America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

After last week's meeting in the Med, Secretary of State James Baker proclaimed, "We are moving into the post-postwar era." The postwar period began with the division of Europe after World War II; the stage of history now beginning is "post-post" insofar as that division is ending. The phrase, with its catchy double prefix, is well on its way to becoming a cliche on the op-ed pages and airwaves of the West. It helps experts who are groping for sound bites more erudite than "Wow!" as they ruminate about the astonishing pace of change in Europe.

Yet in a crucial respect, the Malta meeting did not represent the inauguration of a new world order at all but a holding action on behalf of the old one. George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev have a shared interest in slowing down the rush of events, particularly the juggernaut of German reunification. Consummate Atlanticist that he is, Bush is sensitive to West European anxiety about the disproportionate strength of a single Germany.

But there is more to the famous and no longer hypothetical "German question" than that. Neither the population nor the size of a united Germany would necessarily result in instability; it is not as though the two countries would attain critical mass if they were fused. Rather, the X factor in the debate, largely unmentionable among statesmen but deeply felt among their constituents, concerns the crimes and punishment of the German nation. Many Europeans, including most Soviets, would prefer to let the next generation, or even the one after that, test fully the proposition that 70 years of German expansionism, culminating in the horrors of Hitler, was an aberration.

Gorbachev has his own reason for believing that one Germany is an idea whose time should not come again soon. Reunification is a euphemism for East Germany's voluntary annexation by West Germany. If the G.D.R. merges with the Federal Republic, the Soviet Union could see an ally not only leave the Warsaw Pact but defect to NATO. Estimates on how long Gorbachev would survive the wrath of his comrades range from 20 minutes to 48 hours.

If Bush had to choose between the success of Gorbachev's program to reform the Soviet Union and the fulfillment of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's plan to create a German "federation," the President would almost certainly pick perestroika, since that is what is driving the new Soviet foreign policy. On this issue, Malta was an exercise in private commiseration and public obfuscation. With Bush at his side at their joint press conference, Gorbachev said that "history" should be allowed to determine the status of the two Germanys, and he warned against any "artificial acceleration" of the "process of change." It was a telling caution coming from the Great Accelerator himself. Bush then flew off to Brussels, where he enunciated a masterpiece of gobbledygook, intended to sound receptive to German reunification someday far in the future. There was a similar better-later- than-soon tone to the endorsement that Kohl received over the weekend from the leaders of the European Community.

The whole matter is heavy with irony. First Germany brought World War II to Europe. Then its defeat led to 44 years of postwar tension. Now events in that same nation are complicating the effort to end the division of the Continent as a whole. Because of the German question, the world is stuck in the pre- post-postwar era, which is neither a felicitous phrase nor a welcome state of affairs.