Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949-1969 (The New Cold War History)
William Glenn Gray
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 1469614715
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Using newly available material from both sides of the Iron Curtain, William Glenn Gray explores West Germany's efforts to prevent international acceptance of East Germany as a legitimate state following World War II.
Unwilling to accept the division of their country, West German leaders regarded the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as an illegitimate upstart--a puppet of the occupying Soviet forces. Together with France, Britain, and the United States, West Germany applied political and financial pressure around the globe to ensure that the GDR remain unrecognized by all countries outside the communist camp. Proclamations of ideological solidarity and narrowly targeted bursts of aid gave the GDR momentary leverage in such diverse countries as Egypt, Iraq, Ghana, and Indonesia; yet West Germany's intimidation tactics, coupled with its vastly superior economic resources, blocked any decisive East German breakthrough.
Gray argues that Bonn's isolation campaign was dropped not for want of success, but as a result of changes in West German priorities as the struggle against East Germany came to hamper efforts at reconciliation with Israel, Poland, and Yugoslavia--all countries of special relevance to Germany's recent past. Interest in a morally grounded diplomacy, together with the growing conviction that the GDR could no longer be ignored, led to the abandonment of Bonn's effective but outdated efforts to hinder worldwide recognition of the East German regime.
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Afford to be complacent about this lack of international credibility, for it was one facet of a more profound crisis of legitimacy hovering over the gdr. In June 1953, workers’ riots throughout eastern Germany had thrown into sharp relief the sed’s unpopularity among the very class it was supposed to represent. Under the right circumstances, Stalin’s successors in Moscow might have been willing to dispose of the troublesome gdr altogether, but they could not pursue any German policy successfully.
East German advances. Yet Grewe’s comments did not lend themselves to pithy summarization; the West German press tended to assume that Adenauer’s government would automatically break relations with any country that recognized the gdr.∞≠∏ State Secretary Hallstein actively encouraged such oversimplifications. In several background conversations with the press in 1955 and 1956, he characterized Bonn’s policy as severe and uncompromising.∞≠π Hallstein thus used the media in his quest to convey an.
Sékou Touré within two to three days.∞∑∞ Brentano and Scherpenberg softened this time limit, however, lest the ultimatum cast West Germany in an unsympathetic light.∞∑≤ Anticipating a break between the Federal Republic and Guinea, the sed drafted a press release criticizing Bonn’s bullying behavior; clearly the Adenauer government was ‘‘not prepared to respect the independence of other states’’ in reaching foreign policy decisions.∞∑≥ In the meantime, East German functionaries fanned out through.
The developing world was not so exalted after all. Even as Bonn’s aid program was getting under way in 1960–61, the states of Africa and the Middle East were dividing into mutually antagonistic groupings. This reflected the strain of two major conflicts, the civil war in Congo and the Algerian war of independence against France.≥π The more radical countries, such as Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, tended to support Soviet or Chinese positions on Cold War questions, and they saw little reason to make an.
Efforts to infiltrate labor unions in the Ruhr industrial district.Ω All of this ensured that Kurt Schumacher, however blistering in his assessment of Adenauer, would reserve his sharpest barbs for the newly established sed administration. Among the broader public, too, the government in East Berlin had little credibility. Of those Germans in the American Zone who had heard of the gdr in November 1949, fully 76 percent regarded it as a tool of the Soviet authorities in Germany.∞≠ Konrad Adenauer.