Summit leaders hold joint press briefing: Bush and Gorbachev seek rapid arms-cuts progress
By Hella Pick in Valletta
4 December 1989
The decision to stage a joint press conference at the end of the turbulent seawater summit was one more programme change forced on the two leaders yesterday by Malta’s stormy weather.
President George Bush had planned to have his press conference on the USS Belknap, and President Mikhail Gorbachev to have his on the Soviet liner, Maxim Gorky.
But as it turned out, their improvised joint meeting with the press only served to underline the sincerity of their determination to cooperate closely and constructively in the exciting era they both see ahead. The press conference also illustrated the good humour, and the effort to reach out to each other, that had marked their talks.
Both stressed the importance of US-Soviet cooperation in bilateral relations and in the context of ‘the epoch-making changes’ in Europe and many other parts of the world.
Mr Bush said ‘the stage has now been set for progress over a broad set of issues’, adding later that he ‘could not have hoped for a better non-summit summit’. President Gorbachev, for his part, stressed the frankness and the good personal relationship he had achieved with Mr Bush. He was emphatic that ‘political means’, and not force, should be used to solve world problems. ‘The leaders of our two countries cannot act as fire brigades,’ he added.
Both leaders spoke of their commitment to an east-west conventional arms agreement next year. Mr Gorbachev also stressed the importance of the CSCE process on cooperation and security in Europe.
He called for Nato and the Warsaw Pact to be transformed to meet the challenge of the new times. They ‘should not remain military alliances, but rather military-political alliances, and later on just political alliances’.
In reply to a question about the demise of the Brezhnev doctrine, Mr Gorbachev emphatically welcomed the transformation now under way in eastern Europe. It was making these countries ‘more democratic and humane’. In a reference to the EC, he added: ‘I also see profound changes in West European countries, where integration is taking place while preserving at the same time the national identity of one’s own people. This is very important for us to understand.’
Both leaders were guarded on the question of German reunification. Mr Bush said: ‘I don’t think it is a role of the United States to dictate the rapidity of change in any country. It is a matter for the people to determine themselves.’ The Soviet leader said: ‘The reality is that we have today’s Europe with two German states … This was the decision of history.
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Editorial: Two men in the same boat
4 December 1989
The symbolism was ironic and inescapable. The leaders of the two old superpowers had rival warships on Mediterranean station so that, as rulers of the world, they might commute between the two. But there was an almighty wind and a lashing sea. Hours of chat were slashed from the schedule. And, in the end, they wound up together on a slightly tatty cruise liner anchored out of the gale, holding – through force of circumstance – a joint press conference. Brisk conclusions. The elements are the only superpower. The impetus for progress was there, preordained, without the circumscribed chat. And George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev – the crucial thing about the Maltese summit – are now two politicians stuck in the same boat, sinking and swimming together.
That committed relationship is more important than any number of zizzy initiatives: 97 per cent cuts in this or that category of weaponry, the familiar stuff of modern summitry. It means that Mr James Baker, the American secretary of state, is now the man most in charge of what happens next. It means that George Bush, after months of thumb-sucking, has made his fundamental choice. He has signed up for the ride. He even thinks his good mate Mikhail is being lied to something rotten by those Commy Nicaraguans over arms supplies to El Salvador. Nothing is the fault of the Soviet Union any longer. They are the good guys, so helpful in the Middle East and beyond. Next year’s formal summit can deliver a dramatic range of agreements that will knock the socks off the Democratic Party just before the midterm elections. Jim Baker, a political wizard, has done the calculations. Doing business with Gorbachev is great electoral business. It is thus vital that Mikhail remains around to do business with. The Soviet president, to be sure, stands surrounded by weakness. He cannot control what is left of his empire. Good night, over night, Egon Krenz. Farewell Jakes. He cannot control his own patch: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldavia. He cannot find any way to make his economy deliver the goods. He has precious few cards to play because he sinks, week by week, ever deeper into an intractable quagmire of problems. But anything that George can now do to help, George will deliver. President Bush has signed up for the trip.
What Bush and Gorbachev proclaimed yesterday wasn’t merely, for the umpteenth time, the end of the cold war. It was the beginning of a warm and self-serving relationship. And, because it signalled such a change, not merely from chilly distrust but also from the pretence that the US and the USSR can order the world to behave in certain ways, it was more significant than any detailed communique. More significant and possibly, for countries like Britain, more distressing.
Here is where one summit touches another: this weekend Malta, next weekend Strasbourg. Gorbachev and Bush, together in a Maltese harbour, did not decide the future shape of the European world. They decided, perforce, to create a forum in which the big and middling and little nations of Europe must begin to do that for themselves (with, fascinatingly, Moscow now included beneath the rafters of what Washington might deem a common European home). Under that roof, within a matter of months, the last traces of the cold war will vanish as sweeping arms cuts render conventional assumptions of conflict a practical impossibility to add to today’s common sense and emotional impossibility. At which point, we Europeans have to decide.
None of this means that, in a trice, all the GIs and hardware will be gone. But hundreds of thousands and billions of tons will go home. None of this means that the Warsaw Pact will cease to exist. But the resident, despised armies in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany will gradually return to barracks and then to civilian life. That will be a time of danger and stress: self-evident to all those who remember the bloody trivia of nationalist ferment which riddled the old, raddled Europe. It will also be a time of vital opportunity to show that we can manage now without the discarded crutches of special relationships, the illusion of power in the reflected glory of American amity.
