Europe: The End of World War II

AS the blue-and-gold Lufthansa jetliner rolled to a stop at Cologne airport late last week, the waiting crowd broke into a cheer. Out stepped Foreign Minister Walter Scheel. He brought home from Moscow two red-bound leather volumes containing a renunciation-of-force treaty between West Germany and the Soviet Union that he and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had initialed only a few hours earlier. Perhaps unconsciously, Scheel spoke of accord in a phrase reminiscent of Bismarck's famed injunction to keep the line open to St. Petersburg, then Imperial Russia's capital. Said Scheel: "We have opened a gate to the East."

Actually, the West Germans have done far more than that. Despite disclaimers by Bonn, the Treaty of Moscow in effect represents nothing less than a peace treaty between West Germany and Russia. In the aftermath of defeat in World War II, the conquering powers sundered Germany, drawing the demarcation of the cold war's battle line through the heart of the beaten country. While West Germany became a part of the Western defense and economic system and made, in effect, a separate peace with the Western Allies, Bonn's relations with the East bloc remained in a state of suspended hostilities. Bonn was the Soviet Union's chief whipping boy in Europe; the fear of renascent Germany was the most persuasive Russian rationale for the continued presence of Soviet forces throughout Eastern Europe. West Germany's diplomatic claims, which included the right to represent East Germany in international affairs and demands for lands taken over by Poland, only buttressed Soviet propaganda charges that Bonn was a peril to peace.

The Treaty of Moscow changes all that. It recognizes existing postwar boundaries, including the Oder-Neisse Line, which forms Poland's western frontier, and brings an end to German claims on territory lost in the war.

Brandt's Grand Design. For West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who flies to Moscow this week for the formal signing, the treaty marks the first crucial success of his Ostpolitik. That is his grand design, which envisions a united Western Europe living in peace with its neighbors to the east.

Brandt's first concepts of the possibility of European conciliation were formed during his years as the hard-headed young mayor of West Berlin. Later, as Foreign Minister in the Grand Coalition from 1967-69, he made his first serious approaches to the East. After the Social Democrats formed a ruling coalition with Walter Scheel's Free Democrats following the September 1969 elections, Brandt dispatched his most trusted foreign policy adviser, State Secretary Egon Bahr, to Moscow for exhaustive preliminary discussions.

In 36 hours of talks over a four-month period, Bahr and Gromyko drafted a treaty for a mutual renunciation of force. But in West Germany, the opposition Christian Democrats attacked the plan as a sellout, because Bahr's draft, among other things, failed to affirm Germany's right to eventual reunification. In an effort to arouse popular opposition to the talks, somebody, apparently a Brandt enemy high in the government, leaked excerpts from the Bahr-Gromyko paper to Hamburg's sex-and-scandal newspaper Bild-Zeitung.

Berlin Problems. When Walter Scheel reached Moscow three weeks ago, he insisted that the agreement make clear that Bonn was not renouncing Germany's right to reunification. From almost the beginning, the clowning and informal Scheel seems to have hit it off with the austere Gromyko. In the formal talks at the Spiridonoff Palace, Scheel stressed that Soviet concessions on Berlin were essential to any agreement. Specifically, he demanded signs of progress in the stalled four-power talks about Berlin. At one point, Gromyko snapped at Scheel: "Berlin is not your concern"--meaning that the divided city remains a four-power responsibility. The Soviets refused to give formal assurances concerning Berlin. But later, Gromyko promised Scheel privately that, once the renunciation-of-force treaty was signed, the Soviets would cooperate with the three Western Allies to improve the position of West Berlin. The Bonn delegation accordingly proceeded with the initialing of the treaty, but insisted that the West German government would not offer the document to the Bundestag for final ratification until progress on the Berlin question has taken place.

On the last afternoon, Gromyko disappeared into the depths of the Kremlin, where the treaty was approved at a special session of the Politburo. In the early evening, Gromyko drove to the guest villa on Lenin Hill, where Scheel was staying, and the two made arrangements for the initialing of the agreement the next day, and for the exchange of two accompanying letters.

The first letter, from Bonn to Moscow, will state that German aspirations toward eventual peaceful reunification are not contradictory to the spirit or intent of the new treaty. The second, from Bonn to the Allies, which the Soviets will formally acknowledge, will declare that the Bonn-Moscow agreement does not prejudice Allied rights in Germany, including Berlin, nor does it preclude an eventual peace treaty that could allow a reunification of East and West Germany. On both points, the Soviets acceded to Bonn's demands.

Security Conference. In many ways, the key ingredient of the Treaty of Moscow is what it may do for Europe tomorrow. Writes TIME Correspondent Benjamin Cate: "The Bonn-Moscow accord certainly will lead to similar treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, and to a third German summit with Walter Ulbricht's East German regime. Western Europe, which has leaned so heavily in America's direction for 25 years, will begin to right itself and gradually pull away from America's orbit. Because of the expected expansion of the Common Market, the dream that Charles de Gaulle so cherished of a Europe standing apart from the two superpowers may become a reality. It will not be a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, but it might be a Europe from the Atlantic to the Elbe."

In the meantime, the Bonn-Moscow accord in all likelihood will lead to a European security conference, which the Soviets wish to convene--possibly in Helsinki--as a means of gaining full international endorsement of the status quo in Europe. In such a conference, which would be attended by the U.S. and Canada as well as all European countries, the participants would pledge to respect each other's boundaries; they would also discuss a mutual reduction of forces between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations. The security conference would be, in fact, an updated version of the 19th century Congress of Vienna, in which the nations of Europe and North America would seek to work out new security arrangements, even as the diplomats of Metternich's day sought to put together a new European order following the dislocations of the Napoleonic era.

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