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ill it or will it not be possible to maintain the system of European and international security, which was formed after World War II? This question has now become one of the most important in the political debates. So, it is particularly of interest to get the view of Egon Bahr, one of this system’s architects. Andreas Mazurkov of Eurasian Metals talked to Mr. Bahr in Berlin.

EM: The world is witnessing a sufficiently paradoxical scenario being put in practice right now. The one that you have warned about quite recently: NATO’s center of gravity is rapidly shifting toward the East. Will, in your opinion, the processes that are taking place today become a long-term trend?
– BAHR: Yes, definitely. And it will happen in the first place because new countries will start joining the EU and NATO. This trend will be developing later on. But, naturally, on condition that both organizations will be able "to digest" their newly accepted members, i.e. they will manage to adjust necessary mechanisms of interaction with these members.

EM: What role can the alliance of Germany, France and Russia formed because of the war in Iraq play in the future? Does it have any geostrategic perspective?
– BAHR: I think that in this case there is no reason to talk about any "alliance". What we have here is a manifestation of actual realities of the multi-polar world that is around us. Exactly the recognition of this fact – and the current federal chancellor of Germany drew a special attention to it in his very first official statement – is a basis of today’s German foreign policy.

EM: The U.S. position is to punish Saddam Hussein through war disregarding the opinion of the overwhelming majority of the U.N. Security Council members and ignoring the threat of death and suffering for thousands of innocent people, probably, not only in Iraq itself.... Don’t you think, Mr. Bahr, that this war means the final decline of the U.N. itself?
– BAHR: Today a possible use of military force cannot be completely excluded from the stockpile of international politics. However, this instrument should be used only, if there are appropriate sanctions by the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. has military power but it has no right to decide unilaterally when this power could be used and against whom. This war does not mean the end of the U.N. because nearly all members of this international organization are interested in preserving it and they will not permit its demise.

P  R  O  F  I  L  E
Egon Bahr is a world-famous politician. For decades his opinion has been considered not only by his colleagues from all political factions in Bundestag but by leaders of foreign countries as well. Born on March 18, 1922 in Thuringia. Close associate of Willy Brandt, the former chancellor of West Germany. Authored Germany’s Neue Ostpolitik, which was worked out as far back as the mid-60s and which served as a basis of the first post-war treaties with the socialist block countries. Together with Andrei Gromyko prepared the text of the first base agreement on bilateral relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the USSR (The Moscow Treaty of 1970). Staatssekretar and Germany’s minister in retirement, member of the board of the German Social Democratic Party.

EM: In order to assess the present-day situation from the historical point of view it would be interesting to recall those years, when the European security system was just being created. You were then an employee at the radio station in Berlin’s U.S. sector. How did you take in the atmosphere charged with confrontation between the two blocks?
– BAHR: I joined the radio station in 1950. In those years we, West Berliners, were living with the feeling of a constant threat fearing that without the American support West Berlin would be immediately annexed by the GDR. So, the desire to somehow defend ourselves from this threat was absolutely natural because relying just on "the U.N. guarantee" was not enough. And if there was no presence of Soviet troops, which were permanently ready to take military action, Germany might have reunified even then. Since neither Stalin nor Khrushchev succeeded in getting hold of West Berlin by force, it was decided to build "an anti-fascist wall".
And here is the historical paradox: exactly this horrible structure, which slit the city, turned out to be that concrete foundation that gave birth to the very concept of "the detente policy". Residents of West Berlin felt deeply that all participants in this European drama were interested in maintaining the status quo. Nobody wanted a new war and nobody would help us remove that terrible wall. So, it became clear: we ourselves should start acting by searching for ways and means in order to assert our own interests to whatever extent possible. One of our main tasks, particularly then, was to make that damned concrete wall at least more "transparent". To this end we should have learned to talk with those, who determined whether to issue or not documents needed for going to the Eastern sector. This right to provide these documents belonged neither to the U.S nor to the USSR but to the GDR itself, which we stubbornly refused to call so.
And exactly this made us turn our face toward the East and start a dialogue. The new stage of the foreign policy was later called "changes through rapprochement".

EM: These "changes" became then the cornerstone of Willy Brandt’s entire Neue Ostpolitik (the new Eastern policy). Together with the then federal chancellor you personally made a lot of efforts to convince German politicians of the righteousness of the chosen approach...
– BAHR: The resistance was severe. Willy Brandt and myself were openly accused of treason. And it is true that a lot of courage was required to defend the intended policy of detente.
We actually started to carry out this policy in Moscow. I came to the capital of the USSR in December 1970 so as to begin preparations for signing the first fundamental post-war agreement between our countries. We were talking over specific details of the future agreement with foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. It took us about three weeks of painstaking work and, as a result, West Germany’s foreign minister Walter Scheel could come to Moscow after that for final editing of the prepared text.
The Kremlin was a deep dark secret to us, something mysterious and incomprehensible. And here we were! We got a chance to find out arguments of the opposite side, to weigh them up, to exchange opinions. It was, of course, terribly difficult but, nevertheless, things moved in the right direction. It seemed that Leonid Brezhnev himself felt sincerely satisfied by fixing with his signature first positive moves in the relations between our two countries. It seems to me that even then he already saw the future of Russia being in Europe.
During that time we made an important conclusion for ourselves: it makes sense to conduct negotiations with the USSR just because during all these conversations we began little by little to think about a more distant common future, to plan for it, not just limiting ourselves with stirring up ashes of the past.
It was a total surprise to us that the Soviet leadership was ready to negotiate a radical reduction of arms, right up to a complete renunciation of the then existing doctrine of the compulsory military supremacy...
Exactly then I realized for the first time that the USSR did not have any aggressive intentions toward the West, although nobody in the West itself ever believed in the peacefulness of the Soviet leadership.

