beyondukraine.euandrussiainsearchofanewrelation

48 Beyond Ukraine. EU and Russia in Search of a New Relation
suggested by then NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner,
Germany would remain a full member of the alliance and of its
military structure, while a special military status would be granted
to the former GDR’s territory without leading to its neutralization
or demilitarization 3 . Whereas between February and July 1990
American and Soviet diplomacy endeavored to strike a difficult
compromise about Germany’s international collocation, neither
the United States nor the other members of the Atlantic Alliance
ever undertook legally binding commitments not to invite new
members; nonetheless, the negotiations held between February
and July 1990 – more specifically the talks between U.S. Secretary
of State James Baker III and Kohl with the Soviet leadership in
Moscow in February 1990, Baker’s second visit to Moscow in
May, the meetings between President George H.W. Bush and
Michael Gorbachev in Washington and Camp David between the
end of May and early June, and Kohl’s visit to Moscow and
Stavropol in July 1990 – were ripe with mixed messages and
diplomatic ambiguities. Soviet leaders were induced to believe
that the alliance would not expand eastward, although they
repeatedly failed to secure a written commitment from the United
States, the West German government, and the other NATO
members 4 . As the alliance embraced enlargement in the early
1990s, the volatile nature of those agreements planted the seeds of
mutual grievances, reinforcing conflicting perceptions of the
events leading up to the demise of the East-West division and of
the post-Cold War European order. Since then, Russian leaders
have held the view that the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its
380,000 troops from the GDR and allowed Germany to unify in
return for a clear Western pledge that the alliance would not
expand eastwards, while the West claims that the settlement of
1989-1990 only addressed Germany’s role within the alliance and
3 P. Zelikov, C. Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft, Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 176-177, 180-184, 186-187, and 195-196.
4 In May 1990, while Gorbachev told Baker that in the case of the alliance’s radical
transformation Moscow would propose to join NATO, the foreign secretary replied
dismissively that a pan-European security institution was “an excellent dream, but
only a dream”. Quoted in M.E. Sarotte (2009), p. 164.