Paris - Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, newly released diplomatic files reveal the extent to which Germany's supposed friends in London and Paris were fearful of the country's reunification.

France's then president Francois Mitterrand and Britain's prime minister Margaret Thatcher were both caught out by the speed with which the Germans remade their country in the wake of Communism's collapse.

While Thatcher's supporters would go on to portray her as the heroine of the West's victory in the Cold War, a victory symbolised by the Wall's collapse, at the time the prospect of German reunification "horrified" her.

And, while Mitterrand has been seen as a great friend and ally of Germany's then chancellor Helmut Kohl in the campaign for European integration, in 1989 he neither foresaw nor supported the re-integration of Germany.

"In 1989 we gave the impression of wavering in the face of history. Twenty years on, let's do it justice," said Pierre Lellouche, French European affairs minister, as he followed Britain in opening the 1989-90 diplomatic archive.

Given the subsequent success of the reunification project, and the warm ties that Paris in particular now has with Berlin, the files will make uncomfortable reading for some French and British political veterans.

"France and Great Britain should pull together today in the face of the German threat," Thatcher told the French ambassador to London in March 1990, according to a French diplomatic telegramme released for the anniversary.

"Kohl is capable of anything. He has become another man. He doesn't know himself any more. He sees himself as the master and is starting to act like it," she warned, according to the French translation of her remarks.

French historian Maurice Vaisse, who helped supervise the release of the files, said that Thatcher appeared "horrified" by the prospect that German reunification would make Berlin the dominant force in Europe.

 1 2 Next >