ATLANTIK-BRUECKE SPEECH, Hamburg

May 25, 1992

Mr. Chairman, Helmut, Deputy Hans Dietrich Genscher, Friends:

It is for me an extraordinarily moving occasion to receive this award from one of my dearest friends, in the country in which I was born, and the relationship of which with America I consider to be the central foreign policy necessity today. I had in fact been so moved by this occasion that I offered to deliver my speech in German, but Frau Lindemann desisted, though I do not know whether it was because you like to hear my German accent in English, or whether it is Hamburg's reaction to a Franconian accent. Anyway, this is for me a very significant personal occasion.

When I write about Metternich or Bismarck in America, people say "Aha, that is his German background." I haven't the heart to tell them that at the *Israelische Realschule* where I was obliged to go in 1933, Metternich was not a compulsory subject. I cannot remember whether we reached the age of Bismarck in my German history class by the time I left for America. No, what I learned in Germany was the transitory nature of human institutions, the importance of human relationships in critical times, and the necessity of bringing about, after the tempest of war had passed, a world in which such outbreaks could not occur again. When one has lived through the storms of Germany, one knows that the American expectation of an automatic relationship between intention and outcome is not necessarily true.

Helmut referred to my interest in equilibrium. That is quite true. In a world of many groupings and power centers it is important to have equilibrium to avoid domination. But it is also important to have some sense of shared justice. Power by itself is the most difficult element to evaluate in international affairs. And unless there are some fundamental values within a country and between societies that are considered paramount, power alone cannot achieve the equilibrium which I believe is of such great importance.

Most of my reflections on international affairs developed after the war, first when I was in the army of occupation in Germany, and then as a student at Harvard. I was, incidentally, quite influenced by a German friend who had left Germany not because he was subject to persecution, but because he was philosophically opposed to what the Nazi regime represented. In this sense I learned from a German who was also a refugee but for quite different reasons than mine. Arriving in a devastated Germany at the end of the war, and remembering not just the difficult years through which we had gone but

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also how connected my family had felt to the people here, I felt that our generation had a special obligation to try to bring about a new world in which cooperation between our two societies would become a matter of course. And it was something that took tremendous spiritual strength.

To the German leaders as well as the German people of an occupied country amidst such ruin, it looked as if it would take two generations just to remove the rubble and to begin reconstruction. I have had the privilege of knowing German leaders of all political parties. While I have occasionally disagreed with their practical policies, I have never forgotten the dedication that was required to begin again in a country separated by borders that reflected no historical experience, and to build a democratic state that was tied to the West by firm convictions -- ties that have survived many domestic political changes and huge international upheavals.

We are now in a period for which there is almost no precedent in history. What is perhaps most without precedent is that there is no example I know of -- either of a nation or of a group of nations -- that has so completely achieved what it set out to do in the international scene as the Western democracies have in the past forty years. If one reads what was said by the fathers of NATO and of the Marshall Plan, by the founders of the German Federal Republic, by men like Paul Nitze and George Kennan who designed America's fundamental post-war policy, one finds that what at the time might have seemed like wildly idealistic dreams have, forty years later, become reality. I know of no other instance in history where this has happened so completely. Our challenge now is that we have in fact achieved what we set out to do. We do live in a new world; it is not just the invention of some American president. And the challenge is this: can we give this new world the same cohesiveness and the same inspiration that we gave the period that we have just transited? Conditions have, and are still in, the process of changing radically.

We formed a North Atlantic Treaty Organization because we felt an imminent threat from the Soviet Union. One must pay tribute to the German leaders of all parties who, on behalf of their own as well as Western security, were willing to risk the permanent division of their country in the face of many a siren call from the East. But the threat has now geographically moved a thousand miles to the East, and the origin of the threat is in a state of political disintegration. Under these conditions, the Atlantic Alliance cannot be what it used to be, nor is it enough to repeat endlessly that the Atlantic Alliance is the keystone of our relationship (which, of course, in a way it is) unless we can give a content to that Alliance that is relevant to the new realities.

Germany is unified; the Eastern frontier is no longer at the German-Polish border but somewhere further east -- just exactly where is in itself a subject of political debate, as are the borders of Europe. And it is a subject that requires a whole new set of conceptions. One fact, however, is very clear -- that Germany is geographically

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somewhere in the center of this new construction -- or construction-to-be -- rather than at its exact border. The world has become multipolar. The world of the Cold War, when there were two great blocks confronting each other, was an extremely dangerous but intellectually perhaps somewhat simpler world than one in which we have a Europe, an America, a Japan, a China, and whatever emerges on the territory of the former Soviet Union. What that something turns out to be in itself requires that we think about and work on it together.

I believe that German-American cooperation on all these problems in a world of economic interdependence and instantaneous communication is both crucial and, in a way, very difficult. Crucial, because, for America, there are no familiar categories with which to deal in this new world. In the Cold War we were able to apply the two great lessons of recent American history: the lesson of the New Deal, which taught that political stability is achieved by bridging the gap between economic expectation and reality; and, the lesson of World War II, in which freedom-loving peoples united against what they perceived to be an absolute evil, mobilized their forces, and achieved total victory.

