Leading from Strength

Leading From Strength

It was an anniversary that passed without fanfares or triumphalism. May 23 marked the 30th birthday of the Federal Republic of Germany as a democratic country. Six days earlier, the 518 members of the lower house of parliament had assembled inside Bonn's Bundeshaus --a white, flat-topped, modern building with none of the grandeur of other, older European parliaments. Under a 30-ft. backdrop of the national insignia, a black eagle with spreading wings, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt took the podium. Sturdy-looking as a Hamburg dock, chin set squarely as a chopping block, he methodically reviewed the state of his nation three decades after its occupation by the three Western Allied powers that defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The Federal Republic, he said, had unparalleled economic development, democratic security at home and high prestige abroad, detente in the traditional tinderbox of Central Europe. At one point in his speech, Schmidt said something that could not help stirring the silent emotion of every deputy in the chamber. Said he: "We, the older generation, should stop perhaps for just a moment, and with a bit of astonishment, say to ourselves, this nation already has its own history. And it is, I believe, the best and most dignified part of German history."

Few Europeans with long memories would quarrel with that freeze-frame assertion; it seemed to crystallize the strong new sense of national identity and self-confidence now emanating from Bonn. Long reluctant to exercise a leadership equal to its political and economic strengths, West Germany has finally come of age as a Continental power. Much of the credit for this belongs to Helmut Schmidt. More than any other postwar Chancellor since der Alte--the late Konrad Adenauer--Schmidt has shouldered his way into the front row of international leaders and has increasingly shown that he is not afraid to play a great-power role. Thanks largely to Schmidt's imposing political skills, says one ranking British diplomat, "the West Germans have moved from an occupation mentality to an independence of mind."

Last week Schmidt was preparing to fly to the U.S. for a four-day "private" visit that would include an important bit of unofficial summitry in Washington. President Carter has scheduled roughly three hours of talks with the Chancellor, who will also meet with congressional leaders and breakfast with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In addition, the U.S. public will be able to take the Chancellor's measure when he fans out to give three major speeches in his fluent, almost unaccented English: at Columbia, S.C., where he will attend a centennial celebration for the late former Secretary of State James F. Byrnes; at Harvard, where he is to deliver the main commencement address and receive an honorary doctorate; and at the American Council on Germany, a foreign affairs organization in New York City.

Carter and Schmidt have a number of critical issues to discuss, ranging from energy and economics to defense and detente. Perhaps most of all, the two leaders need to improve their personal rapport. Says one Washington policymaker: "Let's face it. Our relations with West Germany have not gone as well as they could over the past 2% years." The President and the Chancellor have had a severe "chemistry" problem. As one White House official puts it, "The two get along when they are together; the problem is when they're apart."

Schmidt in the past has scarcely concealed the personal animosity and near scorn he feels toward Carter. He has made frosty comments about Carter's "preachy fanaticism" on human rights and his "narrow evangelistic approach" to the problem of nuclear proliferation. The President's turnabout on the neutron bomb, when he suddenly stopped plans to develop the weapon after imploring West European governments to accept it into the NATO arsenal, deepened Bonn's suspicions about the Administration's capacity for leadership. Actually Schmidt could not escape a share of the responsibility in the neutron bomb affair, having stonewalled Carter's urgings in the first place.

When the dollar went on the skids last year, Schmidt's view of what he regarded as Carter's unpredictability and vacillation became downright disdainful: "What sort of a government is it that lets its country's currency go to hell?" he is said to have asked American visitors in Bonn.

Reciprocal suspicions were aroused on the U.S. side when Bonn cautiously dragged its feet about reflating its economy in order to serve with the U.S. and Japan as a "locomotive" of the world economy. Schmidt stirred up other apprehensions about what Washington regarded as West Germany's self-centered approach to economic problems. A key example: Schmidt's vigorous campaign for the European Monetary System, which, except for the British pound, ties European Community currencies together within a narrow band of fluctuation. The scheme was originally devised as a protective measure for Europe against the gyrations of the dollar. But as the deutsche mark became an increasingly popular reserve currency in the treasuries of many countries, some economists suspected Schmidt was chauvinistically trying to create a "mark zone" that would eventually rival the dollar's dominion in international finance.

