The German Janus: From Westpolitik to Ostpolitik
Author(s): Peter H. Merkl
Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Winter, 1974-1975), pp. 803-824
Published by: The Academy of Political Science
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The German Janus: From Westpolitik
to Ostpolitik
PETER H. MERKL
A quarter century of German foreign policies has passed
during which three statesmen figured prominently in the reintegration
of the successor states of the defeated German Reich among the nations
of Europe. The late Konrad Adenauer presided over the rehabilitation of
Western Germany and its incorporation, on a level of near equality, into
the Western alliance (NATO) and into the European organizations from
the Schuman Plan (ECSC) to the Common Market (EEC). This extraordinary
feat of foreign policy was possible at the time only by a policy of
resolutely ignoring all relationships, from hopes of German reunification
to making peace, with the states of Eastern Europe. In East Germany
meanwhile, the late Walter Ulbricht similarly cemented the East German
Republic (DDR) into the Warsaw Pact and, in the 196os, gave it a
new identity as a nation-state in its own right with no expectation of
eventual reunification and few contacts with the West. These solid fronts
of the cold war era suddenly came to be questioned, when Willy Brandt
launched his controversial Ostpolitik in his years (I969-I974) as the
West German chancellor.
The controversies over the Ostpolitik still have not ceased swirling
about related issues and various breakdowns and disappointments in the
new relationships between Bonn and various Eastern capitals. In particular
the established forces of the cold war era, the West German Christian
PETER H. MERKL is a professor of political science at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Origin of the West German Republic; Germany:
Yesterday and Tomorrow; Rassenfrage und Rechtsradikalismus in den USA; Political
Continuity and Change; Modern Comparative Politics; German Foreign Policies, East
and West; and the forthcoming Political Violence under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis.
Political Science Quarterly Volume 89 Number 4 Winter 1974-75 803
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804 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the East
German Communist party, the SED, as well as cold warriors elsewhere,
became very alarmed at what to them appeared to be a sellout of hardearned
positions. Even some American Democrats today, who ought to
know better, are asking themselves whether the price paid in recent years
for detente with the Soviet Union has not been too high. Regarding Willy
Brandt's Ostpolitik, in particular, the question arises as to how it fits
into the broader picture of the West German Westpolitik and of the Western
alliance as a whole. Now that the dust has settled and it can be viewed
more soberly, we need to ask whether the Ostpolitik measures really implied
such a basic reversal of earlier policies, or a departure irreconcilable
with the enduring fabric of Westpolitik.
ANTECEDENTS OF THE OSTPOLITIK I
Our story begins with the confrontations in the CDU/CSU in the early
1960s, between the so-called Atlanticists and Gaullists, misleading labels
that hide the bitter personal struggle between various heirs apparent to
the late Konrad Adenauer. Despite their differences over particular policies,
both camps had in common a desire to pursue a course more in keeping
with a West German national interest that still had to be defined.
Traditional German foreign policy for a hundred years had been looking
both east and west, much like the two-faced Roman god, Janus. Adenauer
had at first resolutely tied the West German saddle horse to the
NATO wagon, implying that there was no difference in interest between
the two. The -German Gaullists, including Adenauer in his last years in
office (1961-1963), wanted to give this Western orientation of the German
Janus more of a French, or European, basis rather than exclusively relying
on an American ally far across the sea. Atlanticists such as Foreign
Minister Gerhard Schroeder also sought to reestablish limited ties to the
old clientele of the German Reich in Eastern Europe. Thus the German
Janus was once more beginning to look east as well as west, just as it had
done under Otto von Bismarck and Gustav Stresemann. Willy Brandt in
I969 merely undertook to complete under more favorable circumstances
and in a more effective manner what Schroeder had attempted in
vain.'
Adenauer's policy toward the East had been an encapsulated refusal
to enter into contacts or negotiate a settlement of the border questions and
other claims. Schroeder, on the other hand, began to advocate an improvement
of West German relations to Eastern Europe as early as 1962. The
final settlment of Germany's World War II legacy in the East, indeed, was
' Brandt's coalition partner, the FDP, had already been holding out for a more nationalistic
departure in foreign policy under such leaders as Maier, Pfleiderer, and
Dehler since the mid-i95os.
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THE GERMAN JANUS 805
a Gordic knot that had resisted Adenauer's "policy of strength." As it
turned out, it failed to yield also to the blandishments of Schroeder's
Ostpolitik and later to the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt, the foreign minister
of the "grand coalition" (I966-I969). Only the Ostpolitik of
Chancellor Willy Brandt has shown any real breakthrough so far, and
even there the indications of a successful consummation still remain to be
seen.
Schroeder's new Ostpolitik was a modest attempt to establish trade
relations with Eastern Europe without automatically negating the Hallstein
Doctrine of diplomatic nonrecognition of states that had recognized
the DDR. West German trade missions or treaties were indeed established
after some initial difficulties2 in Poland, Hungary, and Romania
(1963), and a year later with Bulgaria, though not with Czechoslovakia.
These trade contacts involved a certain duplicity toward the
common organs of the EEC in Brussels which were not consulted, although
Bonn strove to avoid formal violations of its obligations under
the EEC treaty. Schroeder hoped thereby to contribute his share to the
relaxation of international tensions, although he had to endure much domestic
criticism from the hardliners of old. DeGaulle, of course, had long
ago blazed a trail of contacts to Eastern European countries and Washington;
he favored Schroeder's new departures which promised to bridge
over the irremediable chasms of European realities. The government also
had its allies, such as the Free Democratic Party (FDP) leadership and
important academic and journalistic opinion leaders. Its initiatives had already
been preceded by prominent Protestant and Catholic spokesmen
who had advocated recognition of the Oder-Neisse line and other gestures
of German reconciliation with Eastern Europe.
It was rather odd that Schroeder's domestic critics should accuse him of
confirming and accepting the status quo in Eastern Europe which they
still hoped to be able to revise. For the Soviet Union at the same time
was alarmed at how he was threatening by his Ostpolitik to change
the status quo of twenty years of Soviet dominance and monopolistic
control. Neither Moscow nor the DDR overlooked the significance of the
discrimination of Schroeder's policy of conciliation against East Germany
which gave his Ostpolitik the appearance of a sly maneuver to isolate
the DDR. The telltale answer of East Berlin to the Ostpolitik was the
Mutual Assistance and Friendship Treaty of 1964 between the DDR and
the Soviet Union. Schroeder was not discouraged and proceeded to the
next logical step, an attempted rapprochement with Moscow, beginning
with a visit by Khrushchev's son-in-law Adzhubei to Bonn. Unfortunately,
Khrushchev's fall put an end to this promising start.
