Epilogue

Abstract

Although Helmut Kohl had lost the Bundestag elections in September 1998 and was now no longer Chancellor of Germany, he was — untarnished yet by scandals of party financing — invited to the December 1998 European Council in Vienna as a guest of honour. The purpose of the invitation was to confer an award. As only the second person after Jean Monnet, Kohl became an ‘Honorary Citizen of Europe’. The photo of the heads of government, with Kohl in their midst, came to be seen as a tribute to the man who had dominated Europe’s international politics over the previous 15 years. He had not only committed his political capital to the four central undertakings of the European project of his time, the Southern enlargement in 1983–85, the Single Market project in 1985–86, European monetary union in 1989–91 and the Eastern enlargement of the European Union throughout the 1990s, he had, at the same time managed to achieve German unification as part and parcel of European integration. Jürgen Habermas had famously stated that Kohl, who as a leader of a centre-right party had decisively turned against nationalism, was the personifizierte Entwarnung: the personified calling-off of the alarm about recurrent German nationalism. To put it differently one might suggest that Kohl had come to be seen as the incarnation of Civilian Power.