Willy Brandt's Eastern Policy

Worldview ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
Donald Brandon

Five years ago West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder launched a tentative “Opening to the East” which marked a break with Konrad Adenauer's relatively rigid approach to, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The “Grand Conbtion” of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats continued the experiment from 1966-1969. The Hallstein Doctrine—no diplomatic relations with any country which had such relations with East Germany (the Soviet Union being the sole exception)—was abandoned. West Germany established diplomatic relations with the maverick Rumanian regime, and re-established relations with Tito's Yugoslavia. Several trade and cultural exchange agreements were entered into with East European Communist nations.

Author(s):  
Tomasz Arciszewski

Abstract The paper provides a brief review of general tendencies and interesting developments in the area of engineering design theory and methodology in Eastern Europe. This review is limited to East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Particular attention was given to the design research environments in individual countries, and to developed design theories and methods in the context of these environments.


Author(s):  
K. Demberel ◽  

The article deals with the issue of Mongolia's foreign policy during the Cold War. This period is divided into two parts. The first period, 1945-1960s, is a period of conflict between two systems: socialism and capitalism. In this first period of the Cold War Mongolia managed to establish diplomatic relations with socialist countries of Eastern Europe, as the “system allowed”. The second period, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, is the period of the conflict of the socialist system, the period of the Soviet-Chinese confrontation. During this period Mongolia's foreign policy changed dramatically and focused on the Soviet Union. This was due to the Soviet investment «boom» that began in 1960s and the entry of Soviet troops on the territory of Mongolia in 1967. The Soviet military intervention into Mongolia was one of the main reasons for cooling the Soviet-Chinese relations. And military withdrawal contributed to the improvement of Soviet-Chinese relations until the mid-1980s and one of the conditions for improving relations with their neighbors. The internal systemic conflict had a serious impact on Mongolia's foreign policy over those years.


Slavic Review ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-83
Author(s):  
Harvey L. Dyck

In May 1927 Sir Austen Chamberlain precipitated the first great international crisis of the post-Locarno period by denouncing the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement and severing Britain's diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Although Germany was not directly involved, the dispute nevertheless was to have a profoundly disturbing effect on German-Soviet relations. By raising the possibility of a wide-ranging diplomatic, economic, and perhaps even military confrontation between London and Moscow, it strained Germany's diplomatic system, which rested on the Locarno Pact (1925) and the Treaty of Berlin (1926). Thus it posed some fundamental questions for the German Foreign Ministry: Were the policies associated with those agreements compatible with each other only in fair weather? Did Germany have the freedom to remain neutral if the dispute should deepen? In short, was it still realistic to believe that Germany could maintain equally intimate ties with London and Moscow? Because Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann had previously denned a balancing role as the sine qua non of Germany's international revival, the imbroglio soon led to a great debate in the Wilhelmstrasse. The issue on which it turned was, as a leading participant observed, “whether Germany's ties with Russia are worth enough to our present and future political interests so that it pays to assume the political expenses and risks involved in maintaining them.”


2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Kramer

This is the concluding part of a three-part article that discusses the transformation of Soviet-East European relations in the late 1980s and the impact of the sweeping changes in Eastern Europe on the Soviet Union. This final segment is divided into two main parts: First, it provides an extended analysis of the bitter public debate that erupted in the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991 about the “loss” of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. The debate roiled the Soviet political system and fueled the hardline backlash against Mikhail Gorbachev. Second, this part of the article offers a concluding section that highlights the theoretical implications of the article as a whole. The article, as the conclusion shows, sheds light on recent literature concerning the diffusion of political innovations and the external context of democratization and political change.


Slavic Review ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan Denitch

The Seventh World Congress of Sociologists in Varna, Bulgaria, held in September 1970, marked a major stage in the development of social science, particularly sociology, in the one-party states of Eastern Europe. Taking place in the most orthodox country of an increasingly diverse bloc, the congress was characterized by the largest and best-organized participation to date of sociologists from Eastern Europe. One country in the area—Albania—did not participate at all; and Yugoslavia, which is probably the country with the most developed social science community and institutions, had a notably small delegation. Yet the fact is that for prestige reasons, if no other, the East European countries and the Soviet Union did their best to show the state of their current development of sociology. This was shown in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Most delegates presented papers.


2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Tudda

This article examines Dwight Eisenhower's and John Foster Dulles's publicly declared goal to achieve the “liberation” of Eastern Europe, a goal that they claimed would replace the Truman administration's “passive” containment policy.But the evidence shows that Eisenhower and Dulles were unwilling to risk war with the Soviet Union and believed that liberation, if actually pursued, would induce the Soviet Union to react violently to perceived threats in Eastern Europe. Hence, in top-secret meetings and conversations, Eisenhower and Dulles rejected military liberation, despite their public pronouncements. Instead, they secretly pursued a tricky, risky, and long-term strategy of radio broadcasts and covert action designed to erode, rather than overthrow, Soviet power in Eastern Europe. In public, they continued to embrace liberation policy even when confronted with testimony from U.S. allies that the rhetorical diplomacy of liberation had not worked. This reliance on rhetoric failed to deter the Soviet Union from quashing rebellions in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956. If anything, the Eisenhower administration's rhetorical liberation policy may have encouraged, at least to some degree, these revolts.


2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 178-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Kramer

The largely peaceful collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 reflected the profound changes that Mikhail Gorbachev had carried out in Soviet foreign policy. Successful though the process was in Eastern Europe, it had destabilizing repercussions within the Soviet Union. The effects were both direct and indirect. The first part of this two-part article looks at Gorbachev's policy toward Eastern Europe, the collapse of Communism in the region, and the direct “spillover” from Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union. The second part of the article, to be published in the next issue of the journal, discusses the indirect spillover into the Soviet Union and the fierce debate that emerged within the Soviet political elite about the “loss” of the Eastern bloc—a debate that helped spur the leaders of the attempted hardline coup d'état in August 1991.


Author(s):  
Joseph Heller

The new regime in the Kremlin did not bode well for Israel, as Brezhnev and Kosygin continued to condemn Israel as agent of American imperialism. They gave official backing to the new radical regime in Damascus, and supported the PLO’s terrorist activities. In response Israel increased its activities for Soviet Jewry. The establishment of diplomatic relations between West Germany and Israel was another cause for condemning Israel as participating in the anti-soviet campaign, and the Soviet press equated Zionism and Nazism. Israel admitted it was trapped between its demographic need for the emigration of Soviet Jews and its dependence on the west. The visit to the Soviet Union of both Egyptian and Syrian heads of states, and the public Soviet support for their regimes, was ominous. A year before the Six Day War the Kremlin accused Israel of concentrating troops on the border to topple the Syrian regime.


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