In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent.

Timothy Garton Ash is already well-established as one of the leading observers and interpreters of events in Central Europe. His books, particularly The Magic Lantern and The Polish Revolution, have offered readers compelling on-the-scene-reporting presented within an accessible but carefully framed historical context. In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, Ash's weighty and fascinating account of German Ostpolitik and German unification, will only strengthen his well-deserved reputation.

The book covers a tremendous amount of historical material and employs an appropriately complex analytical framework. But it remains at its heart a compelling human story of how a group of West German political leaders struggled through four decades of partition to solve "the German Question" in all its myriad permutations. In the end, Ash is sharply critical of many steps taken by West German leaders from Adenauer to Brandt to Kohl. But he never loses sight of the fact that these men were trying to make sense of their unique position as leaders of a divided nation at the center of a divided continent. Indeed, what stands out most clearly about In Europe's Name is Ash's rich depiction of this unique position and of the policies, flawed and otherwise, that it spawned.

Ash's central historical argument is that Ostpolitik, West Germany's policy toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, was always fundamentally driven by the German version of the German question: how to ameliorate, and in time eliminate, the division of the German people into two states? Bonn's dealings with Moscow, East Berlin, Warsaw, and to some extent, Washington were based, in other words, on West Germany's desire to retain ties with Germans in "the Eastern Zone," ties that could serve as the foundation for future unification. West Germany, in this connection, worked through Ostpolitik to bridge the division of Europe because West German leaders believed that only the end of that broader division could allow for the end of the violent, unacceptable division of their own people and state.

Ash formulates and supports this argument through the use of an impressive array of sources. He has apparently surveyed all the documents that are currently available--in Bonn, Berlin, and Moscow--and he has interviewed virtually everyone who played an important role in Ostpolitik over the last three decades. Scholars writing on modern German history and the background to German unification will have to take his account very seriously. In fact, depending on the nature of documents not yet available, his account may already be authoritative.

However, for the general reader what is most interesting about In Europe's Name is not its historical depth, but rather the challenges Ash poses to the fundamental premises of Ostpolitik. He argues that West German policy toward East Germany and the Communist bloc in general was based on a belief in "liberalization through stabilization." West German leaders, in short, made the mistake of believing that East Germany and other Warsaw Pact countries would liberalize their internal policies if they were convinced the survival of their regimes was not at stake. The West, according to this formulation, should have accepted that Communist parties would rule Eastern Europe for the indefinite future and, just as importantly, clearly communicated that acceptance to Communist rulers.

The problem with this approach is that it gave insufficient credence to the inherent weaknesses of those Communist rulers and to the power and moral validity of internal dissent to them. This "liberalization through stabilization" led to Willy Brandt hushing the crowds who had gathered to hail his first visit to East Germany, to the West German foreign minister refusing to meet with Solidarity leaders during a trip to Warsaw in 1981, and to a gnawing dissatisfaction on the part of leading dissidents like Vaclav Havel with Bonn's willingness to throw its weight directly behind stability rather than liberation. Ash may have drawn this distinction a bit too sharply, and he, of course, has the luxury of hindsight. Nevertheless, he makes a persuasive case that "stabilization" led not to "liberalization," but rather to a kind of arrogant smugness on the part of Communist leaders. That this arrogance, and the repression it spawned, led in time to greater dissent and finally to revolution is not, for Ash, sufficient justification for West German policy. He grants that Willy Brandt and others were grabbing at those straws available in the 60s and '70s. But he is much harder on those, mostly Social Democrats, who continued to push stabilization of Eastern European regimes even into the late 1980s. By then, Ash argues, their approach may have been as immoral as it was ineffective.

It is especially interesting, I think, for Americans to find here what amounts to an account of the cold war from a perspective other than the very familiar U.S.--Soviet one. The cold war was many things, of course, but for Ash in this book it was the division of a continent that required a division of a country that, most tragically, resulted in the division of a city. In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent deepens our understanding of these central historical events of the late twentieth century while at the same time offering us timeless insights into the nature of human aspirations for both national identity and freedom from tyranny. That is plenty for one book.