The dissolution of communism in East Germany that began in 1989 reopened the “German question” and raised the threat of renewed Cold War conflict over Germany. In the end, East Germany was absorbed into an enlarged West Germany. Three factors were particularly important in this outcome. First, in the first week after the Berlin Wall was opened, almost 9 million East Germans — roughly half of the total population — poured across the border into West Germany. Almost all returned to their homes in the east, but the experience aroused long-dormant hopes of unity among ordinary citizens.

Second, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl and his closest advisers skillfully exploited the historic opportunity handed to them. In November 1989, Kohl presented a ten-point plan for step-by-step unification in cooperation with both East Germany and the international community. Kohl then promised the struggling citizens of East Germany an immediate economic bonanza — a generous though limited exchange of East German marks in savings accounts and pensions into much more valuable West German marks. This offer helped a well-financed conservative-liberal Alliance for Germany, established in East Germany with the support of Kohl’s West German Christian Democrats, to win an overwhelming victory in the March 1990 elections. The Alliance for Germany quickly negotiated an economic and political union on favorable terms with Kohl.

Third, in the summer of 1990, the crucial international aspect of German unification was successfully resolved. Unification would once again make Germany the strongest state in central Europe and would directly affect the security of the Soviet Union. But Gorbachev swallowed hard and negotiated the best deal he could. In a historic agreement signed by Gorbachev and Kohl in July 1990, Kohl solemnly affirmed Germany’s peaceful intentions, sweetening the deal by promising enormous loans to the hard-pressed Soviet Union. In October 1990, East Germany merged into West Germany, forming a single nation under the West German laws and constitution.

The peaceful reunification of Germany accelerated the pace of agreements to liquidate the Cold War. In November 1990, delegates from twenty-two European countries joined those from the United States and the Soviet Union in Paris and agreed to a scaling down of all their armed forces. The delegates also solemnly affirmed that all existing borders in Europe, including those of unified Germany and the emerging Baltic states, were legal and valid. The Paris Accord was, for all practical purposes, a general peace treaty bringing an end to both World War II and the Cold War.