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Arthur Burns Memorial Lecture

Die Atlantik-Brücke, zusammen mit dem American Council on
Germany, ehrt in Arthur Burns eine Persönlichkeit, die sich um
die deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen in herausragender
Weise verdient gemacht hat. Dr. Arthur Burns (1904 - 1987) war
Chef der amerikanischen Notenbank in den Jahren 1970 - 1977
und ein in Lehre und Praxis weltweit geachteter Finanz- und Wirt-
schaftsexperte, der über gute Kontakte zu Männern der Politik
und Wirtschaft, auch in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, verfüg-
te und sie pflegte. Bis in sein hohes Alter war er stets um die Völ-
kerverständigung und insbesondere den Dialog mit der jüngeren
Generation bemüht. Während seiner späteren Amtszeit als ame-
rikanischer Botschafter in Deutschland (1981 - 1985) hat Arthur
Burns mit viel Einfühlungsvermögen, historisch fundierter Sach-
kenntnis, Weisheit des Alters und menschlicher Wärme das Ver-
trauen in die deutsch-amerikanische Partnerschaft zu stärken
vermocht. Er verstand sie als eine "reife Partnerschaft", die Un-
terschiede respektiert und Gemeinsamkeiten pflegt. Für ihn wa-
ren gute und dauerhafte bilaterale Beziehungen weniger von den
Fähigkeiten der Außenminister und Diplomaten abhängig als viel-
mehr von der Art und Intensität der zwischen beiden Völkern ge-
wachsenen gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Beziehungen, de-
ren Wurzeln im zwischenmenschlichen Bereich liegen, im per-
sönlich gemeinsam Erlebten und Erfahrenen.

Arthur Burns neigte nie zur Verharmlosung der anstehenden Probleme. Den Antiamerikanismus in der jüngeren Generation, die Geringschätzung der politischen und moralischen Ordnung der westlichen Gesellschaften, aber auch die damals von vielen Deutschen eingenommene Haltung zur Äquidistanz im Verhältnis zu den Vereinigten Staaten und der Sowjetunion betrachtete er stets mit Sorge und gab dieser in der Öffentlichkeit auch deutlich Ausdruck. Seine Urteile fielen dabei oft unbequem aus, aber dennoch fand er dafür viel Unterstützung. In der Atlantik-Brücke hatte er von Anfang an Verbündete, mit denen er eng zusammenar-

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beitete in seinem Bemühen, die jüngere Generation anzusprechen.

Karl Otto Pöhl, damaliger Präsident der Deutschen Bundesbank, hielt die erste Arthur Burns Memorial Lecture im Jahre 1987 in New York zu dem Thema "Co-operation - a Keystone for the Stability of the International Monetary System". Weitere Redner waren 1988 Paul A. Volcker, der frühere Vorsitzende des Gouverneursrats der amerikanischen Notenbank, 1990 Edzard Reuter, 1991 Dr. Alan Greenspan, und 1992 hat Dr. Henry A. Kissinger die Arthur Burns Memorial Lecture in der Paulskirche zu Frankfurt gehalten - als Teil der 500-Jahresfeier der Entdeckung Amerikas durch Christopher Columbus. 1989 hätte Dr. Alfred Herrhausen die Ansprache in New York geben sollen, doch wurde er einige Tage zuvor von Terroristen in Frankfurt ermordet.

Die besonders engen Beziehungen von Arthur Burns zur Atlantik-Brücke hatten ihre Wurzeln auch in dem freundschaftlichen Verhältnis zwischen ihm und Dr. Karl Klasen, dem Vorsitzenden der Atlantik-Brücke in den Jahren 1978 - 1984. Es stammte aus der Zeit, als der eine Vorsitzende der amerikanischen Notenbank in Washington, D.C., und der andere Präsident der Deutschen Bundesbank in Frankfurt am Main war.

Im Rahmen der Arthur Burns Lecture 1992 wurde zum ersten Mal der Karl-Klasen-Journalistenpreis an Dr. Herbert von Borch und Daniel Schorr verliehen.

Atlantik-Brücke e.V

Januar 1993

[LC]

Henry A. Kissinger

*Thoughts on Europe, America*
*and*
*„The New World Order”*

Meine Damen und Herren,

ich werde mir erlauben, einige Worte auf Deutsch zu sagen, nur damit Sie hören, was Ihnen erspart bleibt, wenn ich ins Englische wechsele. Wie Sie natürlich alle wissen, bin ich in Deutschland geboren, aber außer der Tatsache, daß ich mit einem fränkischen Akzent spreche, der für viele schwierig zu verstehen ist, fehlen mir viele Worte, wenn ich auf Deutsch sprechen muß. Deshalb erlaube ich mir, daß ich meine Rede in Englisch halte.

