Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
Drafted | 13 February 1990 |
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Signed | 12 September 1990 |
Location | Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
Effective | 15 March 1991 |
Signatories | |
Parties |
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Depositary | Government of the Federal Republic of Germany |
Languages | |
Full text | |
Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany at Wikisource |
The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (German: Vertrag über die abschließende Regelung in Bezug auf Deutschland[a]), or the Two Plus Four Agreement (German: Zwei-plus-Vier-Vertrag[b]), is an international agreement that allowed the reunification of Germany in October 1990. It was negotiated in 1990 between the 'two', the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, in addition to the Four Powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II in Europe: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The treaty supplanted the 1945 Potsdam Agreement: in it, the Four Powers renounced all rights they had held with regard to Germany, allowing for its reunification as a fully sovereign state the following year.[1][2][3] Additionally, the two German states agreed to reconfirm the existing border with Poland, accepting that German territory post-reunification would consist only of what was presently administered by West and East Germany—renouncing explicitly any possible claims to the former eastern territories of Germany including East Prussia, most of Silesia, as well as the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania.
Background
On 1 August 1945, the
Several developments in 1989 and 1990, collectively termed Die Wende and the Peaceful Revolution, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the SED party in East Germany (GDR). In a 9 February 1990 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev held in Moscow, US Secretary of State James Baker argued in favor of holding the Two-Plus-Four talks. According to Moscow as well as Baker's notes, the famous "not one inch eastward" promise[5] about NATO's eastward expansion was made during this conversation.[6][7] The concession essentially meant that the western half of the unified Germany would be part of NATO but the eastern half would not. The US National Security Council pointed out that it would be unworkable, and the concession was later amended to state that NATO troops would not be stationed in East Germany.[7]
On 18 March 1990, a
Treaty
The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany was signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990,[4]: 363 and paved the way for German reunification on 3 October 1990.[9] Under the terms of the treaty, the Four Powers renounced all rights they formerly held in Germany, including those regarding the city of Berlin.[4][page needed] Upon deposit of the last instrument of ratification, united Germany became fully sovereign on 15 March 1991.
Alliances
The treaty allows Germany to make and belong to alliances, without any foreign influence in its politics. However, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who became chancellor of the reunified Germany, made no secret that the enlarged Federal Republic would inherit the West German seats in NATO and the European Communities.[10]
Military forces and nuclear weapons
All Soviet forces in Germany were to leave the country by the end of 1994. Before the Soviets withdrew, Germany would only deploy territorial defense units not integrated into the alliance structures. German forces in the rest of Germany were assigned to areas where Soviet troops were stationed. After the Soviets withdrew, the Germans could freely deploy troops in those areas, with the exception of nuclear weapons. For the duration of the Soviet presence, Allied troops would remain stationed in Berlin upon Germany's request.[4]
Germany undertook efforts to reduce its
Future territorial claims
Another of the treaty's important provisions was Germany's confirmation of the by now internationally recognised border with Poland, and other territorial changes in Germany that had taken place since 1945, preventing any future claims to lost territory east of the Oder–Neisse line (see former eastern territories of Germany). The treaty defined the territory of a 'united Germany' as being the territory of East Germany, West Germany, and Berlin, prohibiting Germany from making any future territorial claims. Germany also agreed to sign a separate treaty with Poland reaffirming the present common border, binding under international law, effectively relinquishing these territories to Poland. This was done on 14 November 1990, with the signing of the German–Polish Border Treaty.[4] Furthermore, the Federal Republic was required by the treaty to amend its Basic Law so as to be constitutionally prohibited from accepting any application for incorporation into Germany[citation needed] from territories outside of East Germany, West Germany, and Berlin.
Although the treaty was signed by West and East Germany as separate sovereign states, it was subsequently ratified by the united Federal Republic of Germany.
