Thirty years after the seismic shift in world history of 1989–90 with the collapse of communism, the sudden eruption of life-changing events could be another watershed. This will be decided in the next few months—in Brussels and in Berlin too.

At first glance it might seem a bit far-fetched to compare the overcoming of a world order divided into two opposing camps and the global spread of victorious capitalism with the elemental nature of a pandemic that caught us off-guard and the related global economic crisis happening on an unprecedented scale. Yet if we Europeans can find a constructive response to the shock, this might provide a parallel between the two world-shattering events.

In those days, German and European unification were linked as if joined at the hip. Today, any connection between these two processes, self-evident then, is not so obvious. Yet, while Germany’s national-day celebration (October 3rd) has remained curiously pallid during the last three decades, one might speculate along the following lines: imbalances within the German unification process are not the reason for the surprising revival of its European counterpart but the historical distance which we have now gained from those domestic problems has helped to make the federal government finally revert to the historic task it had put to one side—giving political shape and definition to Europe’s future.

We owe this distancing not only to the worldwide turbulence wrought by the coronavirus crisis: in domestic policy the key stakes have changed decisively—this, above all, through the shift in the party-political balance of forces as a result of the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland. It’s precisely because of this that we have been given, 30 years after that epochal change, a second chance of advancing German and European unity in tandem.

In 1989–90 the unification of a Germany divided for four decades became possible overnight and this would trigger an inevitable shift in the balance of forces. This prospect revived historic anxieties of a return of the ‘German question’. Whilst the United States supported the clever moves of the federal chancellor (Helmut Kohl), Germany’s European neighbours were alarmed by the spectre of the return of the Reich—the ‘medium-sized power’ which, since the days of Kaiser Wilhelm II, had always been too big to be peacefully integrated within its neighbourhood circle and yet too small to act as a hegemon. The desire to make Germany’s integration within the European order irreversible was—as the course of the euro crisis post-2010 underlined—only too justified.

Unlike the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who reeled back in shock and horror, the French president, François Mitterrand, bravely opted for going ahead. To fend off the nationalistic selfishness of a neighbour which might seek to play to its economic strength entirely in its own interest, he demanded of Kohl that he agree to bring in the euro.

The roots of this bold initiative, fought for by the European Commission president, Jacques Delors, go back to the year 1970 when the then European Community first aimed at forming a monetary union via the Werner report. In the end, that project collapsed because of currency upheavals and the end of the postwar Bretton Woods settlement. Yet, in the (1975–76) negotiations between the then French and German leaders, Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt respectively, these ideas returned to the table. If truth be told, Kohl—once Mitterrand had engineered the conclusions of the European Council in Strasbourg on December 9th 1989—acted, of course, out of political conviction when he pushed through the visionary link between national unity and the ground-breaking Maastricht treaty of 1992, in the face of political resistance back home.¹

Compared with this historic process, today sees the economic consequences of a pandemic burden the hardest-hit European Union member states in western and southern Europe with intolerable debt. This severely threatens the very existence of the currency union. It is precisely this risk that German exporters fear most and that has finally made the federal government much more amenable to the French president’s determined push for closer European co-operation. A subsequent offensive mounted in unison by Emmanuel Macron and the chancellor, Angela Merkel, proposed a recovery fund built on long-term EU borrowings which, to a large extent, are destined for the most needy member states in the form of non-repayable grants. That proposal led, at the July 2020 summit, to a remarkable compromise. The decision of the European Council to adopt common European bonds, only possible because of Brexit, brought about the first truly meaningful step towards integration since Maastricht.

Even if this decision is by no means cut and dried so far, Macron felt able to speak at the summit of ‘the most important moment for Europe since the founding of the euro’. Certainly, and against Macron’s wishes, Merkel stuck to her usual modus operandi of one small step at a time. The chancellor is not seeking a sustained institutional solution but insists on a one-off compensation for the economic havoc induced by the pandemic.² Although the incomplete political constitution of Europe’s currency union lies behind this threat to its very existence, the shared borrowings of member states will not be made by the eurozone alone but by the union as a whole. But, then, as we all know, progress goes at a snail’s pace—and on crooked paths.