2 Poland, for example, at first insisted on the establishment of normal relations and
on West German recognition of the Oder-Neisse line which Bonn was not prepared to
grant at the time.
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8o6 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
In the end, Schroeder's Ostpolitik and his other attempts at a reorientation
of West German foreign policy got no further than, in fact, signifying
a reorientation toward the forgotten or frozen Eastern aspects of
the concrete interests of the Federal Republic. Most telling perhaps was
the bipartisan Peace Memorandum of 1966 in which Bonn proposed to
exchange renunciation-of-force agreements with all the Eastern states
except the DDR and to enter agreements to freeze the nuclear potential
of central Europe at present levels.3 The idea of a renunciation-of-force
treaty between Bonn and Moscow had already appeared in the Adenauer
government's declaration of policy of 1961 with the object of demonstrating
the good intentions of the Federal Republic which Moscow and East
Berlin had always accused of war mongering and belligerent revanchism.
ANTECEDENTS II
The declaration of policy of the Kiesinger-Brandt government of December
1966 followed the example of President Johnson who in a muchpublicized
television address in October 1966 had stressed the idea of
building bridges to all the Eastern European countries. The Social Democratic
party (SPD), and even the FDP, which was now in the opposition,
intended to take the initiative in seeking contacts, short of diplomatic
recognition, with the DDR. Chancellor Kiesinger himself called "a
German contribution to the maintenance of peace" the foremost aim of
the foreign policy of his administration,4 and devoted a good deal of attention
to German-Soviet reconciliation and to the renunciation-of-force
agreements offered earlier. Diplomatic relations to Eastern Europe and
particularly a reconciliation with Poland and Czechoslovakia-including
a denunciation of the Munich Agreements of 1938-were other notable
items of the declaration of policy. The DDR was no longer exempted
from the proclaimed willingness to build bridges to the East. However,
Kiesinger only spoke of seeking contacts-human, economic, and cultural-"so
that the two parts of our people do not become strangers
to each other during their separation."
'There had been a rapprochement between the SPD and the CDU/CSU in matters of
foreign policy as early as 1960 when Herbert Wehner in a much-noticed speech before
the Bundestag dropped the reservations of the SPD toward Adenauer's foreign policies
and turned the eyes of his party toward the future. This rapprochment helped to
make possible the "grand coalition" of SPD and CDU/CSU under Chancellor Kurt
Georg Kiesinger (CDU) in 1966. Wehner has largely been responsible for the strategy
that took the SPD from the landmark Bad Godesberg Conference of 1959 via the
grand coalition into power in 1969. He was also instrumental in drafting the Peace
Memorandum.
' The standard formula of past administrations had always begun with the call for
German reunification.
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THE GERMAN JANUS | 807
Whatever legitimate doubts the grand coalition may have raised in
many minds,5 in foreign policy it made sense, since the Christian Democrat
Kiesinger and his Social Democratic foreign minister, Willy Brandt,
at least initially seemed to speak the same language and to share the same
goals of Ostpolitik. Within two months, in fact, the new government
managed to achieve agreement with Romania to establish diplomatic
relations. This quick triumph was possible not only because the Erhard
administration had been working on it for some time but also because
the resulting communique simply ignored the problem of East German
recognition and of the Hallstein Doctrine. At the same time, Kiesinger
and Brandt met with DeGaulle and emerged from the meeting speaking of
a common, Franco-German Ostpolitik. This echo of the Gaullist and,
more recently, Johnsonian pronouncements about healing the breach between
Western and Eastern Europe pulled the rug out from under the German
Gaullists and other enemies of Schroeder's Ostpolitik.
Unfortunately, the congruency of verbal formulas was not enough
to solve the real problems posed by the situation. As recently as July
1966, the Warsaw Pact countries had pledged to make their solidarity
with the DDR the test of their Communist loyalty. The price for West
German diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe had gone up. Now it
would take at least the abandonment of the Hallstein Doctrine and of the
claim to speak for all Germans, the formal recognition of all de facto
borders, and the end of West German nuclear ambitions. This was the
reason why Eastern Europe had been rather reserved in its reaction to
the new Ostpolitik of Kiesinger and Brandt.
The following months of 1967 soon were to demonstrate the limitations
of the new Ostpolitik. Romania had been an easy mark because she
had long been on a path of emancipation from Moscow. Yugoslavia was
another easy gain because she had already maintained diplomatic relations
with Bonn up until 1957 when the Hallstein Doctrine motivated
Bonn to withdraw its representatives from Belgrade after Tito's recognition
of the DDR. But the increasing Soviet pressure on Prague, Budapest,
and Warsaw held these countries in a solidary ring against the wooing of
Bonn. The Karlsbad Conference of April 1967 gathered all the Eastern
European Communist parties except for those of Romania and Yugoslavia
to debate on how to meet the West German threat to their solidarity.
Western Communist partie6s including that of France were asked to help
with discrediting the "revanchism" of Bonn. This conference issued a
'The chief criticism of the coalition of the two largest parties, who together accounted
for some go percent of the seats in the Bundestag, circled around its effect on
the two-party system and its preemption of an effective opposition. The last-mentioned
feature, furthermore, was frequently blamed for the growing strength of the
radical right, the NPD, and the New Left, the Extra Parliamentary Opposition (APO).
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808 I POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
resolution calling for a European Security Conference exclusive of the
United States, a proposal which must have pleased DeGaulle.
Bonn also had misgivings about the high-handed manner in which
Washington neglected to consult its allies about its compromises with
the Soviet Union. There must be some secret quid pro quo, the West German
press suggested, possibly involving Soviet noninterference in the
Vietnam conflict. And America's European allies were supposed to pay
for it by accepting nuclear limitations while the great powers themselves
undertook no disarmament steps. This issue for the first time allowed the
German Gaullists to rally their forces around Strauss and Adenauer in
opposition to the leaders of the grand coalition and their policy of relaxation
of international tensions. What better argument could be used
against the new Ostpolitik but that the Soviet Union wanted nothing
more than Bonn's signature on that treaty? More sober critics pointed out
that the treaty would also bar West Germany from access to the peaceful
uses of atomic energy. The issue was also divisive for the grand coalition,
because Kiesinger was more inclined to agree with the critics and
with DeGaulle's advice not to sign than was Brandt.
