Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

The talks over Germany not only yielded agreement on it remaining within NATO after reunification but also touched upon the future of the Alliance, and by implication of the security architecture of the extended region. This far-ranging issue was to be a future bone of contention. At a sitting with Gorbachev in February 1990, Baker enunciated the United States’ willingness to pledge ‘no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO [sic] one inch to the east’ upon reunification. Baker was addressing the question of whether NATO forces would be barred from the territory of the GDR, as the Soviets were demanding. But this and other diplomatic exchanges left the Soviet negotiators with the distinct impression that the prohibition would transcend East Germany and cover the other five nations stranded in the Warsaw Pact (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania). The latter position, as Joshua Shifrinson has documented, was mooted in some inter-agency memos in Washington and had been spelled out by the West German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Enlarging NATO beyond Germany was not on the table for anyone at the time; the Soviets, it has to be stressed, now believed that it would never be. The US and West Germany delivered informal assurances on limiting NATO’s geographical reach, on respect for Soviet core interests and on cooperatively figuring out a comprehensive security framework, perchance through a revamped CSCE. As Baker put it in a memo after one confab with Shevardnadze, the process ‘would not yield winners and losers. Instead, [it] would produce a new legitimate European structure – one that would be inclusive, not exclusive.’[19]

Gorbachev in particular bought into a broad reading of the spirit of the interchanges with the Americans, and it – plus, one has to think, a dose of wishful thinking – weighed heavily in his acceptance of the reunification scheme. When NATO several years later began preparations to take in new members to the east, he cried foul, as has each successive Russian leader since.[20] In Shifrinson’s judgement, the Russians ‘are essentially correct’ in their grievance. ‘NATO expansion was to violate… the quid pro quo at the heart of the diplomacy that culminated in German reunification within NATO.’[21] The policymakers who subsequently chose to enlarge NATO, to be fair, did not think that such a quid pro quo ever existed. But this divergence in views itself indicates that the overarching issue was not truly resolved. In terms of the politics of it, this ‘settlement-that-wasn’t’ became vulnerable to allegations ex post facto in Moscow, either that the West acted in bad faith, or that Gorbachev should have held out for better terms instead of giving away the store.

An aspect of the German reunification procedure that bears emphasis is the reliance on what Sarotte discerningly couches as ‘prefab’ change, a methodology hinged on the mechanical extension of existing formulas and structures rather than negotiation of mutually acceptable substitutes for them. Not only did the Federal Republic literally absorb the GDR into its pre-existing constitutional and legal order, but the newly reunified state was a full member of NATO and of the EC (to be elevated in 1993 into a European Union) to boot. Prefab had its virtues: it ‘wasted no time on conceptualizing new accords and institutions’, it did not set out to fix what was not broken, and it ‘conferred a strong element of predictability on the chaotic… overhaul of both domestic and international order’.[22] In the case of German reunification, the prefab approach also paid off in almost everyone’s estimation, so much so that it became a template. To join the winners’ club, other countries must change themselves to conform with its existing rules; the institutions do not change in order to take on new members.

The paradox was, as Sarotte notes, ‘the struggle to recast Europe after the momentous upheaval of 1989 resulted in prefabricated structures from before the upheaval moving eastward and securing a future for themselves. Americans and West Germans had successfully entrenched the institutions born of the old geopolitics of the Cold War world – ones that they already dominated, most notably NATO – in the new era.’[23] The counter-scenarios emanating sporadically out of Moscow – great-power condominium, a pan-European home, Finlandisation and so on – were half-baked and were discarded sequentially under the pressure of time and circumstance. Faced with a choice between a leap into the unknown and reliance on a proven model, Western policymakers’ instinct was to shun vague, if high-minded, concepts and stick with the familiar.