By the end of 1989, reunification of the two German regimes—the Federal Republic of Germany (‘West Germany’) and the German Democratic Republic (‘East Germany’) had become both highly probable and controversial. At the end of World War II, Soviet-occupied East Germany was ruled by Stalin, through an especially brutal and efficient local Communist Party, whereas West Germany became a commercial republic, albeit with a strong presence of American, French, and British military forces on the ground—the nucleus of the NATO alliance. Although the former capital city, Berlin, was located entirely within the East German sector, it was itself divided between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ section; eventually, the Communist regime built the Berlin Wall as a means of preventing their subjects from escaping to the West.
As the Soviet empire began to collapse in 1989, it became clear that divided Germany was no longer tenable. However, memories of the Nazi tyranny and two world wars died hard, and several heads of state opposed reunification. These included Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir, who raised fears of another Holocaust, and, more realistically, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterand, who could not bring themselves to relish the prospect of a newly-empowered Germany in the heart of Europe. Thatcher and Mitterand also worried that German reunification would damage Russian political support for Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom they had established a comfortable working relationship. This proved not at all unrealistic, as the loss of the Soviet empire did indeed tend to undermine Gorbachev, who would not survive German reunification for very long.
In December 1989, I wrote the following essay on reunification, which was distributed by Dawn Publishing Company, a firm in Quebec, Canada, to a network of readers interested in international politics.
With respect to German reunification, whatever our opinions may be, things will proceed regardless of what non-Germans think. If the Germans want reunification, they will have it. The only power on earth that can stop them is the Soviet Union.. German reunification, at the price of German neutrality in the Cold War, has been a Soviet goal all along. Why should the Kremlin intervene now? I expect them to bargain hard for concessions with respect not only to neutrality but NATO troops.
If he can accomplish that, Gorbachev will thereby consolidate his power. He will be able to say to his critics: ‘My honey caught more flies in a few years than your vinegar did in nearly four decades. Now, if you want to oust me and eliminate my reforms, do you really intend to reconquer eastern Europe? Because if you do not reconquer eastern Europe, reinstating the old system here at home will only serve to impoverish us still further, as we will lack colonies to exploit.’
Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir opposes German reunification. But should he?
Let’s step back for a moment and consider what the disintegration of communism in eastern Europe may mean, in terms of political principles. By now it is clear that thinkers of the twentieth century have yet to discover a single new political principle, although some modern tyrannies have invented the institutional and technological means to enhance the power of tyranny so much as to merit a new term, ‘totalitarian,’ to describe them. (Twentieth-century political thinkers have discovered, or, more precisely, systematized one new political method: Gandhiism or nonviolent resistance, as distinguished from Christian nonresistance. But this method has been used entirely at the service of principles or ideas that predated it—e.g., nationalism in India, the extension of full citizenship to African-Americans, and so on.) This century has instead served as a sort of laboratory in which two rival sets of political hypotheses were tested. ‘Laboratory’ is a metaphor that misses the absence of any control, scientific or other, over the various experiments that have occurred, but let it stand.
The great commercial-republican political philosophers (Locke, Montesquieu, Smith) sought to end the religious strife that had wracked Christian Europe. They formulated new institutions designed to re-channel religio-military spiritedness into business affairs and representative government. The solution works, generally speaking; commercial republics still have wars, but never with one another. As a by-product, commercial republicanism diluted anti-Jewish hatred, legitimizing the financial and commercial function Jews had been more or less forced into by the Christian churches by effectually repealing strict laws against ‘usury.’ Jewish people know this; since the Enlightenment, many of them have adopted some form of ‘liberalism.’
Hegel and other nineteenth-century Germans despised this ‘philosophy of shopkeepers.’ In this they followed but also radicalized Kant, who followed Rousseau, that great modern anti-bourgeois. The German ideologies of nationalism, communism, and racism are little more than vulgarized versions of Hegelianism. Sometimes they compete with one another, accusing each other of ‘bourgeois reaction’ (Bolshevism’s critique of fascism) or ‘Jewishness’ (Nazism’s counter-charge against Bolshevism). At least as often, they cooperate, as in the Soviet Union, where Jew-hatred and anti-‘capitalism’ mix quite easily, as indeed they also do in Marx’s essay, “On the Jewish Question.” According to the Germans and their disciples worldwide, the concept of ‘History’—said to be profound, comprehensive, and dynamic—must replace the concept of modern natural right—based upon the ‘state of nature,’ which ideologists of the ‘German’ schools condemn as ‘ahistorical’ in two senses: it is fiction, and it is static, unable to account for change.
Historicists have looked forward to the confirmation of their hypothesis (where else?) in history. This is precisely what history has denied them. Real history, that is, experience, vindicates the allegedly superficial ‘eighteenth-century thought’ and proves the deep-thinking ‘nineteenth-century’ profoundly wrong. Experience, not theory, shows that there really is a state of nature, a place of war and scarcity which reappears whenever tyrants seize power in the name of some grand idea-scheme. Experience, not theory, shows that real economic dynamism comes from commercial republicanism, not from the destructive dynamics of the Nazis or the Byzantine immobility of the very ‘progressive’ U. S. S. R., whose only capacity to effect change has been as midwife to subversion in poverty-stricken despotisms. ‘Midwife’ again is the wrong metaphor; after all, the offspring bears the genetic traits of the Soviet system as much as the less indecent traits of the unfortunate mother country.
