GERMANY
The deal with Mr Gromyko
MALCOLM RUTHERFORD
Bonn—Mr Gromyko has been Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union for thirteen years. He has been through the Cuba crisis, Czechoslovakia and umpteen crises in Berlin, Indochina and the Middle East. Yet never before can he have spent quite so much time negotiating a single issue.
Mr Gromyko gave about forty hours earlier this year to preliminary talks with Chancellor Brandt's special emissary, Herr Egon Bahr. He began by making maximum demands, such as that Bonn should grant full diplomatic recognition to East Germany, and then he dropped them. The two men finally agreed on a joint working paper, which with very little change was to form the basis of a West German-Soviet treaty on the mutual renunciation of force. On Soviet insistence the text was to be kept secret: but, in two separate stages, the whole of it appeared in the right wing German press. Yet the Russians seem scarcely to have protested.
Herr Walter Scheel, the Bonn Foreign Minister, was to have gone to Moscow early in June to complete the formalities of turning this document into a treaty. Dis- agreements within the Bonn cabinet held up his departure until the last week in July. When he arrived on 26 July, the Soviet news agency Tass immediately put out a state- ment that he would be leaving five days later, which was taken in Bonn as a very bad omen. Mr Gromyko, however, apparently personally intervened to get the agency to issue a retraction. Mr Gromyko had been said all along to be going on holiday on 8 August, and in fact this in- formation proved much the best guide as to how long the talks would last. The treaty was initialled on 7 August. By that time, the two foreign ministers had had a good twenty hours of talks. And to show just how keen the Russians are on having the treaty signed with the maximum publicity, Mr Gromyko handed over an invitation for Chancellor Brandt to go to Moscow as soon as possible, and sign it himself.
There is another point. The Bahr text was assumed to be very near final, almost the best terms for which Bonn could possibly have hoped, and indeed Herr Bahr defended it in just this way. Yet Herr Scheel emerged from Moscow having successfully pressed the German view of three key points: (1) The treaty will not enter into force until a way has been found of improving Western links with West Berlin. (2) The government has made it clear that it sticks to its aim of re- uniting the German people; the treaty will not be allowed to stand in the way of the pursuit of European union. (3) The Russians have abandoned their right of intervention in West German affairs, which they earlier claimed to !mid under certain articles of the United Nations Charter.
The actual text of the treaty was intended to be kept secret until it was signed. But it was no great surprise to anyone when it appeared in full in the right-wing German press on Tuesday morning. In fact it is a very modest document from the Russian point of view. West Germany promises not to use force or the threat of force to try to change existing European borders, including the border between East and West Germany, and it accepts the Oder-Neisse line as Poland's western frontier. The Russians more or less do the same. The difference between this and previous West German positions is that earlier governments believed that Bonn should get something in return from such a negotiation. Chancellor Brandt believes that only by making the concessions in advance are the returns possible—notably on Berlin.
A test of the effectiveness of the treaty, therefore, should come quite soon, with the resumption of the four power talks on Berlin in September. These talks began after Mr Gromyko himself had taken up a re-
ference in a NATO communiqué to the possi-
bility of improving communications 'in and around the city'. It is true that Mr Gromyko has persisted in talking only about West Berlin, whereas the Allies want to talk about the whole of the city; but the allied attitude is that they can't expect everything at once. The talks have yielded nothing so far, but if Chancellor Brandt is right, the situation should begin to change in September.
West Germany in any event has the let- out that if things do not improve in Berlin, the treaty with the Russians will not 'come into force.' This means ratification by the Bonn Parliament, which could prove diffi- cult because it may require a two-thirds majority under an interpretation of the con- stitution which the government is at present busily objecting to. There is no particular evidence that the opposition as a whole really dislikes the treaty; indeed, it would have probably been delighted to have nego- tiated the thing itself. What it does dislike is that it was done by the present government.
The opposition believes it will have a chance to bring the government down over this, and its tactics towards the treaty will be decided on that basis.
Ratification, however, is possibly a faux probleme. One of the first things Chancellor Brandt had to do to get his whole Ostpolitik under way was to sign the non-proliferation treaty. This was seen by industry, scientists and opposition alike as being done with un- seemly haste, but it was pointed out that some of the details could be cleared up between signing and ratification.
It seems that the Russians are happy enough for the present with mere statements of intent. In the end, even if the question of Berlin remains sticky, both sides have the prospect of a gradual 'normalisation' of relations between West Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe. It should be noted that there is a clause in the preamble to the treaty about 'furthering economic, scientific and technical exchanges'. This has been a part of Warsaw Pact declarations for long enough now, and there have been sufficient results to be taken seriously. The West Ger- mans are, after all, building a steel plant in East Germany, despite their lack of rela- tions, and they are supplying steel pipes to the Russians in return for a promised supply of natural gas. It is a very artificial situation for West Germany to do less than 6 per cent of its trade with the East, and both sides would like a change, which is under way.
Mr Gromyko, for one, is obviously satis- fied. He may even have come round to the British concept of diplomacy, of going into a negotiation to discuss the best that can be arranged, rather than pressing maximum demands. One wonders if it is being said of him in Moscow that he is losing his grip.
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