As the cliché goes, some are born to greatness, while
others have it thrust upon them. Helmut
Kohl became German Chancellor in an unusual way. In most parliamentary democracies, a
successful “no-confidence” vote forces the government that lost the vote to
call for a new election. That government
is forced to resign but continues in office as a caretaker government until the
newly-called election determines the make-up of the new government. In Germany, there is what is called a
Constructive vote of no confidence. This
allows a parliament to withdraw confidence in a government and allow a new
government to take over immediately if there is the prospect of a majority to
support a new government to take its place.
Article 67 of the German Basic Law states:
Article 67.
(1) The Bundestag can express its lack of confidence in the Federal Chancellor
only by electing a successor with the majority of its members and by requesting
the Federal President to dismiss the Federal Chancellor. The Federal President
must comply with the request and appoint the person elected.
(2) Forty-eight hours must elapse between the motion and
the election.
This was how Helmut Kohl became chancellor in 1982. At that time, the ruling Social Democratic
Party [SPD - the chancellor was Helmut Schmidt] was in a coalition government
with the Free Democratic Party [FDP – led by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Schmidt’s
foreign minister]. By the fall of 1982,
the FDP disagreed with the SPD over economic policy. This disagreement prompted the FDP to leave
the SPD-FDP coalition and join with the Christian Democratic Union [CDU]. The FDP switched sides, Schmidt lost the
vote, and Kohl was immediately sworn in as Chancellor. Helmut Kohl remained Chancellor of Germany
until 1998.
Helmut Kohl died on June 16, 2017. He was 87.
He was Germany’s longest-serving Chancellor since World War II. He played a significant part in ending the
Cold War. His part in that was to allow
the US to base Pershing II missiles in West Germany. At the time, the Soviet Union had deployed
nuclear-capable SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Chancellor Schmidt argued the Europeans
needed a similar weapon to deter possible Soviet use of the SS-20 [and any
other aggression]. Ironically,
Chancellor Schmidt’s own party was deeply divided over whether to allow US
deployment of such a deterrent on German soil.
Helmut Kohl’s CDU party had no such divide. Over the course of two years of negotiations,
it boiled down to the Soviets desiring to keep almost 600 nuclear warheads in
Eastern Europe if the US canceled the deployment of the Pershing IIs and the
ground-launched cruise missiles in other NATO countries. The US didn’t like the Soviet idea and
deployed the Pershing IIs in November 1983.
The Soviets walked out of the INF negotiations. In 1987 on his own initiative, Kohl decided
to remove older Pershing Ia missiles.
The Soviets eventually came back to the bargaining table. Because Helmut
Kohl allowed the Pershing II deployment, and demonstrated good faith by getting
rid of the Pershing Ia missiles, the US and the Soviets eventually agreed to
eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons in September 1987.
Helmut Kohl will be remembered as the “Reunification
Chancellor”. He made the reunification
of Germany happen despite misgivings from the Soviets, the French, and the
British. How did he do it? I found this nugget from a National Public
Radio article published the day Kohl died:
"For 70
percent of the time that he was in office he looked like he was semi-asleep,"
John Kornblum, U.S.
ambassador to Germany during Kohl's final years in power, told
NPR's Eric
Westervelt. "He wasn't one of these people out ordering people around. He
spent much more
time talking with people on the phone and getting a feel for what
was going on. He
schmoozed all the time. But when it came time to do something, he did
something."
He was a politician, and from what the article implies,
he was a pretty good one. He listened
more than he spoke. When Francois Mitterrand
voiced his skepticism of German reunification, Kohl persuaded him the Germans
had learned from World War II, and that the best way for Germany to be a good
neighbor was to be integrated with the rest of Europe – financially,
economically, and politically. Kohl saw
German reunification and European integration as being two sides of the same
coin. He earned goodwill of Mitterrand
and Margaret Thatcher [albeit grudgingly] by renouncing German claims to Polish
land, by recognizing the Oder-Neisse line [set after World War II] as the
permanent German-Polish border. He won
over Mikhail Gorbachev by pledging to pay billions of German Deutschmarks to
pay for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany. Some would call that a very expensive bribe,
but it did the trick. Gorbachev used to
make references to a “common European home”, and Kohl’s desire for a unified
Germany in an integrated Europe echoed that theme. Cynics would think that was telling Gorbachev
what he wanted to hear, but Kohl followed his own rhetoric with concrete
action.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 took all of
us by surprise [it happened the day before I turned 27]. Helmut Kohl was on a visit to Poland. He was just sitting down to eat dinner when
he got word of the events of November 9th. He cut short his visit and rushed to Berlin. His critics thought Kohl lacked the vision to
make reunification a reality, but in less than three weeks he proposed a
10-point plan for reunification. In
presenting this plan, it included economic assistance, a kind of
confederation between the two German states, a wish to strengthen the European
Community [“We see the process of regaining German unity as a European matter…”]. He called for a more-democratic East Germany
with free and fair elections that included opposition parties. He sent a personal letter to the Francois Mitterrand,
which included a time-line for further steps at the EC level regarding the
economic and monetary union.
