A German lesson for Ireland

Germany will soon mark the 35th anniversary of reunification. In the Lander that once comprised the communist German Democratic Republic, the festivities will likely be muted. For many in “the east”, as it is still called in what was the old Bonn Federal Republic, unification has come to feel like annexation. There is a message here for another European nation. Those impatient for an end to the partition of Ireland would do well to ponder it.

At the time, the merger of the two Germanys a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall looked like a political masterstroke on the part of chancellor Helmut Kohl. Sceptics worried about the economic upheaval, the more so when Kohl defied the Bundesbank to insist on a one-for-one swap of Ostmarks for Deutsche Marks. Others wondered about a clash of political and social cultures. Some of the prejudices predated the Soviet takeover. I once heard a distinguished German statesman remark caustically that the Romans had been wise when they had decided “to stop at the Elbe”.

International disquiet reached beyond the failing Soviet Union. A staunch opponent of communism she might have been, but by 1990 Britain’s then prime minister Margaret Thatcher was more fearful about the effect on the European balance of power of the re-emergence of a powerful Germany. She assured the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that she would try to block it. The fears proved unfounded, though they live on among a certain segment on the right of British politics.

Kohl and his successors lavished tens of billions of euros on rebuilding the former GDR. Great cities such as Dresden and Leipzig, left to decay by the communist regime, were restored to former glory with no regard for cost. And now? Take the political temperature in Brandenburg, Saxony or Thuringia and the ruling sentiment among much of the population is resentment. Voters feel left behind. It is not an accident that the far right, populist Alternative For Germany has put down its strongest roots in the former GDR.

The social and cultural structures of the GDR were dismantled. With them went old certainties and status. Important public service jobs were taken by incomers from the west. The closure of Soviet-era factories prompted an exodus of young people westwards. Investment in the east by the country’s industrial giants was sparse. Put all this together and unification became a takeover rather than a merger. It might have been a moment to create a “new” Germany. Instead the east was bolted on to the west.

At this point supporters of Irish reunification should sit up. The eye-watering financial costs tell their own story. Northern Ireland, of course, is not the GDR. but it does rely on a large permanent subsidy from the UK government. The more important lesson of Germany’s present discontents, however, is that money is not enough.

If the opinion polls are right, the sizeable majority in the Republic in favour of removing the border believe that politically and constitutionally a united Ireland should be much the same as today’s Republic. The six counties of the north would simply “join” the twenty-six counties of the south and life would go on much as before. Germany, in this conjecture, can be taken as a model for Ireland.

Except it should not be. Most obviously, German reunification did not have to make room for a substantial minority of citizens pledging allegiance to another state. True, it is still possible to detect a certain nostalgia in the east for the old Soviet system. And there are still a few Russian speakers. But on the eve of reunification citizens of the GDR did not think of themselves as anything but German. A united Ireland would include up to perhaps 800,000 whose chosen identity was British rather than Irish.

This by definition be a different Ireland. Profound changes, to political structures as well as the emblems of Irish nationhood, would be needed to accommodate the traditions of unionism. It is often forgotten, but the Good Friday Agreement stipulates that the Protestant minority in a united Ireland should be guaranteed the same civil and political rights as Catholic nationalists have secured (albeit very belatedly) in Northern Ireland.

There is no shortage of possible political models. Some were explored more than a century ago by David Lloyd George’s government when it was battling Irish revolutionaries. Eamon de Valera assured Winston Churchill that the north could retain a Stormont parliament in the event of unity. During the 1980s a national consultative group established by the then Irish Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald explored several potential options, federal and confederal.

Nationalists should dust them all down. Receiving the Nobel peace prize for his part in the Good Friday Agreement the unionist leader David Trimble acknowledged that in the decades after partition the protestant majority in the north had built a “cold house” for Catholics.

Legally, all that is required to bring an end to partition is a simple majority of votes north and south in concurrent referendums. In the north, mostly-nationalist Catholics now count themselves more numerous than mostly-unionist Protestants. A 51:49 per cent vote would be enough to meet the terms of the Good Friday agreement. It would also invite the enduring resentment of the great majority of unionists. Much better, surely, to start with a warm house.

The author’s new book, These Divided Isles, Britain and Ireland Past and Future, is published this week by Faber.

https://linktr.ee/thesedividedisles