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The media cycle thrives on anniversaries. Today, November 9, is a perfect example: for the past week or so, the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times and other prominent newspapers have been filled with reflections on the meaning of an event now twenty years past. Late in the evening on November 9, 1989, an inept circle of “reform” communists in East Germany inadvertently gave the green light for unrestricted travel across divided Berlin. Within hours, the Berlin Wall had been overwhelmed and mounted by jubilant, dancing Germans. It was neither the beginning nor the end of a much larger process, the collapse of Soviet domination in East Central Europe; yet the events of November 9 have come to represent the symbolic end of the Cold War.[1]
At their best, “round” anniversaries can lead to stock-taking and a fresh look at seemingly familiar circumstances. How has NATO, or the EU, or Central Europe fared in the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall? Canny leaders know how to harness these moments of historical reflection and use them to propel the conversation forward. And that is just what German chancellor Angela Merkel sought to do last week in her appearance before a joint session of Congress.
Merkel structured her speech around biographies: the story of Konrad Adenauer, the founding chancellor of West Germany; of historian Fritz Stern, whose family fled Germany in 1938; of Merkel’s own childhood as the daughter of an East German pastor. She explained what the “American dream” meant to her growing up, and expressed thanks to the United States for helping Germans to achieve their unity in freedom. Here Merkel echoed, and built upon, a comparable speech by candidate Barack Obama in Berlin in July 2008.[2] She lauded the pilots of the Berlin Airlift; the sixteen million American soldiers who served in Germany at one time or another; and the pronouncements of various Presidents, from Kennedy through Reagan through George H. W. Bush.
For a German leader, historical scene-setting is never beside the point. Germany’s neighbors and allies will always want to know how each succeeding generation understands the significance of Nazi crimes. Merkel’s reference to the “Night of the Broken Glass” (also on November 9, seventy-one years ago) helped to underscore her firm remarks about Iran and Israel: “A nuclear bomb in the hands of an Iranian President who denies the Holocaust, threatens Israel and denies Israel the right to exist, is not acceptable!”
Naturally, Merkel did not leave off with these nods to historically driven imperatives. Speaking – as Germans are wont to do – on Europe’s behalf, Merkel insisted that “shared values” still link the North Atlantic powers in unique ways. “I am deeply convinced that there is no better partner for Europe than America and no better partner for America than Europe.” In outlining her views on the Afghanistan conflict, globalization, and climate change, she repeatedly insisted that cooperation between Europe and the United States was the key to making genuine progress. Merkel’s world is that of a dumbbell, in which Europe and America constitute a kind of double center of gravity in world politics. It is a vision with a long tradition of its own: John F. Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle, among others, sketched out “grand designs” of trans-Atlantic relations along similar lines.
Alas, Merkel’s dumbbell model is either hopelessly antiquated or impossibly precocious. There is little evidence that American policy makers are inclined to approach early 21st-Century challenges – the rise of China, the containment of fundamentalist violence – in preferential consultation with European partners. Europe is neither a problem nor a solution; and because it does not speak with one voice, it is easily ignored – or manipulated.
Merkel’s speech is particularly disheartening when read in conjunction with a hard-hitting analysis published last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). In advocating a “post-American Europe,” the report’s authors, Jeremy Shapiro and Nick Witney, savagely dispense with a number of illusions still harbored by European leaders. Europe no longer needs to rely upon America for security, they argue; it does not have fully overlapping interests with the United States; and it is hobbled, not helped, by efforts on the part of various European states to cultivate a “special relationship” with Washington. Ultimately, they suggest, the United States itself would benefit from a more unified and self-confident Europe that was able to articulate its own interests and advance its own agendas with respect to controversial topics such as Russia, Afghanistan, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Where Shapiro and Witney excel is in their skewering of European “strategies of ingratiation” vis-à-vis America. Merkel employed nearly all of these in her speech to Congress. She practiced “soft envelopment” when seeking to draw the United States into a binding climate agreement at the upcoming Copenhagen summit. She emphasized Germany’s readiness to “pay dues” by shouldering responsibilities in Afghanistan. Most obviously, she engaged continuously in what Shapiro and Witney describe (dismissively) as “lighting candles to the transatlantic relationship.” Whereas these strategies are intended to help nudge American behavior in the desired direction, lecturing to the United States – or thanking it profusely, as Merkel did – is inherently unlikely to sway opinion in Washington. The EU needs to show that it can pursue its own priorities on its own resources.
But having advanced a series of bold propositions, Shapiro and Witney devote no attention to the practical attainment of their goals. How can a European Union of twenty-seven members be expected to arrive at distinctive foreign policy positions? The new ratified Lisbon Treaty may provide an answer; the treaty creates two new offices, a President of the European Council serving a 2.5-year term (awkward!) and a High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. In the event that these new arrangements do allow for a more skillful and timely articulation of agreed European positions, this raises a further question: how likely are the EU member countries to invest significantly in such fundamental attributes of power as military force? Is Europe genuinely prepared to underwrite its own security?
Twenty years after the revolutions of 1989, the idea of creating new structures for a post-Cold War world is still quite radical. Merkel’s approach represents a familiar way of doing business, one that continues to bank on the essential unity of “the West.” But the persistence of trans-Atlantic imbalances has been irritating to many Americans and enervating to Europeans. And it is surely time to move beyond sentimental Cold War clichés such as the “liberty bells” ringing in Philadelphia and (in replica) in the Schöneberg town hall in Berlin. Merkel’s speech to Congress ended on this clanging note. Can Europeans, or at least Germans, start playing in a different register?
[1] For an excellent overview of the events of that night, with a special emphasis on the role of Tom Brokaw and other Western broadcasters, see Mary Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); also Sarotte, “How It Went Down: The little accident that toppled history,” Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2009.
[2] On Obama’s speech at the “victory column” in Berlin, see Andreas Daum, “No Free Lunch: Obama and Nietzsche in Berlin,” History News Network, July 28, 2008.
Tags: Angela Merkel, Berlin Wall, EU, GDR, Germany, Holocaust, Lisbon Treaty, media, NATO
William Glenn Gray
Will Gray is an associate professor of history at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. His first book, GERMANY'S COLD WAR, appeared with UNC Press in 2003. Following that he served as one of five editors of the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE COLD WAR (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Gray's current project, TRADING POWER, concerns the transformation of West German ambitions from military affairs to economic leverage during the 1960s and 1970s. Gray studied at Princeton and the Free University of Berlin and holds his doctorate from Yale University.