As travel between East and West Germany became more
routine, the East German political structure began to erode. This wasn’t due to anything Kohl himself did
– that credit goes to the people of East Germany, and to the people of the
former Warsaw Pact countries that threw off the Communist yoke in 1989. But to his credit Helmut Kohl saw his shot
and he took it. The East German
Christian Democrats [the sister party to Kohl’s own CDU] and their allies made
reunification the major issue for their campaign in the upcoming March 1990
elections. The East German Christian
Democrats won the election and got to form the first freely-elected government
in East Germany. Helmut Kohl had an
ideological twin in East Germany - Lothar de Maizière. Two months after de Maizière formed his
government, he and Kohl signed the German Treaty on the Creation of a Monetary,
Economic and Social Union, which entered into force on 1 July. To keep East German workers in East Germany
[and to keep them from overwhelming West Germany], Kohl introduced the
Deutschmark in East Germany, and allowed East Germans to swap their weaker East
German Marks at a through a 1-to-1 conversion rate. He did this despite warnings from the German
Bundesbank. Once the monetary and
economic union happened, the political union followed very quickly. The four post-World War II occupying powers
[US, UK, Soviet Union, and France] agreed to let Germany to regain total
sovereignty. East Germany reconstituted
itself into five Länder, and each Länder joined West Germany under the Basic
Law. The reunification of Germany took
effect October 3, 1990. Helmut Kohl was
the last chancellor of West Germany, and the first chancellor of a post-war united
Germany. None of this would have
happened had not the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled. But, Helmut Kohl saw an opening, adapted to
events on the fly, and accelerated events to such a point that something I
thought would not happen in my lifetime [the reunification of Germany] became a
reality. I believe his ability to
schmooze with other world leaders was key to the reunification.
As I mentioned before, Kohl renounced any German claims
to Polish lands east of the Oder-Neisse line.
He went one step further and did the same with the Czech Republic. Kohl made a treaty with them where Germany
renounced any claims to the Sudetenland.
Once Germany reunited, Kohl turned his attention to the European
Community. Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand
were the prime movers to make the Maastricht Treaty a reality. Now most European countries have the same currency
[the Euro], and travel between member countries is as easy as travel between
states within the United States. While
Europe doesn’t always speak with one voice, the European Union that resulted
from the Maastricht Treaty is a more-unified Europe, where we are seeing more
coordination between the member countries.
The most recent example of this coordination and cooperation is the
economic sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia in the wake of their illegal
annexation of Crimea.
More important than the entity that is the European
Union, there is the ideal of the
European Union. The EU is a strong
pillar of the post-Cold War order. To
borrow a phrase from RFE/RL’s Brian Whitmore, the EU stands for a world where
small countries have the same rights as big countries. The sovereignty of smaller countries is no
less sacrosanct than those of the larger countries and is, therefore,
unconditional. All countries are created
equal. That belief has brought peace and
stability to Europe. This contrasts with
countries like Russia, who believe that smaller states must be subservient to
the larger states. Countries like
Ukraine and Georgia want to join the EU, and desire to leave behind their past
when they were vassals of the Soviet Union.
Eugene Rumer’s June 30, 2016 piece on the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace website lists the EU’s values as:
1.
Respecting the independence, sovereignty, and territorial
integrity of all nations;
2.
Refraining from using force to settle international
disputes;
3.
Allowing freedom of choice by all states to pursue
their foreign policies and enter into alliances;
4.
Demonstrating respect for fundamental human rights and
personal freedoms in states’ domestic political arrangements.
Since late 2013, thousands of Ukrainians have died for
this ideal. They want to be part of
Europe and not to be subservient to Russia. They desire to chart their own course, and not
to have their course charted by someone else.
In no small way, THAT is Helmut Kohl’s legacy.
Helmut Kohl hung around German politics a little too
long. Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder unseated
him as German chancellor in 1998. Two
years later, it was revealed that Kohl had a secret slush fund he could use to
help fellow CDU politicians. The scheme
of illegal campaign financing did not enrich Kohl personally, but it did
tarnish his reputation to the extent that Angela Merkel, once a Kohl protégé,
took advantage of to become the CDU leader [and now German chancellor]. Over the passage of time, this one scandal
has receded from memory while Kohl’s legacy – the reunification of Germany and
the foundation of the European Union as we know it – remains intact. At first it seemed that Helmut Kohl had
greatness thrust upon him. But given his
performance on the world stage, it appears that Helmut Kohl was instead “born
to greatness.” His place in history is
secure.
RIP Helmut Kohl.
Helmut Kohl at the gate he opened...
