III. POLITICAL
What then is the real problem with German reunification? It will reverse one of the most salutary European developments of the last fifty years: the decline of sovereignty. German reunification will constitute the most dramatic rebirth of sovereignty in the postwar era. In this era, Europe has enjoyed a historically unprecedented period of peace largely because the sovereignty of its warring nations was suppressed, brutally in the East and benignly in the West, by the advent of two great empires. Whatever else it did, the cold war division of Europe into a pax Sovietica and pax Americana did have the virtue of suppressing internecine European conflict.
But the imperial suppression of sovereignty must be temporary. Empire is not forever. Hence the post-cold war question: How to remove the artificial suppression of sovereignty by the superpowers, without then risking the national explosions that follow almost universally – in our time, in Asia and Africa – whenever the imperial power withdraws? Western Europe thought it had found the answer. Over the last forty years it has gradually built up transnational institutions, most notably the European Community. The great project accelerating toward completion was the formation of the single European market by 1992 that would transform the economies of the Twelve into an economic unit almost as free of legal barriers as that of the United States. Ireland and Greece would trade as freely as Maine and Texas.
But the importance of Europe ’92 is not just economic. It involves one of history’s greatest peacetime transfers of sovereignty. By giving up enormous economic, social, and regulatory power to a central European authority, the countries of Western Europe are consciously giving up much of their political autonomy. That is precisely why Margaret Thatcher so resists the process. She knows that EC monetary union, for example, may soon lead to a common currency, which will lead further to a common economic policy, which will lead inexorably toward political confederation. Talk of a United States of Europe is premature. But it is not farfetched. That is the trajectory that Western Europe is following.
Or was until November 9, the day the Berlin Wall fell. Europe ’92 was to substitute the diminished sovereignty imposed by European integration for the diminished sovereignty once imposed by American domination. It was to be a transition from imperially- to self-imposed community. The great hope was that an integrated Europe would begin to acquire some of the internal stability of a federal country such as the United States. By diminishing the sovereignty of each country and centralizing more and more authority in “Europe,” the national rivalries that led to centuries of European wars would become obsolete. It would be as if Texas went to war with Maine.
German reunification challenges the idea and derails the process. West Germany, pledged to diminish its sovereignty by joining this single European market, is now about to swallow the East, an incorporation that will augment its population, territory, economy, military strength, political centrality, and diplomatic clout. It is about to become the new giant on the continent. Leave aside potential territorial claims against its neighbors. Leave aside the possibility of Germany acquiring nuclear weapons. The simple fact of the explosive birth of a new and huge Germany in the center of the continent immediately undercuts the entire movement toward European confederation.
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