The Chancellor declared that “regaining Germany’s national unity” was the crucial political objective of his government. He proposed that the direct negotiations with the GDR should take place within a pan-European setting under the aegis of the European Community and the CSCE. However, he avoided specifying a time frame for the negotiations so as not to spark any further comment abroad about Germany seeking superpower status. At first the road to unity seemed long to both sides, especially after Gorbachev, addressing the Communist Party Central Committee on 9 December 1989, said that Moscow would not leave the GDR “in the lurch”, that it was Moscow’s strategic ally in the Warsaw Pact and that one still had to start from the assumption of two German states, though there was no reason why they should not develop a relationship of peaceful cooperation. Chancellor Kohl said the people in the GDR themselves should be the ones to decide on the speed and the substance of unification. Their expectations and desires swiftly became more urgent and concrete. On 15January 1990, 150,000 people demonstrated in Leipzig, chanting “Germany - united Fatherland”.

The people in the GDR distrusted their new government. They became increasingly attracted to the West, and the process of destabilization increased rapidly. But still Gorbachev held back, particularly since Poland and Hungary were escaping Moscow’s grasp, Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu had been overthrown in December 1989, and the GDR’s departure from the Warsaw Pact would inevitably upset the balance of power. From Western quarters, too, came exhortations to the Germans to “take account of the legitimate concerns of neighboring countries” (U.S. Secretary of State James Baker speaking in Berlin) as they pursued national unity. Finally, the unification process could only be continued after Bonn had given an assurance that there would be no shifting of the present borders, that ln the event of unification NATO’s “structures” would n°t be extended to the territory of the former GDR, ar|d that Germany would reduce its armed forces to offset its strategic advantage. U.S. President George ush was in favor of German unification provided the federal Republic remained a member of NATO.