EM: After the "Moscow Treaty" between the Federal Republic of Germany and the USSR was signed, the West German government and the GDR exchanged permanent missions. What did this step mean then for divided Germany and what was the assessment of the outlook for a further rapprochement?
– BAHR: By signing the "Moscow Treaty" we recognized the inviolability of the post-war borders in Europe. At the same time we never gave up the historic right of the German people to determine their own national destiny by themselves and try to reunify the divided homeland.
This aspiration was taken notice of both in Moscow and East Berlin. However, we, of course, did not have possibilities at that moment to discuss with leaders of the GDR specific ways and terms of reunification. I should put it frankly: even much later, in the mid-80s, I could not imagine that I would live to see the reunification of Germany.

EM: Don’t you admit that the GDR as a sovereign European state could have existed longer and that rates of the German reunification could have been more restrained?
– BAHR: One should clearly differentiate foreign and domestic policy aspects. In my opinion, everything was done absolutely right in the foreign policy field. And, on the contrary, the internal policy side of the German reunification was fraught with miscalculations. Our most important mistake – and I was responsible for it too – was that we underestimated the significance of the difference in the mentality of our new fellow citizens. I myself always thought: Germans in the East listen every day to the same radio programs, watch the same TV programs, read the same books and, thus, they have a good idea of the house that they are going to live in. But in fact everything turned out much more complicated. For forty years in a row people in both parts of Germany were going through the absolutely different socialization processes. Those in the West were living under the banner of militant individualism and those in the East were brought up in the spirit of collectivism.
In practice this miscalculation actually resulted in a fact that even today, 12 years after the country’s political reunification, we still have not attained the genuine unity of Germany. Most likely, the nation’s genuine unity will be brought about by the young generation born and raised under the new system. This generation does not imagine any different way of life, beyond the framework of the unified country.

EM: And to conclude our conversation, Mr. Bahr, let me raise one more important question: the interaction of unified Germany with the U.S., the principal strategic partner. It goes without saying that you remember very well all the circumstances of the crisis in Yugoslavia and the military operation against this sovereign European country with pilots of the German Luftwaffe taking the most active part. Why did the German leadership agree to participate in the operation that was not sanctioned by the world community? What was your personal position on that?
– BAHR: To be fair, it should be reminded that the consent to participate in the military operation in Yugoslavia was "inherited" by the German leadership from chancellor Kohl and his foreign minister Clauss Kinkel. Thus, when Kohl’s cabinet was being replaced by the Red-Green coalition, this subject was not on the agenda.
At the same time the participation in the war against Yugoslavia was also an extremely difficult step for our predecessors, i.e. the government of German Christian Democrats and liberals. That is exactly why Clauss Kinkel, still acting then as the foreign minister, said that this "step off the road" should become the only exemption in the history of post-war Germany.
At that moment the new German leadership came to be the only government in the countries of NATO, which proposed to the world community its own five-item program to settle the conflict peacefully. After that it managed to involve Russia in the negotiating process, secured China’s support and insisted on getting the U.N. mandate. The German government also convinced the U.S. president of the need as well as of the possibility to get back to the negotiations with Slobodan Milosevic in order to reach an agreement on terms that had to be met for ending the military operation of NATO.
Nevertheless, at that moment it became even more apparent to us: we should divide ourselves from America. During the post-war decades we had enough time to grow accustomed to all really big problems being solved for us by others. Now we are absolutely sovereign again and we have the right to be responsible for our decisions and actions.
This also explains the current position of the federal government on the Iraqi problem. There is a special article in the German constitution, which forbids us to participate in offensive wars against third countries. And in this sense our chancellor simply cannot act any other way, if he does not want to violate the very fundamentals of the constitution. He cannot advocate Germany’s participation in the offensive against Iraq without an appropriate mandate from the U.N. But even if the U.N. Security Council gave such a mandate, we would certainly have to face another problem first: was the country’s Bundeswehr capable today of taking this new mission upon itself? And the answer to this question would certainly be negative. On the one hand, our army is at the peak of reforms now, the largest in all the history of its existence. On the other hand, we already have over ten thousand soldiers based in the Balkans and Afghanistan. It is more than the French and British have...
So, in my opinion, the division from America will go on further. This is not today’s phenomenon. As far back as the end of the global conflict between the East and the West, which hid and veiled all nuances, it became absolutely clear to us that the system of the American values significantly differed from ours, the European one. I do not want to analyze here how it all started: this is a long historic process... But the most interesting thing is that America itself is also experiencing today the process of the division from Europe. The U.S. got convinced that in a new situation the so-called "Moscow political factor" often plays more important role than the "NATO factor". It is particularly so, when the case in point is the fight against the international terrorism. The old philosophy of "the brotherhood of historic destinies" had to be discarded. After all, with NATO expansion to the East this alliance has been transforming more and more into a kind of a political instrument rather than being just the military one. Specifically, this means that from the geostrategic point of view Turkey, for example, is becoming more important for the U.S. than Germany.
And believe me: Americans themselves have analyzed these in detail long ago.