This is not the world into which we are now moving. It has no analogy to the Marshall Plan in Eastern Europe, and certainly not in the former Soviet Union. The resources that would be required to execute a Marshall-type plan go way beyond the capacity of what any of the democratic societies could manage. The original Marshall Plan was applied to a Western Europe (including Germany) that already had a democratic tradition, bureaucratic experience, and a managerial group. None of this exists in the former Soviet Union. Its Church never functioned on the basis of a separation of justice and politics, it had no Age of Enlightenment, no Reformation, and no capitalist base. And while in Russia, and maybe in the Ukraine, there were pockets of it, in central Asia there was no experience with any of this whatsoever. So, although we are tempted to speak in terms of quickly producing democracy over there and of democracy then automatically solving all our international problems, I simply do not believe it is possible. The First World War broke out among countries that were technically democratic and enjoyed universal suffrage, yet it was extremely popular when it started.

The evolution of Russia and of the various republics is something that will take a long time, and it will not automatically give us peace. America, to be quite frank, has no experience with a multipolar world, having in the past been either isolationist or dominant. It has never had to deal with an international environment in which it is not possible to find a definitive solution to every problem or in which problems resolve themselves through a long process of adjustment. Therefore, the so-called New World Order will be something of a learning process for Americans. The uniquely American approach -- of which almost every American president has availed himself -- is to present our particular course, whatever it is, not based on national or any other interest, but on altruism -- without understanding that a disinterested policy makes people extremely

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nervous because it is in itself capricious. Thus, what we have to learn in this period is
how to develop a national interest that also encompasses a global interest. I say this
because I believe that Germany as well has not had a great deal of experience with
conducting a foreign policy of encompassing interest.

Looking at German history, one notes that it was the last European country to be
unified -- in 1875. It has spent more of its energy over the centuries on becoming
unified than reflecting on what to do with its unification. It did not know exactly what
to do, finding itself repeatedly in a situation in which, due to efforts it did not
particularly focus on, it became the strongest nation in Europe, as it is again today. After
Bismarck I believe that Germany, with relatively good intentions, produced a rather
chaotic international environment. It has, in fact, conducted foreign policy as a united
country for only 44 of the last 120 years, mainly during the First Reich. It is now a
united country again. Helmut quoted me correctly, of course. Yet I do not say any of
this as somebody who does not trust Germany.

It is in this context that I believe some of the debates in the United States are
somewhat beside the point. America tends to believe that there is one universally correct
solution to all problems. And we have been great believers in the doctrine of collective
security, in which everybody resists aggression jointly based on the assumption that
everybody has the same interest in peace and is willing to run the same risks on its
behalf -- a notion for the validity of which, in my view, there is very little historical
evidence. Therefore, historically, statements by American leaders have created the
impression that what a statesman does in a crisis is call his lawyer and find out what the
legal obligations are. When Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland and President Roosevelt
asked the State Department what this meant, the State Department wrote out an analysis
of all the treaties Germany had broken by entering the Rhineland. But, it said, since
none of them had been signed by the United States, that therefore meant there was no
American interest in the matter -- which illustrates our tendency to focus on the legal
obligations.

Now when we talk about the territory of the former Soviet Union, we tend to try
to escape all our dilemmas by saying "Let's give aid," (which is in fact very little). "They
will then become democratic, market-oriented, and peaceful." But if we look at European
history in the period between the Thirty Years War and the end of World War II, it is
obvious that the key problem of European foreign policy for some three hundred years
and the cause of innumerable wars was how to organize politically the relations of the
political units emerging on that territory. One can always find formulas and in this
sense I am contrary to our official position. I am not so interested in techniques of
integration or non-integration. What I am interested in is whether we can develop
common political goals in the world into which we are moving. The territory from the
Polish frontier to Vladivostock and to the gates of the Middle East is many times larger
than Europe. Fifteen new states have emerged on that territory in a very peculiar

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constellation because all of them still have former Red Army troops on their soil, even though they are members of the United Nations. How this territory organizes itself politically and the relation of the various units to each other will be a central problem of international politics. And we must talk about it, and we must talk about it together, because it affects us all.

Personally I favor an independent Europe. It does not bother me if Europe has an independent defense capability. But when we say the Atlantic Alliance is the key of our policy, what exactly do we mean? Do we mean that every issue we talk about will be like starting from scratch? Or do we mean that there exists some special relationship among us based on our history and values? What is that special relationship? For forty years we could substitute military for political arrangements. That is probably no longer possible, although we should somehow keep the military component. What is the political future we are trying to achieve? That is the question we must put to ourselves. And it cannot be answered without Germany; it cannot be answered without the United States.

I agree with Helmut; many of your neighbors in private conversations express great worries. Now they cannot tell you exactly what it is they are so worried about, partly because they do not understand any more fully than all the others what the problems are. When I say that America needs to have a role in Europe, it is not because I think that Germany has bad intentions, but because I think it will calm some of those concerns and enable us to address the joint problems, some of which I have tried to sketch here.

For me, as I said at the beginning, it is a matter of emotional necessity. Yet it is an objective necessity that the relationship of Germany and the United States, and of Europe and the United States, be as close as possible. When I look at the emerging structures around the world I think it would be suicidal for the rest of the nations to divide themselves over tactical issues and issues of precedent. On the other hand, they need to find a way to ask themselves what their future is to be. In all our countries, domestic politics have become so obsessive and take up so much energy that too many leaders are forced to address the urgent rather than dealing with the important. There is almost no reward for long-term thinking. And yet we must remember where we started.

Forty years ago a number of people, some of whom are here, had a vision of a world which seemed fantastic at the time. But, together with our European friends, it became reality, against all odds, and through many trials. The challenge before us now is: can we begin a new act of creation?

I want to thank Helmut for what he has said about our friendship, and about the relation of our societies. Because for forty years now we have been conducting a dialogue. And there are many others in this room who contributed so much to our joint

May 25, 1992

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