Given the national interests at stake those would most likely have gone nowhere had it not been for the sudden end to the cold war. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s irresistible push for national reunification threatened to make Germany even more dominant. A currency union and irrevocable economic unification seemed to both Kohl and Mitterrand the best way of securing a much larger Germany in a peaceful and stable continent.
