Word: ostpolitik
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...President Nicolai Ceauşescu, Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Of all the Pope's many diplomatic initiatives, including a long and fruitless attempt to mediate peace in VietNam and similarly frustrating efforts in Biafra, Northern Ireland and the Middle East, his Ostpolitik was the most successful. His overtures to the Communist world helped to win the church such concessions as limited freedom to teach, nominations of new bishops and permission for public festivals. They also settled such ancient controversies as the 18-year isolation of Hungary's Cardinal Mindszenty...
...declared that the Communists "retain their interest in a continued improvement of relations." Last week West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt stated soothingly that he felt the East German leadership "intends to continue the process of relaxation of tensions." In fact, there are good reasons for both sides to pursue Ostpolitik, Germany's form of detente. East Germany's stake in good relations involves $1.2 billion in loans from Bonn and exports to West Germany that totalled $939 million in the first half of last year. For West Germany, Ostpolitik has meant preserving the security of geographically isolated West...
...scandal moved Brandt to resign, but it also spelled an end to Mischa's unbridled successes. Before 1974, West German counterspies had been "lackadaisical," recalls Ray Cline, the CIA's former deputy director for intelligence and agency station chief in Bonn in the late 1960s. Thanks to Ostpolitik, the policy of rapprochement with East Germany, Bonn was reluctant to get too tough. But Cline believes the West Germans, "probably because of shock over the Communists' actually infiltrating Brandt's personal staff, have begun to draw the line on the amount of infiltration they will tolerate...
...France and the Soviet Union find difficult to accept (see, for example, Michel Debre's recent article in Le Monde, "Is Germany Becoming a Danger Again?"). More assertive than his predecessors, Willy Brandt turned his back on twenty-five years of German guilt-ridden subservience, and pursued a vigorous Ostpolitik designed to reconcile West Germany with its Eastern neighbors and provide West German diplomacy with a greater freedom of maneuver. Despite European fears that Brandt was about to engineer another Rapallo, and bitter domestic criticism that the Chancellor was conceding too much to the Soviets, Brandt was succesful in liquidating...
...tension between East and West. Henry Kissinger deliberately avoided using the word for several years because he felt it smacked of sentimentality (the literal French meaning of detente is relaxation or easing) and was also associated with West German Prime Minister Willy Brandt's opening-to-the-East Ostpolitik, to which Kissinger was cool...