Word: ostpolitik
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...later as Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister in the Grand Coalition, Brandt performed admirably. In Berlin, he coolly faced down the Soviets during the 1959 crisis, when Nikita Khrushchev threatened the city's links to the West. As Bonn's foreign policy expert since 1966, he began an Ostpolitik diplomacy, seeking new amity with the East that his government is certain to emphasize with new vigor...
Clever Timing. In the days before the Czechoslovak crisis, Foreign Minister Willy Brandt held that West Germany should allow the Communists to operate as a legal party if it expected his new Ostpolitik to achieve its goal: establishing normal relations with the East bloc. But at that time, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht stonewalled Brandt's plan by ordering West German Reds to stay underground. Ulbricht feared that the West German diplomatic initiatives would isolate his unpopular satrapy; therefore he wanted to be able to denounce Bonn throughout Eastern Europe by pointing out the Federal Republic's "persecution...
...West Germans hoped that by making friends in Eastern Europe they would create the relaxed atmosphere in which divided Germany might someday be able to unite. At the outset of the Ostpolitik, the mood in Europe was one of detente. The Soviets seemed willing enough to let Charles de Gaulle traipse around the East bloc and talk about bridge building. But it was quite another thing when West German diplomats and industrialists began arriving with the sort of offers that tempted Eastern bloc countries to look suddenly Westward. Rumania asserted its inde pendence from Moscow by trading ambassadors with Bonn...
...divert attention from the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. But the Soviets undoubtedly hope to accomplish more than that. In their view, West Germany represents the chief threat to the status quo in Eastern Europe, and behind much of the Soviet hostility lies the success of West Germany's Ostpolitik. Until two years ago, the West German government refused to have any political dealings with the Communist countries in Eastern Europe, a rigid cold war stance that suited the Krem lin's own aims well. Then in came the Grand Coalition, whose Foreign Minister, Willy Brandt, initiated the radical...
...Soviet attitude toward West Germany conducive to a relaxation of tensions. In a stormy 90-minute conference, Soviet Ambassador Semyon Tsarapkin told Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger that Bonn must cease its new Ostpolitik, which aimed at establishing normal diplomatic and trade relations with the East bloc countries. Any West German initiative toward the East bloc would be regarded by Moscow as an aggressive action, said the Russian, and the West Germans would have to bear the consequences. The warning was especially unnerving, since in recent weeks the Soviets have stressed that the Soviet Union, like the other victorious powers in World...