Frédéric Bozo - France and the German Question, 1945–1990

Edited by

First published in 2019 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2019 Frdric Bozo and Christian Wenkel

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Names: Bozo, Frdric, editor. | Wenkel, Christian, editor.

Title: France and the German Question, 19451990 / edited by Frdric Bozo and Christian Wenkel.

Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019007659 (print) | LCCN 2019011546 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202274 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202267 (hardback: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: FranceForeign relationsGermany. | GermanyForeign relationsFrance. | German reunification question (19491990) | Cold War. | FranceForeign relations1945

Classification: LCC DC59.8.G3 (ebook) | LCC DC59.8.G3 F685 2019 (print) | DDC 327.4404309/045dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007659

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-226-7 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78920-227-4 ebook

FRDRIC BOZO AND CHRISTIAN WENKEL

Is the German question once again an open one? Against the backdrop of the euro-crisis of the past few years and Germanys newly gained prominence in Europe, many scholars and pundits seem to have come to that conclusion. There is a new German question, wrote Timothy Garton-Ash at the height of the crisis in 2013, adding, It is this: Can Europes most powerful country lead the way in building both a sustainable, internationally competitive Eurozone and a strong, internationally credible European Union? This alleged reemergence of the German question has been a matter of concern in France, too; during the presidential campaigns of 2012 and 2017 a central issue was how to deal with Germany.

More than twenty-five years after Germanys unification, such concerns are astonishing. For most contemporaries, the events of 198990spanning those 329 days that led from the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 to the new day of German national unity on 3 October 1990had been a subject of amazement. Because by the end of the 1980s ending Germanys four decades of division had come to be seen as either requiring an indefinite period or involving the risk of a major disruption of the European order, such a brisk and peaceful development had come as a huge surprise. Yet in the aftermath of the countrys unification most observers believed that the German question in effect was closed, since all the sensitive issues deriving from itfor example, the countrys borders or its politico-military statushad been solved, first and foremost within the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990also known as the Two Plus Four Agreement.

This was no small achievement. The German question had been central to the European system since the beginning of the modern erain fact, since the very emergence of that system in the wake of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. During the course of the following three centuries, the centrality of the German question was never in doubt. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic era contributed to no small extent to the process that led to the emergence of the modern German nation-state. In the wake of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation in 1806, France became the other that helped forge the German national sentiment, as illustrated

The Cold War emerged at least partly from the victors inability, in the wake of the Potsdam Conference of JulyAugust 1945, to reach agreement on the terms of a peace treaty with defeated Germany. By the late 1940s, the nascent Cold War opened a new and decisive chapter in the protracted history of the German question. That chapter was determined by a seemingly unescapable dialectic. On the one hand, the division of Europe and, at its center, of Germany, offered a solution (temporary at least) to the German question: German power was tamed as a result of the countrys partition and diminished sovereignty, and its territorial limits were embedded in the status quo of the bloc system, itself guaranteed by the nuclear balance of terror. On the other hand, precisely because Germany (and particularly Berlin) was at the center of the Cold War system, any calling into question of the German status quo could well lead to a major disruption of the European order, if not World War IIIhence the difficulty for most contemporaries until 198990 to imagine a peaceful and swift settlement. The German problem, de Gaulle famously remarked in 1965, had become the European problem par excellence.