Europe The New Germany Flexes Its Muscles

By JAMES O. JACKSON BONN

To much of Europe, modern Germany resembles a child of doubtful lineage adopted as an infant into a loving family: the child has been good, obedient and industrious, but friends and neighbors are worried that evil genes may still lurk beneath a well-mannered surface -- all the more so now that the child has become an adult.

And what a powerful grownup it has become. United Germany, with 80 million citizens and Europe's largest economy, is asserting itself as never before in postwar history. It is assuming a forceful leadership role in European foreign policy even as the Bundesbank rules Europe's economic roost. Germany has had a leading role in the task of guiding the former Soviet Union through its postcommunist crisis; it was Chancellor Helmut Kohl who, far more than George Bush, pushed for last week's $24 billion Group of Seven aid package for Boris Yeltsin's Russian government. And German firms are grabbing up many of the best business opportunities in the emerging market economies of Central Europe.

At U.N. headquarters in New York City there has been talk of giving Germany a permanent role on the Security Council -- either directly, with a seat of its own, or by establishing a European seat, which the Germans would almost certainly dominate. "What we see -- some among us with a shudder -- is Germany taking the helm in Europe," says James Rollo of London's Royal Institute of International Affairs.

This is not exactly what the neighbors had in mind. The very idea of NATO, the E.C. and other postwar institutions has been to lock Germany into a European structure, not the other way around. Last December's E.C. summit in the Dutch city of Maastricht was supposed to nail down the roof of a house that would contain and control Germany as a cooperative, pacific and co-equal member of the European family. But in the aftermath of Maastricht, Germany has broken ranks on issues large and small, upsetting and sometimes frightening its allies.

When Germany unilaterally last month halted all weapons shipments to Turkey, a NATO ally, because some of them had been used against Kurdish rebels, the Turkish reaction was furious. An Istanbul newspaper caricatured Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher wearing a swastika, and Turkish President Turgut Ozal darkly warned that "Germany changed a lot after unification. It is as if it is trying to intervene in everything, interfere with everyone, trying to prove it is a great power. In the past, Hitler's Germany did the same thing." The attack was intemperate and unfair -- it was Turkey that had been behaving brutally, not Germany -- and anger with the Ankara government ran so high in Germany that Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg resigned for having failed to stop the arms shipments earlier. Kohl rightly rejected Ozal's "tone and content."

Yet only two days earlier, Kohl himself had gratuitously disturbed the skeletons of the past when he hosted a cordial lunch in Munich for Austrian President Kurt Waldheim. That made him the first Western leader to meet Waldheim outside Austria, breaking the diplomatic isolation imposed on the Austrian President for his suspected knowledge of and involvement in wartime deportations to Nazi labor camps. Kohl brooked no criticism. "It's up to me as Chancellor to decide whom I'll meet in Munich," he growled. "I don't need any advice."

Waldheim aside, Bonn's behavior upsets its allies not because it is necessarily wrong. Turkey's attacks on Kurdish rebels are deeply troubling to all its NATO allies, and Germany certainly has a right to object and even to withhold arms. What has changed is Germany's style. The old, far more modest West Germany would have worked quietly behind the scenes to obtain allied consensus on arms transfers or to persuade Turkey to behave less brutally. Not now, and perhaps never again. "Germany is reflecting its power," says Rollo. "It is confident enough to act on its own."

Since Maastricht there has been a growing sense of irritation among Germany's neighbors on a variety of issues. The ink on the Maastricht agreement was hardly dry before Bonn pressured -- some say bullied -- the rest of the E.C. into recognizing the breakaway Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia. Most of the 12 preferred to wait to give E.C. negotiators a chance to implement a cease-fire, but Germany forced a decision by threatening to go it alone. Then, just before Christmas, the Bundesbank suddenly raised its interest rates, compelling most of the rest of Western Europe to follow at a time when governments were eager to ease credit to help their economies recover from recession. Many Europeans saw the bank's unilateral move as a warning that economic and monetary union will simply replace de facto German economic dominance with de jure economic hegemony.

Lately, just about everything the Germans do seems to cause annoyance. When Kohl urged that German be elevated to the status of a working language in the E.C., alongside English and French, a senior British diplomat sniffed, "It was a bit presumptuous of them to demand everything at once." Countered Kohl, who speaks neither English nor French: "Whether one likes to hear it or not, it ((German)) is now the most widely spoken language in the E.C." While that may be a slight exaggeration, what the Germans call their Sprachraum (linguistic space) does include more than 100 million people in Germany and in potential E.C. members Austria and Switzerland, plus millions more in Eastern Europe whose main second language is German.

These signs of assertiveness are the more unsettling because they represent such a departure from Germany's postwar behavior. For four decades its foreign policy has been one of self-effacing followership, never leadership. To Germans, the worst political sin was Alleingang, going it alone. Boastfulness was bad, even when such accomplishments as the postwar economic miracle justified a certain degree of pride; any reference to success was routinely followed by a word of gratitude to the Western Allies and a word of apology for the Nazi past.

Now the German inclination is to savor success without dwelling on the past. Kohl, whose physical bulk and blunt manner seem to personify the big new Germany, called the Yugoslavia decision "a success for German foreign policy." Genscher flatly said, "We were right!" For their part, Germans feel frustrated when they are criticized for doing things that would seem benign if done by virtually any other country. It is time, say many Germans, to reap the benefits of 45 years of good conduct. What they want is responsibility commensurate with duty. "When it comes to paying, everybody says, 'Germans to the front!' " Kohl complains. "So when it comes to political responsibility, I think the Germans should also be standing up front."

