THREE LETTERS
Richard LOwenthal
I.
LETTER FROM BERLIN:
NEUTRALISM AN 0 NATIONALISM
In the course of the last two years, the evolution of public
opinion in the Federal Republic of Germany has become a cause of
major concern to its allies - particularly, but not exclusively, to the
United States and France . The immediate and visible cause of this
concern has been the strength of the popular opposition to the sta–
tioning of United States nuclear weapons of intermediate range–
both Pershing II and Cruise Missiles- in fulfillment of the "double–
track decision" taken by NATO in December 1979, largely on the
initiative of the then West German government and its Social Demo–
cratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and particularly the massive turn
of the German Social Democratic party, now in opposition, to reject
such stationing with a crushing majority.
.
The questions being asked among the Federal Republic's
Western allies are whether the political and cultural decision for
alignment with the West, freely and clearly taken by the West Ger–
mans between the end of Hitler's war and their joining of the Atlan–
tic alliance , is proving to have been superficial and unreliable; whether
a growing number of Germans are falling back into the dream of a
special and unique political and cultural role of Germany between
East and West; whether their attitude to the superpowers is becom–
ing "equidistant," tending to ignore the fundamental difference be–
tween the political systems of the United States and the Soviet
Union; and whether the political changes we are watching are in fact
the beginning of a German turn towards a new, neutralist na–
tionalism, based on a renewed search for a national identity .
I propose to show that the root cause of the change in the West
German political landscape is not a cultural change in West German
mentality, but an objective change in the conditions of the Federal
Republic's military security; that both past errors in the political
guidance ofWest German public opinion and recent errors in the im–
age of the United States security policy conveyed by the present
