ABSTRACT

Josef Joffe is a columnist for and foreign editor of Sud-deutsche Zeitung in Munich. His most recent book is The Limited Partnership: Europe, the US and the Burdens of Alliance. The piece was first published in the New York Times on 30 September 1990. True, waning dependence equals less deference. Absent the Soviet threat, Bonn-Berlin might be less hesitant to convert economic muscle into political clout, but to argue that Reunification II will turn into a remake of the 1871 original is to ignore how much the script itself has changed. The rivalry of nations in the democratic-industrial world has moved from the battlefield into the economic arena, and it promises to stay there as long as the marvelous economic community Europeans have built persists. Power in Europe is measured not by conquest but by capital surpluses. Reunified Germany, by contrast, will be embedded in a larger community, surrounded by friends and not by resentful neighbors.