There are growing fears that over the coming days and weeks Russia will play a divide and rule game to split Europe and the European Union.
Vladimir Putin is resurrecting recent historical ghost to haunt the EU Photo: Getty
Senior European diplomats here in Brussels fear that Vladimir Putin will respond to Western sanctions by taking retaliatory measures that will focus on the different national and economic interests at play in the EU.
The Russian president’s main tactic will be to try and split Germany from the EU pack by threatening to damage its economy, dependent on imports of Russia’s gas, and by reminding Germans of recent history.
Diplomats point to his annexation of Crimea speech to both houses of the Russian parliament yesterday as evidence, with its unsubtle reminder that Britain and France, but not the United States or Russia, opposed German reunification as the Iron Curtain fell in 1989.
“Today, I would like to address the people of the United States of America, the people who, since the foundation of their nation and adoption of the Declaration of Independence, have been proud to hold freedom above all else. Isn’t the desire of Crimea’s residents to freely choose their fate such a value? Please understand us,” the Russian president said.
“I believe that the Europeans, first and foremost, the Germans, will also understand me. Let me remind you that in the course of political consultations on the unification of East and West Germany, [...] some nations that were then and are now Germany’s allies did not support the idea of unification.
“Our nation, however, unequivocally supported the sincere, unstoppable desire of the Germans for national unity. I am confident that you have not forgotten this, and I expect that the citizens of Germany will also support the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity.”
His comments alarm European diplomats because they rub the EU’s nose in an uncomfortable, inconvenient historical truth: Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand opposed German reunification, Mikhail Gorbachev and George HW Bush supported it. Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, is well aware of this.
Countries ranging from Germany and Italy to Britain and France, or Poland and Lithuania, have very different interests when it comes to Russia and the history of the last two decades is still very raw, cutting to the chase of some of the EU’s most important arrangements such as the euro.
A growing number of countries in Europe are increasingly aware that while historical amnesia and the myth of a common European interest is de rigueur in the rarefied atmosphere of the EU corridors, the reality is very different. President Putin is aware of this too.
Not only are there different national interests in the EU but there are opposing ones and historical ghosts that linger at the Brussels summit tables – even going back to Yalta and the West's 1945 betrayal of Eastern Europe. This is a fidgety and squirmy reminder for Britain too. Baroness Thatcher’s great foreign policy blunder was not the EU but her intractable opposition to German reunification.
Notes taken by Anatoly Chernyaev, an aide to the then Russian President Gorbachev, show the depths of Lady Thatcher’s opposition while she was British Prime Minister. His account of a “very confidential” meeting in the Kremlin between Lady Thatcher and Mr Gorbachov on September 23, 1989 is more or less borne out in her memoirs and recently released Foreign Office papers.
“Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the reunification of Germany. The words written in the Nato communiqué may sound different, but disregard them,” she said to the Russian leader, according to Mr Chernyaev. "We do not want the unification of Germany. It would lead to changes in the post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the entire international situation and could lead to threats to our security. We are not interested in the destabilisation of Eastern Europe or the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact either.”
Two months later, Lady Thatcher and President Mitterrand were horrified when Helmut Kohl, the then West German chancellor, announced his country’s reunification without entering into negotiations with the EU, or more specifically Britain or France. Sir Stephen Wall’s book, A Stranger in Europe (2008), showed that Lady Thatcher was not alone in hoping the Soviet Union would nip German reunification and fall of the Berlin Wall in the bud.
“The unexpectedly rapid pace caught the political class by surprise, here as elsewhere. I need hardly refer to the meeting of minds between our prime minister and the French president. Mitterrand’s early hopes of Soviet resistance were disappointed’, explained Sir Ewen Fergusson, the British ambassador to Paris, in a secret 1991 Foreign Office telegram.
Lady Thatcher’s opposition, and she resigned in turmoil created by the issue, was already being overtaken by accelerating, diplomatic negotiations to create an EU and an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) to bind a united Germany into a higher European order. Sir Stephen, a diplomat who helped shape Britain’s EU policy under Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, gives a fascinating account in his book of how the Maastricht Treaty (that created the legal entity of the “European Union”) was aimed at weakening Germany.
“Unease over Germany translates into an almost obsessive anxiety to contain them within reinforced European structures as quickly and thoroughly as possible,” reported Sir Ewen.
“The clearest example is [France’s] determination to press quickly ahead with EMU as a means of getting a handle on German monetary policy before their economy recovers its former vigour [after reunification] and lest Kohl’s Europeanist policies be replaced with more assertive nationalist ones.
"Concern about the future direction Germany may take has resulted in France trying to tie Germany into reinforced European structures as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.”
Not only did France and Britain oppose German reunification but they then insisted that the price Germany pay for nationhood was for it (and everyone else) to be bound into the euro. As the last two years has shown, the euro has not proved to be happy experience and German voters, if they were ever given the chance, would almost certainly send it to the dustbin of history along with the Berlin Wall.
Not only does Germany – which straddles East and Western Europe – have different economic interests appropriate to its geography but it has a history. Just as the shadow of the former Soviet Union still hangs over Poland, the Baltic states and other East European countries, so there are historical spectres at the heart of the EU.
As spring blossoms and the Ukraine crisis unfolds, Mr Putin will do his best to exploit Europe’s uncomfortable history and the sometimes jarring national interests that lie behind the Brussels façade of EU unity.
