Merkel: German reunification sets example to the world (Roundup)

Aug 31, 2010, 17:12 GMT

Berlin - Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday that East German bravery and the country's reunification set an example to the world, in a festive address marking the moment 20 years ago when the reunification treaty was signed.

'The bravery was far greater at the time than we picture it today,' said Merkel, who grew up in East Germany.

In particular, she praised the role of civil rights activists and those who fled the East German regime, and said Germany now bore a duty to fight globally for freedom and democracy.

'If we slacken in this, we will also slacken in our prosperity and success,' Merkel warned.

The chancellor lauded the reunification treaty, a 1000-page document that was hastily drawn up in the summer of 1990, less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

'That was a successful event in our history that we ... can be proud of,' Merkel told dignitaries, gathered in the Berlin building where the document was signed on August 31, 1990.

'The reunification treaty should set an example for further treaties to be agreed in the world,' the chancellor added.

Attendees, near Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate, included the last East German prime minister, Lothar de Maiziere, and the West German foreign minister at the time of reunification, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maizere, who in 1990 was a government official charged with negotiating the West German terms of reunification, said that despite the overall success of the treaty, in retrospect mistakes were made.

'It can come as no surprise, with such a comprehensive treaty, that maybe not every single ruling was ideal,' the minister said.

'I am thinking, for example, of the decision to immediately transfer almost the entire West German legal system to the so-called 'accession area',' he continued.

On August 31, 1990, the western Federal Republic of Germany and the communist German Democratic Republic signed the treaty which effectively absorbed the communist East German state, under a new capital, Berlin.

The document, consisting of 45 articles, was drawn up within less than two months, as officials were eager to disband the East German state before its 41st anniversary, on October 7, 1990.

The rapid negotiations downplayed criticism within East and West Germany at the notion of effectively annexing East Germany - despite the separate political, economic and social developments of the previous 40 years.

In a survey published Tuesday, a third of all western Germans said they had lost more as a result of reunification than they gained.

Of the 2,090 people questioned, 11 per cent said they would ideally like the wall dividing East and West to be rebuilt.

The study, by a Berlin-based sociological research institute, showed that 42 per cent of eastern Germans said they had benefited from reunification. Just 37 per cent of westerners said the same.

One in two western Germans said former East Germans were now better off. Yet three-quarters of those living in the former East did not agree that their lives had improved.

Merkel agreed that it had taken too long to rebalance inequalities between former East and West Germans, for example regarding pension payments.

However she said that many things in Germany were 'wonderful,' 20 years on, referring to unemployment which had fallen to the post-reunification level, and life expectancy which had significantly risen in the former East.

De Maziere, who is a cousin of East Germany's only freely elected prime minister, said the reunification treaty marked an important step at a critical time.

'We all knew the door was now open and we needed to walk through it now. Nobody knew how long this good historic opportunity would last,' he said.

The agreement, drafted less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, followed a series of agreements covering economic, social and currency unification between East and West Germany.

Signed by the West German interior minister at the time, Wolfgang Schaeuble, and East German secretary of state Guenther Krause, the treaty paved the way for German reunification on October 3, 1990.

'The treaty was - and is - both the anchor and the compass for the unification process in Germany,' de Maiziere concluded.