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Chapter 4 The Ostpolitik Debate The early postwar era saw the Federal Republic of Germany align itself decisively with the West, actively supporting collective security arrangements to oppose the extension of Soviet influence. At the same time, it embraced plans to lay the foundations for European integration . In the East, meanwhile, the Berlin airlift gave way to a new East German state (GDR) whose border with West Germany, apart from Berlin, was closed after May 1952. As the 1950s drew to a close, the division of Germany was firmly entrenched. The most potent symbol of this division began to rise up early in the morning of August 13, 1961: the Berlin Wall. These events, contributing to what Adenauer described as a “sharpened and hardened” postwar politics, constitute an unlikely background for a transformation of German attitudes toward the East.1 If anything, they seem a much better predictor of the missile crisis in Cuba a year later that brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Out of these early, acute crises of the Cold War, however, gradually came recognition of the dangers posed by the superpower standoff. In the United States, this recognition produced a new impetus for arms control , in the form of an Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty with the USSR signed in Moscow in August 1963, as well as provisions to enhance communication during a crisis by creating a direct “hotline” between Washington and Moscow. These measures were designed to make Cold War confrontation less dangerous, but not to end it. The American grand strategy still required containment. In Europe, as in other parts of the world, this strategy meant keeping up the pressure on the Soviet Union. In East Asia, it would soon mean another war. For Americans, détente would have to wait until the 1970s. Yet in Germany, despite the “hardening and sharpening” of Cold War divisions, Adenauer’s decisive Westpolitik soon gave way to new uncertainty about the proper West German stance toward the GDR. The sobering lesson of the Cuban missile crisis about the ease with which mutual superpower hostility could spill over into other parts of 67 68 Cultures of Order the world, and with what dire consequences, could not be missed in Germany. Such was Adenauer’s stature and so successful was his strategy of institutional linkage with Western Europe, however, that his successor could contemplate only “little steps” to break the ice with Germany’s Eastern neighbors.2 Ludwig Erhard, German Chancellor from 1963 to 1966, did establish new trade missions, promote slightly more liberal economic policies toward the East, and lessen travel restrictions between East and West Berlin. Ultimately, however, his cautious policies may have done as much to delay a new Ostpolitik as to encourage it.3 Erhard’s caution must, no doubt, be understood in the context of a decade that, as Thomas Banchoff has pointed out, seemed to offer “no self-evident way to respond to the policy challenges posed by shifts from cold war to détente.”4 After the Suez Crisis, France was pursuing a new policy of independence under de Gaulle and a nuclear strategy that pointedly refused to discriminate between East and West (une défense tous azimuths). In Germany, which remained an occupied power, a similarly unilateral strategy was clearly impossible. Even a tentative opening to the East seemed to risk alienating the United States. In short, there was no obvious way to reconcile the dangers posed by the Cold War to Germany with a policy that was likely both to ameliorate these dangers and, at the same time, to win acceptance from Germany’s key allies. Despite the international pressures and the legacy of Germany’s own earlier Westpolitik, however, German politicians nevertheless found ways to pursue an opening to the East. The Grand Coalition (1966– 1969) brought Kurt Georg Kiesinger to power as the third CDU chancellor along with an SPD vice-chancellor and foreign minister, Willy Brandt. This coalition paved the way for Ostpolitik, although not, as this chapter will seek to show, simply as a result of the German left’s increasing power. The Grand Coalition inaugurated another period of intense debate within Germany over foreign policy and international order. The result of this debate was a change in German policy. The change in policy, however, was the result of a deeper continuity. The commissive-institutional strategy continued to prevail over the assertive-rights strategy in Germany, and it is this continuity that informed Ostpolitik...

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