Rewind 32 years to one of those moments of great euphoria in European affairs — the reunification of West and East Germany. The celebrations were by no means confined to Germany. There was rejoicing too in the United States and much of the rest of the West, for Germany’s rebirth as a single country seemed powerfully symbolic of the end of the Cold War and the defeat of communism.
Both these two latter outcomes had long been the primary foreign policy goal of Britain’s then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. But German reunification? This was regarded in No. 10 with great suspicion and foreboding.
Thatcher’s doubts have in many ways proved prophetic, no more so than in Germany’s deeply ambivalent attitude to today’s war in Ukraine, where Berlin seems, Janus-like, to face both ways.
