The opposition of the rest of Europe and Russia has to be put in context. Russia would not have been able to support the East German economy nor would it have been able to afford to maintain a pointless troop presence that would no longer have local support. The rest of europe might have been opposed because of historical reasons having to do with security but not allowing unification would have created a massive roadblock for the european economy. Short of reunification, there was not an acceptable legal regime to end Germany's limited sovereignty(which the rest of europe supported).

Given that Germany strongly supported reunification and the US was in support for obvious geopolitical reasons there was no way for any other power to stop the process. Russia could either be paid to leave or get nothing and spend money it doesn't have to maintain the troop presence to boot. Poor relations with Germany would have had a catastrophic impact on the Russian economy. The UK was never really serious about stopping reunification and barely tried to bluff. Similar reasons apply to France which could not oppose reunification and support European integration.

For all these reasons I find the the focus on contingency to be rather overdrawn. It was not inevitable in the sense that it had to happen(you can come up scenarios where the soviet union continues into the 21st century) but given the collapse of the Warsaw Pact it's hard to understand how unification could have been ultimately prevented.

You can see a similar dynamic taking place in South Korea where unification is broadly supported by the younger population in the face of titanic security and economic concerns. German unification has been supported for hundreds of years for comparable reasons.

The younger population of South Korea is generally opposed to reunification: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/pyeongchang-olympics-korea-unif...

Ending Germany's limited sovereignty did not require reunification. It required (a) the Four Powers renouncing their residual authority over Germany, as they did in 1990's 4+2 Treaty (b) an agreement about what to do with West Berlin. The obvious options for removing occupying power control of West Berlin without reunification would have been (i) West Berlin becomes an exclave of West Germany; (ii) West Berlin is integrated into East Germany; (iii) West Berlin becomes independent as a third German state.

Why would the UK have even pretended to want to stop it? Weren't their foreign policies, at least towards communism, heavily aligned with the US?

Also noteworthy, the Soviet Union dissolved shortly after, at the end of 1991.

Whereas Germans, East and West alike, had largely thought of themselves as Germans in varying senses since Bismark (and both the DDR and BRD claimed to be legitimate successors to the same historical state), the peoples who lived (and live) in Northern Ireland didn't all think of themselves in the same way. Some thought of themselves as British, some as Irish, and many as some mix of both. A big reason why historians mark the Good Friday Agreement as the end of The Troubles is that it recognized the right of each person in Northern Ireland to identify with the nationality they chose (self-determination), in a way that both the British and Irish governments cooperated to recognize in administrative affairs where nationality mattered.

There wasn't a separate ethnoreligious East German identity. There were (and are) conflicting identities in Northern Ireland with ethnic, religious, national, and historical dimensions. The two situations on-the-ground were extremely different.

I remember back around '92 or '93 looking out from the window of an in-law who lived in the Harz mountains and seeing an old border watch tower. Then I commented that it looked like there were people up there. "Oh yes, those are the Russians" I was told. "Even though there is no border they keep up the procedures because they're afraid that if they just sit around they'll be sent home".

surely one of the reasons for continuation of Russian resentment, not a foundation?

Helmut Kohl negotiated a very good deal. Money was not an issue for Germany but speed and total withdrawl of the Russian troops. Germany would have paid much more. A year later and it might be too late for the reunification (Gorbachev was kicked out of the Kremlin).

I guess they could have gone down in flames if they wanted to choose that instead. The rest of the world owes them a huge thanks for accepting defeat gracefully. And for beating Hitler of course.

> Kohl would shoulder the lion’s share of the costs for extracting 546,000 Red Army troops from Germany—an exodus requiring fifty troop trains a day, fifty-five cars each, for more than three years—and building bases to house them once they were home. The immediate cost of the buyout, or the bribe, was measured in tens of billions, then hundreds, a spectacular use of economic power in political warfare. Its immensity matched the importance of the moment. Over time, *the bill for unification would come to more than two trillion dollars.*

The Washington Post mentions 14 * 10^9 DEM, or ~7.210^9 EUR or ~910^9 USD at the time.

Where you are quoting from? As far as I know such promises were never given and not even discussed at that time.

> Mary Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment Toward NATO Enlargement in February 1990,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 1 (January 2010): 119–40. Sarotte fought for, and won, the declassification of key documents cited in this chapter, and she is the leading scholar on the question of NATO expansion. Key conversations between the Bush administration and Gorbachev are in a 2017 National Security Archive briefing book, “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard,” https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//dc.html?doc=4325680-Document-06-....

After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.

On Feb. 10, 1990, between 4 and 6:30 p.m., Genscher spoke with Shevardnadze. According to the German record of the conversation, which was only recently declassified, Genscher said: "We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east." And because the conversion revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: "As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general."

Shevardnadze replied that he believed "everything the minister (Genscher) said."

Edit: https://books.openedition.org/ceup/2759?lang=en says:

In the session with Baker on February 9, 1990, Gorbachev discussed various forms of German unification and association with NATO. Although he could not accept it publicly, he agreed with Baker’s argument that the presence of U.S. troops in Europe was a factor in overall European stability, which implicitly meant accepting the idea of Germany’s eventual membership in the Western alliance. It was during this conversation that Baker offered Gorbachev guarantees (that is the word used in the Russian memorandum of conversation—garantii) that NATO would not “spread an inch eastward,” and the Soviet leader accepted the statement as sufficient on the basis of the trust he felt had been built between him and the U.S. leadership—never asking for a written pledge. Gorbachev’s reasoning could partially be explained by the domestic dilemma he faced: how could he tell the Politburo that he had asked for written guarantees that NATO would not expand to the territories of the Warsaw Pact while the Pact was still in existence? That would have meant he had already accepted the idea that the socialist alliance was on its deathbed. In this conversation, Baker was not trying to mislead Gorbachev in any way; he was merely expressing the official position of the U.S. government at the time, which was fully shared by other Western leaders, talking specifically about the NATO presence on East German soil, but by implication also about any future expansion. However, the Bush administration would change that position very soon—without providing any notification to Gorbachev.

“Gorbachev’s reasoning could partially be explained by the domestic dilemma he faced: how could he tell the Politburo that he had asked for written guarantees that NATO would not expand to the territories of the Warsaw Pact while the Pact was still in existence? That would have meant he had already accepted the idea that the socialist alliance was on its deathbed”

A good diplomat might have phrased that differently, without removing too much content, though, so that the Warschau pact wouldn’t lose face from it. Maybe something along the lines of that the two parties recognized each other’s spheres of influence? (Or maybe that wasn’t something either party was willing to commit to?)