Ich will nur über Herrn Burns einige Worte auf Deutsch sagen. Arthur Burns war mein Freund, und er war auch mein Lehrer. Ich traf ihn, als ich Direktor einer Studiengruppe war, die, wie das in Amerika üblich ist, Berichte über die amerikanische Zukunft schrieb. Einer dieser Berichte handelte von der Wirtschaft, über die meine Kenntnisse nicht extensiv waren. So sagte einmal einer meiner Kollegen in der Regierung zu mir, daß mein Wissen über "Economics" das beste Argument gegen das allgemeine Wahlrecht sei, das er kenne. Ich suchte also Herrn Burns auf und erklärte ihm, was ich in diesem Bericht vorhatte zu sagen, und er

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antwortete: "Was Sie sagen, ist alles völlig richtig, aber wenn Sie es schreiben, wird jeder wissen, daß Sie ein Amateur auf diesem Feld sind, und so würde ich Ihnen raten, es zu lassen." Wir wurden daraufhin enge Freunde und sahen uns oft. In der amerikanischen Regierung gab es niemanden, dem ich mehr vertraute. Obwohl die Federal Reserve Bank unabhängig ist und sich nicht mit Politik befassen soll, habe ich nie etwas unternommen, das wirtschaftliche Konsequenzen haben konnte, ohne den Rat von Arthur Burns vorher einzuholen. An dem Tag, als ich erfuhr, daß es so etwas wie Watergate gab, waren Arthur Burns und George Schulz die ersten zwei Menschen, die ich um Rat fragte, wie wir in dieser schwierigen Zeit unsere Regierung zusammenhalten könnten. Sie alle kennen die großen Verdienste von Arthur Burns als Botschafter in Deutschland. Ich will nur noch sagen, daß er als Mensch, als Vertreter demokratischer Werte, als ein Mann von größter Integrität unglaublich vermißt wird in dieser Zeit. Für mich ist es eine große Ehre, heute die sechste Arthur Burns Lecture halten zu dürfen.

If you permit me, I will now continue in English. I must tell you that Frau Lindemann has told me that even when I read a German text, which I can do quite fluently, I sound more convincing in English than in German. And so I will now talk to you about the strange situation in which America, Germany and Europe find themselves. It is strange because only a little while ago an article appeared in America to great applause called "The End of History". A little longer ago, if anyone had predicted that the sixth Arthur Burns Lecture would be held in a unified Germany, a Europe in which communism had collapsed, and a world in which a Russian empire that had been growing since Peter the Great had disintegrated, he would have been considered optimistic to the point of irrationality. We all now live in a world that nobody foresaw. Therefore, we all have to adjust to realities which two or three years ago we never thought about. Yet we must also ask ourselves about the future: What kind of a world will emerge out of this extraordinary change?

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What is even more remarkable is that I do not know of any period in history in which there has been such an exact correspondence between what a group of nations set out to do and what they accomplished. If you compare what the leaders of the West were saying in the late Forties and early Fifties, and what their objective was with that which in fact took place, it is an almost exact fulfillment of their wishes. And yet, as George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "There are two tragedies in life: one is not to fulfill your heart's desires; the other is to fulfill them." We are now faced with having to think about a world we never believed was possible, and with working out our relationship under conditions we never expected. We can speak about the necessity of German-American friendship, European unity, or Atlantic partnership, but the real challenge is that any relationship that does not define what we can do together is doomed to becoming formalistic and, after a while, drained of content. The challenge of our period, then, is not to affirm our friendship, but to affirm what actions we can take together and the purposes we can fulfill. Let me discuss this first in relation to the United States.

For the United States, this is a particularly difficult period philosophically. We have just reached the end of a political campaign in which both parties, strangely enough, seem to agree that foreign policy is no longer a vital issue or an important challenge. In a sense, this very attitude illustrates how much more difficult the next phase of foreign policy will be — intellectually as well as philosophically — more difficult than any America, in particular, has ever faced previously.

If you look at American history, you can distinguish a number of phases. In the first phase — from the country's origin to the time of the Monroe Doctrine — the United States maneuvered with great skill through the European balance of power in order to extend its own new society's margin of independence. America's approach was not unlike what many of us have witnessed among the non-aligned nations of the current period. After the Monroe

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Doctrine and up to the end of the Second World War, the United States conducted nothing which European practitioners of diplomacy would have recognized as foreign policy. No great nation was ever as separated from the current of international affairs as the United States was during that period. Moreover, it was the only nation in history deliberately created in the pursuit of liberty, and the only to which people came in the explicit quest for freedom. Aided by the geographic invulnerability of being nestled between two great oceans, the extraordinary resources of the country itself, and their willful isolation from the day-to-day realities of European politics, Americans developed a keen sense of having had conferred upon them a truly special dispensation.

