Word: realpolitik
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Congress of Vienna gave Poland nominal independence, but after a period of "watchful waiting" the Russians were back again with a program of wholesale executions and Russification. Napoleon had used Poland ("my second Polish war") as an excuse to attack Russia, but it was Otto von Bismarck, master of Realpolitik, who saw Poland's festering hatred of Russia as a means of keeping the great eastern power in bounds. "If one helped the Poles a little, they could rise in revolt and win their freedom," he whispered to Italy's Premier Crispi...
...brilliant successes of [Mendes-France's] improvised diplomacy are well known. France has returned to a policy of national Realpolitik on the prewar model, with opportunism its only principle and immediate national advantage its only aim. For those other European nations that have survived the last great attempt at this sort of Realpolitik in the Hitler years, nothing remains except to follow France more or less unwillingly along this path. Perhaps anything is better than the continuation of a mendacious abnegation of responsibility. The "new style" of French diplomacy has the advantage of honesty. Europe has lost nothing...
...putting integration ahead of unification, he welcomed a Socialist resolution: that German unity is "the highest goal of German policy." To prove his loyalty to the goal, he promised to urge the West to arrange free, all-German elections. But Adenauer's best defense was his Realpolitik. Instead of arguing for Western integration for its own sake, he explained that the best way to get bigger & better concessions out of the Russians is to snuggle up close to the West...