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PAGE 10
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 25, 1984
policy last fall with their opposition to the deployment of Per
shing-2 missiles...•
Consensus has faltered before, but each time it was patched up,
and the system continued with little change•••. This time,
though, the number 35 is suggestive. It evokes the shift of the
center of political gravity downward from the generation that
emerged from World War II.
The successors may lack the deep
commitment to order and stability that has been the basis for the
postwar consensus. The whole tone and character of West German
politics may be changing.
An unstable Germany could eventually demand a powerful party or person to
come to the fore to restore law and order. Now for more concerning West
Germany's growing "identity crisis," here are excerpts from an article by
Philip Geyelin, published in the May 22 INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE:
Geography makes the Federal Republic the centerpiece of any
strategy for the defense of Western Europe. It follows that when
serious West Germans talk of! deepening identity crisis, policy
makers and politicians would be well advised to pay attention.
To a degree, West Germany's angst [ anxiety] is also Europe's. It
has to do with a generational distancing from the spirit and
purposes of the early Atlantic Alliance days: with economic
stagnation: with fear of being a U.S.-Soviet nuclear battlefield.
But West Germany' s angst is also uniquely indigenous, rooted in
its past and aggravated by the postwar division that consigned
East Germany to Communist rule. The Christian Democratic mayor
of Frankfurt, Walter Wallmann, laid it out in an unsettling way
in Washington the other day over breakfast, and later in a speech
to the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. His
message was also delivered in private talks with Reagan adminis
tration officials and members of Congress. It boils down to a
plain warning that West Germany's allegiance to the Atlantic Al
=
liance, and� its membership in NATO, is .!12 longer something
to take for granted.
"The consensus over foreign policy which has existed between the
two major parties ever since 1959 has broken down," Mr. Wallmann
said....
From Bismarck at the end of the 19th century until
after World War II, he contends, Germany did not
have
an estab
lished raison d'etat--a clear definition of its place in the
European scheme of things. The postwar "German question" was re
solved after a bitter battle between a Christian Democrat, Konrad
Adenauer, and a Social Democrat, Kurt Schumacher, over whether
the Federal Republic should seek its security in the Atlantic
Alliance or reach out for national reunification and neutrality.
In 1959 a Social Democratic Party conference created the consen
sus, in Adenauer's favor, that Mr. Wallmann says has now broken
down. Whether that is literally the case is less important than
the visible trends and tendencies that have gradually reopened!
"German question'' that was supposedly settled 25 years ago.
Mr. Wallmann sees no prospect for [German ] reunification, and he
therefore recognizes strict limits to the promise of Ostpolitik