America is the only nation I know of that believes that her domestic performance has universal import. American isolationism has been based on two propositions: one, that America was too good for this world, and should therefore not soil herself with day-to-day politics (as expressed in the isolationism of the Twenties); two, that America was not good enough for this world, and had no right to participate in it until she had improved herself to a point where she could morally sustain the sheer power she physically possessed — a type of isolationism that prevailed in the Sixties and Seventies. In neither case did America really believe that anything that happened abroad could fundamentally affect her, not even at the height of the Cold War. I once gave a lecture in Omaha, Nebraska in which I described in conventional terms the communist terror and the measures that needed to be taken against it. Then, in the question period, somebody got up and said, "What you say is all very well, but what could anyone in the world want from us in Omaha?" The headquarters of the Strategic Air Command was five miles outside of Omaha, and if there was one city in the world certain to be attacked even before Washington in the event of a nuclear war, it would have been Omaha. That, however, was not part of my audience's consciousness.

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I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of Woodrow Wilson, who appeared in Europe in 1918 to say that everything that had ever been done in diplomacy was wrong and that only certain principles were universally true. He listed among these: self-determination, collective security, the League of Nations, and the rule of law. The most interesting thing was not the inspiration of his vision, important as it was, but that if you go back and read American scholarly discussions of the period you cannot find a single article that says, "How does he know this? Why is this true?" His principles were accepted as universally valid and, to this day, underscore American thinking on foreign policy. America is the only country I know of in which the word "balance of power" is always preceded with some perjorative adjective, and in which "realpolitik" denotes a criticism. Any American foreign policy since World War I that did not have an idealistic Wilsonian bent to it proved built on sand.

In the post-World War II period this element was relatively easy to incorporate because it lent itself so well to the application of America's two seminal experiences of that generation: the experience of the New Deal, which taught that political unrest results from a gap between economic expectation and reality; and, the experience of the anti-fascist war, one of the few wars without ambiguity in which it was easy to construct the conflict as one between good and evil. The post-World War II period as well met many of these criteria. The Marshall Plan became the moral equivalent of the New Deal, and NATO the moral equivalent of the anti-fascist coalition. And through most of the Cold War, American leaders were convinced that it was not really possible to negotiate with the Communists unless they first altered their values and converted to democratic ways. If you look at the American policy of Containment, it was based on the idea of creating situations of strength so that, at some point, negotiations could take place. It never described what these negotiations might consist of because there first had to be a change of attitude on the part of the adversary. Afterwards, the specific terms would be more or less ir-

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relevant. Curiously enough, that's what happened, unhistorical as it was and just about the way it was expected to happen.

The result, however, is that we are now in a world for which we have no previous experience. Those of you who follow American discussions will know that my views are not totally representative of every point of view, to put it mildly. Yet the great challenge facing America is that she is moving into a world that has more of the attributes of Nineteenth century Europe — though on a global basis — than of the Cold War. That is, if in Nineteenth century Europe there existed five great powers, then the status of each great power was defined by the improbability of any of the others attempting to impose their will without first evoking a coalition to make that possible, and at a cost that was commensurate with what the domestic situation in each of those countries could stain. Foreign policy in the Nineteenth century thus consisted of adjustments to the general equilibrium which were, most of the time, carried out by European Congresses, but sometimes by war. Its essence, as Lord Palmerston once said about England, was that it knew no friends, only interests. There were no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, as reflected in the fact that there were no fundamental ideological conflicts. Disagreements could be dealt with within the existing system. My argument is that the world into which we are now moving, albeit globally, has a number of these attributes. It will be composed of several major power centers. None of these will be able to impose its will on the others, either because of physical inability, or because of an unwillingness to pay the price of imposing its will or of sustaining the consequential responsibilities. There will in fact be, with a few exceptions I will mention in a minute, probably no permanent friends, and the United States will find itself in the historically unprecedented situation of having to define a national interest.

I have been studying the various speeches and inaugural addresses of American presidents in this century and, different as these presidents were, they were all united by one common the-

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me: if they spoke of foreign policy at all, they all maintained that the United States had no national interest and that its foreign policy was selfless, being conducted on behalf of the people of the world, on behalf of international law, of resistance to agression — in fact of almost anything but American self-interest. As late as the Gulf War, President Bush was telling the Congress that America was not at war because she wanted anything, but because she was defending international law. He was not being hypocritical, but sounding a profound American belief. Yet America will son be in a world in which, in my view, this will no longer work, even though most Americans have not realized that yet. The common belief is still that if democracy spreads all over the world, we will no longer face the need for balance or equilibrium, or have recurrent tensions. Although there have never been enough democracies in the world at any one time to test this proposition, the enthusiasm with which European parliaments greeted the outbreak of World War I — at a time when there was universal suffrage — raises at least some question as to whether this can always be true. No doubt, in Yugoslavia today, all the various governments that are killing each other would find an easy majority among their populations for the causes they are pursuing. But I don't wish to argue here about the merit of this proposition. I simply want to state that, on a global basis, it will not happen very fast. It would also involve us in domestic politics on a global scale that would bring its own problems.

What the United States is facing over the next ten years is not just a problem but a great drama — how to relate the convictions which made it a great country and that gave a tremendous impetus to its post-war policy, to the needs of the period and to its emerging realities. When I was a graduate student, I called on President Truman, who had just left office, for some paper I was writing and asked him what meant most to him during his period in office. He said, "What I am proudest of is that we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back as equals to the community of nations. I would like to think that only Americans

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could have done that." I do not know whether only Americans could have done it, but it was an expression of the American spirit that has to be preserved. Yet in a world of infinite complications and much greater complexity, at a time when the national leadership is more and more focused on domestic concerns, the requirements of getting elected in every democracy are so tortuous that the relationship between those qualities it takes to get elected and those it takes to govern is increasingly becoming lost. This too is another American problem.

Now, in a strange way, what I have said about America having no concept of national interest, only a concept of global interest, is also true of the second most powerful nation in the Atlantic world, namely Germany. I will not impose my recitation of German history on you, or you will say to me what Arthur Burns said about economics, but it is, it seems to me, a fact that in the Seventeenth century both Britain and France developed a national identity and a concept of national purpose. Germany spent most of the years between the Treaty of Westphalia and the formation of the German empire becoming a nation. It had to spend more energy on forming itself than on seeking to find out what its national interest might be. And so there emerged in the center of Europe a state with very complex attributes. It had more neighbors than anyone else, and it faced both east and west. It was therefore natural for it to want to protect itself against all possible enemies. Yet in trying to protect itself against all the enemies together, it managed to threaten each of them individually and, by the definition of the balance of power, only brought them closer together.

When one studies the history of Germany between Bismarck and the outbreak of World War I, one is struck by how such a well-meaning, decent, and basically non-aggressive people could have managed to bring about everything they feared most without defining exactly what it was they wanted. What did the Germans mean when they said they wanted a place in the sun? What if on August 1, 1914 the Allied powers had come to the German Kaiser

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and said, "Here is a map of the world. Tell us what you want." What would he have wanted? I have never seen a clear description of what the national objectives of Germany might have been that justified such a truculent foreign policy. I do not say it as a criticism of the past. I say this: that Germany is a country that was unified in 1871, led the life of a normal state only up to 1914, was subjected to the period of discrimination inherent in losing a war, then entered the Nazi period only to be divided again and to have to spend forty years focusing, at least in part, on the problem of how to become a nation again. So now Germany is here again: the most powerful nation in Europe, unified, democratic and tied to the West for the first time in its modern history and at a moment when leaders in the West do not know exactly what they are supposed to do. Thus both Germany and the United States need to define new purposes to lend new meaning to all they have accomplished over the last forty years.

Now, let's turn to the big issues of this moment: the future of European unity, the future of the Atlantic partnership, and the future of a German national policy. These are all up for new definitions within institutions that were created on quite a different set of premises. When European unity was formed it had several purposes, one of which was to find a home for a national Germany and to prevent the recurrence of previous tragedies. But the arrière pensée was always that Germany was likely to be divided; at least I do not know of anybody who foresaw such rapid unification of Germany.

Another purpose was to restore the identity and the morale of Europe by giving it the opportunity to conduct its own autonomous, indeed independent, policy. When NATO was formed there was only one major threat in the East while the Atlantic partnership consisted, importantly, of American protection, and in the early stages, of American capital. Most of these conditions have now been altered. The third premise of European unity has, at least for the moment, disappeared, though there are still some nearly pa-

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thetic efforts to give meaning to NATO. These consist largely of expanding it to the territories of the former Soviet Union through some sort of cooperative effort — a purpose for which it never would have been created in the first place. The future of Europe is affected by the reality that a unified Germany will be its most powerful country; the subconscious debate among many is whether Germany will prove more dominant in an integrated Europe or in a national Europe, something that must affect, at times even consciously, the attitudes of many other states as well.

Now I happen to believe two seemingly contradictory things: First, I am always attacked in the United States because I really do not think it is within our capacity to spread democracy on a day-to-day basis all over the world, for this will get us into situations that are beyond our capacity to manage. On the other hand, I believe that the democratic western nations that share similar institutions do have a common destiny, and can vindicate democracy in a world of fundamentalism and of ethnic conflicts — of which, in my view, what we have seen in Yugoslavia could be but a foretaste of what might happen elsewhere. It is absolutely imperative that we in America and in Europe find new means of cooperation. I also personally believe that Europe can do this best if it unifies, provided it does not define its identity by opposition to the United States, which was a problem twenty years ago. The problem Europe will now have with the United States will not be one of excessive imposition, but of excessive withdrawal. What Europe has to create vis-à-vis the United States are reasons for cooperation, not excuses for limiting American influence, which will only too happily be given up.

