From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes Toward the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany / Russia and Germany Reborn

From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes Toward the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany. By Joyce Marie Mushaben. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998. 420p. $75.00.

Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, the Soviet Collapse, and the New Europe. By Angela E. Stent. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 300p. $29.95.

James Sperling, University of Akron

A decade has passed since the Berlin Wall was breached, an event presaging three of the most important developments of the postwar period: the unification of Germany, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War, which these developments signified, has not been an unmixed blessing. The stable crisis that established the parameters of European diplomacy, particularly the contained but unresolved German Question, has been displaced by disintegration and civil war along Europe's southern perimeter, an economically enfeebled and diplomatically disabled Russian Federation, and incomplete transitions to democracy and the market in East Central Europe. The transition to a stable, democratic, and prosperous post-Cold War Europe has proven more difficult than imagined at the onset of the 1990s.

A unified Germany has been at the center of the multiple transformations taking place in Europe. It is most susceptible to the adverse consequences of a destabilized Europe, and it has had the expectation of leadership and partnership imposed upon it by its neighbors, east and west. At the same time, unification and the end of the de jure occupation reopened the German Question: Will Germany once again prove too large for Europe? The barely concealed suspicions and resentments harbored against Germany presented then Chancellor Kohl with a daunting set of external and internal challenges. He faced the triple task of reassuring his Western partners (particularly France and Britain) that Germany would remain a faithful and constructive member of the European Union and NATO; of assuring the Soviet Union that the form and content of German unification, particularly an unqualified membership in NATO, would not degrade Soviet security; and of coping with the financial, political, and psychological consequences of unification. So far Germany appears to be meeting all three challenges successfully, a conclusion largely consonant with the arguments presented in the books under review.

Joyce Mushaben and Angela Stent...