Klaus Kinkel
Dynamic German foreign minister who clashed with John Major’s government over EU integration
KLAUS KINKEL, who has died aged 82, was Germany’s foreign minister from 1992 to 1998 in the wake of the country’s reunification, leader of the Free Democratic Party from 1993 to 1995, and from 1993 to 1998 Vice-chancellor to Helmut Kohl.
A protégé of his predecessor Hans-dietrich Genscher, Kinkel had risen through the civil service. Previously director of West Germany’s intelligence service the BND, he only joined the Free Democrats on becoming Minister of Justice in 1991.
As foreign minister, he personified a more assertive foreign policy than that pursued prior to reunification – something which he realised America, in particular, found hard to take.
Kinkel pressed for Germany to be given a permanent seat on the UN Security Council; secured a constitutional amendment allowing German troops to take part in UN peacekeeping; upbraided China over its treatment of dissidents; and endeavoured to build a relationship with a newly democratic Russia as other Western nations stood back.
He worked through Moscow to exert pressure on Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs to curb their at times genocidal activities as the former Yugoslavia was engulfed in war. His task was the more sensitive as it was Genscher who had precipitated the conflict by having Germany recognise an independent Croatia. To gain this leverage, Kinkel controversially refrained from criticising President Yeltsin’s crackdown in Chechnya.
He resisted moves to impose sanctions on Croatia as the conflict intensified. However, after pro-croat militia shelled the office of the German put in to administer the divided town of Mostar, Kinkel hauled Croatia’s President Tudjman out of an audience with the Pope to remonstrate with him.
Early in the conflict he proposed an International Criminal Tribunal to adjudicate on war crimes; criticised Brussels for its slow reaction to the humanitarian crisis; tried to persuade Britain to take more refugees; and pressed for the lifting of the international arms embargo on Bosnia so its embattled Muslims could defend themselves.
In 1995 he was a signatory to the Dayton Agreement formally ending the conflict.
Charming, animated and approachable with an almost boyish face, Kinkel nevertheless possessed a surprisingly short fuse. At one EU summit, he persuaded Spain to drop its demands for more fish from Norwegian waters by threatening to “snap the spine” of the Spanish foreign minister. He avoided the telephone whenever possible, preferring to engage with his staff by fax.
Kinkel’s relations with John Major’s British government were bumpy. During September 1992 he tried to defuse tensions over the Exchange Rate Mechanism, only for a visit by Douglas Hurd days before “Black Wednesday” to be torpedoed by the Bundesbank leaking a briefing paper dismissing Norman Lamont’s claim that Germany was to blame for sinking the pound. It took a State Visit by the Queen soon after to ease the tensions, Kinkel praising her.
Relations were again strained by Germany imposing a ban on British beef because of BSE, and Major vetoing the federalist Belgian premier Jean Luc Dehaene, Germany’s choice to head the European Commission.
In January 1996 Kinkel delivered a plea to Britain to end its ambivalence toward European integration and join Bonn and Paris in the drive toward common policymaking. His exasperation with Major’s government led him that December effectively to urge Britons to vote Labour in the coming general election.
Nor was Kinkel always happy with France, usually Germany’s partner in cementing closer union. He was livid at persistent efforts by Paris to sabotage a GATT trade agreement between the EC and the United States.
He was equally impatient with the Greek presidency of the EC during the crucial first half of 1994. Commentators said he was “virtually running the show, in the vacuum left by the Greeks”.
Kinkel helped negotiate and then championed the Maastricht treaty, pressed for former Communist states to start attending EC meetings, and called for a gradual merging of the Western European Union with the EU to give Europe an independent military capability.
Though he supported enlargement of the EU, he argued in 1997 that Turkey did not qualify because of its record on “human rights, the Kurdish question, relations with Greece and of course very clear economic questions”.
As leader of the junior coalition partner to Kohl’s Christian Democrats, Kinkel made a point of attending the funerals of immigrants killed by far-right and neo-nazi groups – the only Cabinet minister to do so.
Nevertheless, his overall lack of political feel led to the FDP suffering a series of disastrous results in provincial elections that put its parliamentary future at risk. He survived a party vote of confidence in December 1994 by 390 votes to 185, but after further reverses stepped down the following May, succeeded as leader by Wolfgang Gerhardt.
