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Though the ground for last week's pact had been prepared in six meetings between foreign ministers Eduard Shevardnadze and Hans-Dietrich Genscher over the past two months, Kohl had no reason to expect Gorbachev would agree so quickly. The Soviet leader clearly wanted to settle the issue of German unification so he could move on to his country's domestic problems. But the atmosphere surely helped. By the time they made their announcement, the two men were laughing together. Observes a Western diplomat in Moscow: "It may come as a surprise, but Kohl and Gorbachev kind of like each other."
Soviet officials insisted it was not just Kohl's sincerity that carried the day. "The Kohl of 1990 is not the Kohl of 1986," said Vladimir Shenayev, deputy director of Moscow's Institute of Europe. "Even a year ago, Kohl would have said that a unified Germany would be a member of NATO and there was no point in discussing it. Now he's showing an ability to compromise." The promise of financial aid helped: having already pledged some $3 billion in credits to Moscow, Kohl agreed to sign a comprehensive economic pact with the Soviet Union.
The prospect of more deals to come between Bonn and Moscow presents Kohl with a different diplomatic challenge: how to assure his allies in Europe that the German powerhouse, the largest economy in the European Community, is not seeking to control Eastern Europe. Even before he arrived home, Kohl was asked if the Zheleznovodsk agreement was a new Rapallo -- a reference to the 1922 treaty between the communist U.S.S.R. and the Weimar Republic that paved the way for German rearmament after World War I. The comparison is "wholly off," said Kohl, because "the reunified Germany is part of NATO and the European Community."
As he showed again just before leaving for the Soviet Union, Kohl has become increasingly adept at handling the spasms of angst about Germany. The immediate grievance was a statement by British Trade Minister Nicholas Ridley that the "uppity" Germans were plotting to take over Europe, and he would just as soon hand over the Continent to Hitler. What made the uproar worse was the widespread conviction that Ridley had only said what Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher thought. But Kohl wisely laughed off Ridley's remarks as "pretty silly," comparing them to his own gaffe about Gorbachev and Goebbels. Ridley was forced to resign.
Thatcher's anti-German feelings seemed further confirmed by last week's leak of a memorandum written by her private secretary Charles Powell after a seminar she held with several well-known experts on Germany. They had to explain to the Prime Minister that the countries of Eastern Europe actually wanted German investment and that this "did not necessarily equate to subjugation." The Powell memo alleged that "abiding" characteristics of the Germans, "in alphabetical order," included "aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality." The concept of permanent national character is generally fatuous, and in this case Powell's words make a poor fit for Kohl, the biggest German of them all. Kohl can be intimidating because of his size (6 ft. 3 in.) and might sometimes appear aggressive, but no more so than Thatcher. If he now looks assertive, it is only in contrast to the penitent posture Germany adopted for most of the postwar years.