Ministers reunite

By Seth Brown     11/5/09 6:00pm

While students prepared for Night Of Decadence weekend, a group of suited men reunited around the piece of the Berlin Wall in front of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Friday afternoon, nearly 20 years after the fall of the wall on Nov. 9, 1989. The former foreign ministers of France, the Soviet Union, and East and West Germany, as well as the former private secretary to the British prime minister, joined former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III in a panel Friday evening at the Baker Institute. The panel spoke to a mixed audience of more than 200 Rice faculty, students and alumni on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent quest for German reunification.

History Professor Douglas Brinkley moderated, asking each speaker about their roles in the events as well as the historical significance of each.

Baker said though many believed the fall of the wall to be inevitable, the reunification process and results were far from clear.

---

---

"There were a number of questions which had to be answered, such as how the merger [between East and West Germany] would take place, and the relationship of the united Germany with NATO and the European community," Baker said.

Roland Dumas, French foreign minister during the end of the Cold War, noted that the reunification spanned two years following the wall's fall.

"Germany lost the war, but there was no peace treaty," he said. "The negotiations for the Two Plus Four Agreement [to unify East and West Germany] needed six sessions to create a peace treaty that we didn't have."

The speakers widely credited the East German people for their role in bringing down the wall, thereby accelerating the process of reunification.

Markus Meckel, the minister of foreign affairs for the German Democratic Republic for four months during 1990, said the turning point for him was Oct. 9, 1989, when 70,000 East Germans were allowed to demonstrate peacefully in Leipzig.

"At this point, I knew we could proceed with democracy, but nobody planned the fall of the wall," Meckel, a current member of the German Parliament, said. "We thought reunification would be a task for after the establishment of democracy."

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had envisioned a slow reunification following the democratization of East Germany and a period of confederation between the two German states, Charles Powell, private secretary to both Thatcher and John Major, her successor, said.

"People who grew up in the '30s had lingering worries that Germany could revert, though they knew it was different after the war," Powell said. "[Thatcher] was also worried about backlash from Soviet hardliners, as the interests of the rest of Eastern Europe had to be taken into account too."

Eduard Shevardnadze, the former foreign minister of the Soviet Union, said he had to fly into Berlin Nov. 9, 1989, the day the wall fell, in order to keep Soviet troops from getting involved with the situation.

"We heard on Nov. 9, 1989 from the embassy that it was possible for big changes to happen in Germany, that maybe it would be important for the troops in Berlin," Shevardnadze said. "We agreed it was important not to get involved."

The panel members agreed that Shevardnadze and Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the former Soviet Union, deserved recognition for their roles in the fall of the wall and the reunification of Germany.

"This would never have happened so peacefully without the clear position of the USSR: No use of force," Hans Dietrich-Genscher, the former foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany, said. "If the people want it, it should happen."

German Studies Professor Klaus Wiessenberger, who is teaching HANS 200: The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall, said seeing the different representatives together at such a close range was an incredible event for him.

"I was in Berlin in the summer of 1989, and saw the wall and all of the graffiti, and I felt the wall was made transparent by that," Wiessenberger said. "It lost its ominous character to me. I felt it was a splendid show of solidarity. Then I saw on TV how the wall had opened, and I saw Tom Brokaw on the same platform where I had stood."

Jones College freshman Marc Sabbagh, an intern at the Baker Institute, said the panel's presentation was especially intriguing for someone his age.

"Our generation doesn't know much about the Cold War," he said. "So to know these people who went through it and changed what happened was really cool."

Though many of Sabbagh's generation may not be familiar with the Cold War era, Genscher pointed out that the fall of the wall had significance beyond Germany.

"Many thought that this was only a German affair," Genscher said. "But it was actually a European, a world affair.

---