The Hidden Hand: Gorbachev And The Collapse Of East Germany
This is a solid and valuable book. Although principally a student of German affairs, Gedmin writes surely about the Soviet end of the story. This allows him to examine the process leading to the collapse in east Germany from both sides, and to trace the links between the two. He has done his research carefully, and he lays the analysis out lucidly and briefly.
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Despite the myriad setbacks of recent months, the U.S.-European alliance is not doomed. But repairing it will require a strategic overhaul no less bold than that which followed the end of the Cold War. The key to today's transatlantic divide is not power but purpose. To revive and revamp the alliance, therefore, the United States and the European Union must forge a new grand strategy capable of meeting the great challenges of the era: expanding the Euro-Atlantic community and stabilizing the greater Middle East.
In the past, Germany has redefined itself as a nation only with dramatic consequences. Today it faces four distinct foreign policy choices: a deepening of the European Community; a widening of the EU and NATO to include Germany's eastern neighbors; a partnership with Russia; or the unilateral taking on of the rights and responsibilities of a world power, with all its financial and military obligations. What should Germany do? Take the eastern route, widening Europe so that it has stable democracies on both its flanks. What will Germany do? Probably nothing. Keeping to its postwar traditions, it will choose not to choose.
Germany, the grandmother of social welfare states, is being forced to take a hard look at its long tradition of generous social benefits for workers (and now for eastern Germans as well). Lengthy paid vacations, guaranteed jobs, cash-heavy unemployment benefits, and labyrinths of regulations are conspiring to set up daunting hurdles to a competitive economy. Starting a new business is laborious; hiring workers is expensive compared with elsewhere; and the country's once-renowned education system is stagnant. Even worse, when German baby boomers are ready to claim their hallowed pensions, the money may not be there. Germans will have to pen a new social contract for the 21st century.

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