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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 2, 1983
PAGE 13
...The optimistic--or naive--strategists outside West Germany
•..contend that once West Germany passes the psychological test
of deploying the first nine Pershings, the rest will follow with
out any problem in 1984 and beyond.
But this rosy scenario may well prove to be as wrong as earlier
forecasts. There is a basic flaw in this approach: It assumes
that what is going on in West Germany is simply a question of
missiles, a kind of anti-nuclear fever that will drop as quickly
as it came.•.• What is really happening in West Germany is the
re-emergence of the old "national question" nearly 40 years after
the end of World War II.
If Germany is profoundly disturbed by the Pershings, it is
because they are American weapons placed under the sole control
of the President of the United States. That situation maintains
Germany in the position of a defeated vassal state--a vassal
state that continues to pay the price of its tragic mistakes of
the 1930s by a painful division of the German nation between two
blocs dominated by two rival superpowers. The Pershing missile
palisade symbolizes the permanence of that division, perhaps even
more than the Berlin Wall.
Many Germans quickly refute such an analysis. If there is one
thing the Germans hate to discuss openly, even among themselves,
it is their national identity problem. One former top official
in the Schmidt government recently told me that the German
"reunifLeation" issue is "an obsession only in the minds of
French Gaullists." But he quickly went on to say that "Germany
is the only nation which has had to choose between peace and
unity," and that "it cannot be expected to continue stockpiling
forever thousands of nuclear weapons whose employment is in the
hands of a foreign power."...
Like it or not, the Germans are gradually--and perhaps inevita
bly--breaking away from the postwar in�titutions that were
supposed to take care of the "German problem" once and for all.
NATO, which was conceived as a political device to "anchor" the
western part of Germany firmly to the west as well as a military
alliance against the Soviets, no longer does the trick. And the
European Community has failed to channel German national aspira
tions into the "ersatz European nationalism" its founders envi
sioned some 25 years ago.
Again, the "German Question" is back o� the table. Clearly, this
issue, rather than the arithmetic of Pershing deployment, will be
the more important question facing both the West--and the Soviet
Union--in the future. Let us not fool ourselves. The missiles
issue will not "go away" by the end of the year. It will be with
us for many more months and years to come, simply because the
Euromissiles battle is not a battle over hardware but over the
fate of Germany, and wit11"-it� over thefate of Europe'"""as�hole.
Shortly before he died on October 17, the renowned French political analyst
Raymond Aron published his memoirs. In his last work he said, as reported
in the October 24 INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE: