainly, the Soviets were in no doubt about the strategic importance of the decisions which would have to be made about SNF. Mr and Mrs Gorbachev arrived at 11 o’clock at night on Wednesday 5 April in London for the visit which had had to be postponed the previous December as a result of an earthquake in Armenia. I met them at the airport and returned to the Soviet Embassy where the number of toasts drunk suggested that the Soviet leader’s early crackdown on vodka was not universally applicable. In my talks with Mr Gorbachev I found him frustrated by — and surprisingly suspicious of — the Bush Administration. I defended the new President’s performance and stressed the continuity with the Reagan Administration. But the real substance of our discussions related to arms control. I raised directly with Mr Gorbachev the evidence which we had that the Soviets had not been telling us the truth about the quantity and types of chemical weapons which they held. He stoutly maintained that they had. He then brought up the issue of SNF modernization. I said that obsolete weapons did not deter and that NATO’s SNF would certainly have to be modernized. The forthcoming NATO summit would confirm this intention. Mr Gorbachev returned to the subject in his speech at Guildhall which contained a somewhat menacing section about the effect on East-West relations and arms control talks more generally if NATO went ahead with SNF modernization.

All this pressure was by now having an effect. In particular, Chancellor Kohl was retreating. In April a new German position on SNF modernization and negotiation was extensively leaked before any of the allies — other than the Americans — were informed. The German position paper did not rule out a ‘third zero’, did not call on the Soviet Union unilaterally to reduce its SNF levels to those of NATO and cast doubt on SNF modernization.

I had acrimonious discussions with Chancellor Kohl behind the stage-managed friendliness of our meeting at Deidesheim at the end of April.
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Chancellor Kohl gave a lengthy justification for Germany’s recent conduct. He wanted NATO to discuss a mandate for negotiations on SNF, though he said he was absolutely opposed to a ‘third zero’. He said that it was simply not sustainable politically in Germany to argue that those nuclear weapons which most directly affected Germany should be the only category not subject to negotiation.

I said that I would begin by reminding Chancellor Kohl of some
of the background. He had been the one who had originally proposed that there should be an early NATO summit to take the decision on modernization and I had supported him. I read out to him the joint statement which we had issued at Frankfurt. We had not been informed of the German Government’s new position until several days after it had been leaked to the press. NATO had to have SNF and they must be modernized, as he himself had agreed recently. We could not become embroiled in SNF negotiations which would lead inexorably to a ‘third zero’. I told Chancellor Kohl about the reports we had been getting of the Soviet Union’s real views and intentions. They were delighted that they had gained an advantage with the modernization of their own SNF and that we were delaying ours. They were also confident that they could influence opinion in West Germany in favour of SNF negotiations. I repeated that Britain and the United States were absolutely opposed to negotiations on SNF and would remain so. Our present forces were an irreducible minimum if we were to sustain the strategy of flexible response and they would in due course have to be modernized. Even if a decision to deploy the Follow-On to LANCE (FOTL) were postponed, there must be clear evidence at the forthcoming summit of NATO support for the US development programme. In fact, the German Government’s actions had put NATO under severe strain.

Chancellor Kohl began to get agitated. He said he did not need any lectures about NATO, that he believed in flexible response and repeated his opposition to a ‘third zero’. But the fact was that Germany was more affected than anyone else by SNF and that therefore German interests should be given priority. I retorted that, contrary to what he said, SNF did not affect only Germany. Our troops were on German soil. It had never been possible to rely on all the NATO allies; there were always weak links. But hitherto the United States, Britain and Germany had constituted the real strength of NATO.

At this Chancellor Kohl became still more worked up. He said that for years he had been attacked as the vassal of the Americans. Now he was suddenly being branded a traitor. He repeated that he did not believe that once the INF agreement had been reached you could resist negotiations on SNF. But he would think again about what I had said and would be in touch with the Americans about it. I reported on our discussion in a message to President Bush, concluding that ‘provided Britain and the United States remain absolutely firm, we can still achieve a satisfactory outcome at the [NATO] summit’.

In the run up to the NATO summit the newspapers continued to focus on splits in the alliance. This was particularly galling because
we should have been celebrating NATO’s fortieth anniversary and highlighting the success of our strategy of securing peace through strength. Apart from the Americans only the French fully agreed with my line on SNF and in any case, not being part of the NATO integrated command structure, they would not be of great importance in the final decision. I minuted on Tuesday 16 May: ‘if we get a “no negotiations” SNF section this will be reasonable, combined with a supportive piece on SNF research.’ I was still quite optimistic.

Then on Friday 19 May I suddenly learnt that the American line had shifted. They were now prepared to concede the principle of negotiations on SNF. Jim Baker claimed in public that we had been consulted about this US change of tack, but in fact we had not. Without in any way endorsing the American text, which I considered wrong-headed, I sent two main comments to the Americans. It should be amended to make the opening of SNF negotiations dependent upon a decision to deploy a successor to LANCE. It should include a requirement of substantial reductions in Soviet SNF towards NATO levels. Jim Baker replied that he doubted whether the Germans would accept this. The attitude of Brent Scowcroft — the President’s National Security Adviser — was sounder. But I could not tell what the President’s own view would be. In any case, I now found myself going to Brussels as the odd man out. Everyone else accepted the principle of SNF negotiations, and the differences between them existed only on the conditions to be met before these were held. I did not want any negotiations at all. And, if there had to be any, I wanted tougher conditions than those in the American text. Above all there must be no fudged language on the ‘third zero’.

