Reunification - 1990

Enlarge image East meets West: the two Germanies reunite following the peaceful revolution (© picture-alliance/ dpa) With the Wall having fallen in 1989, it was to be another 11 months before Germany was reunited. Germans in both German states welcomed it. In the first (and last) free elections to East Germany’s Volkskammer (parliament) on 18 March 1990 the East German electorate voted by an overwhelming majority for those parties that demanded swift accession to West Germany.

In summer 1990 a treaty to this effect was negotiated by the two Germanies, as had the treaty concerning the German-German currency union. Parallel to this in the Two-plus-Four-Treaty West and East Germany reached agreement with the four powers responsible for Berlin and Germany as a whole, i.e., the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France on the conditions with regard to foreign and security policy determining German unity.

Enlarge image Foreign Ministers (l-r) Roland Dumas (France), Eduard Shevardnadze (USSR), soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (m), James Baker (USA), Hans-Dietrich Genscher (BRD), Lothar de Maiziere (DDR) and Douglas Hurd (Britain) after signing the treaties (© picture-alliance/ dpa) In terms of the old demand for "unity in freedom" the German Question was finally solved in 1990. It could only be solved with the approval of all the country’s neighbours, which also meant: with the solution at the same time of another problem that had dominated the century: the Polish Question. The final recognition, binding under international law, of the fact that the Oder and Neisse Rivers formed the western border of Poland was a precondition of the reunification of Germany in the borders of 1945.

Enlarge image German-Russian cooperation: Mikhail Gorbachev (L), Helmut Kohl (C) and Hans Dietrich Genscher (R) (© picture-alliance/ dpa) Post-reunification Germany sees itself not as a "postnational democracy among nation states", as the political scientist Karl Dietrich Bracher once termed the "old" Federal Republic in 1976, but rather a post-classical democratic national state among others – firmly embedded in the Atlantic Alliance and in the supranational confederation of states that is the European Union (EU), in which certain aspects of national sovereignty are pursued jointly with other member states. There is much here that distinguishes the second German state from the first – namely everything that had made Bismarck’s Reich a military and authoritarian state. There is, however, also some form of continuity between the first and the second nation state. As a democratic constitutional state, a federal and welfare state the reunited Federal Republic of Germany very much follows traditions that date well back to the 19th century. The same applies to the universal, equal suffrage and the parliamentary culture, which had emerged in the Reichstag during the German Reich. A certain geographical continuity is also clearly evident: The Two-plus-Four-Treaty, the constitutional founding document of the reunited Federal Republic of Germany, once again outlined in writing the smaller German solution, the existence of the separate states of Germany and Austria.

Enlarge image About one million people celebrated the German Unity in Berlin in the night to 3 October 1990 (© picture-alliance/ dpa) The German Question has been resolved since 1990, but the European Question remains open. Since the expansions to the EU in 2004 and 2007, the EU has included 12 additional nations, of which ten were under Communist rule until the dawn of the new epoch between 1989 and 1991. They are all states that belong to the former Occident – and which have been defined by a largely shared legal tradition, the early separation of religious and state powers, princely and civil powers, not to forget by the experience of the murderous consequences of religious and national enmity, and racial hatred. It will take time for those parts of Europe that were once divided to grow closer together. This will only succeed if European unity develops at the same pace as the Union has expanded. This development requires more than institutional reforms. It hinges on joint deliberation on European history and its consequences. The one consequence that is more important than all others is an appreciation of the overall binding nature of Western values, first and foremost inalienable human rights. These are the values that Europe and America have created together, which they uphold, and by which they must at all times be measured.