Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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GENEVA, May 26--The Big Four foreign ministers agreed today to plunge into secret bargaining on Berlin and a summit meeting when they resume their conference here Friday. Then they flew off to Washington for the funeral of John Foster Dulles...
...secret talks will pivot around more limited objectives--a stopgap agreement in the explosive Berlin crisis and an agreement for a parley at the summit...
...Soviet proposal is a good deal simpler than the Western plan, and hence it is easier to dismiss. Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko has asked that the Big Four sign separate peace treaties with the "two German states" and then undertake the joint administration of West Berlin as a "free city." Western acceptance of this plan means recognition of East Germany, abandonment of the traditional policy of re-unification through free elections, and admission that while the East Germans have a right to East Berlin as their "capital" West Berlin must remain under political tutelage--with a new and rather...
Admittedly, even all these concessions, though extremely unpleasant, do not imply immediate surrender of any essentials. The trouble with this proposal is that it doesn't solve anything: West Berlin would be nominally free, but it would still be subject to extreme pressure from the outside; West Germany might be in NATO, but East Germany would remain in the War-saw Pact. The current crisis has taught the West that any negotiated settlement cannot leave Germany divided and Berlin a vulnerble island...
With this consideration in mind, the West has proposed a complicated four-step plan, starting with unification of Berlin by free elections under four-power supervision and ending, rather irrelevantly, with provisions for armaments reductions and European security. The most interesting feature of the Western plan is the section of German re-unification. West Germany is much larger than its Eastern counterpart, yet Soviet proposals for re-unification have always been based on the idea of "federation," with the "two Germanies" being treated as two equal states effecting a merger. The West, for its part, has insisted on immediate nationwide...