So that now is the challenge. What we really need is a philosophical equivalent of the containment theory and of the Marshall Plan, though it would have to be much more complex and much less aimed at a single objective. In each of our countries there are now new generations that have not had the experience of working together, so the task of their leaders on both sides of the Atlantic

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is to define the common purposes by which we can get ourselves
into that so-called "new world order". For every great construction
was an idea before it became a reality. One doesn't have to un-
derline this in the Paulskirche. The great challenge to our period,
and especially of this time, will be whether, having achieved most
everything we set out to do, we can refine goals for ourselves that
are worthy of what our predecessors accomplished. That is why it
is a particular honor for me to have been asked to speak on be-
half of one of those, Arthur Burns, who was among the great figu-
res not just in America, but in the West. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked to say a few words ab-
out the first Karl Klasen Award being presented right now to two
distinguished journalists. When I returned to Germany in the
1940's, at the end of the war, and saw the smashed cities and the
disintegration of society, it would have seemed inconceivable that
we could meet today in one of the most modern cities of the
world, in the restored Paulskirche, and that people would be
wondering what to do with a Germany that has become too
strong, too unified, and too rich. In those days it looked to me vi-
sually as if it might take fifty years just to clear away the rubble.
And when one thinks, as many of you do, of the time when a di-
stance of thirty miles in Germany meant that you did not even
know how to reach somebody because there was next to no ef-
fective communication, one has to pay tribute to the courage and
spiritual strength of the generation that dared to begin again. Karl
Klasen belonged to that generation. He opposed the government
that had caused such a debacle. But he also belonged to those
who went to work doggedly and with great determination to re-
build their country. And the rebuilding was done not only in the na-
me of material progress, but in the name of removing any ambi-
guity as to where Germany stood morally and politically.

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In the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, the most extraordinary achievement of Germany was not simply its material restoration, but the moral and political restoration, which has been so taken for granted today that people don't even consider it extraordinary anymore. Karl Klasen epitomized the generation that thought that reliability, steadiness, and integrity needed to be the principal traits of the new Germany and he could do it because he represented them in his own person. When, in the seventies, Klasen fought for stability of the German currency, it was naturally a technically important economic mission. But it was also philosophically and psychologically crucial that Germany be wedded to steadiness and reliability, that its word count, and that predictability become a sort of national duty. Whether or not one agrees technically with the various schools of thought that were contending at that period, I had the privilege of meeting Karl Klasen a few times towards the end of his life, after he had retired as president of the Bundesbank and had returned to the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank. It was a privilege for me to know such a man of vision and such steadiness, a man I never thought of in terms of whether he was German or whether the problems he was addressing were of particular relevance to his own society. Rather, I always thought that the values he epitomized and stood for were relevant to all of us in the West.

Therefore it is a truly special privilege to be here as this award is being given to two journalists, both of whom I have known and greatly respected. They have not always agreed with everything I have done, which proves that even two distinguished journalists cannot be right one hundred percent of the time. They have, in fact, come at me occasionally from opposite directions, which shows the unifying impact I can have on certain professions. But I have always greatly respected them and have learned much from each of them, so I want to congratulate the committee for giving their first two awards to such extraordinary men, Dan Schorr and Herbert von Borch.

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OV '92 17:49 ATLANTIK-BRUECKE BONN

P.2

Henry Kissinger: Arthur Burns Memorial Lecture Frankfurt, Oct. 28, 1992

Meine Damen und Herren, ich werde mir erlauben einige Worte auf
Deutsch zu sagen nur damit Sie hören was Ihnen erspart bleibt wenn
ich ins Englisch wechsele. Wie Sie natürlich alle wissen, bin ich
in Deutschland geboren, aber außer der Tatsache, daß ich mit einem
fränkischen Akzent spreche, das für viele schwierig ist, fehlen
mir viele Worte wenn ich auf Deutsch sprechen muß, und deshalb
erlaube ich mir, daß ich zu Ihnen auf Englisch spreche.

Ich will nur über Herrn Burns einige Worte auf Deutsch sagen.
Arthur Burns war mein Freund, und er war auch mein Lehrer. Ich
traf ihn als ich Direktor einer Studiengruppe war, die, wie das in
Amerika üblich ist, Berichte über die amerikanische Zukunft
schrieb. Einer dieser Berichte war über die Wirtschaft, über die
meine Kenntnisse nicht extensiv waren. Einer meiner Kollegen in
der Regierung sagte mal zu mir, daß mein Wissen über Economics das
beste Argument gegen das allgemeine Wahlrecht ist, das er kennt.
So suchte ich Herrn Burns aus und erklärte ihm, was ich vor hatte
zu sagen in diesem Bericht, und er antwortete, "Was Sie sagen ist
alles völlig richtig, aber wenn Sie es schreiben, wird jeder
wissen, daß Sie ein Amateur in diesem Feld sind, und so würde ich
Ihnen raten, das nicht zu unternehmen." Wir bekamen, wir wurden
dann enge Freunde daraufhin. Wir sahen uns oft. In der Regierung
gab es niemanden, in den ich mehr Vertrauen hatte. Und obwohl die
Federal Reserve Bank unabhängig ist, und sich nicht mit der
Politik befassen soll, habe ich nie etwas unternommen, das
wirtschaftliche Konsequenzen haben konnte ohne den Rat von Arthur
Burns. An dem Tag wo ich erfuhr, das es so etwas wie Watergate

