Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany

• 1. Introduction

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  The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany was signed in Moscow on the 12th of September 1990. Most people know it by a shorter name, the Two Plus Four Agreement. The two were West Germany and East Germany. The four were France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. They were the wartime powers that had occupied Germany since the end of World War II in Europe. Six governments put their names to one document, and it set the terms on which Germany could be reunified.

  Yet the treaty has had a second life that has little to do with its text. Russian leaders have repeatedly pointed to a promise about NATO that appears nowhere in it. What did the victors give up? What did Germany promise in return? And who said what about NATO, and did anyone really mean it?

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• 2. A Provisional Border

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  The Potsdam Agreement of the 1st of August 1945 laid down the first terms on which the Allies would govern Germany. It also created a provisional German-Polish border, the Oder-Neisse line. In theory, that line handed most of Germany's former eastern provinces to Poland and the Soviet Union. The German populations living there either fled or were expelled.

  East Germany formally accepted the line in the 1950 Treaty of Zgorzelec with Poland. West Germany refused. Following the Hallstein Doctrine, it declared that treaty null and void. In 1970, the Treaty of Warsaw brought a reluctant West German recognition of the border, but only as a provisional one.

  The Potsdam text itself pointed to a future fix. The border was to be finalised later. It called for "a peace settlement for Germany to be accepted by the Government of Germany when a government adequate for the purpose is established". For decades, no such government existed. The German Question became one of the central issues of the Cold War, and little progress came until the late 1980s. In largely technical ways, Germany therefore lacked full national sovereignty. The border question was still open when the Berlin Wall fell.

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• 3. Road To Moscow

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  Two names cover the upheaval of 1989 and 1990, Die Wende and the Peaceful Revolution. Together they toppled the Berlin Wall and collapsed the SED party that ruled East Germany.

  On the 9th of February 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker spoke with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow and argued for holding Two-Plus-Four talks. Both Moscow's notes and Baker's own notes record the famous "not one inch eastward" promise about NATO expansion. The idea was that the western half of a united Germany would sit inside NATO while the eastern half would not. The US National Security Council objected that this was unworkable. The pledge was later reworded, so that NATO troops would simply not be stationed in East Germany.

  On the 18th of March 1990, East Germans voted in a national election. An alliance of parties favoring reunification won a plurality. To secure unity and full sovereignty, both German states were prepared to accept the Potsdam terms that affected Germany. On the 31st of August 1990, they signed the Unification Treaty, which set out how East Germany would accede to the Federal Republic. Only then could all the international parties negotiate a final settlement.

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• 4. Sovereignty Restored

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  The Four Powers gave up every right they had held in Germany, including those regarding the city of Berlin. The treaty was signed by West and East Germany, each as a separate sovereign state. Reunification came on the 3rd of October 1990, and it was the united Federal Republic of Germany that ratified the document afterward.

  The treaty entered into force on the 15th of March 1991, once the last instrument of ratification had been deposited. That was the day united Germany became fully sovereign.

  Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor who became chancellor of the reunified Germany, made no secret of his expectations. The enlarged Federal Republic, he indicated, would inherit West Germany's seats in NATO and the European Communities. The treaty left that path open by allowing Germany to make and belong to alliances without any foreign influence in its politics.

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• 5. Armies And Arsenals

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  All Soviet forces in Germany had until the end of 1994 to leave. Before the Soviets left, Germany would deploy only territorial defense units outside alliance structures. After that, German troops could deploy freely in the areas the Soviets vacated, with the exception of nuclear weapons. Allied troops would stay in Berlin during the Soviet presence if Germany asked.

  Germany undertook to reduce its forces to no more than 370,000 personnel, with no more than 345,000 in the Army and the Air Force. The limits would start once the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe entered into force. The other negotiating parties were expected to "render their contribution to enhancing security and stability in Europe, including measures to limit personnel strengths".

  The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would continue to apply in full to the united country. Germany reaffirmed that it would not manufacture, possess or control nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Six states, covering Berlin and the former East Germany, became a permanent Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. No foreign armed forces, nuclear weapons or their carriers could be stationed or deployed there. The German Army could deploy conventional systems with nonconventional capabilities, provided they were designed and equipped for a purely conventional role. Germany also agreed to use military force only in accordance with the United Nations Charter.

  The Soviet Union dissolved itself in December 1991, and command of its forces in Germany passed to the Russian Federation. The German government recognised Russia as the successor state, with the right to keep troops in Germany until the end of 1994. Post-Soviet Russia then faced severe economic hardship. President Boris Yeltsin ordered the deployment cut to levels well below those the treaty permitted. The last Russian troops left at the end of August 1994, four months ahead of the deadline.

  During the first decade of the 21st century, the Bundeswehr was gradually transformed into a fully professional force. By the 1st of July 2011, when Germany voluntarily suspended conscription, it had fewer than 250,000 active personnel. That was barely two thirds of the treaty limit. By 2025, active personnel had fallen below 183,000. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German government announced a significant, long-term rise in military spending. Even so, the planned size of up to 260,000 would remain far below the 370,000 ceiling.

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• 6. Closing The Eastern Question

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  East Prussia, most of Silesia and the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania had once been German. Germany now renounced any claim to them. The treaty defined a united Germany as the territory of East Germany, West Germany and Berlin, and it barred any future territorial claims.

