The Two Plus Four Agreement, signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990, was the treaty that ended the Second World War in Europe. Two German governments — the Federal Republic, represented by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and the German Democratic Republic, represented by Foreign Minister Markus Meckel — and the four wartime occupying powers — the United States (James Baker), the Soviet Union (Eduard Shevardnadze), the United Kingdom, and France — put their names to it. Three weeks later, on October 3, 1990, the five reconstituted East German Länder acceded to the Federal Republic, and the Cold War settlement in Europe was complete.
Mary Elise Sarotte, in Not One Inch (2021), treats the Two Plus Four Agreement as the formal completion of the Cold War in Europe. The agreement extinguished the four-power rights that had existed since 1945, established the post-1945 borders of a unified Germany, fixed the conditions under which a unified Germany would belong to NATO, and committed the Soviet Union to a complete troop withdrawal from the territory of the former GDR by the end of 1994.
The Six Parties and Their Interests
The six signatories had different priorities. Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted reunification on West German terms, with Germany inside NATO, as quickly as possible. President George H. W. Bush supported the German position, with the broader calculation that a unified Germany inside NATO was preferable to the alternative of a neutralized Germany. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President François Mitterrand were more cautious; Thatcher in particular opposed rapid German unification, fearing a return of German power.
Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to limit the costs of losing the Cold War. The four-power framework of the Two Plus Four was the result of an American proposal at the Ottawa foreign-minister meeting of February 1990, designed to lock in the principle that the four powers retained legal authority over Germany until the external settlement was concluded. The Soviet Union initially preferred a four-power process, then accepted the two-plus-four compromise. The negotiations that followed were, by Sarotte’s account, the most difficult of the diplomatic process: the Soviet Union wanted a more substantive role, larger financial commitments, and stronger assurances about NATO’s posture in the former East.
The negotiation succeeded because each of the six parties got enough of what it wanted. Germany got reunification on its own terms, inside NATO, with no further external conditions on its foreign policy. The United States and the United Kingdom got a unified Germany inside NATO. France got a German commitment to deepening European integration, including support for the IGC on European Political Union that produced the Maastricht Treaty of February 1992. The Soviet Union got the troop withdrawal schedule, the financial package — the “no deployment” commitment about NATO forces in the former East.
The Provisions
The agreement had ten articles. Article 1 confirmed that the unified Germany would consist of the territory of the Federal Republic, the GDR, and Berlin, with the post-1945 borders confirmed. Article 2 reaffirmed the renunciation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and the obligations of the INF and START treaties. Article 3 committed the unified Germany to reduce the Bundeswehr to 370,000 within three to four years. Article 4 set the deadline of 1994 for the complete withdrawal of Soviet military personnel from the territory of the former GDR. Article 5 committed the unified Germany to honor the “no deployment” of NATO forces in the former East.
The most important of the political commitments, in Article 6 and 7, was the confirmation of the Oder-Neisse line as the eastern border of a unified Germany. Poland, not a signatory of the agreement, received German confirmation in a separate treaty of November 14, 1990. The German-Polish Border Treaty of 1990 was the legal instrument by which the Federal Republic, and with it the unified Germany, renounced all territorial claims arising from the period 1937–1945.
The Question of NATO Membership
The most politically sensitive provision was the confirmation that a unified Germany would belong to NATO. The Soviet position during the negotiations of late 1989 and early 1990 had been that Germany should be neutral, or at least should not have NATO forces in the former East. The shift in the Soviet position came in the late spring of 1990, after Kohl offered substantial financial compensation and after the United States pressed the case. The “no deployment” commitment — that NATO forces would not be deployed into the former GDR — was the formula. It was a substantive concession to the Soviet Union. It was also, in retrospect, a temporary one. The commitment was lifted in 1994, when the Bundeswehr became the principal NATO force in the former East, and the original restriction on NATO deployment effectively lapsed.
The collapse of the Soviet position on NATO membership is a major subject in the secondary literature. The traditional Western view, in the memoirs of Bush, Baker, and Genscher, was that Kohl and the German government outmaneuvered a weakening Soviet Union. The Russian view, in the 2014 historical narrative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, treats the “no deployment” commitment as a binding pledge broken in the 1990s. Sarotte’s account is the most even-handed: the Soviet Union did make a binding commitment to a unified Germany in NATO, the commitment was honored in its specific terms until the mid-1990s, and the post-1990s expansion of NATO was a separate decision with separate justifications.
The Implementation
The agreement was implemented on schedule. The Volkskammer ratified the agreement on September 20, 1990. The four powers terminated their reserved rights over Germany and Berlin on October 1, 1990, two days before the formal accession. The Bundeswehr absorbed the National People’s Army (NVA) of the GDR, which had numbered roughly 90,000 personnel; some units were retained in reduced form, and a portion of the NVA officers entered the Bundeswehr under a careful vetting process. The Soviet troop withdrawal, which began in 1990, was completed on August 31, 1994, with a final ceremony at Wünsdorf south of Berlin. Roughly 338,000 Soviet military personnel had been withdrawn; an estimated 546,000 family members had left with them.
The Long-Term Significance
The Two Plus Four Agreement is, by its terms, a settlement of the Second World War. It confirmed the post-1945 borders, terminated the four-power occupation regime, and brought the territory of the former German Reich into the European territorial order. The agreement is the foundation of the post-1990 European security order, and it is the document on which the legal status of a unified Germany rests.
Its long-term significance is the source of contemporary controversy. The agreement was an arrangement among the wartime powers and the two German governments, made in a specific moment in 1990. The European security order that emerged from it, including the expansion of NATO to the former Warsaw Pact and the former Soviet republics, is a separate development that the agreement did not specifically authorize. Critics, including the Russian government since 2014, have argued that the two developments are continuous and that the agreement implicitly limited NATO expansion. The Western reading, codified in official statements, is that the two are separate and that the agreement was not violated. The dispute is not abstract: it is one of the background conditions of the Russia-Ukraine war that began in 2014 and escalated in 2022.