In place of the West German offer of bilateral renunciations of force,
the Karlsbad Conference came up with the Gomulka Plan for a collective
renunciation-of-force agreement to be signed by all European states including
the DDR, whose international discrimination in any case was to
cease forthwith. The DDR, furthermore, concluded Friendship and Mutual
Assistance treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia to complete
the regional integration of the DDR in case the Warsaw Pact should
lapse following the security conference. And to draw the final line under
the years of evolution toward a separate state, the DDR also moved to
abolish the last remaining legal fiction of commonality, the all-German
citizenship, and replaced it with its own "nationality." Ulbricht would
have liked, in a reversal of the Hallstein Doctrine, to make the establishment
of diplomatic relations between Bonn and the East European countries
dependent on Bonn's recognition of the DDR, but did not succeed
in winning the support of the conference.
The Federal Republic's attempt to break into the northern tier of Eastern
European states now met a good deal of resistance even in Prague which
had welcomed the Kiesinger statement about abrogating the Munich
Agreements of 1938. Instead of diplomatic relations, Bonn only achieved
the conclusion of a trade treaty and the establishment of trade missions.
Warsaw still showed no signs of giving in to the German wooing. Bonn
had to settle down in patience for the long waiting game, all the while
assuring the East that it had no intention of isolating the DDR or any
other state. And, once more, it attempted to advance the idea of mutual
renunciations of force with each Eastern European state which amounted
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THE GERMAN JANUS 809
to a West German admission that Bonn could not but accept the state of
things as they were anyway.
The Kiesinger-Brandt team could no longer hope for the trade-off of
reunification and nuclear arms, but was reluctant to drop its interest in
Western nuclear planning and in peaceful uses of atomic energy. Kiesinger,
moreover, wanted to maintain the West German stake in a future
European force de frappe, while Brandt stressed the willingness of the
Federal Republic to agree to nuclear nonproliferation, provided it was going
to be a first step toward general nuclear disarmament or effective international
controls on the nuclear arms race between the great powers.
This argument found strong support also with India, Japan, and Sweden
at the Geneva conferences of 1967 and 1968, and it was obviously in
better harmony with the Ostpolitik than were the fulminations of the
German Gaullists and the Springer press.
On August 21, 1968, the tanks of the Warsaw Pact forces, led by the
Soviet Union and including East German units, rolled into Czechoslovakia
to snuff out the liberalism of the "Prague Spring." There were reports
of clandestine protest actions inside East Germany, but by and large
the East German troops were as surprised as the Russians that the Czechs
tended to compare them to another armed invasion they had suffered
thirty years earlier. The Germans fiercely resented the swastikas which
Czech youths and some of their own countrymen painted on their
tanks and rolling stock. The Soviet desire to rein in its wayward satellites
with a harsh hand had been evident for some time.
The implications of this action for the West German Ostpolitik were
ominous. Bonn's negotiations toward a mutual renunciation of force
with the Soviet Union had run aground on the hard demands of the
Soviet government and the DDR at the time of the Berlin crisis of November
1967. In the meantime, Moscow further added a reference to certain
clauses of the Potsdam Agreements of 1945 and of the United Nations
Charter which justified hostile intervention on the part of the original
signatories in case of a revival of fascism in any of the erstwhile enemy
nations of World War II. This right of intervention could presumably be
construed to refer to the National Democratic party (NPD) or any other
neo-fascist splinter party of postwar Germany and West Berlin, or, for
that matter, to the Bonn government itself which Communist propaganda
had been calling "fascist," "imperialist warmongers" since its beginnings
in 1949. The Soviets indicated that they would maintain this right
of intervention even if a renunciation-of-force treaty was signed and, to
add insult to injury, published the content of the confidential negotiations
for all the world to see. The Czechoslovak invasion, which the
Warsaw Pact justified as such a "suppression of fascist elements and foreign
agents" presumably coming from West Germany, once more reThis
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81io POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
vealed that the perception of a fascist Bonn was a functional prerequisite
to maintaining Soviet control over the satellite empire. The West German
government in a note still tried to reason that a renunciation of
force would have to be based on equal conditions for both partners and
could not be modified with any one-sided right of intervention. The Soviets
replied in the strongest language that the Federal Republic had no
claim to equality with other European states and that its renunciationof-force
proposals left untouched its "revanchist platform with regard
to all the main questions of European security."
As the roof caved in on Bonn's policy of detente, the old fears reappeared.
When at the time of the invasion Soviet troops began to mass
across the border from West Germany, in the Bohemian Forest, moreover,
Bonn urgently called for strengthening NATO and appealed to the
Western allies for a change in the uncertain status in central Europe. At
West Germany's urging, also, the Western allies forcefully rejected the
Soviet interpretation of the U. N. charter and the Postdam Agreements.
Washington bluntly announced that any Soviet invasion of West Germany
would bring immediate military retaliation. This finally cooled
down the ardor of Soviet belligerence.
THE TURNING POINT OF 1969
The parliamentary elections in September 1969 became something of a
watershed in postwar West German history in that they finally retired
the CDU/CSU as a government party of twenty years' standing. The
chief issues were of a domestic nature, although the differences between
the two largest parties also had significant foreign-policy overtones.
Strauss and his adherents conducted themselves as "the national opposition"
against the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and the Ostpolitik.
The Soviet claims to a right to intervention in Germany and the nuclear
nonproliferation treaty were seen by many to be made of the same discriminatory
cloth, and some hardliners even spoke of a "super-Yalta"
or "Super-Versailles." Kiesinger insisted on polemicizing against a "party
of recognition (of the DDR)" in a willfully crude distortion of the issues.
Thus he and his party had retreated far from their position at the
outset of the grand coalition. Brandt held out the hope that signing the
nonproliferation pact would avoid Bonn's falling into isolation. Waiting
for the Soviet ardor to cool off might yet produce an advance in
Ostpolitik.
The coming electoral upset was already heralded by the selection in
March of a new Federal president by the Federal Assembly" in Berlin,
8The Federal Assembly consists of the Bundestag deputies and a like number of
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THE GERMAN JANUS 811
when the FDP threw its electoral votes behind SPD candidate Heinemann
who thereby won the contest. The FDP had already developed a draft
"general compact" for the orderly relations between East and West Germany
and thus was obviously ahead of the SPD.7 Again there were bitter
propaganda campaigns and harassment of the access routes to Berlin.