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OV '92 17:50 ATLANTIK-BRUECKE BONN

P.3

gab, war Arthur Burns und George Schulz die ersten zwei Menschen,
die ich um Rat frug, wie wir unsere Regierung zusammenhalten
könnten in dieser schwierigen Zeit. Sie alle wissen, was er als
Botschafter tat, und seine großen Verdienste, die Herr Kiep
richtig beschrieben hat. Ich will nur sagen, daß er als Mensch,
als Vertreter demokratischer Werte, als ein Mann von der größten
Integrität, unglaublich vermißt wird in dieser Zeit, und daß es
für mich eine große Ehre ist, hier die sechste Arthur Burns
Lecture halten zu dürfen.

If you permit me, I will now continue in English. I must tell you
that Frau Lindemann has told me that even when I read a German
text, which I can do quite fluently, I sound more convincing in
English than in German. And so I will now talk to you about the
strange situation in which America, Germany and Europe find
themselves. It is a strange situation, because only a little
while ago an article appeared in America to great applause called
"The End of History". A little longer ago, if anyone had
predicted that the sixth Arthur Burns Lecture would be held in a
united Germany in a Europe in which communism has collapsed, and
in a world in which the Russian empire created since Peter the
Great has disintegrated, he would have been considered optimistic
to the point of irrationality. We all live in a world that nobody
forsaw. We all have to adjust ourselves to realities that are no
longer possible. And yet we now have to ask ourselves about the future: What kind of a world will
emerge out of this extraordinary change? What is even more
possible?

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11-23-92 11:51AM

P003 #25

Henry Kissinger
Arthur Burns Memorial Lecture, Atlantik-Brücke
Frankfurt, October 28, 1992

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What is even more remarkable is that I do not know of any period in history in which there has been such an exact correspondence between what a group of nations set out to do and what they accomplished. If you compare what the leaders of the West were saying in the late Forties and early Fifties, and what their objective was with what in fact took place, it is an almost exact fulfillment of their wishes. And yet, as George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "There are two tragedies in life: one is not to fulfill your heart's desires; the other is to fulfill them." We are now faced with having to think about a world we never believed was possible, and with working out our relationship under conditions we never expected. We can speak about the necessity of German-American friendship, European unity, or Atlantic partnership, but the real challenge is that any relationship that does not define what we can do together is doomed to becoming formalistic and, after a while, drained of content. The challenge of our period, then, is not to affirm our friendship, but to affirm what actions we can take together and the purposes we can fulfill. Let me discuss this first in relation to the United States.

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campaign in which both parties, strangely enough, seem to agree
that foreign policy is no longer a vital issue or an important
challenge. In a sense, this very attitude illustrates how much more
difficult the next phase of foreign policy will be -- intellectually as
well as philosophically -- more difficult than any America, in
particular, has ever faced previously.

If you look at American history, you can distinguish a number of
phases. In the first phase -- from the country's origin to the time of
the Monroe Doctrine -- the United States maneuvered with great skill
through the European balance of power in order to extend its own
new society's margin of independence. America's approach was not
unlike what many of us have witnessed among the Non-Aligned
nations of the current period. After the Monroe Doctrine and up to
the end of the Second World War, the United States conducted
nothing which European practitioners of diplomacy would have
recognized as foreign policy. No great nation was ever as separated
from the current of international affairs as the United States was
during that period. Moreover, it was the only nation in history
deliberately created in the pursuit of liberty, and the only to which
people came in the explicit quest for freedom. Aided by the
geographic invulnerability of being nestled between two great

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America is the only nation I know of that believes that her
domestic performance has universal import. American isolationism
has been based on two propositions: one, that America was too
good for this world, and should therefore not soil herself with day-
to-day politics (as expressed in the isolationism of the Twenties);
two, that America was not good enough for this world, and had no
right to participate in it until she had improved herself to a point
where she could morally sustain the sheer power she physically
possessed -- a type of isolationism that prevailed in the Sixties and
Seventies. In neither case did America really believe that anything
that happened abroad could fundamentally affect her, not even at
the height of the Cold War. I once gave a lecture in Omaha,
Nebraska in which I described in conventional terms the communist
terror and the measures that needed to be taken against it. Then,
in the question period, somebody got up and said, "What you say is
all very well, but what could anyone in the world want from us in
Omaha?" The headquarters of the Strategic Air Command was five

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miles outside of Omaha, and if there is one city in the world certain
to be attacked even before Washington in the event of a nuclear
war, it would have been Omaha. That, however, was not part of my
audience's consciousness.