This was not like a European Council: it was important that we demonstrated the unity of NATO if it was to be effective and so I felt that compromise in some circumstances was a moral duty rather than a matter of weakness. However, I put my case very strongly in the speech I made. I said that I was profoundly sceptical whether negotiations on SNF could possibly be to NATO’s benefit. I was prepared to consider a text which would envisage such negotiations, but only after an agreement for the reduction of conventional forces had been reached and partially implemented. This, moreover, could only be on the basis that another ‘zero’ was excluded.

In fact, at the last minute the Americans brought forward proposals calling for conventional forces reductions and for not just further deep cuts but accelerated progress in the CFE talks in Vienna, so that those reductions could be accomplished by 1992 or 1993. This sleight of hand permitted a compromise on SNF by enabling the Germans to
argue that the prospect of ‘early’ SNF negotiations was preserved. However, I emphasized in my subsequent statement to the House of Commons the fact that only after agreement had been reached on conventional force reductions, and implementation of that agreement was under way, would the United States be authorized to enter into negotiations to achieve partial reductions in Short-Range Missiles. No reductions would be made in NATO’s SNF until after the agreement on conventional force reductions had been fully implemented.

I felt that I had done as much as was humanly possible — without firm support from the United States for the line I really wanted — to stop our sliding into another ‘zero’. I could live with the text which resulted from the tough negotiations which took place in Brussels. But I had seen for myself that the new American approach was to subordinate clear statements of intention about the alliance’s defence to the political sensibilities of the Germans. I did not think that this boded well.

President Bush’s remarks in his speech in Mainz on 31 May 1989 about the Germans as ‘partners in leadership’ confirmed the way American thinking about Europe was going. When the President came to London he sought to deal with the problems those remarks had caused by saying that we too were partners in leadership. But the damage had been done. Now, as 1989 wore on, the march of events in eastern Europe and the prospect of German reunification added a new element, inclining the United States to take German issues still more seriously.

In the late summer of 1989 the first signs appeared of the imminent collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Solidarity won the elections in early June in Poland and General Jaruzelski accepted the result: I congratulated him on this when he came to London a few days later. Liberalization proceeded in Hungary, which opened its borders to Austria in September across which flooded East German refugees. The haemorrhage of population from East Germany and demonstrations at the beginning of October in Leipzig led to the fall of Erich Honecker. The demolition of the Berlin Wall began on 10 November. The following month it was the turn of Czechoslovakia. By the end of the year Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who had been gaoled in
February, had been elected President of Czechoslovakia and the evil Ceauşescus had been overthrown in Romania.

These events marked the most welcome political change of my lifetime. But no matter how much I rejoiced at the overthrow of communism in eastern and central Europe I was not going to allow euphoria to extinguish either reason or prudence. I did not believe that it would be easy or painless to entrench democracy and free enterprise. Some of the liberalizing and liberated countries had stronger traditions of freedom to draw upon than others. But it was too soon to be sure precisely what sort of regimes would emerge. Moreover, central and eastern Europe — still more the Soviet Union — was a complicated patchwork of nations. Political freedom would also bring ethnic disputes and challenges to frontiers, which might have moved several times in living memory. War could not be ruled out.

The welcome changes which were happening had come about because the West had remained strong and resolute — but also because Mr Gorbachev and the Soviet Union had renounced the Brezhnev doctrine. On the continued survival of a moderate, reforming Government in the USSR would depend the future of the new democracies. We had seen in the past — in 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia — what happened when democrats took to the streets believing that the West would ultimately step in to help them against the Soviets and then found themselves abandoned. It was too early to assume that the captive nations were permanently free from captivity: their Soviet captors could still turn ugly. It was therefore essential to go carefully and avoid actions which would be deemed provocative by either the Soviet political leadership or the military.

This led directly on to the third consideration — the future of Germany. For nothing was more likely to stir up old fears in the Soviet Union — fears which the hardliners would be anxious to exploit — than the prospect of a reunited, powerful Germany, possibly with renewed ambitions on its eastern flank.

There was — and still is — a tendency to regard the ‘German problem’ as something too delicate for well-brought-up politicians to discuss. This always seemed to me a mistake. The problem had several elements which could only be addressed if non-Germans considered
them openly and constructively. I do not believe in collective guilt: it is individuals who are morally accountable for their actions. But I do believe in national character, which is moulded by a range of complex factors: the fact that national caricatures are often absurd and inaccurate does not detract from that. Since the unification of Germany under Bismarck — perhaps partly because national unification came so late — Germany has veered unpredictably between aggression and self-doubt. Germany’s immediate neighbours, such as the French and the Poles, are more deeply aware of this than the British, let alone the Americans; though the same concern often leads Germany’s immediate neighbours to refrain from comments which might appear insensitive. The Russians are acutely conscious of all this too, though in their case the need for German credit and investment has so far had a quiescent effect. But perhaps the first people to recognize the ‘German problem’ are the modern Germans, the vast majority of whom are determined that Germany should not be a great power able to exert itself at others’ expense. The true origin of German
angst
is the agony of self-knowledge.