Sabine Lee has written an informative and interesting article on the behind-the-scenes diplomacy of the western powers' response to the 1958-59 Soviet attack on the Four Power status of Berlin. There are minor chronological and editing problems, but the article has the great merit of capturing most of the great issues that characterized the Federal Republic's reemergence at the "top tables" of western diplomacy and putting them in the context of this early internal western crisis. Those issues were long-lived: at the very end of Cold War diplomacy in Europe, the Two-Plus-Four talks of 1990, the western allies were still grappling with the same questions and patterns of national diplomatic and political behavior.
Chief among them were 1) Anglo-American differences in approach to Germany, and 2) German-American commonalities (in this case) and differences (in later crises) in approach to the Soviet Union. Lee shows how both pairs of issues shaped western diplomacy in 1958-59.
The focus of her article is, in fact (despite its title), the different reactions to the Soviet challenge that took shape in Washington and London in late 1958. The Americans believed that the West had to resist any Soviet attempt to divorce the Berlin issue from its broader German and European contexts, while their British colleagues were much more amenable to, as Lee writes, "some sort of recognition of the G[erman] D[emocratic] R[epublic], because Khrushchev had the upper hand." The problem, for London, was that the American hard line led to the conclusion "that non-recognition of the GDR was an issue on which the Allies would have to stand and fight. This, the British could not, and did not, want to accept." (p. 51)
In this disagreement, Bonn was dependent on Washington's willingness to maintain this hard line, but Adenauer also had a number of cards to play in his ability to influence the United States. American concerns pivoted on the fear that western indifference to the Federal Republic's interests "could lead to a reversal of West German policy, to disenchantment with the United States and to 'boosting a [sic] stock of German neutralists'." (p. 51) Adenauer was the first West German chancellor, but not the last, to recognize that such concerns gave Bonn a lot of leverage in Washington, regardless of whether West Germany favored a hard line to Moscow, as in 1958-59, or a softer western approach, as in the early 1970s.
Lee points out another telling difference between London and Washington's approach to foreign policy at the time: the United States "disagreed with the [British] assumption that the Allies could not prevent Khrushchev from carrying out his threat...." The comment is not a central part of her argument, but it poses a question important to students of the Anglo-American relationship, particularly its future in the post-Cold War world. American confidence in deterrence (not just of the nuclear kind) contrasted in 1958-59 with a British instinct to practice appeasement of a power clearly capable of carrying out a threat to use force. In the face of growing American unwillingness in the 1990s to project that confidence, what will be the consequences of that British instinct? Have we already had a partial answer in western Europe's pre-Dayton response to the Balkan crisis?
As indicated above, there are some editorial and chronological problems with Lee's narrative of the diplomatic and political events of late 1958 and early 1959. Her arguments depend to a large extent on action/reaction and cause/effect sequences that hinge on the question of a few days' or hours' timing. Was a particular memorandum really the result of a certain embassy cable, or had the memorandum already been in draft long before the embassy's report was received? As anyone who has worked with such documents knows, their dates can be deceiving; but in this case, the problem is more that shorthand references to key people and documents make a second or third reading of Lee's chronology necessary to track the chain of events. Even then, there are some unanswered questions. To which US embassy does footnote 20 refer? (Presumably London or Bonn, but which one?) Why would U.S. Ambassador David Bruce have sent "a telegram to Mr. Hooker in the American Embassy in London," (p. 53) when Hooker presumably worked for Bruce? The problem is apparently the familiar one of an author's overfamiliarity with sources and resulting inability to see that the reader needs guidance in tracking their sequence.
Finally, Lee concludes that "the perception rather than the reality of policies...had most impact on the development of Britain's and West Germany's mutual relations in the late 1950s." However, her own evidence seems to demonstrate the opposite: that there were real policy differences between the two countries, not just misperceptions. Lee shows that Bonn and London were well aware of their differences regarding Moscow and clear-eyed about the importance of influencing Washington during those crucial months. The West Germans had, from the American point of view, the stronger argument, and they prevailed. In the end, the policy and diplomacy of the United States determined which approach became western policy.
In the long run, as Lee suggests, West Germany itself adopted a more flexible attitude toward negotiation with Moscow and its Warsaw Pact allies, culminating in Bonn's Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik. But while this flexibility was, on the surface perhaps, akin to what Britain advocated in 1958-59, it remained, in fact, much closer to the American position. The great success of West German Ostpolitik and the broader detente policies of NATO was that they never allowed the question of Berlin to be divorced from the broader questions of Germany and Europe. In the 1971 Quadripartite Agreement and the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, this western determination bore fruit. As he always maintained, Willy Brandt, no less than his CDU predecessors and his SPD and CDU successors, anchored Bonn's Ostpolitik to its Westpolitik. For forty years, the "old" Federal Republic refused to be tempted by Moscow's blandishments of a new "Rapallo."
Lee's article is well worth reading for its description of one of the critical moments of those forty years. To modify one of her quotes from Kurt Birrenbach (p. 48), she has recounted one part of a successful foreign policy story: how "the ship of the Federal Republic" in its early days found a safe harbor in the West, where it was outfitted to navigate successfully the more treacherous waters of the East-West conflict. Despite Anglo-American differences, Bonn never sailed those waters alone, and as Lee shows, the composition and cohesion of its convoy made all the difference in time of crisis.