Then mysteriously both the DDR and the Soviet Union softened
their approach and began to make counteroffers relating to the access
of West Berliners to their friends and relations in East Berlin. There were
two potent reasons for the change in approach. As the Soviet ambassador
in Bonn, Tsarapkin, himself informed the West German government,
Chinese and Soviet troops had clashed bloodily at the Ussuri River
half way around the world. And the steadying hand of the Nixon administration,
in whose foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, Europeans
had the greatest confidence, had appeared on the scene with Nixon's
personal visit to Berlin.
Willy Brandt tackled the objectives of his Ostpolitik with a dispatch
born of years of observing the ups and downs of Soviet-German relations.
After a mere five weeks in office, the chancellor had already put an
end to the debate over the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by attaching
the West German signature to the treaty. A billion dollar deal with the
Soviet Union followed in which Bonn traded pipes for a huge pipeline
through European Russia for Russian natural gas. A platoon of diplomatic
emissaries from Bonn descended upon Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and
Bucharest with other favorable credit and commercial arrangements
as well as assurances about the peaceful intent of the Federal Republic.
The whirlwind of activity focused in particular on Moscow where
Brandt's special ambassador Egon Bahr met with Foreign Minister Gromyko
about forty times between January and August 1970 in preparation
of the renunciation-of-force agreement with the Soviet Union. Foreign
Minister Scheel (FDP) also met with his Soviet counterpart some
seventeen times during the same period for this purpose. Still more surprising,
Brandt maneuvered the reluctant DDR government into two
widely publicized encounters between himself and DDR Premier Willi
Stoph, one in the historic East German city of Erfurt, the other in West
German Kassel, to demonstrate to the whole world an intra-German understanding
of sorts. At the same time, Brandt also got the four great powers,
who had neglected their responsibilities for the status of Berlin for
so long, together once more to work out a permanent solution for the bedeputies
of the Laender diets. It serves as an electoral college to elect the Federal
president.
7 The FDP later in the year also proposed dropping the Hallstein Doctrine altogether
when Cambodia, Iraq, and the Sudan recognized the DDR.
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812! POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
leaguered city. Events moved so rapidly in 1970 as to take Brandt's opponents
in East and West Germany rather by surprise. The interpretation
and analysis of what was happening and what it really meant began to
catch up with the decelerating flow of the events only years later.
To begin with, the element of surprise could be maintained in large
part only because of the air of unreality and hopeless entanglement
which had long surrounded the relationship between Bonn and the East.
Twenty-five years after the end of World War II, the tensions in Europe
still were unrelieved, with nearly one-third of a million American
troops and half a million Soviet troops stationed in various Western and
Eastern European countries. West Germany had made its peace with the
West, but never really with the East, pretending that the DDR did not exist,
and ignoring the border questions and de facto losses of territory.
Twenty years of hard-lining CDU governments and certain refugee and
right-wing groups had been talking as if Germany had not lost the war
in the East and as if the Western alliance could be used in the long run
to win back the rightful spoils of war of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and
the Soviet Union which had suffered so grievously from German invasion
in World War II. These right-wing elements and parts of the West
German press rose in righteous wrath against Brandt's Ostpolitik initiatives.
Ironically, they found their best allies among hard liners in the
East German SED who fought tooth and claw against any rapprochement
with Bonn. The vested interests in the status quo of both Germanies
joined hands in propaganda, in provoking and magnifying incidents, and
in leaking confidential documents and reports in order to wreck this unconscionable
intra-German and Eastern rapprochement.
THE Moscow TREATY
In spite of all the bitter sallies and incidents of that eventful year, the
Renunciation-of-Force Treaty between the Federal Republic and the Soviet
Union was initialed August 211, 11970. It was published together
with a letter on German unity and supplementary notes and documents
which gainsaid the earlier alleged "papers" leaked by the opposition to
create the public impression of a "sell-out" or "betrayal of the fatherland"
to communism, or of German ethnic interests to alien peoples. The
two contracting parties solemnly pledged
to maintain international peace and achieve detente [and] . .. to further the
normalization of the situation in Europe and the development of peaceful relations
among all European states, and in so doing [to] proceed from the
actual situtation existing in this region.
They agreed to be guided in their mutual relations by the United Nations
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THE GERMAN JANUS | 813
Charter and "to refrain from the threat and use of force."
they declared their acceptance of all present frontiers and d
territorial claims against anybody," with the reservation that a final'
peace treaty conference or mutual consent (e.g., between East and West
Germany) may still produce changes.8 The treaty was to be submitted
for ratification to the Bundestag only upon a satisfactory result of the
four-power negotiations on the status of and access to West Berlin. In
supplementary agreements, Bonn promised to conclude similar renunciation-of-force
treaties with the DDR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Regarding
the DDR, in particular, the Federal Republic agreed to treat East
Berlin as "a second German state within German territory," on a basis
of equality and nondiscrimination, and no longer to claim the right to
represent all Germans (Alleinvertretung).
The treaty documents made sure to cover also the points raised by the
opposition spokesmen of the CDU/CSU, and the refugee and expellee organizations.
They left undiminished the German right of self-determination
and reserved the final disposition of the frontier questions to a
peace conference which would very likely be some years off in the future.
Most important for the West German side, they made ratification of
the treaty dependent on a "satisfactory settlement" of the status and access
to Western Berlin, a point creating considerable controversy at home
and abroad. In May 1970, the negotiations with Moscow nearly collapsed
when the Soviets reportedly wanted to separate the linking of the
two subjects since, after many a meeting, the four-power negotiations on
Berlin had not produced agreement on vital points. But Bonn remained
adamant and asserted in a June note that there would be no renunciationof-force
without progress on Berlin. If it had not been for this pressure
on the Soviets and the Western powers, the four powers would very
likely have never made the effort. There is at least some evidence that
West German public opinion was very favorably impressed by this feature
of the Bonn-Moscow negotiations. The Soviet Union was too, for it in
turn made the entering into force of the Berlin Agreements dependent
on ratification of the renunciation treaty.
