German Foreign Trade Policy Towards the East in the Light of Recent Research

Abstract

Robert Mark Spaulding, Osthandel und Ostpolitik. German Foreign Trade Policies in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer (Oxford and Providence: Berghahn, 1997), 546 pp., £60, ISBN 1–57181–039–0.

Volker R. Berghahn, ed., Quest for Economic Empire. European Strategies of German Big Business in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and Providence: Berghahn, 1996), 224 pp., £35:00 (hb), £16.50 (pb), ISBN 1–57181–027–7.

Meung-Hoan Hoh, Westintegration versus Osthandel. Politik und Wirtschaft in den Ost-West-Beziehungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1949–1958, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), ISBN 3–631–49003–8.

Friedrich von Heyl, Der innerdeutsche Handel um Eisen- und Stahl, 1945–1972. Deutsch-deutsche Beziehungen im Kalten Krieg. (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997), DM 64, ISBN 3–412–03897–0.

Research into the history of foreign trade relations languishes in a grey area between the history of foreign policy and economic history. This is particularly true of German trade relations with eastern Europe during the Cold War, even though this was precisely the time when the topic was the focal point of public interest. Before Chancellor Willy Brandt and Foreign Minister Walter Scheel introduced their New Ostpolitik, the Federal Republic's trade with the East (Osthandel) was one of the most controversial issues in foreign policy. The reasons for this were, in no small measure, historical, closely tied up with the ‘ghost of Rapallo’ and the myth of red trade. The treaty concluded between the German empire and Soviet Russia at the economic conference of Genoa in 1922 created the fatal impression that this was a case of two underdogs in the international community getting together to undermine the status quo established by the Treaty of Versailles. From then on, whenever the ‘ghost of Rapallo’ was invoked what was meant was that Germany could be sure of Soviet support for the implementation of its revisionist claims in the East, and thus have greater room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis the West.