Ostpolitik

• 1. Introduction

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  Ostpolitik produced its most visible symbol in 1987. That year, East German leader Erich Honecker made an official visit to West Germany. It was the first time any East German head of state had crossed into the West. Two German states that had spent four decades in near-total estrangement were now conducting the routines of normal diplomacy.

  The German word Ostpolitik translates as eastern policy. It names West Germany's effort, beginning in 1969, to normalize relations with the communist governments to its east. For twenty years before that, an unyielding doctrine of non-recognition had defined every foreign-policy decision Bonn made. The architects of Ostpolitik argued that recognition, not isolation, would ultimately do more to change the communist East.

  How that argument was made, how it survived a nearly fatal political crisis, and why it outlasted its architects are the threads this documentary follows. Willy Brandt, the man most identified with the policy, won the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

• 2. The Hallstein Doctrine

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  In 1957, the Federal Republic of Germany broke diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia because Belgrade had welcomed an East German ambassador. This was the first public application of the Hallstein Doctrine. Under that policy, West Germany would sever relations with any state that formally recognized East Germany. The doctrine rested on a specific legal claim: West Germany held that it was the only democratically legitimate government of the entire German nation. To recognize East Germany was to recognize a rival claim to that status.

  Christian Democratic governments under Konrad Adenauer and his successors upheld this position without compromise from 1949 through 1969. East Germany remained diplomatically cut off from much of the Western world. But the doctrine carried a structural weakness that revealed itself with each passing year. When West Germany established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1965, a bloc of Arab states responded by establishing ties with East Germany instead. The instrument designed to isolate East Germany had begun to isolate West Germany.

  Henry Kissinger was among those who urged Bonn to adopt a more flexible posture, arguing by the late 1960s that the rigid stance was harming American interests as well. Egon Bahr had already been working on an answer to that problem for years.

• 3. Change Through Rapprochement

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  At the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing in 1963, Egon Bahr gave a speech that would become Ostpolitik's intellectual foundation. His central phrase was what he called "change through rapprochement." Bahr was at that point a close ally of Willy Brandt, who was serving as mayor of West Berlin. His argument was direct: refusing to deal with East Germany had not weakened its government, and would not. What might achieve real change was the opposite approach: trade, contact, and sustained engagement. Brandt believed that German-German encounters, however modest, would accumulate into something transformative over time.

  Brandt became the fourth Chancellor of West Germany in 1969 and moved quickly to put the philosophy into practice. He was careful to frame Ostpolitik as consistent with West Germany's existing commitments. The new policy was not a departure from NATO or from the European project; it was an extension of them. France feared that détente would make West Germany more powerful and less predictable. Brandt countered by threatening to withhold German financial contributions to the European Common Agricultural Policy, a pressure that eventually brought France around.

  The first concrete test of the new approach came with the Soviet Union. Of all the Eastern Bloc states, it was the only one with which West Germany already maintained formal diplomatic ties.

• 4. Signing the Treaties

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  On the 12th of August 1970, Brandt signed the Treaty of Moscow with the Soviet Union. The agreement renounced the use of force and formally recognized the existing borders of Europe. Four months later, on the 7th of December 1970, came the Treaty of Warsaw, extending formal recognition to the People's Republic of Poland. The Warsaw treaty specifically confirmed West Germany's acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line, the contested postwar border between Poland and Germany. A Four Power Agreement on Berlin followed on the 3rd of September 1971, and a Transit Agreement on the 17th of December 1971. The Treaty of Prague, signed on the 11th of December 1973, extended the sequence further east. Each agreement was a separate negotiation with a separate government, building a web of recognized relationships one step at a time.

  The Basic Treaty, signed on the 21st of December 1972, established formal relations between the two German states for the first time since partition. Because West Germany had long insisted it was the only legitimate German government, the act of recognizing East Germany carried enormous symbolic weight. Brandt handled this by repeating a formulation he had first used in 1969: the two states in Germany cannot regard one another as foreign countries. The ambassadors exchanged under the treaty were deliberately called "permanent representatives" rather than ambassadors, for political reasons. The most tangible practical result was that both German states were now free to join the United Nations.

  The CDU opposition in the Bundestag had already declared its hostility to the Basic Treaty. The path to ratification would prove far more turbulent than the negotiations themselves had been.

• 5. The Parliamentary Crisis

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  Egon Bahr's private negotiations with Soviet diplomat Valentin Falin had produced a document called the Bahr-Papier. Its unintentional publication gave the CDU opposition concrete evidence that the government had already conceded more than it publicly acknowledged. Members of the governing coalition of Social Democrats and Free Democrats began defecting to the opposition. The coalition's parliamentary majority was in genuine danger.

  By April 1972, opposition leader Rainer Barzel had gathered enough support to call a parliamentary constructive vote of no confidence. He was aiming to become Chancellor. He came two votes short. It later emerged that the East German government had paid two CDU deputies to vote against Barzel's motion.

  New general elections in November 1972 gave the coalition a fresh mandate from voters. On the 11th of May 1973, the Federal Parliament voted to approve the Basic Treaty. The political bitterness that had defined 1972 faded into something close to consensus. CDU leader Helmut Kohl became Chancellor in 1982, after the Free Democrats switched coalition partners. He continued Ostpolitik without reversing any of it. In 1983, Franz Josef Strauß helped secure passage of a Kohl-initiated loan of 3 billion marks to East Germany. Strauß had fought against the Basic Treaty more fiercely than almost anyone in the CDU bloc. By the time Ostpolitik had become West German consensus, it had already been borrowed by other governments. One of them was centered not in Bonn but in Rome.

• 6. A Concept That Traveled

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  Pope Paul VI, who served from 1963 to 1978, pursued his own version of eastern engagement that came to be called Vatican Ostpolitik. His aim was to improve conditions for Christians, and particularly Catholics, living under Soviet-controlled governments. Holy See diplomats, including Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, concluded that the Catholic Church had been too reluctant to engage with communist authorities. The Cuban missile crisis had sharpened this conviction: the risk of nuclear conflict made ideological intransigence seem dangerous rather than principled. The Vatican set about reducing its anti-communist rhetoric and sought to make the sacraments and public church life more accessible behind the Iron Curtain.

  Paul VI received Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko at the Vatican in 1966 and Soviet head of state Nikolai Podgorny in 1967. Conditions for the Church in Poland, Hungary, and Romania improved somewhat during his papacy. South Korea applied a parallel logic in the 1980s. It developed a policy toward North Korea that it named Nordpolitik, in direct allusion to Brandt's approach. The Democratic Party of Korea later built on Nordpolitik with a successor concept called the Sunshine Policy.