Another important aspect was its portent for the threat of Soviet intervention
made in 1967 under articles 53 and 1107 of the United Nations
Charter. Despite some opposition comment to the contrary, the present
treaty was presumed to have the effect of invalidating the Soviet threat.
8On this subject, see esp. Georg F. Duckwitz, "The Turning Point in the East,"
Aussenpolitik (English ed.), XXI (1970), 363-379, where the details of the treaty are
discussed and related to earlier agreements of the Federal Republic such as Adenauer's
1954 declaration at the London Conference "never to seek the reunification of Germany
or the modification of the present frontiers of the Federal Republic of Germany by
means of force."
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814 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
To be sure, as the hard liners in West Germany and elsewhere were quick
to point out, no conceivable guarantee of this nature can ever be expected
to bar a totalitarian state from aggression under all circumstances. But the
American and NATO assurances could always be depended on to protect
the Federal Republic in the event the Soviet Union made an abrupt aboutface
and turned to aggression again.
Foreign Minister Walter Scheel put the rationale of a renunciation-offorce
succinctly when he wrote in July 1970 in a newspaper editorial that
the nature of military tensions in central Europe inexorably imposed certain
necessary attitudes upon West German policy: It had to be a policy of
peace, one free from the unrealistic illusions and emotions of yesteryear.
It must work to inspire confidence and trust in German intentions and
not "feed on existing distrust." And it had to be based on Bonn's alliance
and the support of its Western friends. The earlier policy of ignoring
the East permitted the Soviets for twenty-five years to cement their empire
by playing on the Eastern European fears of Germany. The "imperialist,"
"aggressive" nature of the Bonn regime was a functional prerequisite
of Communist policy and cohesion. What a triumph, then, to
get Moscow to acknowledge the peaceful, nonaggressive intentions of
West Germany and her willingness to leave the border settlement to
negotiations rather than strong-arm tactics! And as for the support of
the allies, this aspect of the Ostpolitik was quite in keeping with the allied
goal of a relaxation of international tensions as, with rare exceptions,
a long line of prominent American and international visitors tes-
tified.
THE DDR ON THE DEFENSIVE
It is not possible here to go into all the vagaries of the struggle of the
CDU/CSU and the refugee spokesmen against the ratification of the
Renunciation-of-Force agreements with Moscow, Warsaw, and, most recently,
Prague. Regarding the latter two, as the immediate neighbors of
Germany, as the homelands of many German refugees, and particularly
as the victims of German aggression in World War II, feelings were bound
to run high both among the advocates and the enemies of reconciliation.
Let us focus instead on the reception of the Ostpolitik in East Berlin.
To understand the defensive attitudes of the DDR leadership, one cannot
ignore the obvious defects, in the East German view, of the negotiations
between Bonn and Moscow. Bonn had declared its intent to organize
its relations with the DDR "on the basis of complete equality, nondiscrimination,
respect for the independence of each of the two states in
matters of internal competence within their respective boundaries," and
renounced the claim to Alleinvertretung. But these concessions were not
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THE GERMAN JANUS | 815
an integral part of the Bonn-Moscow Treaty, nor did they follow the
East German proposals and indicate a promise of real international recognition
instead of the suspicious "inner-German" relations on Willy
Brandt's program. Since the Western allies insisted on their residual
rights over Berlin and Germany, recognition was not even Bonn's to give.
The Soviets, moreover, refused to force the East German demands upon
Bonn and had even stated their readiness to bring about, on the basis of
residual occupation rights, a Berlin settlement to Bonn's liking and presumably
at East German expense. The assertion of the occupation rights
meant a severe setback to East German pride and self-confidence. The
DDR leaders could not tell whether they were being taken to the altar
or down the garden path. The nightmare of agreement between
Bonn and Moscow had ever been the DDR's cauchemar des coalitions and
the thought of some of the nearly 200,000 Soviet troops stationed in
East Germany being moved to the Chinese frontier is as painful to
East Berlin as the thought of American troop withdrawals is to Bonn.
The DDR had little choice but to accept the new situation, although not
without attempts to undermine it. At first the leadership seems to have
adopted a strategy of reinterpreting the Moscow Treaty in the light of
its own needs while pretending that the Federal Republic had merely been
forced to conclude this "Soviet accord" and was not in fact the author of
the policy. Thus, East Berlin in August 1970 issued a statement approving
of the treaty while denouncing Bonn for not ratifying it immediately
and, in particular, for still withholding East German recognition.9At a
later point, Ulbricht sought to shift the initiative in the Berlin question
from the allied negotiations back to a dialogue between the two Germanies,
or simply to stall and obstruct whenever possible. Soviet leaders have
shown no reluctance to intervene personally whenever East Berlin became
too obstreperous. But there have also been times when the willingness of
the Soviet Union to come to terms with Western negotiators seemed to be
noticeably slackening under the impact of pressure from the DDR. Even
though he is known for his hard line, Ulbricht's successor, Erich Honecker,
has had to acquiesce to the measures of Ostpolitik. The East German
leaders are on the defensive, reduced to petty harassment and recurrent
campaigns of "demarcation (Abgrenzung) against imperialist West Ger-
9 See Neues Deutschland, August 15, 1970. Originally, the DDR had responded to
the West German overtures with a demand for loo billion marks in reparations for the
pre-1961 loss of East German refugees and for "economic discrimination," meaning
the Hallstein Doctrine. It should be noted, however, that the establishment of contacts
and administrative cooperation at the ministerial and subministerial level between
the two Germanies survived the debacle of the Kassel meeting between Willi Stoph
and Brandt, to a modest degree, in fields such as transportation and postal services
-Postpolitik instead of Ostpolitik.
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816 I POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
many"'0 and against the "Social Democratism" emanating from Willy
Brandt's SPD, a tool of "the monopoly, capitalist bourgeoisie."
For the DDR, moreover, long-range security no longer seems to be
found in bilateral agreements, but only in multilateral pacts and conferences
where its links to the Warsaw Pact nations would become less dependent
on momentary internal problems or the external expediencies of
its Eastern partners. The intense desire of East Berlin for Western diplomatic
recognition is, at least covertly, also a desire for greater autonomy
from Soviet hegemony. With its striving for more autonomy from Moscow,
of course, the DDR is in the best company of all the other Eastern
European states. As a truly autonomous partner of the Communist bloc,
the DDR could play a double-sided game of security politics, analogous
to the role of the Federal Republic in the Western alliance, in which the
Communist alliance would still guarantee its security without smothering
it in its powerful embrace. Proletarian internationalism and socialist
brotherhood need not be limited to the Russian bear hug.
