656 Chapter 32
German model for social peace and economic growth
(requiring more concessions to labor and more support
of the welfare state than British or American conserva-
tives would accept). In European policy, he was one of
the chief advocates of the European Union and, in for-
eign policy, one of the chief defenders of NATO and
close ties to the United States. By 1989 he had
achieved a long tenure as chancellor but had not given
any signs that he would preside over one of the most
important accomplishments of twentieth-century Ger-
man history.
When the events of October-November 1989 re-
opened the German question, Helmut Kohl seized the
opportunity with surprising speed. On the night that
the DDR opened the Berlin Wall and joyous Berliners
celebrated in the streets, Kohl made a simple speech
nearby: “We are, and we remain, one nation.” Kohl
promptly produced, and the Bundestag ratified, a Ten-
Point Plan for German Unity in November 1989. Point
ten was clear: “We are working for a state of peace in
Europe in which the German nation can recover its
unity in free self-determination.” The speed of Kohl’s
action surprised many, but he argued that something
must be done to slow the torrent of East Germans mi-
grating to the West—500,000 immigrants arrived in
November alone. World leaders could only respond as
the surprised George Bush did: “We’re pleased.” A few
weeks later, in January 1990, Gorbachev acknowledged
that reunification was probable.
The East German government initially hesitated,
and the prime minister of the DDR spoke of plans for a
commission to study the possibilities, but the sentiment
of public opinion was overwhelming. Demonstrations
in East Germany denounced the old regime—especially
after revelations of the activities of the Stasi,the former
secret police—and hard-liners were forced to resign.
East German elections of March 1990 settled the ques-
tion. No party received an absolute majority, but 48
percent voted for a party backing immediate unification
and nearly 70 percent voted for parties favoring some
form of unification. The Communist Party received
16 percent of the vote. This election led directly to ne-
gotiations for unification. Helmut Kohl pressed for im-
mediate action, and within a few weeks, the two
Germanys had agreed upon a common currency and
economic policy, although this typically meant that
West German standards prevailed or difficult problems
were postponed. More than eight thousand state-run
businesses in the DDR would be privatized. Institutions
in the East would be transformed; universities, for ex-
ample, were given West German administrators who
closed most programs in Marxism-Leninism and re-
duced programs in Russian language and studies.
The negotiations between the Federal Republic and
the DDR were expanded into the “two-plus-four nego-
tiations” in May 1990, bringing together the two Ger-
manys and the four powers that had divided Germany
in 1945 (Britain, France, Russia, and the United States).
In these talks, the four powers accepted German reas-
surances about the international aspects of the new
Germany. A Russo-German Treaty of July 1990 and a
Treaty of Final Settlement on Germany in September
1990 stated the terms: Germany could unite and remain
within NATO, but the German government must
(1) reduce its standing army to fewer than 400,000
troops; (2) renounce all nuclear, chemical, and biologi-
cal weaponry; and (3) provide financial assistance to
Russia for the repatriation of the Soviet army. While
those details were still being worked out, the two Ger-
manys formed an economic merger based on the West
German mark. Then, in October 1990, forty-five years
after the postwar partition, a unified Germany of nearly
eighty million population was created by the DDR
joining the Federal Republic. The first all-German elec-
tions in nearly sixty years followed in December 1990,
with Helmut Kohl becoming the first chancellor of the
new state. The Bundestag voted in 1991, by a narrow
margin, to return the capital of Germany to Berlin in a
twelve-year transition.The Yugoslav War, 1991–99
While Germans were celebrating their union to the
tune of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Yugoslavia was frag-
menting into six states in an internecine war. Yugoslavia
had been created at the Paris Peace Conference of
1919, according to the principle of “the national self-
determination of peoples,” by merging the independent
states of Serbia and Montenegro with provinces taken
from the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although
Yugoslavia (“the land of the southern slavs”) had been a
dream of Slavic nationalists, it had always been a deli-
cate federation of several different peoples (chiefly
Slovenes, Croatians, Bosnians, Serbs, Albanians, and
Macedonians) who practiced several different religions
(chiefly Roman Catholicism in Slovenia and Croatia,
Islam in Bosnia and Kosovo, and Orthodox Christianity
in the other regions) and who spoke languages different
enough to require different alphabets.
Yugoslavia and the western Balkans had long been
a powder keg of bitter rivalries, many of which had