Abstract
W tEST GERMANY'S Ostpolitik has a long heritage. In the years following the Second World War Chancellor Adenauer-like Gustav Stresemann, after the First World War-sought to rectify German war guilt and restore national dignity through rehabilitation and integration with the West, while keeping German options open in the East. Traditionally, Germans have concluded that the best barometer of their stature as a world power has not been colonial expansion, but rather the exercise of control or hegemony in Eastern Europe. The West represented the main threat. For one thousand years, French policy was dedicated to the indefinite division of the Germans. Eastern Europe was the region for political and economic opportunities. For Adenauer, gaining respectability in the West by demonstrating responsibility was not only necessary for recovering national prestige and dignity, it was the only conceivable means for achieving reunification on Bonn's terms of self-determination and the establishment of common institutions. Bonn could deal with the Soviet Union only from a position of strength, which required unqualified integration into Western institutions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 demonstrated that Adenauer's policy of inflexibility, strength, and 'maintained tensions' had failed to achieve even its minimal goals. Adenauer had linked reunification with the restoration of 'lost territories', which succeeded in unifying the East Europeans and the Russians behind the East German demands for international recognition as a viable and independent state. The construction of the Wall convinced West Germans of the need to reappraise the Federal Republic's general Eastern policy. Over several years, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) gradually realised that a modified stand toward East Germany (GDR) might provide both political leverage against the entrenched Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and improve the lot of the East German citizens. The SPD's Ostpolitik postulated that West Germany could
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