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All Quiet on the German Front? Germany in the Post‐Detente Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Extract

WHEN ALL ABOUT THEM IN EASTERN EUROPE WERE LOSING their heads, the Russians could always count on the East Germans. Now nobody, least of all the Russians, seems so sure. Whether or not East Germany's leader, Erich Honecker, visits West Germany this autumn as planned, the German question is back on the political agenda of both East and West. The sharp battle-by-reprint, during the summer of 1984, in the party newspapers of East Germany and the Soviet Union over the permissible degree of contact between the East German regime and the West German government has revealed in public a remarkable rift within the Warsaw Pact over one of the most sensitive issues in post-war Soviet foreign policy: strategy towards Germany.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1984

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References

1 The Economist, 4 August 1984.

3 For a history and analysis of the problem in East German‐Soviet relations, see Moreton, N. E., East Germany and the Warsaw Alliance, Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press. 1978.Google Scholar

4 For the most recent argument on this point see Dean, Jonathan, ‘How to lose Germany’, Foreign Policy, No. 55, Summer 1984, p. 58.Google Scholar

5 International Herald Tribune, 1 August 1984.

6 For an examination of wider Soviet strategy towards Germany see, Moreton, Edwina, ‘The German Factor’, in Moreton, Edwina and Segal, Gerald (eds), Soviet Strategy Toward Western Europe, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1984.Google Scholar

7 J. Dean, op. cit, p. 66.