The diplomatic friction between Washington and Bonn eventually led to fears that Bonn's assertively independent approach, which French Pundit Raymond Aron dubbed "Gaullism in a minor key," might prove a threat to Western solidarity. The first hint that West Germany might possibly be distancing itself from NATO was delivered by a leading figure of the left wing of Schmidt's own Social Democratic Party. Just as General Alexander Haig and other NATO commanders were warning about the Soviet Union's ominous military buildup, the S.P.D.'s parliamentary floor leader, Herbert Wehner, insisted that Moscow's moves were "defensive and not offensive." Wehner argued against the deployment of U.S. Cruise and Pershing II nuclear-tipped missiles on West German soil to counter Soviet intermediate-range weapons not covered by SALT II.

Schmidt, whose personal commitment to NATO is unquestioned in Washington, managed to squelch Wehner and reassure his European allies. But the dovish words from S.P.D. leftists could not help raising the specter of a West Germany one day seeking a "special relationship" with the Soviet Union at the expense of the West, perhaps in the name of the dormant but enduring long-range goal of reunification with East Germany.

Administration officials hope that the worst in Bonn-Washington relations is over. They and the West Germans also insist that the deep root of the relationship--a shared belief in a strong defense as well as in continued detente--remains as sound as ever. Nor is Washington unhappy about West Germany's unabashed new global role. In fact it would be content if that role continues to grow. Says one Administration planner: "We don't want to push the Germans. But insofar as they feel comfortable with a position of greater leadership, we can encourage it."

Gratified by the active part that Bonn has played in European affairs, the Administration hopes Germany will also play a larger role in collective efforts to resolve the Cyprus crisis, mitigate the isolation of President Anwar Sadat, and work out a solution for Namibia. Nonetheless, substantial issues are at the top of the agenda that face the Chancellor and the President when they meet. Items:

European Defense. Schmidt favors SALT II; with White House encouragement, he is expected to promote the treaty on his speaking tour. The Chancellor, however, is concerned about the Soviet intermediate-range missiles, which are not covered by the treaty and thus fall into a "gray zone." They have confronted him with West Germany's traditional dilemma as the point-country on the frontier of divided Europe, namely, how to balance the strengthening of NATO against Bonn's continuing Ostpolitik--the policy of "opening to the East" launched a decade ago by Schmidt's predecessor, Willy Brandt. That is why Schmidt is reluctant to allow the U.S. to station its counter-missiles on West German soil unless other NATO countries also agree to do so.

Nuclear Policy. In his disastrous first meeting with Schmidt, Vice President Mondale attacked West Germany's agreement to sell nuclear reactors to Brazil. That controversy has cooled by several degrees. While the deal with Brazil has not been canceled, Schmidt has agreed not to sell reprocessing technology to Third World countries until the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation program deals with the issue later this year. On domestic nuclear energy, Schmidt and Carter share a common problem: namely, the rising public concern about the safety of nuclear power plants.

Economic Worries. Despite the improved performance of the dollar in recent months, Schmidt is seeking assurances that the Administration will continue its efforts to support the dollar and will bring U.S. policy on energy consumption under control. With about a third of its G.N.P. dependent on exports, West Germany is more sensitive than most countries to global economic stability. Schmidt and Carter want to compare their notes for the June 28 Tokyo economic summit that both men will attend. For its part, the U.S. is seeking stronger West German commitments to help with the financial rescue of two vital allies: Turkey, which is on the verge of bankruptcy and vulnerable to political upheaval, and Egypt, which has been politically and economically isolated from the rest of the Arab world since signing the peace treaty with Israel.

One additional factor makes the Schmidt visit especially important. The Chancellor arrives a week before the East-West summit in Vienna, where Carter will confront Brezhnev face to face for the first time. Schmidt has met the Soviet leader twice, most recently in May 1978. Carter wants to elicit every tip he can: how to judge Brezhnev's moods, how to broach touchy subjects, and most of all, how to deal with his shaky, if not sinking, health.

As the two leaders meet, they find themselves in quite different political positions. Schmidt enjoys a popular support at home that is probably more solid than that of any other major Western leader. His approval rating is often as high as 70% in the polls, which he watches as closely as any other modern politician. Carter has not scored that well since his election. In terms of international prestige and influence, West Germany is certainly a nation on the way up. Many West Germans believe their country's ascendancy is due partly to a conscious decision by Schmidt to take up the slack of what he has perceived as weak U.S. leadership that has diminished global confidence in the Carter Administration.

