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The Prospects for German Reunification
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14147 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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1 / 1988 |
2,402 Words |
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Mark Holston
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It is by virtually every measurement an impossible dream, yet the government of West Germany pursues it with the same dogged determination that helped to make this remarkable country postwar Europe's most successful state. "The awareness of the nation's unity is as keen as ever, and the will to preserve it unbroken," stated West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to his East German counterpart, General Secretary Erich Honecker, during the historic September visit to the Federal Republic. "The preamble of our Basic Law is not negotiable," Kohl lectured his guest. "It calls for the entire German people to achieve in free self-determination the unity and freedom of Germany."
The issue of reunification--the "German question" in diplomatic circles--is one that few outside Bonn expect ever to be resolved to the satisfaction of West Germany's political majority. While Kohl's message of national unity plays well to a country where 40 percent of the population has relatives confined to a life of economic hardship and restricted freedom in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), it is a message Honecker is tired of hearing, and one the Federal Republic of Germany's (FRG) nervous neighbors in the West hope will remain on indefinite hold.
"Both an end to illusion and a platform for hope," is how Hamburg's influential weekly Die Zeit summed up the Honecker visit. From an official standpoint, reunification is viewed differently. While the prospect that relations between the two German states will improve has been given new life, the illusion that some miracle will bring the two halves together still clings to life, and it remains fundamental to the day-to-day functioning of the Federal Republic's bureaucracy.
Reunification as policy
"It's not a question of 10 years or 100 years, but a process that will eventually lead to reunification," explains Reinhold Schnoor, an articulate FRG official typical of the postwar generation of young Germans who are playing an increasingly important role in their country's government and policy creation. But Schnoor's ministry, housed in yet another of the faceless, stainless steel and glass, shoe box-like office buildings that abound in Bonn, has no counter-part in any other nation. The Federal Ministry for Intra-German Relations exists only because the Federal Republic has never accepted the GDR as an equal in the world club of nations. According to West German law, the GDR is a state within the German nation: Citizenship to all residents of East Germany is automatic, no duty is charged on goods imported from the East, and mail goes to points in the GDR on internal rather than international postal rates. Through these and countless other measures, the Federal Republic maintains, on paper and in spirit, that a special relationship exists and that it is out of the question to accept the GDR as a foreign country. That is why Schnoor and over 300 colleagues work diligently with an annual budget of $1.4 billion to give the policy of reunification a bureaucratic semblance of reality.
The ministry serves two distinct purposes. Symbolically, it reminds the world of the Federal Republic's resolve to stand by its reunification policy. More practically, it serves an important role as coordinator of a growing number of programs aimed at normalizing the historically strained relations between East and West and aiding those from the East who opt for a new life in the Federal Republic through either legal or
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