I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of Woodrow
Wilson, who appeared in Europe in 1918 to say that everything that
had ever been done in diplomacy was wrong and that only certain
principles were universally true. He listed among these: self-
determination, collective security, the League of Nations, and the
rule of law. The most interesting thing was not the inspiration of
his vision, important as it was, but that if you go back and read
American scholarly discussions of the period you cannot find a single
article that says, "How does he know this? Why is this true?" His
principles were accepted as universally valid and, to this day,
underscore American thinking on foreign policy. America is the only
country I know of in which the word "balance of power" is always
preceded with some perjorative adjective, and in which "realpolitik"
denotes a criticism. Any American foreign policy since World War
I that did not have an idealistic Wilsonian bent to it proved built on
sand.

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In the post-World War II period this element was relatively easy
to incorporate because it lent itself so well to the application of
America's two seminal experiences of that generation: the
experience of the New Deal, which taught that political unrest
results from a gap between economic expectation and reality; and,
the experience of the anti-fascist war, one of the few wars without
ambiguity in which it was easy to construct the conflict as one
between good and evil. The post-World War II period as well met
many of these criteria. The Marshall Plan became the moral
equivalent of the New Deal, and NATO the moral equivalent of the
anti-fascist coalition. And through most of the Cold War, American
leaders were convinced that it was not really possible to negotiate
with the Communists unless they first altered their values and
converted to democratic ways. If you look at the American policy
of Containment, it was based on the idea of creating situations of
strength so that, at some point, negotiations could take place. It
never described what these negotiations might consist of because
there first had to be a change of attitude on the part of the
adversary. Afterwards, the specific terms would be more or less
irrelevant. Curiously enough, that's what happened, unhistorical as
it was and just about the way it was expected to happen.

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The result, however, is that we are now in a world for which we
have no previous experience. Those of you who follow American
discussions will know that my views are not totally representative of
every point of view, to put it mildly. Yet the great challenge facing
America is that she is moving into a world that has more of the
attributes of Nineteenth century Europe -- though on a global basis -
- than of the Cold War. That is, if in Nineteenth century Europe
there existed five great powers, then the status of each great power
was defined by the improbability of any of the others attempting to
impose their will without first evoking a coalition to make that
possible, and at a cost that was commensurate with what the
domestic situation in each of those countries could sustain. Foreign
policy in the Nineteenth century thus consisted of adjustments to the
general equilibrium which were, most of the time, carried out by
European Congresses, but sometimes by war. Its essence, as Lord
Palmerston once said about England, was that it knew no friends,
only interests. There were no permanent friends and no permanent
enemies, as reflected in the fact that there were no fundamental
ideological conflicts. Disagreements could be dealt with within the
existing system. My argument is that the world into which we are
now moving, albeit globally, has a number of these attributes. It
will be composed of several major power centers. None of these will

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I have been studying the various speeches and inaugural addresses of American presidents in this century and, different as these presidents were, they were all united by one common theme: if they spoke of foreign policy at all, they all maintained that the United States had no national interest and that its foreign policy was selfless, being conducted on behalf of the people of the world, on behalf of international law, of resistance to agression -- in fact of almost anything but American self-interest. As late as the Gulf War, President Bush was telling the Congress that America was not at war because she wanted anything, but because she was defending international law. He was not being hypocritical, but sounding a profound American belief. Yet America will soon be in a world in which, in my view, this will no longer work, even though most Americans have not realized that yet. The common belief is still that

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if democracy spreads all over the world, we will no longer face the
need for balance or equilibrium, or have recurrent tensions.
Although there have never been enough democracies in the world at
any one time to test this proposition, the enthusiasm with which
European parliaments greeted the outbreak of World War I -- at a
time when there was universal suffrage -- raises at least some
question as to whether this can always be true. No doubt, in
Yugoslavia today, all the various governments that are killing each
other would find an easy majority among their populations for the
causes they are pursuing. But I don't wish to argue here about the
merit of this proposition. I simply want to state that, on a global
basis, it will not happen very fast. It would also involve us in
domestic politics on a global scale that would bring its own
problems. What the United States is facing over the next ten years
is not just a problem but a great drama -- how to relate the
convictions which made it a great country and that gave a
tremendous impetus to its post-war policy, to the needs of the period
and to its emerging realities. When I was a graduate student, I
called on President Truman, who had just left office, for some paper
I was writing and asked him what meant most to him during his
period in office. He said, "What I am proudest of is that we totally
defeated our enemies and then brought them back as equals to the

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community of nations. I would like to think that only Americans could have done that." I do not know whether only Americans could have done it, but it was an expression of the American spirit that has to be preserved. Yet in a world of infinite complications and much greater complexity, at a time when the national leadership is more and more focused on domestic concerns and the requirements of getting elected in every democracy are so tortuous that the relationship between those qualities it takes to get elected and those it takes to govern is increasingly becoming lost. This too is another American problem.