The emergence of West Germany as a self-confident power has been a natural evolution--the product of an enlightened policy by the Western Allies after World War II that reinforced Teutonic diligence and determination. In 1945 Hitler's thousand-year Reich lay in ruins. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf were reduced to jagged piles of debris. The Allies' "carpet" bombing had blighted the industrial heartland of the Ruhr Valley and the transportation facilities of the whole country. It was a country with millions of homeless refugees, without leadership, and with a heritage that had to be rebuilt from scratch.

Having already sent millions of dollars' worth of goods as stopgap relief, in 1948 the U.S. embarked on the Marshall Plan and over the next four years systematically distributed some $12 billion in economic aid to Western Europe--including West Germany. That rescue program, perhaps the most costly humanitarian effort in history, fueled the industrial revival of the country, made Americans highly respected in Germany at the time, and is still vivid in the memory of a grateful older generation.

Risen from the wasteland, and painfully adjusting to its collective guilt about the Hitler era, the Federal Republic for years remained reluctant to assert itself. Adhering scrupulously to the democratic rules and confines of their postwar constitution, West Germany's 61 million people busily created the most stable big society in Western Europe. The limitations on rearmament obviously helped the Germans, as it did the Japanese, to concentrate resources and energies on export industry instead of defense.

Yet even within the prescribed quotas for military manpower and non-nuclear weaponry, West Germany also built a standing army of 489,000--the largest, best-equipped and most disciplined in Western Europe and second only to the U.S. and Turkey in the NATO alliance. That military machine faces an enduring dilemma: it has to be strong enough for the defense of Central Europe, but never so strong as to provoke the Soviet Union's obsessive fear of a renascent, militaristic West Germany. "We must be cautious," says Defense Minister Hans Apel. "Neither in Eastern nor Western Europe can we create the impression that we are longing for a special military position. On the other hand, we are not allowed the luxury of withdrawing to the bystander role of a grand duchy. We must be involved, but not overinvolved."

So long as the memory of German militarism hung in the Continental atmosphere--alongside Soviet supersensitivity about the guns of Bonn--it seemed imperative not to make waves. It was far safer for West Germany to think of itself, in the European context, as a banker than as a politician, and certainly not as a general. Willy Brandt recounts that John Kennedy once asked him to tell him candidly how Germans perceived themselves. Brandt's blunt answer: "Of course, I hold my head up high, but inside I bow and scrape."

Five years ago, Brandt, the idealistic crusader for Ostpolitik, was forced to resign as Chancellor after one of his closest aides, Guenter Guillaume, was arrested as a spy for East Germany. Along came Schmidt, and the new West Germany is progressively spreading its wings with little apology. Its self-confidence has been amply demonstrated, and not only in open defiance of U.S. preferences on a variety of key issues. Pursuing a more active diplomacy in the Third World, Schmidt has ranged far afield; earlier this year he visited Brazil, Peru and the Dominican Republic, leaving no doubt that he means to expand West German commerce in Latin America. Increasingly Schmidt has been cutting the most forceful figure at European Community summits. Says a Danish diplomat ruefully: "If the Germans don't agree, it can't be done in the E.C."

The launching pad for West Germany's political takeoff has been there all along: its rock-solid economy, second only to that of the U.S. in the industrialized West. The Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the 60s and early '70s continues. Last year West Germany had another immense trade surplus, $21 billion; its gross national product is expected to grow more than 4.5% in 1979, and despite the rising cost of oil to a country that produces almost none of its own, inflation will probably not exceed 4%, by far the lowest figure of any major Western economy.

Unemployment is also down, from 5.9% in early 1976 to the present 3.8%. The jobless figure has remained remarkably low despite the country's profound restructuring of key industries, which, as in the rest of Europe, have come under pressure from low-cost foreign competition. West Germany's textile industry is now oriented to high fashion, steel toward high-grade specialty alloys, shipbuilding away from supertankers to small, specialized vessels. Unlike many other industrial countries, West Germany foresaw the problem of competition and moved swiftly.

