There were fateful days in February 1990 – days that decided about Europe’s security and which still give rise to new uncertainties to this day. When Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies the deployment of troops on the Ukrainian border with an alleged threat from NATO, he always brings up this key historical moment.
Putin himself experienced the time in his office in Dresden’s Angelikastrasse (not Angela), the KGB headquarters in Saxony. From his perspective, the masses demonstrated on the Leipziger Ring, stormed the Stasi offices and heralded the fall of the superpower Soviet Union. The Dresden KGB branch was spared, but the experiences were traumatic for Putin.
The accusation raised by the current president, his foreign minister and a long line of Russian dignitaries: The Soviet Union was betrayed by the West in 1990 because NATO failed to keep what is probably the most important security promise: the Atlantic Alliance, according to the Russian interpretation, would never expand east, and even a united Germany would never become a full member of the alliance.
This narrative has burned itself into the minds of the Russian leadership. But: The claim is incorrect, the historically verifiable commitments and agreements are far more complex, and the debate about a European security architecture continued long after the year of German unification.
The archives are open, the sources are available
The sources can now be described as rich: The archives of the governments of Helmut Kohl, George Bush (USA) and Bill Clinton (USA) are open, private records and letters from foreign policy actors such as Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Eduard Shevardnadze and James Baker have been published . The last Soviet leader, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, decided – instigated by Kohl’s example – to publish his papers.
Nobody has processed the material more thoroughly than the historian Mary E. Sarotte, who has just published her third book on the end of the Cold War and about the 1990s from a security perspective (“Not One Inch”, Yale University Press). Sarotte likes to interpret her American citizenship as partiality, but the charge is fabricated – no one has sought historical justice more than she.
In this way she succeeded in reconstructing the important days between February 6 and 25, 1990, when Gorbachev consented to the unification of Germany. Gorbachev did this in a conversation with the then Federal Chancellor Kohl in Moscow. This was preceded by visits by Foreign Ministers Genscher and Baker to the Soviet capital. In his conversation with Gorbachev on February 9th, the American Baker in particular left the impression that a unified Germany could become a member of a “(politically) changed NATO”, but that its scope would not be extended “eastwards” (as stated in his own notes).
The White House was of course taken by surprise by the advance of its own minister and on the same day sent a letter from the President to Kohl in which Bush proposed a “special military status” for East Germany, but otherwise made it clear that Germany as a whole had to become a member of NATO . Thoughts of enlargement were not considered at all at the time – the Warsaw Pact existed for a year longer.
Kohl was familiar with both US positions and had no doubts about Bush’s determination when, in the decisive conversation with Gorbachev on February 10, he chose the oral formulation that “NATO would of course not expand into the territory of East Germany”. In this conversation Kohl received Gorbachev’s promise to unite. Gorbachev was of course under the impression of Kohl’s assurance, but must also have known that the German Chancellor could not make a decision on behalf of NATO as a whole.
Kohl cleared the doubts with a few billion
14 days later, during a meeting between Kohl and Bush at the American President’s country residence, Camp David, Kohl put his statement into perspective and did not contradict the US President, who said, “To hell with it. We prevailed, not her.” Kohl, a very pragmatist, had long since recognized the greatest needs of Gorbachev, who threatened to collapse his country economically. Germany offered the Soviet Union billions in aid, declared as financing the withdrawal of troops from the GDR.
Gorbachev himself, as his notes can be interpreted, was never primarily guided by considerations of security policy. He never insisted on the oral statements of Baker or Kohl being written down. On the contrary: after Bush’s reading had prevailed and it was documented in a detailed telegram to the French president in April, he proposed a pan-European security architecture under the leadership of NATO. He even went so far as to bring membership of the Soviet Union into play in May.
So the Soviet Union never sought legally binding commitments or even contracts on the role of NATO after unification. The subject no longer appears in the negotiations on the foreign policy of German unity (two-plus-four talks). What remains is the gray area that was created orally in the days between February 8th and 25th.