3 - Ostpolitik: Détente German-Style and Adapting to America

Summary

Translated by Richard Sharp

ACTIVELY ADAPTING TO AMERICAN DÉ#x00e9;TENTE POLICY

Germany's new Ostpolitik and its most important concrete expression, the Moscow and Warsaw treaties, were and still are seen as evidence of an independent policy of an economically and politically strengthened Federal Republic. At first glance, and up to a point, this view is accurate. On closer inspection, however, it is apparent that the new Ostpolitik was equally a reflection of dependence on Western policy, particularly the policy of the United States. Ostpolitik was in effect American détente policy translated into German.

Even the initial concepts underlying West Germany's new Ostpolitik and Deutschland-politik (policy on the German question) reflected American Ostpolitik, President John F. Kennedy's “strategy of peace.” In a programmatic address to Evangelical Academy in Tutzing on July 15, 1963, Egon Bahr, the intellectual progenitor and later the chief architect of West German Ostpolitik, argued that the new concept of “change through rapprochement” would “fit seamlessly into the Western concept of the strategy of peace,” and represented the “transfer of [Kennedy's] strategy of peace to Germany”:

The change in East-West relations that the United States hopes to bring about serves the purpose of surmounting the status quo, by leaving the status quo unchanged for the time being. This may sound paradoxical, but it does open up future prospects, whereas the existing policy of exerting pressure and counter-pressure has merely led to the rigidity of the status quo. Confidence in the fact that our world is the better world, a world stronger (in a peaceful sense of the word), and a world that will prevail, makes it possible to contemplate an attempt to open our own minds and those of our opponents, and to set aside previous notions of liberation.