It drew on the workaday cooperation among management, labor and government that has long been a touchstone of the country's stability. While Britain, for instance, still suffers from class conflict, Germany already had a limited form of worker participation in management as early as the Weimar Republic. In his state of the nation speech, Schmidt singled out the trade unions in particular for their "admirable wisdom and sanity." Schmidt's friend and only rival as the leader of the E.G., French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, has often cited West Germany as a model for his own country's economic development.

In part because it can well afford to, West Germany has also produced something of a cultural resurgence. More than $1 billion a year, perhaps the biggest cultural subsidy in the world, is spent by state and federal authorities to finance an aesthetic amalgam of 800 museums, 1,600 art galleries, 60 opera houses, 96 orchestras and 200 legitimate theaters. West Germany has its own new wave of film makers--Rainer Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders--whose reputations as cinematographic cult figures rival those of the Truffauts and Godards who starred in France's Nouvelle Vague of the '60s. Director Volker Schlondorff won top honors at the Cannes Film Festival last month for his film version of Gunter Grass's classic, The Tin Drum.

For all its burgher prosperity and bustling stability, West Germany is not without problems. The burden of the unemployment falls mainly on the Gastarbeiter, the 3.9 million "guest workers" and their families imported over the years from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece and Portugal to do the menial jobs that West Germans disdain. As jobs have become scarcer, more than a million Gastarbeiter have been repatriated, either by inducement or expulsion; the remainder live as alienated poor in urban ghettos, cut off from the rest of society.

The Teutonic obsession with internal security has raised concern about the "Ugly German" on occasion. Throughout its largely successful campaign against the wave of terrorism by the notorious Red Army Faction, the .A federal government re frained from overreacting and jeopardizing civil liberties. During the whole period, Schmidt acted coolly and shrewdly. First of all, he had the sense not to call army troops out into the streets, which would have alarmed Germans and other Europeans alike. When he did use troops, in 1977, it was to launch the dramatic commando raid that rescued a hijacked Lufthansa airliner at Mogadishu.

In 1972, however, parliament passed a controversial "job ban" aimed at barring extremists and members of the minuscule Communist Party from all public jobs by means of a system of excessive "loyalty" checks. The law has since been modified and now exempts individuals who may have belonged to extremist organizations in the past but are no longer members. Abroad, the residual "Ugly German" image has not been dissipated by the 26 million West German tourists who annually seek the sun (vacations for industrial workers average 4 1/2 weeks a year); as travelers, Germans often come on strong, flaunting their deutsche marks, in the old image of the American tourist.

Helmut Schmidt has said, "It will take 50 years to forget the Nazi past. " Yet West Germans have progressively tried to come to terms with it. The turning point was Brandt's act of atonement in 1970, when he knelt before a memorial in the Warsaw ghetto to victims of Hitler's Holocaust. The Nazi issue arises periodically; the election two weeks ago of Christian Democrat Karl Carstens, a former Nazi Party member, as West Germany's new President provoked protest demonstrations by left-wing groups dressed in mock Nazi uniforms. It was clearly a milestone in national adjustment when the TV series Holocaust was shown throughout the country earlier this year. The series provoked no serious protest, as might have happened in the past. Instead, for the first time, national soul searching about the Nazi period was brought out in the open in an intense public debate.

One inheritance of the past that sociologists and pundits detect is a surprisingly strong undercurrent of dark insecurity that runs beneath the gleaming material surface. It is evident in the mood of uneasiness among students. It is regularly reflected in a brooding quality that characterizes Germany's new plays, novels and poetry. In many subtle ways, it affects the citizen at large. Says Richard Lowenthal, professor emeritus at Berlin's Free University: "The citizens of West Germany live more securely than at any time since 1914, but they do not feel secure." However, the uncertainty produces a beneficial impulse: to refresh the democratic institutions constantly because they are never quite taken for granted. But it also shows that the Germans will not soon, if ever, get rid of the Angst that has inhabited the Teutonic soul since the Lutheran Reformation.

No one better personifies the confidence, and complexes, at work in today's German society than Helmut Schmidt. "He has all the positive and negative German qualities, and this I explains his enormous popularity," says one Bonn bureaucrat. I "We are thrifty. Cleanliness and I order are still our most valued virI tues. We tend to organize everything. Our industriousness is both admired and deplored by foreigners. And we are arrogant. The whole German mentality can be seen through Helmut Schmidt." Adds University of Cologne Sociologist Erwin Scheuch wryly: "Schmidt is an above-average average German."

