The Conclusion looks towards the end of the period in this book's discussion, the end of the 1980s. By the late 1980s,the dynamics of German-German economic competition in the realm of living standards had created an unsustainable situation for the GDR. The high costs of the promised socialist consumer society under Honecker's Unity of Economic and Social Policy program had incurred mounting debts, a strategy that relied on short-term borrowing from the West to patch holes in domestic consumer good production. This entanglement with the Federal Republic opened up the possibility of rethinking the German-German relationship.
Conclusion