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And so there emerged in the center of Europe a state with very
complex attributes. It had more neighbors than anyone else, and it
faced both east and west. It was therefore natural for it to want to
protect itself against all possible enemies. Yet in trying to protect
itself against all the enemies together, it managed to threaten each
of them individually and, by the definition of the balance of power,
only brought them closer together. When one studies the history of
Germany between Bismarck and the outbreak of World War I, one
is struck by how such a well-meaning, decent, and basically non-
aggressive people could have managed to bring about everything they
feared most without defining exactly what it was they wanted.
What did the Germans mean when they said they wanted a place
under the sun? What if on August 1, 1914 the Allied powers had
come to the German Kaiser and said, "Here is a map of the world.
Tell us what you want." What would he have wanted? I have
never seen a clear description of what the national objectives of
Germany might have been that justified such a truculent foreign
policy. I do not say it as a criticism of the past. I say this: that
Germany is a country that was unified in 1871, led the life of a
normal state only up to 1914, was subjected to the period of
discrimination inherent in losing a war, then entered the Nazi period
only to be divided again and to have to spend forty years focusing,

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at least in part, on the problem of how to become a nation again.
So now Germany is here again. The most powerful nation in
Europe. Unified. Democratic. Tied to the West for the first time
in its modern history and at a moment when leaders in the West do
not know exactly what they are supposed to do. Thus both
Germany and the United States need to define new purposes to lend
new meaning to all they have accomplished over the last forty years.

Now, let's turn to the big issues of this moment: the future of
European unity, the future of the Atlantic partnership, and the future
of a German national policy. These are all up for new definitions
within institutions that were created on quite a different set of
premises. When European unity was formed it had several purposes,
one of which was to find a home for a national Germany and to
prevent the recurrence of previous tragedies. But the *arrière pensée*
was always that Germany was likely to be divided; at least I do not
know of anybody who foresaw such rapid unification of Germany.

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importantly, of American protection, and in the early stages, of
American capital. Most of these conditions have now been altered.
The third premise of European unity has, at least for the moment,
disappeared, though there are still some nearly pathetic efforts to
give meaning to NATO. These consist largely of expanding it to the
territories of the former Soviet Union through some sort of
cooperative effort -- a purpose for which it never would have been
created in the first place. The future of Europe is affected by the
reality that a unified Germany will be its most powerful country; the
subconscious debate among many is whether Germany will prove
more dominant in an integrated Europe or in a national Europe,
something that must affect, at times even consciously, the attitudes
of many other states as well.

Now I happen to believe two seemingly contradictory things:
First, I am always attacked in the United States because I really do
not think it is within our capacity to spread democracy on a day-
to-day basis all over the world, for this will get us into situations
that are beyond our capacity to manage. On the other hand, I
believe that the democratic western nations that share similar
institutions do have a common destiny, and can vindicate democracy
in a world of fundamentalism and of ethnic conflicts -- of which, in

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So that now is the challenge. What we really need is a
philosophical equivalent of a Containment theory and of a Marshall
Plan, though it would have to be much more complex and much less
aimed at a single objective. In each of our countries there are now
new generations that have not had the experience of working
together, so the task of their leaders on both sides of the Atlantic is
to define the common purposes by which we can get ourselves into
that so-called "new world order". For every great construction was
an idea before it became a reality. One doesn't have to underline
this in the Paulskirche. The great challenge to our period, and

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especially of this time, will be whether, having achieved most
everything we set out to do, we can refine goals for ourselves that
are worthy of what our predecessors accomplished. That is why it
is a particular honor for me to have been asked to speak on behalf
of one of those, Arthur Burns, who was among the great figures not
just in America, but in the West. Thank you very much.

================

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked to say a few words about
the first Karl Klasen Award being presented right now to two
distinguished journalists. When I returned to Germany in the 1940's,
at the end of the war, and saw the smashed cities and the
disintegration of society, it would have seemed inconceivable that we
could meet today in one of the most modern cities of the world, in
the restored Paulskirche, and that people would be wondering what
to do with a Germany that has become too strong, too unified, and
too rich. In those days it looked to me visually as if it might take
fifty years just to clear away the rubble. And when one thinks, as
many of you do, of the time when a distance of thirty miles in
Germany meant that you did not even know how to reach somebody
because there was next to no effective communication, one has to

[L]

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pay tribute to the courage and spiritual strength of the generation that dared to begin again. Karl Klasen belonged to that generation. He opposed the government that had caused such a debacle. But he also belonged to those who went to work doggedly and with great determination to rebuild their country. And the rebuilding was done not only in the name of material progress, but in the name of removing any ambiguity as to where Germany stood morally and politically.

In the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, the most extraordinary achievement of Germany was not simply its material restoration, but the moral and political restoration, which has been so taken for granted today that people don't even consider it extraordinary anymore. Karl Klasen epitomized the generation that thought that reliability, steadiness, and integrity needed to be the principal traits of the new Germany and he could do it because he represented them in his own person. When, in the Seventies, Klasen fought for stability of the German currency, it was naturally a technically important economic mission. But it was also philosophically and psychologically crucial that Germany be wedded to steadiness and reliability, that its word count, and that predictability become a sort of national duty. Whether or not one agrees technically with the

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