His popularity, which regularly runs far ahead of his own Social Democratic Party, is also due to his broad political placement. Schmidt is an internationalist, a liberal on most social issues, and a strict economic conservative when it comes to guarding against inflation-- even if that means curbing welfare spending. As he put it during a recent visit to London to meet Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "I am not a socialist, I am a democrat." In light of his sound-money, free-market policies, many politicians have observed that he might seem more at home in West Germany's conservative Christian Democratic Union than in his own S.D.P. In fact, a number of key C.D.U. parliamentarians murmur privately that they dearly wish they had him as leader of their party.

Schmidt is a magnetic speaker and skilled television performer. Characteristically, most West German politicians tend to shout down at their audience, as though thunder were persuasive, and to gesticulate like bandleaders. Schmidt carefully modulates his resonant baritone voice and paces the words in his crisp North German accent. His rigid grip on he lectern seems to convey a firm hold on he tiller of the ship of state. As he moves into a crescendo, he is apt to whip off his glasses with a flourish, as though to meet each spectator eyeball to eyeball. Franz Josef Strauss, 63, the burly leader of Bavaria's ultraconservative Christian Social Union, calls Schmidt "the Federal Actor." Helmut Kohl, 49, the hapless C.D.U. chairman who was deposed last week as his party's candidate for Chancellor in the 1980 elections in favor of the more dynamic Ernst Albrecht, 48, grumbles sarcastically: "If I were half as beautiful as beautiful Helmut, I would have an easier time in politics."

To Germans who admire his churning drive and nuts-and-bolts expertise as an economic manager, Schmidt has become "the Doer." Some of his most devoted followers call him "Super-Schmidt." But there are also many who are critical of his notoriously quick fuse and slashing insults. This has earned him yet another nickname: "Schmidt the Lip."

Even the Chancellor's closest supporters admit he has a vanity and impatience that can blister into arrogance. In his clockwork Cabinet meetings, he thinks nothing of cutting off the first digression with a knifing "That's not pertinent!" He once complained about Ludwig Erhard, who succeeded Adenauer as Chancellor, that "talking with him is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."

Control and practicality are Schmidt's watchwords. Sixteen-hour days of budgeted, systematic labor are normal for him, and he often brings home stacks of buff-colored dossiers to read until two or three in the morning. Even so, Schmidt is what Germans call a "Morgenmuffel," one who hates to get up in the morning. At the London economic summit in 1977, not suspecting that it might further damage their jersonal rapport, Carter invited him to a 7 a.m. breakfast; Schmidt was appalled.

It is a rare occasion when he can relax at home with his wife of 36 years, "Loki." Their modest residence, situated on the Rhine within sight of the I Chancellery, is furnished in modern-functional style and decorated with expressionist and impressionist paintings. Bookcases are filled with volumes on history and economics. Schmidt occasionally relaxes with a mystery story, preferably by Agatha Christie, plays Bach or Mozart on a large electric organ, or challenges his wife at chess and double solitaire. He hates to lose at chess, as well as politics; when he does, he is apt to rail at his own "stupidity" for making the wrong move.

Although no athlete, Schmidt at 60 is vigorous and trim: 5 ft. 8 in., 172 Ibs. A chain-smoker of mentholated cigarettes, he drinks no alcohol except for dutiful sips at a dinner or reception. He never refuses a cigar, however. Devoted to his 90-year-old parents, whom he visits at a home for the elderly near his beloved Hamburg, he unfailingly sticks the proffered cigar in his pocket to take to his father. Schmidt and his wife spend every weekend possible in Hamburg. On summer holidays at their cottage on a lake in northern Germany, they are joined by their only child, Susanne, 31, an economist like her father, who works for the Deutsche Bank branch office in London.

Schmidt originally planned to be an architect. Instead, in 1937 at the age of 18, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and served with an antiaircraft unit that fought on both the Eastern and Western fronts. After being commissioned a first lieutenant, he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and held as a prisoner of war for six months in Belgium. Earlier, he had joined the Hitler Youth, as did every other boy in his school. His submissive stance is said to have privately troubled Schmidt in later years. Returning after the war to the devastation of Hamburg, he abandoned architecture to study political economy because, as a friend recalls, "considering the scope of the task of reconstruction, he believed he could be of more use."

