Word: oder
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Germany is powerful, and there is economic jealousy, which is understandable. And there were the damaging three weeks it took Chancellor Kohl to realize that he had to be firm and definitive about guaranteeing the Oder-Neisse border with Poland. That was enough to worry some people -- including in France. Still, it doesn't change our position, which is that we favor German unity. The fewer problems Germans have between themselves, the fewer they will have with the rest of the world...
...opening session had been intended to cover only procedural matters, but was forced into substance by a dispute that illustrates how quickly old apprehensions are resurfacing. Alarmed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl's ambiguity about the status of postwar German-Polish borders along the so-called Oder- Neisse line, the Poles demanded a seat at the table for discussions of their frontiers. Paris and London backed Warsaw -- something that sounded depressingly reminiscent...
After 7 1/2 hours of discussion, the conferees announced that they had agreed to invite the Poles to join in when the meetings focus on the Oder- Neisse line. In a belated attempt to reassure other Europeans who feel stampeded by the rush to unification, Volker Ruhe, general secretary of Kohl's Christian Democratic Union, said the process was so complex that it might take two to three years to complete. A single state would not be achieved, he said, "as long as the external questions are not settled...
Poland could get its faltering economy back on track by selling the lands east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers to United Germany. Many Germans are openly anxious to get back the territory they lost after World War II. And unlike the Lithuanians, the Germans have lots of hard currency on hand...
Most irksome so far has been Kohl's refusal to state unambiguously that a united Germany would lay no claim to land east of the Oder-Neisse line, which constitutes the present border between East Germany and Poland. When challenged, Kohl hides behind legalisms. His motives, however, are political: a vocal minority of the descendants of 13 million Germans who fled those territories after 1945 still lays claim to lands that are now part of Poland and the Soviet Union. Kohl needs their vote in West Germany's December election...