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denounced as a propaganda ploy. The INF treaty eliminating medium-range
nuclear weapons in Europe is the best evidence that diplomatic relations with
the Soviet Union improve when the West is consistently (irm about
preserving a balance of military forces.
A dissolution of the Western Alliance would be a severe, perhaps fatal,
blow to prospects for greater fi-eedom and democracy in Eastern Europe. A
neutralist Western Europe without Atlanticist ties to the United States would
be divided, weak, and unable to influence developments in Eastern Europe
if
the Soviet Union did not want it to do so. Hopes (or continued democratiza–
tion in Eastern Europe rest on a continuation of the Atlantic Alliance. Just as
the Western Alliance was decisive for the Westernization of West Germany,
so can it contribute to the political and moral strengthening of Western tradi–
tions in what is now called Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev is right to
speak of a common European home, but the common Western values resting
on the dignity of individuals and political rreedom have found their home in a
Western Europe. The facts of political, moral, and cultural tradition outweigh
those of geographic proximity in thinking through what a common European
home is. Without doubt, it stretches across the Atlantic.
Whether the Atlantic Alliance continues depends as much on decisions
made in London and Bonn, in particular, as in Washington.
It
is not at all out
of the realm of possibility that a combination of Gorbachev's arms control
initiatives with a Labor government in Britain, and even more important, a
Social-Democratic-Green government in West Germany, could lead to ir–
reparable divisions, and an American exit from Western Europe.
An
influential part of the West German intellectual and political elites have al–
ready convinced themselves that the Soviet Union poses no threat at all,
while focusing their criticism on the United States, and on the centrality of
West Germany's Western ties. I would urge you
to
seek contact with that
beleaguered but determined part of the West German intellectual and political
establishment which retains Adenauer's wisdom that only a firmly Western–
oriented West Germany could lend assistance to strivings for freedom and
democracy in Eastern Europe.
Poland and Israel
Speaking here in Cracow, less than one hundred kilometers from
Auschwitz- Birkenau, it is important
to
say we assume that you who defend
principles of political freedom will also be loyal to the claims of memory, the
memories of the Holocaust of European Jewry. No task could be more ur–
gent in the creation of a democratic political culture in Poland than a truthful
and complete recollection of the Jewish catastrophe. If they are not already
translated into Polish, I would urge you to translate the great postwar histo-
