Berlin

The “old” Federal Republic, contrary to Helmut Kohl’s claims, was always a land of immigrants, but it was easier to deny this reality in the Bonn era than is the case with multiethnic Berlin as the capital. Just in time for the move to Berlin, Germany took the first step toward a long overdue revision of its citizenship laws, which heretofore were based almost exclusively on bloodlines. The new law, passed in May 1999, allows any child born in Germany with at least one parent resident in the country for eight years to gain automatic German citizenship. Such an individual can maintain dual citizenship until age twenty-three, then must decide which citizenship to keep. The principal beneficiary of this change is Germany’s well-established Turkish community, which has always been especially prominent in Berlin. Of course, the new law will not mean an end to prejudices or social discrimination, in Berlin or elsewhere, but it does represent a significant shift in the country’s view of itself.

In the Bonn Republic, Germany’s governments kept a wary eye on Eastern Europe even while making strategic economic investments in the region. From the outset, Bonn’s primary concern was to keep the Federal Republic firmly anchored in the European and Atlantic West. Adenauer’s foreign policy was dominated by reconciliation with France and the establishment of strong ties with America. With Berlin as its capital, Germany will maintain its strong Western ties, but it will also look more to the east. Indeed, if the Federal Republic is to realize its full potential as a major European power, it will have to take the lead in integrating those parts of the Continent that are not yet members of the EU into a broader European framework. Here, too, preliminary steps have already been taken. Whereas the old Federal Republic mended fences in the first instance with its neighbors to the west, united Germany has taken measures to improve its relations with Poland. Polish-German ties will undoubtedly be strengthened by having the German capital in Berlin, which is only fifty miles from the Polish border.

The core of the Bonn Republic was the conservative Catholic southwest and even more conservative Bavaria. National unification began the shift away from that core, and it made possible the previously unimaginable victory of a “Red-Green” coalition in 1998. The move to Berlin carries this gravitational shift further and provides the setting for a new, more “experimental” style of German leadership, both at home and abroad. None of the top leaders in the Schröder government hail from Berlin, but they seem more at home on the Spree than on the Rhine. Schröder himself was a leftist student leader in the 1960s before reinventing himself as a centrist “new Socialist.” As minister-president of Lower Saxony he became quite cozy with big business, sitting on the board of Volkswagen and bailing out a steel mill at a cost of nearly $1 billion. Partial to Cuban cigars and Italian suits, he was always impatient with stuffy Bonn, considering himself a man for “new beginnings.” Where better to launch new beginnings than from a city that has always been more than happy to toss away the old in favor of something new?

The “New Berliner” Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the Brandenburg Gate, August 25, 1999

Joschka Fischer, Germany’s new foreign minister, is likewise a former radical turned pragmatist. In his protest-filled youth he was briefly incarcerated for rioting. He remains willing to challenge established doctrine, whether it be the pacifist and noninterventionist shibboleths of his own Green Party, or the deference to Washington, NATO, and Brussels typical of Bonn’s foreign policy in the old days. Like Schröder, Fischer is excited by the prospect of ruling from Berlin, seeing the place more as a city of the future—European and global—than as a frightening relic of the bad old German past. There is, he says, “no negative genius” lurking in Berlin; it will not stir the nationalist in the German soul. “Fears about Berlin will remain only that—fears,” he says confidently. The Berlin Republic will not revert to centralized nationalism, he adds, because Germans have become “passionate federalists,” and also because the nation-state itself has lost much of its power under the influences of Europeanization and globalization. “The nation state in Europe is now a thing of the past, no more than a virtual reality,” he insists. Of course, this is not quite accurate, but it is certainly true that in the age of expanding European unity, multinational corporate mergers, the Internet, and the “Global Village,” the traditional nation-state is a much-diminished force.