Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (), or the Two Plus Four Agreement (; short: German Treaty), is an international agreement that allowed the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s. It was negotiated in 1990 between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (the eponymous "Two"), and the Four Powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II in Europe: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the treaty, the Four Powers renounced all rights they held  in Germany, allowing a reunited Germany to become fully sovereign the following year. At the same time, the two German states agreed to confirm their acceptance of the existing border with Poland, and accepted that the borders of Germany after unification would correspond only to the territories then administered by West and East Germany, with the exclusion and renunciation of any other territorial claims (e.g., to the Kaliningrad Oblast). Background. On 2 August 1945, the Potsdam Agreement, promulgated at the end of the Potsdam Conference, among other things agreed on the initial terms under which the Allies of World War  II would govern Germany. A provisional German–Polish border known as the Oder–Neisse line awarded, in theory within the context of that "provisional border", most of Germany's former eastern provinces to Poland and the Soviet Union. The German populations of these areas either fled or were expelled. Those agreements reached were provisional and the agreement stipulated that the situation would be finalised by "a peace settlement for Germany to be accepted by the Government of Germany when a government adequate for the purpose is established" (Potsdam Agreement 1.3.1). Parts of those above-mentioned agreements were burdened with controversy  from several sources e.g., Churchill's comment about "stuffing the Polish goose too full" (of German lands). The overall "German Question" became one of the salient and crucial issues of the long-running Cold War, and until it ended in the late 1980s, little progress had been made in the establishment of a single government of Germany adequate for the purpose of agreeing to a final settlement. This meant that in some respects (largely, but not only, technical), Germany did not have full national sovereignty. Several developments in 1989 and 1990, collectively termed Die Wende and the Peaceful Revolution, led  to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the SED party in East Germany (GDR). In a 9 February 1990 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev held in Moscow, US Secretary of State James Baker argued in favor of holding the Two-Plus-Four talks. According to Moscow as well as Baker's notes, the famous "not one inch eastward" promise about NATO's eastward expansion was made during this conversation. The concession essentially meant that the western half of the unified Germany would be part of NATO but the eastern half would not. The US National Security Council  pointed out that it would be unworkable, and the concession was later amended to state that NATO troops would not be stationed in East Germany. On 18 March 1990, a national election was held in GDR, leading to an alliance of parties that favored German reunification winning plurality. To achieve unity and full sovereignty, both German states were willing to accept the terms of the Potsdam Agreement that affected Germany. On 31 August 1990, the FRG and GDR signed the Unification Treaty, which describes the manner and specifics of the GDR's accession to the Federal Republic. It was then  possible for all international parties to negotiate a final settlement. Treaty. The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany was signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990, and paved the way for German reunification on 3 October 1990. Under the terms of the treaty, the Four Powers renounced all rights they formerly held in Germany, including those regarding the city of Berlin. Upon deposit of the last instrument of ratification, united Germany became fully sovereign on 15 March 1991. The treaty allows Germany to make and belong to alliances, without any foreign influence in its politics. All Soviet  forces in Germany were to leave the country by the end of 1994. Before the Soviets withdrew, Germany would only deploy territorial defense units not integrated into the alliance structures. German forces in the rest of Germany were assigned to areas where Soviet troops were stationed. After the Soviets withdrew, the Germans could freely deploy troops in those areas, with the exception of nuclear weapons. For the duration of the Soviet presence, Allied troops would remain stationed in Berlin upon Germany's request. Germany undertook to reduce its armed forces to no more than 370,000 personnel, no more than 345,000  of whom were to be in the Army and the Air Force. These limits would commence at the time that the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe would enter into force, and the treaty also took note that it was expected that the other participants in the negotiations would "render their contribution to enhancing security and stability in Europe, including measures to limit personnel strengths". Germany also reaffirmed its renunciation of the manufacture, possession of, and control over nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and in particular, that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would continue to apply in full to  the unified Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany). No foreign armed forces, nuclear weapons, or the carriers for nuclear weapons would be stationed or deployed in six states (the area of Berlin and the former East Germany), making them a permanent Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. The German Army could deploy conventional weapons systems with nonconventional capabilities, provided that they were equipped and designed for a purely conventional role. Germany also agreed to use military force only in accordance with the United Nations Charter. Another of the treaty's important provisions was Germany's confirmation of the by now internationally recognised  border with Poland, and other territorial changes in Germany that had taken place since 1945, preventing