Kohl's vision to color Europe's future

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Fresh from his annual two-week retreat at a fat farm in Austria, Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced last Thursday that he would run for a fifth term of office next year. Already the longest-serving leader of late 20th-century Europe, he could turn out to be the most important as well -- if he wins his last gamble.

"In future the agenda is one of bloody conflict," commented the newspaper Saarbruecker Zeitung after Kohl made his decision public on his 67th birthday. "Kohl's announcement has set off a marathon political election campaign."

It is 18 months until the next German election, but every decision made in Germany until then will be made in the shadow of that looming election. Because if Kohl wins, then 1999 will see the realization of his grand project of European Monetary Union. The German mark, the French franc, and perhaps even the British pound will disappear, to be replaced by a one-size-fits-all 'euro'.

Even that does not fully convey the scale of what is at stake. European Monetary Union (EMU) is not some banker's brainchild; it is Kohl's strategy for embedding Germany irrevocably in a broader European society. Which is a matter of some urgency, given the fact that previous failures to integrate Germany into Europe caused two world wars and killed about 50 million Europeans in this century.

Many Germans resent Kohl's argument that something special must be done to lock Germany into Europe, because it seems to imply that there is something wrong with Germans -- that it was the German national character, rather than the vagaries of history, produced Hitler. Gerhard Schroeder, prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony and a potential opposition candidate for chancellor next year, gets particularly cross about it.

"Kohl maintains the Germans have to be tied into Europe," Schroeder said recently. "I say the Germans are politically and democratically mature. They want to be Europeans because they want to, not because they must be to avoid being a danger to others."

The current generation of Germans are certainly no threat to their neighbors, but Schroeder forgets geopolitics. There are eighty million Germans in a continent where no other country west of Russia reaches sixty million. Germany is right in the middle, and it has the world's third-biggest industrial economy. All this, plus the history, makes the neighbors chronically uneasy.

It was Helmut Kohl's great triumph in 1990, the peaceful reunification of Germany, that reawakened the old 'German question'. The divided, emasculated Germany of 1945-1990, with six foreign armies on its soil, was not even a potential threat.

The new, reunited Germany is -- and Kohl understood this almost immediately. By 1993 he had adopted the idea of European Monetary Union as the best way of entangling Germany's government, economy and society inextricably with those of its neighbors. And it was Kohl's determination and clout that pulled the rest of the European Union into the project.

If Kohl wins in 1998, then one way or another the EMU will probably happen in 1999. And if not, then not. So what are his chances of winning an unprecedented fifth term in office?

Rotten, by normal political standards. Kohl has been in power for fifteen unbroken years, which is long enough to get on everybody's nerves. Moreover, the German economy is in trouble. Unemployment, at 12 percent, is the highest Germans have experienced since before Hitler rose to power in 1933. Economic growth last year was a mere 1.4 percent.

Kohl's government seems helpless before these problems. Much touted plans for tax reform and the revision of the national pension system were abandoned within days of being brought into the legislature in February. There is open dissension in the cabinet. Worst of all, two out of three Germans are against the EMU, fearing that the 'euro' will be a weaker currency than the cherished mark.

Kohl should be doomed -- and indeed, the opinion polls consistently put the Social Democratic (SPD) opposition slightly ahead of the ruling coalition. But that is now, when opinions have no consequences. Eighteen months from now, it could be different.

During the fifteen years Kohl has been chancellor, the SPD has seen five different leaders come and go. It may well tear itself apart again before the election, because Gerhard Schroeder is mounting a strong challenge to current leader Oskar Lafontaine.

A lot of Germans just trust Kohl. He speaks no language but German, he has no intellectual pretensions, he always seems a bit uncomfortable abroad. He is fat, a bit pompous, boringly stable in his private life. He wins because he doesn't scare people.

Yet when Kohl decided Germany must be reunited before the post-Communist east slid into chaos, he moved with amazing speed and determination -- and a total contempt for mere financial considerations. The East German mark was declared equal to the West German (the day before, the black market rate was around four-to- one), and the whole thing was a done deal in weeks. Democratic ratification came later, and economic logic went out the window.

Germans are still paying a price for that deal. Eastern Germany is now probably the most expensive place in the world to manufacture anything (West German wages, but East German productivity), and the true unemployment rate in the east is around 25 percent. One trillion marks of government subsidies have been swallowed up almost without a trace.

But Kohl would simply say that it had to be done. Not to reunify Germany, once the Communists fell, would have created an explosively unstable situation in Europe. In the privacy of his own mind, he probably now makes the same argument for the EMU: it may be dodgy economically, but it's vital politically.

Helmut Kohl is a visionary in disguise. If he wins next year's election, it will be his vision that defines 21st-century Europe.