Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
of international relations.’ He even suggested that the Berlin Wall could ‘disappear when those conditions that created it fall away. I don’t see a major problem here.’ This was a scarcely veiled snub to the Honecker regime. And, alluding to the division of Germany itself, he stated ‘we hope that time will resolve this’. But while speculating about the end of one great geopolitical barrier, Gorbachev also aired his fears of a new, ‘impenetrable wall across Europe’ – referring to the European Community’s plans for a totally integrated single market by 1992. ‘So far we have not heard the economic or political arguments convincing enough to dispell such apprehensions.’ Here is a reminder that in June 1989 the process of ‘European integration’ seemed like a way of deepening the division between the two halves of the continent, rather than a unifying force of the sort that Gorbachev envisaged when he spoke of a ‘Common European Home’ stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals.[52]
For Gorbachev, Bonn was part of a series of visits around Europe in mid-1989 during which – like Bush with his speaking tour in the spring – the Soviet leader presented his evolving ideas about the new Eastern Europe that was emerging through his programme of political and economic restructuring.
In Paris three weeks later, he developed the line taken with Kohl on Poland and Hungary, insisting that communist countries ‘now in transition’ would ‘find a new quality of life within a socialist system, a socialist democracy’ as the ‘process of democratisation’ ultimately transformed all of Eastern Europe. In other words, what was going on within the Soviet bloc was reconstruction not deconstruction. Yet, pointing to the historical connections between 1789 and 1917, he declared that perestroika was also a ‘revolution’. Speaking to a packed and eager audience of professors, writers and students in the Sorbonne – a venue he had specially requested – Gorbachev felt like the intellectual that he yearned to be. He philosophised about the fundamentally ‘new global problems facing mankind at the end of the twentieth century’ to which his ‘new thinking’ provided answers. He warned the West not to expect Eastern Europe’s ‘return to the capitalist fold’ or to cherish ‘the illusion that only bourgeois society represents eternal values’.[53]
Lurking beneath these comments was Gorbachev’s real irritation with those addresses Bush had delivered in April and May. He did not see any ‘realism’ or a ‘constructive line’ in those statements and in fact found them ‘quite unpleasant’, he told Kohl in Bonn. ‘Frankly speaking, those statements reminded us of Reagan’s statements about the “crusade” against socialism.’ Like Reagan, Bush ‘appealed to the forces of freedom, called for the end to the “status quo”, and for “pushing socialism back”. And all this’, Gorbachev fumed, ‘at a time when we are calling for the de-ideologisation of relations. Unwillingly, questions come to mind – where is Bush genuine, and where is Bush rhetorical?’[54]
When the topic came up between Mitterrand and Gorbachev on 5 July in the Elysée Palace, the French president did not mince words about his own quite different views. ‘George Bush would conduct a very moderate policy even without congressional constraint because he is conservative.’ In fact, he added, Bush ‘has a very big drawback – he lacks original thinking altogether’. Mitterrand’s frustration about his own lack of influence and France’s diminished status in global affairs was palpable. He also felt sidelined by the active European diplomacy of Bush and Kohl – a theme to which I will return in chapters four and five. Conversely, the Soviet leader must have relished the Frenchman’s dig at the foot-dragging US president as much as he appreciated Mitterrand’s profession of ‘faith in the success of perestroika’.[55]
Nevertheless, determined to take the initiative from the ‘crusading’ Bush and regain the moral high ground, the Soviet leader pulled out the stops when speaking to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Declaring that ‘the post-war period and the Cold War are becoming a thing of the past’, Gorbachev offered an eye-catching disarmament package, proposing cuts in Soviet short-range nuclear missiles ‘without delay’ if NATO agreed, and the ultimate goal of eliminating all these weapons. Mindful of recent Alliance arguments over the ‘third zero’, he mischievously claimed that the USSR was holding fast to its ‘non-nuclear ideals’, while the West was clinging on to its dated concept of ‘minimum deterrence’.
The Soviet leader also elaborated on his vision of a Common European Home. This ruled out ‘the very possibility of the use or threat of force’ and postulated ‘a doctrine of restraint to replace the doctrine of deterrence’. He envisaged, as the Soviet Union moved towards a ‘more open economy’, the eventual ‘emergence of a vast economic space’ right across the continent in which the ‘eastern and western parts would be strongly interlocked’. He continued to believe in the ‘competition between different types of society’ and saw these kinds of tensions as ‘creating better material and spiritual conditions of life for people’. But he was looking forward to the day when ‘the only battlefield would be markets open for trade and minds open to ideas’.
Admitting that he had ‘no finished blueprint’ in his pocket for the Common European Home, he reminded his listeners of the work of the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), when thirty-five nations had agreed common principles and values. It was now time, he declared, for the present generations of leaders in Europe and North America ‘to discuss, in addition to the most immediate issues, how they contemplate future stages of progress towards a European Community of the twenty-first century’. At the cornerstone of Helsinki 1975 were the two superpowers and, Gorbachev believed, that situation had not changed. ‘The realities of today and the prospects for the foreseeable future are obvious: the Soviet Union and the United States are a natural part of the European international and political structure. Their involvement in its evolution is not only justified, but also historically conditioned. No other approach is acceptable.’[56]
Gorbachev returned home via Romania, where he led a Warsaw Pact meeting that formally and publicly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine – in other words cementing his statements in New York and more recently Strasbourg that force would not be used to control the development of individual socialist states. Combined with Gorbachev’s PR offensive of drastic, unilateral Soviet force reductions in Eastern Europe and his express desire for the Warsaw Pact states to make progress with NATO countries on producing a conventional arms accord by 1992,[57] this was another deeply worrying moment for Honecker and the other hardliners in the bloc – Ceaușescu and Miloš Jakeš of Czechoslovakia – especially considering that they had used the summit to lobby vehemently for Warsaw Pact military intervention in Hungary. Champions of repression and intransigence, they must have felt that the Kremlin was abandoning them.[58] Gorbachev certainly left his fellow communist leaders in no doubt what he thought about the dinosaurs among them. He stressed that ‘new changes in the party and in the economy are needed … Even V. I. Lenin said that new policies need new people. And this does not depend on subjective wishes any more. The very process of democratisation demands it.’[59]
The Soviet leader left Bucharest on 9 July, just as the president of the United States was arriving in Warsaw. Each superpower was putting down markers on a Europe in turmoil.
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Bush had been alarmed by the Soviet leader’s peace offensive around Europe, not least because America’s NATO allies appeared to be in the grip of some kind of ‘Gorbymania’ which made them susceptible to Soviet blandishments about arms reduction. His own European tour – to Poland and Hungary ahead of the G7 meeting in France – had been planned in May but it was now all the more imperative, in order to ‘offset the appeal’ of Gorbachev’s message.[60]
Indeed, before even setting off for Europe, Bush made a point of quickly and strongly rebuffing Gorbachev’s Paris proposals: ‘I see no reason to stand here