The East German attitude is somewhat self-contradictory but understandable
even when it may border on a quixotic sense of insecurity or
paranoia." East German foreign policy, therefore, looks toward the European
Security Conference (CSCE) envisaged by the various Eastern
European countries and the Soviet Union at Karlsbad (1967) and Budapest
(1969), and debated also by the Western foreign ministers at Rome
(1970) and since 1972 by the smaller European nations. This conference
has been described by East German sources as "a conference for the taming
of the imperialistic, tension-provoking West German Ostpolitik."''2
10 The fear of cultural contacts with the West was eloquently expressed by H.
Busse and W. Haenisch in "Friedliche Koexistenz-Grundprinzip der Aussenpolitik
der DDR," Deutsche Aussenpolitik, no. X (1974), 32-33, 37. See also the discussion
of the evolution of East German "national identity" in Hermann Axen, Zur Entwicklung
der sozialistischen Nation in der DDR (East Berlin, 1973), a lecture by the secretary
of the SED Central Committee.
" Foreign Minister Otto Winzer, for example, still rather recently expressed acute
alarm at a 1963 formula of Willy Brandt's according to which peaceful coexistence
between the two Germanies denotes "a peaceful method of competition and penetration,
an advancement of transformation" (italics by Winzer) which he interpreted as
"undermining the socialist order of state and society" in the DDR, and as being at
the root of Brandt's 1970 refusal to grant diplomatic recognition. Die Einheit (May
1970), 592.
"The Soviet Union first proposed such a conference in 1954, to forestall West German
rearmament. Revived by Rapacki in 1964, the idea finally became capable of
realization after 1968 when the Warsaw Pact agreed to full participation of the United
States and Canada. See the communique in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee
on Foreign Affairs, 92nd Congress, 2nd session, Hearings before the Subcommittee
on Europe, 1972, Conference on European Security, pp. 142-144. See also Otto
Winzer's article on peaceful coexistence, Die Einheit (May 1970), 594-596, and Peter
Florin in German Foreign Policy (June 1970), 423-438.
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THE GERMAN JANUS I 817
But its principles of sovereign equality, inviolability of borders, and
nonintervention in the internal affairs of the thirty-three European and
North American countries13 would appear to have just as much applica1
tion to the power of the Soviet Union over its satellites.
THE QUID PRO QUO
Why did Brandt and his foreign minister, Scheel, succeed where others
had failed? The secret of their success lay in the timing and in their skillful
linkage of the various measures and their ratification. The BonnMoscow
treaty as well as the one with Warsaw was not to come up for ratification
until a "satisfactory" solution of the Berlin question was reached
by the four powers, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet
Union. This made the Berlin settlement the crucial pivot of the relaxation
of tensions in Europe, as indeed it should have been. Herein then lay
Willy Brandt's grand design for the solution of the German problem in
the East-West context. It consisted of tying all the loose ends of the Ostpolitik
into a package dependent on four-power action in the most delicate
point of friction, Berlin. If one could wrest de facto control of the access
routes to Berlin from the DDR, secure the economic survival and free
movement of the West Berliners with Soviet guarantees, and assert the
political link between West Germany and Berlin, after twenty-five years
of recurrent crises, this was worth the settlement in the East. The nature
of the package placed the burden where it belonged, into the lap of the
four powers and made a settlement especially attractive to the least cooperative
of them, the Soviet Union. The DDR, which obviously stood to
lose from the final product of the negotiations, played no official role in
the long series of meetings among the representatives of the big four.14
The Soviets would have preferred severing all Berlin ties, including the
subsidies, to Bonn and making West Berlin economically and, by implication,
politically dependent on "its natural, East German hinterland."
The East Germans for their part have always objected to the West German
"revanchist" activities in this "bridgehead against the DDR" and
insisted on the "good conduct" of West Berliners, West Germans, and
transients in West Berlin as a condition for their cooperation.
'lOther principles agreed upon include the multilateral renunciation of force, the
peaceful settlement of disputes, respect for human rights and basic freedoms, and cooperation
among states. For an East German view, see Dieter Vogl, "Die Warschauer
Vertragsstaaten und die europaeische Sicherheitskonferenz," Deutsche Aussenpolitik
(January 1971), 48-62, where great emphasis is placed on the participation of the
Federal Republic and of the neutral states of Europe whether or not they are United
Nations members.
14 See details in Peter H. Merkl, German Foreign Policies, West and East: On the
Threshold of a New European Era (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1974), pp. 156-165.
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8i8 I POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
By mid-i971, the expectations raised by the bold gamble of the Ostpolitik
had reached such a height that even the CDU/CSU was willing
for the time being to withhold criticism of the kind of Berlin agreement
that was evidently taking shape. "For the first time since the end of
World War II," declared Chancellor Brandt triumphantly on September
1, "agreements based on international law are creating clear conditions
for access to West Berlin and for the relations between the city and the
Federal Republic of Germany." Two days later, in the building of the long
defunct Allied Control Council of Germany, the foreign ministers of the
four major allied wartime powers initialed the Berlin Agreement, a first
step toward a viable settlement.
The agreement reaffirmed the reserved rights of the four allies and
pledged the latter to respect each other's rights in Berlin and not to attempt
to change the status quo unilaterally or by threat of force. Four annexes
to the agreement proposed details of (i) the civilian traffic between
West Germany and West Berlin, (2) the relationship between the Federal
Republic and West Berlin, (3) travel and communications between West
Berlin and the surrounding East German territories; and (4) the representation
of West Berlin interests abroad and the Soviet consular activities
in West Berlin.
Regarding the first item, the Soviet Union solemnly assured the Western
powers that the traffic of goods and persons across East German territory
to and from West Berlin would be "facilitated and unimpeded."
Some regulations of this traffic were specified and the details left to intraGerman
agreements. In the second annex, the Western powers reaffirmed
the ties between Berlin and Bonn, provided that West Berlin not become
a constituent part of the Federal Republic and the political organs of the
latter not be convened in West Berlin. In the third annex, the Soviets gave
equal visiting rights in East Germany to the West Berliners who had long
been discriminated against as compared to West German or foreign visitors.