Implementation
Russian withdrawal from Germany
After the
Bundeswehr after the treaty
In the first decade of the 21st century, the Bundeswehr underwent a gradual transformation to a fully professional force. By 1 July 2011, the date on which Germany voluntarily suspended conscription, the Bundeswehr retained fewer than 250,000 active duty personnel – barely two thirds of the country's treaty limit. The defence minister at the time, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, said that a cut to 185,000 persons was on the horizon.[12][13]
Later developments
On 19 November 1999 any issue of "NATO expansion" was rendered obsolete by the accession of the Russian Federation, together with USA, Canada and 52 European states
"8. Each participating State has an equal right to security. We reaffirm the inherent right of each and every participating State to be free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance, as they evolve. Each State also has the right to neutrality. Each participating State will respect the rights of all others in these regards. They will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States. Within the OSCE no State, group of States or organization can have any pre-eminent responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the OSCE area or can consider any part of the OSCE area as its sphere of influence."[16]
The extent of good faith on the part of the Russian Federation was demonstrated by the statement by President Boris Yeltsin to USA President Bill Clinton, on the same day the Charter was signed: "Just give Europe to Russia" and following discussion.[17] Nor did the Russian Federation cease it's attack on Chechnya.
Russia–NATO relations started to deteriorate rapidly following the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004–2005. In December 2006, Russia indicated that the ratification of the Energy Charter Treaty was unlikely due to the provisions requiring third-party access to Russia's pipelines.[18] Russia suspended in 2007 its participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. In 2008, the relations deteriorated further and became almost openly hostile, following the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence from Russia's ally Serbia and its partial recognition by the West, to which Russia responded in August 2008 with launching the Russo-Georgian War. On 20 August 2009, Russia officially informed the depository of the Energy Charter Treaty (the Government of Portugal) that it did not intend to become a contracting party to the treaty.[19] On 1 April 2014, NATO unanimously decided to suspend all practical co-operation with the Russian Federation in response to the annexation of Crimea, but the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) was not suspended.[20] In 2015, Russia entirely terminated its participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. On 18 February 2017, Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, said he supported the resumption of military cooperation with the NATO alliance.[21] In late March 2017, the Council met in advance of a NATO Foreign Ministers conference in Brussels, Belgium.[22]
After the subsequent
Russian claims of unwritten assurances
The treaty does not mention NATO membership prospects of any other countries, as none of them has been a party to the treaty, while only 4 out of the 15 NATO member states at the time have been parties to it.[25] Some commentators, such as Stephen F. Cohen,[26] as well as Mikhail Gorbachev in 2008,[27] have advanced in later years the interpretation of a comment allegedly made by US Secretary of State, James Baker, to the effect that NATO would expand "not one inch eastward" in a unified Germany, as applying instead to Eastern Europe;[28] neither has such a provision been included in the treaty, nor any of the parties has proposed or demanded its inclusion, and neither a recording nor written minutes of Baker's comment exist. In 2014, Gorbachev said that the assurance only pertained to East Germany, and that the resulting agreement was upheld by NATO.[24][29][30] His main aide in these negotiations, Eduard Shevardnadze, likewise agreed that NATO never made any such commitment regarding other countries in Eastern Europe, and that "the question never came up" in the talks on German reunification.[31][32] That is presumably because all of the countries in question were still in the Warsaw Pact at the time and hosted large Soviet garrisons.[33][34] Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, felt that NATO's later acceptance of countries like Poland violated the spirit of the earlier agreements.[29][35][36]
In December 2017, researchers Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya argued that declassified documents challenged this narrative.[6] They commented: "The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels."[5] They further said that "the view of the State Department was that NATO expansion was not on the agenda, because it was not in the interest of the U.S. to organize 'an anti-Soviet coalition' that extended to the Soviet borders, not least because it might reverse the positive trends in the Soviet Union. (See Document 26) The Bush administration took the latter view. And that's what the Soviets heard."[5]
In 2018,
On 18 February 2022, German magazine
Russian claims of the alleged 1990 assurances on a non-expansion of NATO to Gorbachev were again raised on the occasions of the
See also
Territorial evolution of Germany in the 20th century |
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- Allied Control Council
- Berlin Declaration
- Basic Treaty
- Bonn–Paris conventions
- Council of Foreign Ministers
- Four Power Agreement on Berlin
- Germany Treaty
- London and Paris Conferences
- Occupation statute
- Petersberg Agreement
Notes
- ^ French: Traité sur le règlement final en ce qui concerne l'Allemagne; Russian: Договор об окончательном урегулировании в отношении Германии, tr. Dogovor ob okonchatel'nom uregulirovanii v otnoshenii Germanii
- ^ French: Accord Deux Plus Quatre; Russian: Соглашение «Два плюс четыре», tr. Soglasheniye «Dva plyus chetyre»
- ^ A mechanism for such unification existed via the article 23 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany.