Klaus Kinkel was born at Metzingen, Baden-wurttemberg, on December 17 1936, the son of a doctor. From the Staatliches Gymnasium at Hechingen he read Law at the universities of Tübingen, Bonn and Cologne, and was active in Catholic students’ organisations. He received his LLD in 1964.
First employed as a civil servant in the state of Baden-württemberg, he joined the Federal Ministry of the Interior in 1968. In 1970 he became personal secretary to Genscher, then its minister, moving with him to head his office when he was appointed Foreign Minister in 1974.
For an entire year, Kinkel was one of only four persons in the government who knew that Günter Guillaume, special assistant to Chancellor Willy Brandt, was suspected of being an East German spy. Kinkel and the others – including Brandt – were sworn to secrecy and tried to carry on as usual while a counter-espionage team did its work.
Guillaume’s eventual exposure ended Brandt’s career. It emerged that Guillaume had suspected that he was being watched, but was ordered to stay put.
Kinkel went on to lead the foreign ministry’s policy planning staff, concluding that West Germany was trying to do too much in the way of assistance to other countries.
In 1979 Genscher engineered his appointment as head of the BND. Kinkel’s office at Pullach, near Munich, had been occupied in Nazi times by Martin Bormann. Apart from a year as state secretary at the Ministry of Justice, he stayed there until 1987.
After the CIA, the BND was the West’s largest intelligence agency, with nearly 10,000 staff handling West Germany’s agents abroad and its military signals and communications intelligence. It conducted few proactive secret operations.
Morale was low after a series of scandals, but Kinkel quietly and competently restored it. The agency gradually expanded its worldwide intelligence-gathering so as to have information to trade with the country’s allies, but its focus remained firmly on East Germany.
The BND came under close parliamentary scrutiny, a useful grounding for a future minister. Kinkel jokingly told a reporter that his East German counterpart, Markus Wolf, did not have to put up with such oversight, or exposés in the press.
Returning to the Ministry of Justice in 1987, again as state secretary, he was in place as the Berlin Wall came down and Kohl pushed through reunification – originally forecast to take 15 years – in just over a year. Kinkel dealt with many of the legal complexities raised.
Kinkel ceased to be a civil servant in January 1991 when moved sideways to become Minister of Justice. He took the lead in pressing for the return from Russia of Erich Honecker, the former East German leader, to face trial, and worked to prosecute Markus Wolf for espionage. When Kinkel testified against him, Wolf asked why Kinkel, as former head of the BND, was not in the dock with him.
Kinkel defused a hunger strike by imprisoned members of the terrorist Red Army Faction in return for their renouncing violence, despite opposition to any deal from the CDU’S interior minister.
In April 1992 Genscher resigned after 18 years as foreign minister. Kohl and the FDP hierarchy nominated Irmgard Schwaetzer to succeed him, but in a palace coup Kinkel defeated her 63-25 in a vote of MPS to take the job.
He threatened to quit as foreign minister in November 1995, after 50 CDU deputies voted to block an official invitation to the Iranian foreign minister to attend a conference on Islam. He then upset Muslims by cancelling the conference.
Setting 1997 as the year to make sure the single currency was delivered, Kinkel denied in a letter to the Financial Times that this would be achieved through “creative accounting”. He insisted that Germany wanted as many countries as possible to participate in monetary union from the start.
After Kohl’s defeat at the September 1998 federal election by Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats, with the FDP forced into fourth place by the Greens, Kinkel resigned as foreign minister and vice-chancellor. He remained a member of the Bundestag until 2002.
After leaving government, Kinkel practised law and was a member of the European advisory council of Lehman Brothers. He was also founding chairman of the Deutsche Telekom Foundation and a board member of the Bundesliga Foundation, the United Nations Association of Germany and the German Near East Initiative.
In 2011, at the request of Chancellor Angela Merkel, he represented Germany at the funeral of Sultan bin Abdulaziz, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
In 2016 Kinkel was elected president of an ethics commission created by the German Football Association – part of a drive for transparency and integrity following revelations of a financial scandal around the 2006 World Cup in Germany.
Klaus Kinkel married Ursula Vogel in 1961; they had a son and three daughters.