This annex also promised to improve the ruptured communications
between East Germany and West Berlin and to resolve the problem of enclaves
such as Steinstuecken by exchanges of territory, with the details
again left to intra-German negotiations. The fourth annex, finally, granted
West German consular representation abroad and with respect to international
organizations to the residents of West Berlin and authorized
the establishment of a Soviet Consulate General in the Western sectors of
the city. In a further exchange of letters with Bonn, the Western powers
indicated which West German governmental agencies would be permitted
to appear and operate in West Berlin for purposes of coordinating the
relationships between the two entities.
The Brandt government immediately made it clear in a televised address
that the Berlin Agreement was only the beginning of a settlement
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THE GERMAN JANUS I 819
and that in many ways it accomplished little more than the sanctioning
of the existing situation. Nevertheless, the former Berlin mayor said,
"there are to be no more Berlin crises." And he stressed the sanctioning
of access rights and the visiting privileges of West Berliners. The West
Germans and West Berliners obviously had not received everything they
had hoped for, and what they had been granted still required long and
difficult direct negotiations between the two Germanies. East German
stalling and different interpretations of the Berlin Agreements complicated
their implementation in intra-German accords.15 There have been
incidents and violations on both sides to this day to disillusion the starry-
eyed.
There was also the bitter fight to the finish by the CDU/CSU opposition
which at first hoped to topple Brandt by defeating his treaties and
then discovered it could not afford the odium of wrecking the whole edifice
of his popular Ostpolitik. For without the ratification of the Renunciation-of-Force
treaties with Moscow and Warsaw by the West German
Bundestag, the Berlin Agreements and even the implementing traffic accords
between Bonn and East Berlin would fail to enter into force. Thus
the Moscow Treaty passed on May 17, 1972, with a majority of 248
against lo (238 abstaining) and the Warsaw Treaty passed with 248
against 17 (231 abstaining), and the CDU/CSU also chose to abstain in
the upper house, the Bundesrat. A joint resolution by both major parties
on legal reservations regarding the Oder-Neisse line and other borders
passed the Bundestag by 491 to 5 votes, and was immediately gainsaid
by a special message of reassurance about the Oder-Neisse line addressed
to the Polish government by Chancellor Brandt.
In the battle over ratification, the Brandt government had lost its legislative
majority and could no longer even pass its budget. A surprise motion
of no-confidence by the opposition came very close to toppling the
Brandt cabinet. Nevertheless, the engineers of the Ostpolitik continued
to work on further civilian traffic and cooperation agreements with the
DDR and, two weeks before the November elections, unveiled a Basic
Treaty on the relations between the two German states, in which the
Federal Republic "formally takes note of the DDR as a sovereign and
equal state," though not as a foreign country, as Brandt pointed out in a
newspaper interview.
THE BASIC TREATY WITH THE DDR
The Basic Treaty proceeds from the fact of the German division under
16A book review by V. A. Pjatin of V. N. Boldyrew's Westberlin und die europaeische
Sicherheit (1973) in Deutsche Aussenpolitik, no. i (1974), 189-192, gives
a revealing glimpse of East German motives.
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820 1 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
allied suzerainty without exactly recognizing such a divisionl as permanent.
It does pay tribute to detente, nonuse of force, and inviolability of
borders, and pledges the two German states to (i) normal, good-neighborly
relations, (2) sovereign equality, self-determination, and, among
other things, the protection of human rights, (3) the discontinuance of
Alleinvertretung by Bonn, (4) the promotion of European security and a
reduction of armaments, especially the control of nuclear weapons, (5)
steps toward economic, scientific, and cultural cooperation, and (6) an
exchange of permanent missions between the two Germanies. As Willy
Brandt put it in a press conference, this treaty is "the instrument for organizing
cooperation under the prevailing circumstances," that is, "by
way of settled coexistence" and without abandoning the notion of a
common nationhood. It opens the way to "the normalization that is now
possible" and makes life easier in many ways in the two Germanies and
in West Berlin, again without changing the legal status quo in such
matters as citizenship or property. A number of practical cooperation and
exchange agreements between the two states and including Berlin will
follow.
By this time, the long-expected wave of diplomatic recognitions of the
DDR by many states other than the Federal Republic (which had insisted
on noninternational recognition) was obviously well under way. FDP
leader and Foreign Minister Walter Scheel felt compelled to deny that this
was "a bitter consequence" of the Ostpolitik and, in particular, of the
Basic Treaty. On the contrary, he argued, it is "a natural outcome of
these treaty negotiations and of the conclusion of the accord that the
NATO members now establish contacts." Not only was this trend already
strong without the policies of Bonn, thus making it necessary for
the Federal Republic to take the initiative and obtain concessions from
Moscow and Pankow while they still had something to offer the East, but
also the Basic Treaty and the Four-Power Declaration relating to the
treaty and United Nations membership expressly reserved the final disposition
of the German question to a peace settlement. "There was no reason
in the meantime to discriminate against the DDR" as long as it
showed some willingness to cooperate. The underlying formula, in other
words, was that human improvements in the DDR and in West Berlin
were well worth the concession of international recognition, since German
reunification was in any case unattainable in view of the irreconcilable
differences between the two systems.
Needless to add, the CDU and especially the CSU rejected this trade-off
as well as the whole Basic Treaty with the DDR. There was some expression
of dissent among the CDU deputies, however, which produced
several points illuminating the predicament in which the party has found
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THE GERMAN JANUS | 821
itself since 1970. The CDU/CSU must catch up to the international
developments, the dissenters argued, and be realistic about the emergence
of the DDR and the present Eastern borders which are now being
recognized by practically everyone in West and East.
Indeed, it seems to be the normal course of major innovations in foreign
policy that they can only begin with a realistic acceptance of world
conditions as they are rather than as they never were or as they might have
been years ago. The SPD learned this lesson the hard way during the
long years of Adenauer's bold new departures in foreign policy. It was a
painful process for the SPD leaders to give up their hardened rearguard
action against his policies of European integration and of bringing West
Germany into the Western alliance. Only after they had come to accept
the new conditions could they set out for major departures of their own.
It may well require a similarly painful process of accepting the achievements
of their antagonists before the proud leaders of the CDU and CSU
can stage a comeback.
OSTPOLITIK AND WESTPOLITIK
During their determined struggle against Brandt's Ostpolitik, the CDU/
CSU leaders' weightiest, if not their most influential argument, pointed
to an inherent conflict between further European integration and the Eastern
policies. Granted that the West German policies toward the East presupposed
a secure West German position within NATO and a sound
economic one within the Common Market, this objection is far from absurd.
