SUPERPOWER BULLIES AND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY- 5
Created | Updated May 9, 2016
THE GERMAN PROBLEM
And though Lord Acton was making a general statement about the last four hundred years of Modern History leading up to 1895, it is impossible to read this passage in the knowledge of Acton’s own personal History, the History of the German people that he had shared for most of his adult life, and with the benefit of Hindsight and knowledge of the “Age of Catastrophe” from 1914 to 1945 that the Germans dragged Europe and the world into, without seeing that his words were as relevant to the recent growth of a German superpower, as of the might of Charles V and his combined Spanish and German Empires, or the might of his son Phillip’s Spanish Empire in Europe and across the oceans, or any of the “glorious” episodes of French History.
And in fact, beyond Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Catastrophe” and into what we saw as a “Golden Age”, it was the practical realities of ‘the German Problem’ rather than actual ideological differences that pushed the other two Superpowers, the USA and the USSR, into that strange “Third World War”, beginning with the Berlin Crisis in 1947. And “the German Problem” was central to American policies towards the European Recovery Programme and the work of Jean Monnet, including the creation of the EU, as Alexander Werth implied, when commenting on the way that General De Gaulle vetoed the possibility of Britain’s entry in the early Sixties. De Gaulle he suggested suspected that “special relationship” and the recent British agreement to accommodate US missiles would mean that Great Britain would act as an American Trojan Horse within the EU, whereas, in fact, West Germany was the real US Trojan Horse complete with large American bases in the Front Line defence against the Red Army and a new German Air Force equipped with supersonic fighter-interceptors.
And “the German Problem” entered a new phase, as Mrs. Thatcher described in her Downing Street Memoirs, when Communism collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down, and the world was confronted with the inevitability of a third German reunification in 125 years. The British Prime Minister and the President of France discussed the situation in terms of the re-emergence of “the German problem” and agreed that Germany would have to pay a price in order to prevent the re-occurrence of old difficulties. Germany would have to give up its national currency and become the mainstay of the Euro and a new French top-down architecture devised by another French genius would be imposed by the Maastricht Treaty.
But, in fact, if this was all meant to tie Germany down like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, in the world crises of 2016 the leaders of the three superpowers that emerged in the fifty years before 1914- President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and President Putin- are still in many ways seen as operating in a different league to other world leaders, and constantly run the risk of being ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t’.
But then for leaders of Superpowers the reality that they face is the same as it was for all living things, as Arthur Miller observed at the end of his autobiography “Timebends”, reflecting on the coyotes that he knew were ‘out there’ in the darkness of the forest he had planted around his house that “I am…doing what they are doing, making myself possible and those who come after me…In the darkness out there they see my light and pause, muzzles lifted, wondering who I am and what I am doing here in this cabin under my light. I am a mystery to them until they tire of it and move on, but the truth, the first truth, probably, is that we are all connected, watching one another. Even the trees.” (page 599)
And though Lord Acton was making a general statement about the last four hundred years of Modern History leading up to 1895, it is impossible to read this passage in the knowledge of Acton’s own personal History, the History of the German people that he had shared for most of his adult life, and with the benefit of Hindsight and knowledge of the “Age of Catastrophe” from 1914 to 1945 that the Germans dragged Europe and the world into, without seeing that his words were as relevant to the recent growth of a German superpower, as of the might of Charles V and his combined Spanish and German Empires, or the might of his son Phillip’s Spanish Empire in Europe and across the oceans, or any of the “glorious” episodes of French History.
And in fact, beyond Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Catastrophe” and into what we saw as a “Golden Age”, it was the practical realities of ‘the German Problem’ rather than actual ideological differences that pushed the other two Superpowers, the USA and the USSR, into that strange “Third World War”, beginning with the Berlin Crisis in 1947. And “the German Problem” was central to American policies towards the European Recovery Programme and the work of Jean Monnet, including the creation of the EU, as Alexander Werth implied, when commenting on the way that General De Gaulle vetoed the possibility of Britain’s entry in the early Sixties. De Gaulle he suggested suspected that “special relationship” and the recent British agreement to accommodate US missiles would mean that Great Britain would act as an American Trojan Horse within the EU, whereas, in fact, West Germany was the real US Trojan Horse complete with large American bases in the Front Line defence against the Red Army and a new German Air Force equipped with supersonic fighter-interceptors.
And “the German Problem” entered a new phase, as Mrs. Thatcher described in her Downing Street Memoirs, when Communism collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down, and the world was confronted with the inevitability of a third German reunification in 125 years. The British Prime Minister and the President of France discussed the situation in terms of the re-emergence of “the German problem” and agreed that Germany would have to pay a price in order to prevent the re-occurrence of old difficulties. Germany would have to give up its national currency and become the mainstay of the Euro and a new French top-down architecture devised by another French genius would be imposed by the Maastricht Treaty.
But, in fact, if this was all meant to tie Germany down like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, in the world crises of 2016 the leaders of the three superpowers that emerged in the fifty years before 1914- President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and President Putin- are still in many ways seen as operating in a different league to other world leaders, and constantly run the risk of being ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t’.
But then for leaders of Superpowers the reality that they face is the same as it was for all living things, as Arthur Miller observed at the end of his autobiography “Timebends”, reflecting on the coyotes that he knew were ‘out there’ in the darkness of the forest he had planted around his house that “I am…doing what they are doing, making myself possible and those who come after me…In the darkness out there they see my light and pause, muzzles lifted, wondering who I am and what I am doing here in this cabin under my light. I am a mystery to them until they tire of it and move on, but the truth, the first truth, probably, is that we are all connected, watching one another. Even the trees.” (page 599)