A united, commercial-republican Germany, surrounded by other commercial republics, signifies the practical refutation of ‘Germanism.’ Friends of freedom should work to ensure that ‘Germans’ the world over understand this, and do not forget it. Commercial-republic Europe will face to potential threats, one external, the other internal. Gorbachev recently reaffirmed his adherence to communism. His giant empire may rest its ambitions; it will not abandon them until it ceases to be an empire. Unless and until the Soviets become commercial republicans, Europe will be at hazard. In the meantime, if NATO and the Warsaw Pact both dissolve, the Soviets will increase their relative power, given their obvious geopolitical advantage over the United States: access to Europe by land.
Internally, the religious toleration commercial republicanism enforces often leads to a flaccid toleration of anti-republican political movements; moral relativism and spirited nihilism unwittingly collaborate. To some extent, ‘Germanism’ arose because commercial republicanism could not offer the intense spiritual satisfactions found in the religiously-buttressed despotisms and constitutional monarchies it replaced. These satisfactions were perverted or ‘secularized’ by the anti-religious ideologies that partially replaced Christianity and Judaism in the West. To a certain degree, this is inevitable. The United States houses all manner of bizarre cults; the best that can be said is, none of them gets very far. Therefore, strong religious institutions will remain indispensable as shields against both moral indifferentism and fanaticism. Easter Europe, as in the United States of 1787, has seen churches that fight for commercial republicanism, in the knowledge that it will lead them in peace. They must also learn better to guard themselves against the temptations inherent in the commercial-republican way of life.
The fear associated with German reunification is that Christian religious revival can include Jew-hatred. This is where Israel can seize what Herr Hegel would call a world-historical opportunity. As the only commercial republic in the Mideast with unique historical links to Germany, to Eastern Europe, and to Russia, Israel should reverse Shamir’s position and endorse German reunification. In doing so, however, it must make clear that Jews and Christians can flourish within commercial-republican regimes. ‘Never again’ must Jews or Christians entertain ideologies that subvert this regime. Such ideologies cause holocausts.
As it happens, Muslims do not seem nearly so ‘compatible’ with commercial republicanism. The only other commercial republic in the Mideast was Lebanon, ruled by a Christian minority; it disintegrated under pressure from Muslims. This raises questions about the capacity of the PLO to bring genuine self-government anywhere. What, exactly, does the PLO intend to establish in ‘Palestine’? A ‘democratic,’ secular state, they say, but given the abuses the word ‘democracy’ suffers (as in ‘German Democratic Republic’), it is impossible to view this rhetorical smoke with anything other than suspicion. The intifada, which is nothing less than an attempt to ‘Lebanonize’ Israel, can and must be suppressed as part of a comprehensive plan to defend not merely ‘the Jewish state’ (a concept many non-Jews will quite understandably view with indifference) but commercial republicanism, and therefore peace, in the Mideast.
A strong statement of support for German national aspirations under a commercial-republican regime can win friends in Germany and the United States, so long as that statement intelligently clarifies the character of those aspirations. Far more important, it would provide a chance to set forth a standard or a framework for a genuine political settlement, by establishing the point that Israel is the model for Mideast politics. Israeli officials never say what would need to happen in the surrounding states in order to establish a just and lasting peace. The lesson of North America, the lesson of Europe, is, ‘If you want peace, surround yourself with commercial republics.’ This puts the pressure on the Muslim regimes, where it belongs. It enables statesmen, journalists, clergy, and other interested persons to ask the Muslims, ‘What are you doing, concretely, to promote peace in the one proven and lasting way, the way of commercial republicanism?’ In such an atmosphere, an Israeli proposal to partition both Lebanon and Jordan so as to produce four commercial republics in those two countries, would be quite reasonable. Realistic? Of course not. But why not? Because too many Muslims want theocracy more than they want peace. Indeed, the define ‘peace,’ Islam, as theocracy. The world does not yet sufficiently appreciate this. But now that the world does finally acknowledge the benefits of commercial republicanism, it can begin to appreciate it.
Unfortunately, Israel’s social-democratic founders were themselves too ‘German,’ and many of its leading politicians continue to be. Socialism and/or nationalism has preoccupied them. For this reason, Israelis today tend to obscure the issues in their own minds. They worry about a reunified Germany on nationalist grounds, instead of seeing the opportunities it presents politically. They tend to think more in terms of ‘Germans-versus-Jews’ than in terms of tyranny versus commercial republicanism. The example of the Weimar Republic—the ill-conceived product of a punitive war settlement—should not be taken as decisive. When Israelis do appeal to ‘fellow democrats’ around the world they are too sentimental, too vulnerable to the claim that they contradict themselves by opposing a ‘Palestinian’ state. Luckily for them, Muslims are even more muddled, and send even more violently mixed signals.
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