- ^ This is partly due to the fact that at the time the Warsaw Pact was still in existence and neighboring Poland was formally a part of it.
References
- Federal Republic of Germany (12 September 1990). "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany". United Nations.
- ^ "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany". Foothill College.
- ^ Hailbronner, Kay. "Legal Aspects of the Unification of the Two German States" (PDF). European Journal of International Law.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i
ISBN 9780674353251.
- ^ a b c Savranskaya, Svetlana; Blanton, Tom (12 December 2017). "NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard". National Security Archive. George Washington University. Briefing Book 613.
- ^ a b Majumdar, Dave (12 December 2017). "Newly Declassified Documents: Gorbachev Told NATO Wouldn't Move Past East German Border". The National Interest. Retrieved 2022-03-08.
- ^ a b
Sarotte, Mary Elise (September–October 2014), "A Broken Promise: What the West Really Told Moscow about NATO Expansion", Foreign Affairs, 93 (5): 90–97, JSTOR 24483307
- ISBN 978-0691007465, pp. 211–214.
- ^ "The Two plus Four Treaty". Federal Foreign Office (Germany). Archived from the original on 2013-10-18.
- JSTOR 20081501.
- ^ "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (two plus four)". 12 September 1990 – via U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Germany.
- ^ "German army 'to suspend' conscription in 2011". BBC News. 22 November 2010.
- ^ "60 Year Anniversary of the German Compulsory Military Service Act | in Custodia Legis". 21 July 2016.
- ^ NATO. "Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation". NATO.
- ^ "Istanbul Document 1999, Charter for European Security". OSCE.org. Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. 19 November 1999. pp. 13(20) - 42(49). Retrieved 2024-04-13.
Original signatories: 1. Albania, 2. FDR Germany, 3. USA America, 4. Principal of Andorra, 5. Republic of Armenia, 6. Republic of Austria, 7. Republic of Azerbaijan, 8. Republic of Belarus, 9. Kingdom of Belgium, 10. Bosnia and Herzegovina, 11. Republic of Bulgaria, 12. Canada, 13. Republic of Cyprus, 14. Republic of Croatia, 15. Kingdom of Denmark, 16. Kingdom of Spain, 17. Republic of Estonia, 18. Republic of Finland, 19. French Republic, 20. Georgia, 21. United Kingdom of GB and Northern Ireland, 22. Hellenic Republic, 23. Republic of Hungary, 24. Ireland, 25. Republic of Iceland, 26. Italian Republic, 27. Republic of Kazakhstan, 28. Kyrgyz Republic Kyrgyzstan, 29. Republic of Latvia, 30. Republic of Macedonia (by letter), 31. Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, 32. Principality of Lichtenstein, 33. Republic of Lithuania, 34. Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, 35. Republic of Malta, 36. Republic of Moldova, 37. Principality of Monaco, 38. Kingdom of Norway, 39. Republic of Uzbekistan, 40. Kingdom of the Netherlands, 41. Republic of Poland, 42. Portuguese Republic, 43. Romania, 44. Russian Federation, 45. Republic of San Marino, 46. The Holy See, 47. The Slovak Republic, 48. The Republic of Slovenia, 49. Kingdom of Sweden, 50. Swiss Confederation, 51. Republic of Tajikistan, 52. Czech Republic, 53. Turkmenistan, 54. Republic of Turkey, 55. Ukraine..
- ^ "Charter for European Security; Istanbul Document 1999". OSCE.org. Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. 19 November 1999. p. 3 (10). Retrieved 2024-04-13.
- ^ "Declassified Documents Concerning Russian President Boris Yeltsin". Clinton Digital Library. pp. 562 -. Retrieved 2024-04-13.