  Germany also agreed to sign a separate treaty with Poland, reaffirming the existing common border under international law. On the 14th of November 1990, it did so, with the German-Polish Border Treaty. In effect, Germany relinquished the lost territories to Poland.

  Article 23 of the Basic Law, the West German constitution, had said that "other parts of Germany" could join its area of application. That wording was removed. In 1992, new text replaced it. It steered German policy toward deeper integration within the European Union. It also set ground rules for transferring sovereignty to the European level.

  The Basic Law's preamble and Article 146 were also amended. They now say the constitution covers "the entire German population" and list the 16 federal states as its area of application. That indirectly fixes Germany's external borders. Yet the Basic Law spells out neither the details of those borders nor their finality.

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• 7. Treaties Afterward

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  In 1990, Russia and Western nations signed the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. The Energy Charter Treaty followed in 1991, creating a multilateral framework for cross-border cooperation in the energy industry, principally fossil fuels. Russia postponed ratifying it, linking its decision to the adoption of a Transit Protocol.

  In 1994, the Budapest Memorandum was signed. Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States gave security assurances to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In return, those three countries handed over their post-Soviet nuclear arsenals. In 1997, NATO and Russia signed the Russia-NATO Founding Act, which stated that each country had a sovereign right to seek alliances.

  NATO went on to expand to sixteen Eastern countries, apart from East Germany in 1990. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia followed in 2004. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, North Macedonia in 2020, Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024. Five of the sixteen border Russia.

  Relations began to sour after the Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. In December 2006, Russia indicated that ratifying the Energy Charter Treaty was unlikely, because it required third-party access to Russian pipelines. In 2007, Russia suspended its participation in the conventional forces treaty. In 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Russia's ally Serbia and won partial Western recognition. Russia answered in August 2008 by launching the Russo-Georgian War. On the 20th of August 2009, Russia told the Government of Portugal, the depositary, that it did not intend to join the Energy Charter Treaty. In 2015, it ended its participation in the conventional forces treaty entirely.

  On the 1st of April 2014, NATO unanimously suspended all practical cooperation with Russia over the annexation of Crimea. The NATO-Russia Council itself was not suspended. On the 18th of February 2017, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said he supported resuming military cooperation with the alliance. In late March 2017, the Council met ahead of a NATO foreign ministers conference in Brussels.

  After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO members considered the Founding Act definitively abrogated by Russia. The Madrid summit that year declared Russia "a direct threat" to Euro-Atlantic security. In the same year, Russia withdrew from the European Convention on Human Rights and was expelled from the Council of Europe.

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• 8. Not One Inch

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  Only four of the fifteen NATO members at the time were parties to the treaty, and none of the Eastern European countries was. So the text says nothing about their NATO prospects. No recording or written minutes of Baker's remark exist. None of the parties has ever proposed adding such a clause.

  Stephen F. Cohen and, in 2008, Mikhail Gorbachev advanced a reading in which the comment applied to Eastern Europe as a whole. In 2014, Gorbachev said the assurance had pertained only to East Germany, and that the agreement was upheld by NATO. Eduard Shevardnadze, his main aide in the talks, agreed. He said NATO never made such a commitment about other Eastern European countries and that "the question never came up". That is presumably because those countries were still in the Warsaw Pact and hosted large Soviet garrisons. Even so, Gorbachev and his successor Boris Yeltsin felt that NATO's later acceptance of countries like Poland violated the spirit of the earlier agreements.

  In December 2017, researchers Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya argued that declassified documents challenged that account. They found that multiple national leaders had considered and rejected Central and Eastern European membership in early 1990 and through 1991. They also found that NATO was discussed in the unification talks well beyond East German territory. In their view, the State Department judged that expansion was not on the agenda. An anti-Soviet coalition reaching the Soviet border was not in American interests. Their summary of the Soviet experience was blunt: "And that's what the Soviets heard."

  In 2018, Hannes Adomeit disputed their conclusions. He said the documents were already known. He argued that exploratory talks must be distinguished from "negotiations, promises, commitments or indeed guarantees". Assurances about NATO command structures and forces in the former East Germany, he said, could not be stretched into promises about enlargement further east.

  A 2021 analysis by Marc Trachtenberg concluded that "the Russian allegations are by no means baseless... But the Soviets were not deliberately misled." Mary Elise Sarotte's 2021 book, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Cold War Stalemate, took a middle path. She concluded that Russian claims of betrayal are untrue in law but carry a psychological truth.

  On the 18th of February 2022, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an investigation of the British National Archives. Joshua Shifrinson of Boston University had found a secret memo dated the 6th of March 1991, about five months after the negotiations. It recorded a meeting in Bonn of the directors of the US, UK, French and West German foreign ministries. The memo reports a statement by the West German representative, Jürgen Chrobog. In his words, "during the 2+4 negotiations we made it clear that we Germany would not expand NATO beyond the Elbe. We cannot therefore offer Poland and the others NATO membership." Klaus Wiegrefe suggests Chrobog may have confused the Elbe with the Oder. He says Bonn never made such a thing clear. Die Welt noted that a German foreign minister of the time would never make a binding statement on behalf of NATO.

  Russia raised the alleged assurances again over the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and during the 2021-2022 crisis. Vladimir Putin demanded a legal ban on Ukraine joining NATO, which both Ukraine and NATO refused. Russia then invaded Ukraine. Russia also cited the supposed non-expansion pledge as grounds to disregard the Budapest Memorandum, and NATO rebuffed that argument.

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