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106 Ostpolitik caused friction on a number of different levels: it sparked tensions within Willy Brandt’s Social Democratic Party, parliament, and the coalition cabinet, between West Germany and the Western allies, and even within the Eastern bloc. It is the latter two conflicts that this chapter will discuss, arranging documents from various national archives around nine distinct but interconnected arguments. Inevitably, such a vue d’ensemble has to start with an explanation of the goals and tactics underlying the new Eastern policy as devised during Brandt’s time as foreign minister of the “Grand Coalition” from December 1966 to September 1969 and put into practice during his chancellorship of the social-liberal coalition until 1974 and then onward to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Helsinki on 1 August 1975. One might compare the “Neue Ostpolitik” of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr with a coin: the currency, or ultimate goal, imprinted on it is called “unification.” In order to avoid any reminiscence of the original borders of the vanished Reich, Brandt refused to speak about “reunification,” preferring the “unification” or “Zusammenwachsen ” (growing closer) of the two existing German states. The two sides of the coin represent two long-term strategies to achieve unification. Undermining Communism by exposing the people under its rule to Western values and liberties was one side of the coin. But the eventual breakdown of Communism itself would not guarantee German unification. Thus, the other side of the coin was therefore to devise an all-European security system, taking care of the legitimate security concerns of all nations (including the United States and the Soviet Union) concerned by a prospective unification of the two German states. This, and only this, it was argued at the time, could possibly ease the way to unification after an eventual 7 Ostpolitik as a Source of Intrabloc Tensions Oliver Bange Ostpolitik as a source of intrabloc tensions 107 collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe. Of course, with a secret agenda like this, Brandt and Bahr had to play their cards very close to their chests. For this reason, some of the best evidence for this double-sided strategy is found not in the German archives (for obvious domestic and party political reasons) but in the archives of other Western allies, particularly in Washington and Paris, where this strategy had to be “sold” and defended, and those in Eastern Europe, where the success of the strategy—once it was recognized—became a reason for great concern. The following represents an overview and summary of the arguments deriving from the multiarchival, international research undertaken for the “Ostpolitik and Détente” project at the University of Mannheim.1 The “New Ostpolitik” was built upon American and French strategies that were instituted from 1960–61 onward, and particularly on the concept of “ideological competition ” first developed in the United States by Secretary of State Dean Rusk during the Kennedy years, then refined by the Johnson administration after 1964. As a strategic game plan, Ostpolitik was an intelligent, early reaction to the new approaches developed under Charles de Gaulle and John F. Kennedy. Seen from Berlin, but not only from Berlin, these approaches offered real alternatives to the prioritization of “Westindung” over reunification by the then Konrad Adenauer government. Within this new strategy, two aspects can be clearly distinguished: one is the search for the holy grail (i.e., a unified Germany) in a new European security system (proposed by de Gaulle as early as 1959–60 and pursued by him with concrete policies from 1961–62); the other is the idea of an intensive ideological struggle through, above, or under the Iron Curtain, conceived perhaps by Kennedy or, much more probably, by the team around Dean Rusk back in 1961.2 In the years following the catastrophic summit between Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961,3 Rusk kept on talking to Brandt about the West’s ideological superiority, arguing that it would be better to look forward to ideological “competition” than to shy away from it.4 The most appropriate weapons for that struggle would be human contacts of all sorts, culture, and, above all, the exchange of information. It was only under Johnson that the loose and largely unconnected ideas of Kennedy’s men were finally cast into a coherent strategy. Already in January 1964 this strategy became, at least internally, the declared foundation of American policy toward the Eastern bloc. The euphemism used by...

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