Did Ostpolitik Work?

In one of his last public speeches, at the Christian Democratic Union party congress in 1966, former West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer delivered a defense of the "policy of strength" that had been the hallmark of his long tenure in office. Arguing by implication against détente and "change by rapprochement," then being advocated by the Social Democratic Party, which would soon be known as the new "Ostpolitik," Adenauer declared that the West must remain armed and vigilant. "We remain convinced," he said, "that Germany must be reunited in peace...I will not give up hope that one day the Soviet Union will realize that the division of Germany and, with it, the division of Europe, is not to its advantage. We must watch to see when the moment comes, and when a time nears, or seems to near, that presents a favorable opportunity, then we must not leave it unused."

That moment came in 1989, when it dawned on Mikhail Gorbachev that his country was no longer capable of maintaining the European status quo. What brought him to that realization? Timothy Garton Ash tells us in his new book that when that question was put to the veteran Soviet diplomat, Valentin Falin, he answered, "Without Ostpolitik, no Gorbachev." But in an interview with the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, Falin also said that the West had arms-raced the Soviets to death. Similarly, former West German chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl and former Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher told the author that they believed that the crucial factor in forcing a revision of Soviet policy was the deployment of the Pershing and cruise missiles, and Kohl added that Gorbachev had told him that he agreed. But former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, in his memoirs in 1989, also claimed Gorbachev's endorsement of his thesis that Ostpolitik was the crucial influence on his new thinking.

This will not be settled definitively until official files have been opened and analyzed by scholars, but until that time Timothy Garton Ash has performed a laudable service by enabling us to make at least a tentative judgment of the claims of the champions of Ostpolitik. On the basis of materials drawn from the papers of Brandt, Schmidt, Egon Bahr and such critics of Ostpolitik as Alois Mertes and Werner Marx, as well as his own intimate knowledge of the countries with which he deals, he has written what he describes as a book "that looks at the West German approach to reducing or overcoming the 'Yalta' division of Germany and Europe-Ostpolitik--in the light of other Western, East European, and Soviet approaches." This work concentrates on the words and deeds of those who were in power between the public proclamation of Ostpolitik in 1969-70 and the unification of Germany in 1989-90, and also on the activities of the Social Democrats when they were in opposition after 1982.

ORIGINS OF OSTPOLITIK

There was, of course, a German Ostpolitik before 1969. Leaving aside Adolf Hitler, who used the term to describe his efforts to create Lebensraum in the east for the Thousand-Year Reich, it must be remembered that Adenauer inaugurated an eastern policy when he went to Moscow in 1955 and signed a treaty that established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and that Gerhard Schroder, foreign minister under Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, sought to promote normalization (a perhaps overused word in the East-West dialogue of the 1970s) by concluding trade agreements throughout Eastern Europe. Kurt Georg Kiesinger, chancellor of the so-called Grand Coalition of the Christian Democratic Union, the Christian Social Union and Social Democratic parties from 1966 to 1969, was also proud of his Ostpolitik, which indeed anticipated certain features of the later policy. It recognized that German reunification could not be an end in itself but must be seen as the product of the overcoming or reducing of the division of Europe. But these early ventures were tentative and abortive, and the Grand Coalition's attempts to establish diplomatic relations with Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria were blocked by the East Germans and Poles with the backing of the Soviet Union.

When we talk about Ostpolitik, therefore, we think automatically of the dramatic initiatives of Brandt. The policies of his government led to the negotiation of the whole complex of Eastern treaties in 1969-70, the dramatic struggle in the West German Bundestag to secure their ratification, and the West German elections of 1972, which were a kind of plebiscite on what was then called the new Ostpolitik. It was distinguished from earlier experiments by the idealistic rhetoric and the flair for theater of its chief spokesman, who captured the imagination of the world, winning the Nobel peace prize in 1971. Its energetic and consistent strategy was to seek German unification by lowering the barriers between East and West and by pursuing a European peace order by way of full recognition of the sovereignty and frontiers of existing East European states, including, paradoxically, the German Democratic Republic.