Uncertainties of Security Policy

Abstract

German unification has been but one — albeit one of the most significant — of the dramatic and largely unexpected changes which have fundamentally transformed the security environment in Europe in recent years. For over forty years, Europe was divided by an Iron Curtain which ran through the heart of Germany and Berlin. The Cold War produced the largest concentration of conventional and nuclear forces in Central Europe the world had ever seen. The FRG and the GDR became integral parts of the two military-political alliance systems that confronted each other across a palisade of tanks, missiles and barbed wire. In this manichaean world, the security policy of the Federal Republic was relatively straightforward: full integration into the NATO alliance, along with a close strategic and political relationship with both Washington and Paris. From the late 1960s onwards, this Westintegration was accompanied by a search for a Europaische Friedensordnung (a ‘European Peace order’) in which, it was hoped, Germany would be able to achieve its national self-determination in freedom and peace.