In Malta, Mr Bush and Mr Gorbachev proclaimed that they are themselves a special relationship. President Bush has staked his prestige on it; to the limits of congressional approval, he is cast as the historic peace-maker, offering his new friend enough international momentum to keep the domestic wolves at bay. President Gorbachev, from a far feebler position, no longer feels the need to offer minty notions to woo the Europeans in order to goad Bush into action, because Bush and Baker have made up their minds. That is pell-mell progress, for all the talk of measured consideration and studied calm. It is an apt backcloth for the pell-mell unfolding of events on the east European ground.
But we, who watch and wonder from the sidelines, should have no illusions. The process itself is ultimately unpredictable. It poses questions about the future governance, and integrity, of the Soviet Union that can only be guessed at. And, in a far shorter run, it poses questions of the Europeans themselves that they have only hesitantly begun to formulate. A couple of weeks ago in Paris, the leaders of western Europe asked history to slow down a bit. It isn’t. It is speeding up. Two weeks ago, Czechoslovakia was a Communist dictatorship; and Egon Krenz ruled East Germany. Next weekend, along the practical economic lines ground out over years, those leaders will be asked to find common cause in a process of integration that provides one platform of assured relationships from which to proclaim a European view of what Europe should become. If – after Malta – that imperative is forgotten amid petty nationalist trumpetings, we may all begin to despair of our ability to chart our own future.
This is an edited extract. Read the full article.
Europe Tomorrow: The climb to the sunlit uplands – planning for a new Europe
By Martin Woollacott
4 December 1989
This week, after the Gorbachev-Bush summit, in the wake of the most momentous events since the second world war, European Community leaders meet in Strasbourg to shape a single European market for the 90s. But they must also begin planning for a new Europe in the 21st century, with a Community that might include more than a score of nations and many associated countries as far east as Azerbaijan. Today, in a momentous period of 20th century history, the Guardian publishes a four-page analysis of the new Europe. Martin Woollacott sets the scene.
US urges faster EC integration: Thatcher is isolated at Bush’s Nato summit
By John Palmer and Martin Walker
5 December 1989
BRUSSELS
President Bush yesterday threw the full weight of the United States behind faster economic and political integration in the European Community – in clear defiance of Mrs Thatcher’s known objections.
The president’s unambiguous support for faster European integration – made at the special Nato summit here yesterday – comes on the eve of the Strasbourg European summit, where the prime minister is already isolated over plans for economic and monetary union.
Speaking to a press conference after the Nato summit, President Bush said: “I appreciate the vital role of the Twelve in the new Europe, and it is my belief that the events of our times call both for continued and even intensified efforts by the Twelve to integrate, and that there is a role for Europe as a magnet to draw the forces of reform towards eastern Europe.”
Afterwards, senior US officials said the president’s remarks were a clear signal that the US stood behind those in the EC pushing for faster progress towards a more united Europe.
Chancellor Kohl was left in no doubt that faster European integration was the only context in which the superpowers and their allies would tolerate total German reunification. Accepting this, the chancellor agreed to the new Nato formula that “German self-determination should be a peaceful, step-by-step process, linked firmly to European integration and the Nato Alliance.”
For her part Mrs Thatcher was obviously stung by the unexpected force of President Bush’s backing for European integration, which was received with delight by the other European Community leaders. Speaking after the end of the Nato meeting, Mrs Thatcher pointedly said that the president’s remarks had been carefully prepared and would “require study in depth” before she replied.
“There were some things I would have no trouble in replying to, but other parts will require reflection,” she said. “It is not that we are opposed to European integration, but it is a question of the kind of Europe we will want in the future.”
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US outlines vision for new Europe
By Anna Tomforde and John Palmer
13 December 1989.
BONN
The US yesterday linked support for East Germany’s new leaders with a new vision for a changing Europe in which Nato would adopt a more political role and Washington’s ties with the European Community would be enhanced.
After outlining Washington’s response to the recent changes in eastern Europe, the secretary of state, Mr James Baker, made an unscheduled visit to East Germany where he held talks with the new prime minister, Mr Hans Modrow.
It was the first time that a US secretary of state held official talks with East German leaders on their own territory, underlining Washington fears that a collapse of the East German reform process could imperil developments throughout eastern Europe.
In what he called “a new architecture for a new era”, Mr Baker outlined closer cooperation between western Europe and the US which would bind the west closer together while at the same time “opening up the doors to the east.”
Washington, he said, stood by its commitment to overcome the division of Europe, Germany and Berlin, but this had to come about in a gradual process which satisfied German aspirations and met the “legitimate interests” of all concerned.
Mr Baker declared his support for the EC “taking on increasingly important political roles”. His remarks – to the Berlin press club – were received gleefully by senior EC officials in Strasbourg as evidence of US support for their view about how the community should evolve in the new European situation.
His views appear to contradict Mrs Thatcher’s statement to the House of Commons that US policy towards European integration had not changed under President Bush.
In Potsdam – where the Prussian kings had their summer seat and where the wartime allies in 1945 decided the future of defeated Nazi Germany – Mr Baker assured Mr Modrow of US support for East German reforms.
Overlaps between Nato and European institutions would inevitably grow, Mr Baker said. Nato should be transformed into a political body capable of building a new security structure for Europe. “In our view there is no conflict between the process of European integration and an extension of the cooperation between the European Community and its neighbours in east and west.”
He described Nato as a forum where western countries would work together to negotiate agreements between east and west and see that they were implemented and verifiable. As Nato’s military role was reduced, the European Security Conference could become the “most important forum of east-west cooperation.”
In a passage likely to upset Mrs Thatcher’s belief in a “special relationship” between London and Washington, he suggested that the US and the EC “work together to achieve whether in treaty or some other form, a significantly strengthened set of institutional and consultative links. We suggest that our discussions about this idea proceed in parallel with Europe’s efforts to achieve by 1992 a common internal market so that plans for interaction would evolve with changes in the community,” he said.
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