- ^ Russia gets tough on energy sales to Europe: No foreign access to pipelines, official says, by Judy Dempsey, International Herald Tribune 12 December 2006
- ^ "Arbitration Panel Holds That the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty Protects Foreign Energy Sector Investments in Former Soviet Union". Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. 5 February 2010. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2010-05-08.
- ^ "NATO-Russia Relations: The Background" (PDF). NATO. March 2020. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
- ^ "Lavrov Says Russia Wants Military Cooperation With NATO, 'Pragmatic' U.S. Ties". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 18 February 2017. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
- ^ Barnes, Julian E., "Russian, NATO Diplomats Discuss Military Deployments in Baltic Sea Region" (subscription required), The Wall Street Journal, 30 March 2017. Retrieved 30 March 2017.
- ^ "NATO brands Russia the biggest 'direct threat' to Western security, as it eyes off 'serious challenges' posed by China". ABC News. 30 June 2022.
- ^ a b c d e Kellerhoff, Sven Felix (18 February 2022). "Archivfund: Was die Notiz über die Nato-Osterweiterung bedeutet". Die Welt (in German). Retrieved 2022-05-31.
- ^ Robert B. Zoellick (22 September 2000). "Two plus four: The lessons of German unification". The National Interest. 61: 17–28.
- ^ Cohen, Stephen F. (24 February 2005). "Gorbachev's Lost Legacy" Archived 2018-08-10 at the Wayback Machine. The Nation. Retrieved 1 October 2022.
- ^ Blomfield, Adrian; Smith, Mike (6 May 2008). "Gorbachev: US could start new Cold War". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2022-02-07.
- ^ "Memorandum of conversation between Baker, Shevardnadze and Gorbachev". National Security Archive. George Washington University. 9 February 1990. Briefing Book 613. Retrieved 2022-02-28.
- ^ a b Kórshunov, Maxim (16 October 2014). "Mikhail Gorbachev: I am against all walls". Russia Beyond. Retrieved 2022-01-31.
- ^ Eckel, Mike (19 May 2021). "Did The West Promise Moscow That NATO Would Not Expand? Well, It's Complicated". Radio Free Europe. Retrieved 2022-10-01.
- S2CID 57571871.
- S2CID 154322506.
- ^ Steven Pifer (6 November 2014). "Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says 'No'". Brookings Institution.
- ^ Jack Matlock (3 April 2014). "NATO Expansion: Was There A Promise?". JackMatlock.com.
- ISSN 2195-1349. Retrieved 2022-04-23.
- Russia Beyond the Headlines. Retrieved 2022-02-07.
The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO's military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker's statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it. Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been observed all these years. So don't portray Gorbachev and the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the West's finger. If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object. The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.
- ISSN 2366-0805. Retrieved 2021-06-26.
- S2CID 231694116. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2021-01-26.
- ^ Garey, Julie (11 November 2021). "Article Review 151 on 'The United States and the NATO Non-extension Assurances of 1990'". The International Security Studies Forum (ISSF). Retrieved 2022-03-08.
- ^ Wintour, Patrick (12 January 2022). "Russia's belief in Nato 'betrayal' – and why it matters today". The Guardian. Retrieved 2022-03-26.
- ^ ISSN 2195-1349. Archived from the originalon 2022-03-01. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
- ^ a b c "Treaties with Russia contained no pledge NATO would not expand – German Foreign Ministry". TASS. Archived from the original on 2022-03-01. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
- ^ Moynihan, Dr Robert (7 March 2022). "Letter #45, 2022, Mon, Mar 7: Viganò". Inside The Vatican. Archived from the original on 2022-03-08. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
- ^ NATO (12 May 2014). "Russia's accusations – setting the record straight, Fact Sheet – April 2014".
- ^ Michael Rühle (2014). "NATO enlargement and Russia: myths and realities". NATO Review. NATO.
Further reading
- Trachtenberg, Marc. "The United States and the NATO Non-extension Assurances of 1990: New Light on an Old Problem?" International Security 45:3 (2021): 162–203. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00395 and online commentary on H-DIPLO 2021
- Sarotte, M. E. (2021). Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300259933.
External links
- Full text in English (PDF format; Published by Foreign and Commonwealth Officewebsite)
- Full text in English (HTML format; Published by U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Germany)