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many and Britain started this century in discord. We enter its
last quarter in total trust. 8
In 1973 the FCO legal advisers certified in the context of establishing
diplomatic relations with the GDR that Britain did not regard
Germany as having split into two sovereign states. The British political
commitment to German unity was also confirmed in Parliament
by Lady Tweedsmuir in February 1973. 9 And again in the joint declaration
by the Prime Minster and Chancellor Kohl, issued after their
summit at Chequers in May 1984, in which Mrs Thatcher confirmed
‘the conviction of successive British governments that real and permanent
stability in Europe will be difficult to achieve so long as the
German nation is divided against its will’. 10 This summit approved a
progress report on bilateral relations and appointed ‘coordinators’ to
take things forward.
FRG Government Policy
In 1986, during his state visit to Britain, President von Weizsäcker
reaffirmed the Germans’ commitment to overcoming the division of
their country by overcoming the division of Europe. The EU would
always be more than a Common Market for the German people. The
concept, associated in particular with Willy Brandt’s adviser Egon
Bahr, who developed it after the Wall went up in 1961, was that to
have any chance of changing the reality of the status quo, first this
reality had to be accepted, however unpleasant it was. Once the division
of Germany was acknowledged, ways and means would be
found to diminish its worst effects—the imprisonment of 17 million
8 Quoted from Adolf M. Birke and Hermann Wentker (eds.), Deutschland und
Rußland in der britischen Kontinentalpolitik seit 1815, Prince Albert Studies, 11
(Munich, 1994), 150.
9 FCO, Selected Documents on Germany, 4.
10 ‘The Heads of Government reaffirmed the importance of the United
Kingdom’s rights and responsibilities relating to Berlin and Germany as a
whole. The Prime Minister reaffirmed the conviction of successive British
Governments that real and permanent stability in Europe will be difficult to
achieve so long as the German Nation is divided against its will.’ See Salmon,
Hamilton, and Twigge (eds.), German Unification, p. ix.
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