In 1949 Schmidt graduated at the top of his class at the University of Hamburg. While still a student, he joined the S.P.D., partly because his schoolteacher father had been a lifelong member. A successful stint as a whiz-kid interior minister in the Hamburg local government at 31 earned him national recognition. In his first try in 1953 he was elected to the Bundestag. In 1969, after two years as S.P.D. Bundestag floor leader, he entered Brandt's national Cabinet as Defense Minister. By the time Brandt began to lose his political authority Schmidt was West Germany's internationally regarded Finance Minister and the Chancellor's increasingly powerful standin. "When occasionally Willy wouldn't show up, it seemed perfectly natural that Helmut would take over the sessions," a Cabinet colleague recalls. Just as naturally, when Brandt resigned after the Guillaume scandal, Schmidt took over as Chancellor.

As popular as he is with the public, Schmidt does not have correspondingly dominant control over his own government, which is a coalition of his own S.P.D. and the middle-road Free Democratic Party. In the surprisingly close 1976 elections, the S.P.D.-F.D.P. coalition ended up with a greatly reduced majority --253 out of 496 voting seats in the Bundestag. Although F.D.P. today has only 40 seats in the Bundestag compared with the S.P.D.'s 224, the F.D.P. can, and does, exercise disproportionate power in the coalition. With four key portfolios in its hands, the F.D.P. can make its voice heard in major policy decisions. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for instance, does not always agree with Schmidt; he is currently concerned that Bonn is perhaps too soft toward the Soviets and too tough toward the U.S.

Schmidt also faces a division within his own party, provoked mainly by Wehner's small but militant left-wingers. They are unhappy about the F.D.P.'s disproportionate power. In addition to their dovish stand on European defense, the leftists also differ with Schmidt on nuclear energy and social welfare policies, which, they complain, have too often been compromised for the sake of limiting inflation, and for the sake of accommodating the F.D.P.

Schmidt is almost as popular in other Western European countries as at home. Nonetheless, there is a lingering fear behind lots of closed government doors that the Chancellor just might be, or become, too strong; that the goblins of West Germany's past could emerge to influence its Continental behavior. Other Europeans still have deep memories of the Germany of the past and, fairly or not, wonder if the new West Germany ever acts entirely in the present.

Not that they expect a resurgence of authoritarianism; the proven solidity of West Germany's democracy persuasively rules that out Rather, they point to other experiences that have contributed to West German insecurity, like the devastating inflation of the Weimar Republic in 1922-23, which helps explain the German obsession with maintaining the value of their currency.

One senior British diplomat who admires Schmidt complains that the new West German leadership is still too narrowly focused on national interest instead of international cooperation. Says he: "We haven't yet seen the wider vision. It is still 'Germany First.' And the German stand --like Scarlett O'Hara's vow that 'I'm never going to be hungry again'is 'We are haunted by inflation.'"

Italian Economist Nino Andreatta, a leading planner for the Christian Democrats, blames West Germany for holding back Western European recovery because of its excessive fear of inflation. One Italian foreign ministry official goes further, saying that West German policies have actually slowed down the process of recovery, and complains that "we have told Bonn this many times but to no avail."

The West German answer, in brief, is that inflation for economies is a killer disease. Otmar Emminger, head of West Germany's equivalent of the U.S. Federal Reserve, uses a different image. "Inflation is like a dictator," he says. "It must be fought before it becomes established, or it is too late." A German warning about dictatorship has a certain authority about it.

If Europeans were to "stop a moment" as Schmidt asked on the 30th anniversary, they might see through the clear glass of the present that the postwar achievements of West Germany he listed are already far more than anybody could have expected. Even those Europeans who quibble with Bonn's economic policy know that the country that turned the Ruhr into the peacetime turbine of Europe should be more than capable also of becoming more outward looking and less tightfisted, given time. Many are willing to bet on it, and therefore to welcome the growing West German power. "What disturbs us is to have a power vacuum in Western Europe," says Italian Author Luigi Barzini, one of the Continent's shrewdest pundits. "It's as if this were a circus without a lion tamer. That is dangerous. So, by and large, we would not be terribly disturbed if the tamer were West Germany."

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