C - The Federal Republic of Germany's foreign policy in the early 1980s

Summary

The FRG Government position in the early 1980s was that FRG foreign policy was based on a number of clearly defined basic tenets. Government foreign policy was set out on pp. 5–12 of Aspekte der Friedenspolitik: Argumente zum Doppelbeschluss des Nordatlantischen Bündnisses published in June 1981 by the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government. Those main features implicitly or explicitly relevant to this study are set out below.

In the author's view the original is a somewhat unclear and repetitive document and, therefore, selected and extracted quotations are presented here not in the order they occur in the original, but without doing violence to the sense of the document. Translations of the quotations are the author's own.

Published by the Federal Press and Information Office, Aspekte, is of course, a declaratory document, i.e. it is designed to affect foreign perceptions and domestic perceptions more than it is meant to be an objective analysis. But it is, however, a useful statement of the broad upper and lower limits within which practical policy was conducted and as such the author needs to refer to it and the reader needs to know about it.

The foreign policy starting position of the Federal Republic of Germany is determined in particular by three main factors:

the existence of two German states and the special situation of Berlin, the exposed situation of the Federal Republic of Germany on the boundary position between East and West and with it her special need for security,

the dependence of her economy on industrial export goods and foreign raw material deliveries.