And so they are, in the areas where they do the most paying. By contributing about 70% of all assistance pledged by the industrialized world to the new entities rising from the wreckage of the old Soviet Union, Germany has emerged as the point nation for managing the economic development of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The same holds for the rest of the old East bloc, where German business is overwhelmingly in front. "The more the East is emptied of Soviet power, the more it is being replaced by Germany's," observes French historian Georges Valance.

Such growing influence may be considered good or bad, but either way it is probably unavoidable. "Indisputably, Germany is going to occupy a totally dominant position in the years to come," says Simon Petermann, professor of international relations at Brussels Free University. "That's a position that, in many respects, the Germans have long held. The difference now is that the old formula casting Germany as an economic giant and a political dwarf no longer holds true."

But recognizing the inevitability of Germany's asserting its power is not the same as welcoming it. French political leaders are concerned that their entire postwar policy, which adroitly cultivated a Bonn-Paris axis that magnified French power by combining with Germany's, may be coming unstuck. Germans firmly deny any intention to dominate Europe: Kohl's slogan is "A European Germany, Not a German Europe." But they are no longer willing to be subordinate within it. "The days when the French could count on our subservience are over," says a senior German diplomat. "And that applies to others too."

Such talk raises hackles among the victims and victors of World War II who fear a resurgence of Teutonic arrogance. When former British Cabinet minister Nicholas Ridley in 1990 called the E.C. "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe," the cry of "Hear, hear" rose across Britain. Ridley's views cost him his job, but he has gained some converts. "I am beginning to think that Nicholas Ridley was on to something," wrote Financial Times columnist John Willman, who considers himself pro-German. "Two disastrous attempts to establish German hegemony over Europe earlier in the century by military means failed to win friends and influence people. This time power and influence have been won without a single shot being fired, through the unbeatable combination of a stable currency and a strong manufacturing base."

Yet Germany's military power cannot be ignored. Its armed force of 454,000 is Europe's largest. And it is assuming increasing responsibility for its security as the U.S. draws down its forces in Europe. Some German military demands are inevitable. If France and Britain retain their nuclear deterrent forces, for example, Germany probably will want to have a say in how they are used to protect a future united Europe. If not, says Valance, "Germany may one day decide to acquire nuclear arms to deal with the threat of the ones in Ukraine."

This sort of speculation is as troubling to Germans as it is to their neighbors. So far, there is no consensus in the country on the use of German soldiers anywhere outside the territory of NATO, but the Kohl government has proposed a constitutional amendment to permit participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations. Some conservative political leaders believe German troops should also be available for such joint contingents as the U.S.-led coalition that fought the gulf war.

In fact, Germany's initial hesitancy to support the anti-Iraq coalition may have helped produce Bonn's recent burst of assertive energy. The term gulf syndrome is applied to German leaders who, stung by criticism of their early reluctance to support Desert Storm, are determined never again to be thought timid. There is even some concern that Kohl is going too far in that direction. "Except for Hitler you have to go back a long way to find a German head of government who speaks so provocatively and insensitively about the outside world," says Heinrich Jaenecke, a columnist for the weekly Stern. "Hubris has led this nation astray more than once. The old symptoms are reappearing."

Karsten Voigt, a Social Democrat and a senior member of the Bundestag's Foreign Affairs Committee, says what is happening is a natural consequence of Germany's postwar development, and not something to be feared. "With the changes that have taken place, we have a stronger impact in whatever we do," he says. "It is not that we are being more assertive, but that even with continuity in our policies and behavior we have more influence. The apprehension felt by other countries will fade away in perhaps 10 or 15 years when people will see that a united Germany is a stabilizing factor in Europe. Meanwhile, we have to live with the criticism."

But criticism rarely, if ever, comes from the White House. The Bush Administration was unstintingly supportive of German unification in 1990 and is no less so now that unity has, inevitably, produced a more powerful Germany. "Let me state, clearly and unequivocally, that we welcome and value this German assertiveness in collective actions designed to achieve common goals and objectives," says U.S. Ambassador Robert Kimmitt in speeches to German groups. "With whom could the U.S. better pursue effective collective action than Germany, a trustworthy, reliable ally?"

For some Germans, however, those words may be too kind. Officials are uneasy when Americans talk enthusiastically of a special German-American relationship. The slogan "Partners in Leadership," which describes official U.S. policy toward Germany, touches a Europeanist nerve. "When one talks of leadership, one must think of the very successful system in the E.C., where every country has just one vote," says Volker Ruhe, general secretary of Kohl's Christian Democratic Union, who was named Defense Minister last week. "We don't like to lead from the front. We like to lead from the middle of the crowd."

The way to be sure that Germany stays in the "middle of the crowd" is to forge ahead with the integration of Europe. Kohl may be a better Europeanist than anybody else in Europe. "There was a tremendous sense of relief in the French delegation as we came back from Maastricht," recalls Maurice Gourdot- Montagne, a spokesman at the Quai d'Orsay. "We bet on Helmut Kohl because he is the most European."

Yes, but will he remain a good European if the others are not? The Germans wanted, practically pleaded, to pool their sovereignty at Maastricht in a broad European political union. Such a union was promised, but is a long way from reality. "If the Maastricht Treaty stalls, then we may see a return to traditional policies of the German nation-state," warns Francois Heisbourg, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. "Then Germany could feel free to break out and go its own way." That happened twice in this century, with devastating consequences. It would be the height of folly for Europe's leaders to risk letting it happen again.

With reporting by William Mader/London, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Frederick Ungeheuer/Paris