One aspect in the preparatory talks for the Conference on European
Security and Cooperation, for example, concerned the West German desire-shared
by other EEC members and opposed by the East-to allow
the European Community (EEC, ECSC, and Euratom) a mode of formal
participation. Behind this request lay the/concern that the Eastern Europeans
should recognize the right of the EEC members to continue to develop
without Eastern interference the process of economic and political
integration they have begun and to which they accord priority over
any all-European patterns of cooperation. The European Community indeed
commissioned its Political Committee (of Political Directors of each
Foreign Ministry) and an ad hoc group to prepare a common strategy
toward the conference, an absolutely necessary maneuver, since community
members after January 1, 1973, are no longer free individually to conclude
new trade treaties with nonmember states. Furthermore, these deliberations
have been linked with those in the NATO Council, at least
among the delegations from community countries. The Eastern Europeans
for their part feel a hearty dislike for the Common Market, its "economiThis
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822 ! POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
cally discriminatory" policy, and even more for its ambitions to become
a politically unified "superpower" and a vehicle for "Western European
imperialism."16 Within the EEC Commission, the views about the European
Security Conference have ranged from positive ones hoping for better
relations with the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe (with the ulterior
motive of making the satellites less dependent on Moscow) to the suspicion
that the conference was a plot to substitute a weak all-European pattern
of cooperation for the further political integration of the community.
The standard response of the Brandt government to these Christian
Democratic criticisms has always been that Bonn's Westpolitik has been
proceeding apace and that the Ostpolitik measures enjoyed substantial
support among all of the Western allies.17 Appearances have indeed fostered
the impression of a very active and successful Westpolitik, especially
with the dramatic expansion of the Common Market from the original
six to nine members. To be sure, the demise of Charles DeGaulle and the
persistence in the face of determined resistance at home of a pro-European
leadership in Great Britain account far better for the final coming about
of that long-awaited event than anything the Brandt government did in
its few years in office. Still, as Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark
took on their official roles in the European Community on January i,
1973, it was difficult for the critics to claim that no progress was being
made in European integration. The impact of the event was further magnified
by the surprising eagerness of the British to enter into the round of
contacts and activities toward greater cooperation in political and defense
matters which accompanied the expansion of the community. For
many years, a potent argument against British membership in the Common
Market had been that Great Britain was "not really interested in
European integration" beyond the advantages of economic cooperation
and hence, that her membership would water down the heady spirit of
European union. Now that she was actually joining, her government
turned to be nearly as keen on playing a strong political role in the community
as any of the "good Europeans" of long standing who had agreed
16 This gives some plausibility to the Christian Democratic demand, that Eastern
Europeans should first "recognize EEC" before the Federal Republic would drop its
objections to the international recognition of borders and of the DDR. Actually
Brezhnev in a speech of March 1972, did "recognize the reality of the Common Market"
and asked for a similar "recognition" of Comecon by Community members. See
also Michael Palmer, "The European Community and a European Security Conference,"
The World Today, July 1972, and the special issue of Deutsche Aussenpolitik on
the European Community Westeuropa, Politik, Oekonomie (1973).
17 In December 1972, the NATO Council once again reaffirmed its support for the
intra-German policy of Bonn as well as for its policy of "peaceful reunification."
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THE GERMAN JANUS | 823
at the Hague Conference of 13969 to turn their attention to political in
gration.
There is no need to provide here a detailed review of the lively developments
in the European Community in the years of the greatest advances
of Ostpolitik, nor to comment on its current ups and downs. Suffice
it to say that European integration was far from dormant and that its impact
on West Germany was far greater than that of the increasing trade
relations with the East. West German relations with the United States also
have not suffered in the least, although there appears to be more of a
sense of European self-confidence vis-'a-vis the old fears that American
trade and capital will take over Europe. At the same time that Western
Europe feels all this burgeoning economic strength, moreover, it remains
as militarily dependent on the United States as ever. The late President
Pompidou in 1971 spoke optimistically of a European political union
by 13980.
In 1972, for a summit conference of the ten prospective members of
the European Community (Norway had not yet opted out), Bonn prepared
an agenda which puts Ostpolitik and Westpolitik in context. The
first points on it were economic and monetary measures, along with social
security, regional structural policy, and the environment. Second
were institutional reforms such as the strengthening of the Council of
Ministers, the European Parliament, and of the Economic and Social Committee.
The third point called for an "organized dialogue" with the
United States, better relations with industrialized countries, trade cooperation
with Eastern Europe and with the developing nations. European
political and intergovernmental cooperation also figured prominently
on the West German agenda for the summit. As the reader will
notice, Ostpolitik played a very modest role in this context.
Looking back on the hectic battles of 1970-1972 with the benefit of
hindsight, one is inclined to see the Ostpolitik in a more realistic light
than seemed possible then. It was never as great a reversal of previous
policies as its detractors claimed but merely the more effective execution
of earlier attempts. The Renunciation-of-Force treaties and the reluctant
rapprochement of the Federal Republic with the DDR have not
basically changed the political landscape of Europe or surrendered vital
defenses against the ideological pressures of the East. West Germany is
too well ensconced in its Westpolitik relations to have to fear such consequences.
The basic differences in the political and economic systems
on either side continue as before and their impact limits the possibilities
for interaction and frequently leads to mutual suspicions and minor
breakdowns. Either side naturally is inclined to get some political advantage
out of the greatly increased volume of trade and of cultural exThis
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824 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
changes, at the same time that it feels dangerously exposed by
ering of the psychological guards of two decades of cold war.18 But
these fears are obviously to be preferred to the system of fears that kept
both sides under its spell prior to Brandt's Ostpolitik.*
18 For an excellent survey from the East German perspective, see J. Dankert et
al., "Die Beziehungen Frankreichs, der BRD, Grossbritanniens zu den sozialistischen
Staaten Europas," Deutsche Aussenpolitik, Sonderheft 1973: Westeuropea, Politik,
Oekonomie, 1)3-149,. and, from the West German side, Andreas Meyer-Landrut,
"Fourth Year of the M6scow Treaty," Aussenpolitik, no. i ([974), 23-30
* Adapted from Peter H. Merkl, German Foreign Policies, West and East: On the
Threshold of a New European Era.
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