ABSTRACT
The democratic revolutions of 1989-1990 and the end of the Cold War marked a watershed moment in European history. It not only affected Germany and the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that were freed from Soviet domination, but also transformed the course of European integration. In the late 1980s, European integration had mainly been about technical issues – reviving the integration process, changing voting procedures, and completing the Common Market. In 1989, the sudden end of the division of Europe raised a whole new set of geopolitical challenges. For the fi rst time, it became possible to turn the project of European integration into a truly pan-European endeavour. What emerged out of this unsettled historical period was an ambitious agenda for deeper integration that would tie a unifi ed Germany into a tight network of European institutions and governance arrangements. While negotiations on a common currency had garnered pace before (at the Stuttgart summit in 1983 and again after the Hannover summit in 1988), 1 there had been no sign of an imminent breakthrough. 2 Yet all of this changed in the wake of the dismantlement of the Austrian-Hungarian border, the Polish elections of 4 June 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ‘German question’ again came to preoccupy Europe. What would become of the two German states? How realistic was unifi cation? What role would and should a unifi ed Germany play in Europe? What should a future European governance architecture look like and how could it be achieved?
