Europe The New Germany Flexes Its Muscles

To much of Europe, modern Germany resembles a child of doubtful lineage adopted as an infant into a loving family: the child has been good, obedient and industrious, but friends and neighbors are worried that evil genes may still lurk beneath a well-mannered surface -- all the more so now that the child has become an adult.

And what a powerful grownup it has become. United Germany, with 80 million citizens and Europe's largest economy, is asserting itself as never before in postwar history. It is assuming a forceful leadership role in European foreign policy even as the Bundesbank rules Europe's economic roost. Germany has had a leading role in the task of guiding the former Soviet Union through its postcommunist crisis; it was Chancellor Helmut Kohl who, far more than George Bush, pushed for last week's $24 billion Group of Seven aid package for Boris Yeltsin's Russian government. And German firms are grabbing up many of the best business opportunities in the emerging market economies of Central Europe.

At U.N. headquarters in New York City there has been talk of giving Germany a permanent role on the Security Council -- either directly, with a seat of its own, or by establishing a European seat, which the Germans would almost certainly dominate. "What we see -- some among us with a shudder -- is Germany taking the helm in Europe," says James Rollo of London's Royal Institute of International Affairs.

This is not exactly what the neighbors had in mind. The very idea of NATO, the E.C. and other postwar institutions has been to lock Germany into a European structure, not the other way around. Last December's E.C. summit in the Dutch city of Maastricht was supposed to nail down the roof of a house that would contain and control Germany as a cooperative, pacific and co-equal member of the European family. But in the aftermath of Maastricht, Germany has broken ranks on issues large and small, upsetting and sometimes frightening its allies.

When Germany unilaterally last month halted all weapons shipments to Turkey, a NATO ally, because some of them had been used against Kurdish rebels, the Turkish reaction was furious. An Istanbul newspaper caricatured Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher wearing a swastika, and Turkish President Turgut Ozal darkly warned that "Germany changed a lot after unification. It is as if it is trying to intervene in everything, interfere with everyone, trying to prove it is a great power. In the past, Hitler's Germany did the same thing." The attack was intemperate and unfair -- it was Turkey that had been behaving brutally, not Germany -- and anger with the Ankara government ran so high in Germany that Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg resigned for having failed to stop the arms shipments earlier. Kohl rightly rejected Ozal's "tone and content."

Yet only two days earlier, Kohl himself had gratuitously disturbed the skeletons of the past when he hosted a cordial lunch in Munich for Austrian President Kurt Waldheim. That made him the first Western leader to meet Waldheim outside Austria, breaking the diplomatic isolation imposed on the Austrian President for his suspected knowledge of and involvement in wartime deportations to Nazi labor camps. Kohl brooked no criticism. "It's up to me as Chancellor to decide whom I'll meet in Munich," he growled. "I don't need any advice."