any future claims to lost territory east of the Oder–Neisse line (see also Former eastern territories of Germany). The treaty defined the territory of a 'united Germany' as being the territory of East Germany, West Germany and Berlin, prohibiting Germany from making any future territorial claims. Germany also agreed to sign a separate treaty with Poland reaffirming the present common border, binding under international law, effectively relinquishing these territories to Poland. This was done on 14 November 1990 with the signing of the  German–Polish Border Treaty. Furthermore, the Federal Republic was required by the treaty to amend its Basic Law so as to be constitutionally prohibited from accepting any application for incorporation into Germany from territories outside the territories of East Germany, West Germany and Berlin (although Germany is permitted to maintain research stations in Antarctica; at present it has ten). Although the treaty was signed by West and East Germany as separate sovereign states, it was subsequently ratified by united Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany). Implementation. After the Soviet Union dissolved itself in December 1991, the command unit of the  Soviet Group of Soviet Forces in Germany devolved to the Russian Federation. The German government subsequently recognized the Russian Federation's claim to be the successor state of the Soviet Union, including the right to maintain troops in Germany until the end of 1994. However, with post-Soviet Russia facing severe economic hardship, President Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troop deployment in Germany to be reduced to levels significantly below those permitted in the Treaty. The last Russian troops left Germany at the end of August 1994, four months before the treaty deadline. In the first decade of the 21st century , the Bundeswehr underwent a gradual transformation to a fully professional force. By 2011, the year Germany voluntarily suspended conscription, the Bundeswehr had retained fewer than 250,000 active duty personnel – barely two thirds of the country's treaty limit of 370,000. Claimed violations. Article 5, paragraph 3 of the treaty concerning the area of the former East Germany states: "Foreign armed forces and nuclear weapons or their carriers will not be stationed in that part of Germany or deployed there." In 2010, the newspaper "Junge Welt" alleged this to have been violated by NATO troops during a 2009 exercise in the  former East German Trollenhagen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. According to the German Air Force, NATO was merely making an inspection there on that occasion; however, the inspection included a unit from the Finnish Air Force. In September 2007, France offered Germany joint control over its nuclear arsenal, but the Germans rejected this. Eastward expansion of NATO. The treaty does not mention future NATO membership of other countries. Some have nevertheless interpreted the famous statement by US secretary of state James Baker, to the effect that NATO would expand "not one inch eastward" as applying to Eastern Europe as a whole. However, Gorbachev  himself confirmed that this assurance only pertained to East Germany, and that the resulting agreement was upheld by NATO. His main aide in these negotiations, Eduard Shevarnadze, likewise agreed that NATO never made any such commitment regarding other countries in Eastern Europe, and that "the question never came up [in the talks on German reunification]." That is presumably because all of the countries in question were still in the Warsaw Pact at the time and hosted large Soviet garrisons. Nevertheless, both Gorbachev and his successor Yeltsin felt that NATO's later acceptance of countries such as Poland violated the "spirit  of the earlier agreements. In December 2017, researchers Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton discovered declassified documents that they claim challenge this narrative. They commented: The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels ." They further stated that, "The view of the State Department was that NATO expansion was not on the agenda, because it was not in the interest of the U.S. to organize 'an anti-Soviet coalition' that extended to the Soviet borders, not least because it might reverse the positive trends in the Soviet Union. (See Document 26) The Bush administration took the latter view. And that's what the Soviets heard." In 2018, Hannes Adomeit disputed their conclusions, commenting that those documents had been known before, and stated: "it is inadmissible to conclude that assurances concerning the expansion of NATO  command structures and the stationing of NATO forces on the territory of the former GDR had anything to do with promises concerning the enlargement of the Alliance east of a unified Germany." Additionally he noted: "a distinction must be drawn between informal or exploratory talks of this nature on the one hand and negotiations, promises, commitments or indeed guarantees on the other." An analysis by Marc Trachtenberg in 2021 concluded that "the Russian allegations are by no means baseless". Mary Elise Sarotte in his 2021 book "Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Cold War Stalemate" concluded  that Russian claims of betrayal are technically untrue but have psychological truth. In 1997, NATO and Russia signed a treaty stating that each country had a sovereign right to seek alliances. NATO ended up expanding to thirteen more Eastern countries (apart from the GDR in 1990): Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia in 2005; Albania, Croatia in 2009; Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020.), some of them on the border with Russia. The 1990 assurances on a non expansion of NATO to Gorbachev were again the subject of public debate in  2022 on the occasion of the 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis, during which the Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded compliance through a legal ban on Ukraine joining NATO, which both Ukraine and NATO refused. The crisis ultimately led to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The invocation of this supposed non-expansion pledge to justify Russia's annexation of Crimea has been criticized by NATO.