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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
More than 20 years ago, Philip Windsor proposed a succinct explanation of the East–West divide: ‘… the Cold War began with the deliberate Soviet decision to cut Europe in two and in reacting the Western powers took a deliberate decision to cut Germany in two.’ For the following two decades from 1969 to 1989, the formula ‘Peace and stability through partition” (U. Nerlich;J. Joffe) reflected widespread satisfaction with the territorial status quo in Europe. However, substantial disagreements (as L. Freedman observes p. 5) with established security policies, defence doctrines and armed forces' structures both in NATO and the Warsaw Pact (WP) might be taken as evidence that ‘Europe was on the verge of an historic change’. In respect of the state of public opinion, NATO ministers in early March 1988 declared the need gradually to overcome the unnatural division of Europe
1 Windsor, P., German Reunification, p. 23Google Scholar, Quoted in Ieuan G. John, ‘From a Divided to a United Germany: The Evolution of the German Question’, in Barston, p. 23.
2 In a careful assessment of the various ’defensive intent proposals’ (strukturelle Nicht-Angriffsfähigkeit) which were transferred from alternative strategic concepts into elements of Genscher's response to Gorbachev's architecture of common European security, C. M. Kelleher (in Freedman, pp. 164 ff.) reviews the types of forces, the characteristics of weapons systems, manpower and organisation, deployment patterns, command and control, and military doctrine. Suggesting a framework for a defensive intent agreement stresses that this is a political exercise: it rests on the ‘political decision to constrain the capability of military forces in the hope of reducing the need for them’ (p. 176). As to the restructuring of forces, she recommends conventional forces should be thinned out by geographically zoned areas, based on the principle of reciprocal constraints; the arrangement of the zones envisages a context for moving away from the policy of a layer-cake forward defence of the inter-German border. ‘Moreover, the emplacement in the region closest to the inner-German border of only infantry and light weapons systems of primarily defensive orientation might change the nature of the central Europe confrontation dramatically (p. 175). To provide for a more stabilised balance of forces in Central Europe, Kelleher advocates that short-range nuclear and chemical weaponry – left unconstrained by the INF Treaty – should be separated from the forward-based conventional forces, but held in secure storage in the rear (p. 174).