Kohl's dream of united Europe remains incomplete

PARIS (Reuters) - Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Helmut Kohl's dream of a united Germany leading to a politically united Europe remains unfinished business.

It is set to stay that way despite the expected entry into force of the European Union's Lisbon Treaty in the near future.

German unification triggered possibly the last great leap forward in European integration, with the landmark agreement in Maastricht in 1991 to establish an economic and monetary union with a single currency and a common foreign and security policy.

Resistance by Eurosceptical Britain and reluctance by France to share more sovereignty prevented the EU moving any further toward Kohl's dream of a full political union akin to Germany's own federal system of governance.

After Maastricht, the widening of Europe to embrace new members from the former Soviet bloc took precedence over deeper integration. The bloc has grown from 12 to 27 nations spanning most of the continent.

As communist rule crumbled around Eastern Europe in 1989, Kohl, then chancellor of West Germany, sought to ease his neighbors' acute anxieties over the scramble for reunification by embedding it in a wider process of European unity.

In a landmark speech to parliament in Bonn on November 28, 1989, setting out a 10-point plan for German unity, Kohl declared: "Opportunities are opening to overcome the division of Europe and hence also of our Fatherland."

Kohl wanted to bind the new Germany into a united Europe and NATO to prevent any resurgence of nationalism. He argued that an economic and monetary union would be unbalanced and a patchwork unless Europe achieved a political union at the same time.

Kohl was the last German leader to proclaim the ideal of a United States of Europe -- a vision now confined to a handful of federalists like former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. His successors, Gerhard Schroeder and Angela Merkel, have been less enthusiastic about the EU, and more willing than Kohl to stand up for German national interests.

Recently opened archives show then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand were more concerned to slow the pace of German unification than to jump on the train and ride it to European unity.

They were irritated when the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, supported the idea of allowing a democratic East Germany to join the European Community.

Thatcher, who feared the return of an aggressive Germany, was locked in a domestic struggle over her hostility to European integration that culminated in her forced resignation in December 1990.

After initial diplomatic missteps, Mitterrand concluded that his best course was to embrace German unity and use the historic opportunity to escape the dominance of the deutschemark by advancing plans for a common currency.

But the French leader never seriously entertained Kohl's ideas of taking foreign policy decisions by majority vote, nor granting the European Parliament sweeping legislative powers and oversight. His foreign minister, Roland Dumas, said Mitterrand's instructions to him for the Maastricht treaty negotiations were to concede as little power as possible to the EU assembly.

The Maastricht treaty prompted a backlash against "rule from Brussels," causing referendum defeats in several countries that have blighted efforts to reform EU institutions to this day.

The Lisbon treaty includes steps toward closer political union such as the creation of a powerful foreign policy chief with an EU diplomatic service and a multi-billion-euro budget. But member states will keep their veto over decisions on foreign and defense policy as well as taxation and the EU budget.

The treaty also establishes a long-term president of the European Council of EU leaders and a streamlined decision-making system giving greater weight to population size -- a concession to Germany which France fought to prevent as recently as 2000.

The European Parliament will have co-decision power on a wider range of EU legislation.

But the EU remains a long way from Kohl's federal vision. Indeed Germany's own constitutional court appeared to draw the line against any substantial further European integration in a ruling on the Lisbon treaty this year.

(Additional reporting by Tom Heneghan; Editing by Ralph Boulton)