Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...media equations of Israel and the apartheid regime of South Africa, have become not only acceptable, but even quite fashionable. When in 1975, despite Western condemnation, the UN General Assembly declared Zionism "a form of racism and of racial discrimination," through an Arab State, Third World, and Soviet bloc majority coalition, Israel's very existence became a crime against international law, while ethical notables such as Libya, Iraq and Syria were still deemed "peace-loving." Moreover, through this process of UN moral inversion, Israel and South Africa could now "legitimately" be equated in the meetings of the Palestine National Coucil...
...million citizens might head West. Without the Wall, West Berlin will bear the brunt of that great rush. But West Berlin's workers already resent the city's shortages of jobs and housing and the heavy concentration of alien guest workers from Turkey and ethnic Germans from the East bloc. Ironically, unless the burden of a new influx is properly shared, the people on the Western side might not be all that happy to see the monstrosity fall...
...maintenance of a security zone around the Soviet heartland. For most of the postwar period, the Soviets pursued those goals by raw military power and ideological control. Both have slipped as a series of military stalemates and the example of failed economies under police-state oppression led restless East bloc nations to turn westward for inspiration...
...Germany, might well result in the kind of safe, neutralized continent Moscow has long sought. The U.S. role would wither, and the Soviet Union, the largest land power, would be free to dominate. Josef Joffe, foreign editor of the Munich newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, argues that decay of the East bloc is not harmful to the Soviet Union as long as it does not proceed more quickly than the loosening of the transatlantic tie in the West. "If Gorbachev can pull this off," he says, "the rewards will be handsome: maximal Soviet influence in Europe, which will more than compensate...
...major changes in the present alliance system, West Germany is set to become the overwhelming economic power of Middle Europe. It is already the most important Western trading partner of all seven Warsaw Pact countries. And the slow disintegration of Comecon, the Moscow-based council that brokers East bloc trade, coupled with Eastern Europe's desperate need for capital and expertise, will open up enormous new economic opportunities that West Germany is poised -- financially, geographically and politically -- to exploit. "Between the two superpowers, there shall be a union of European states from Poland to Portugal, with a united Germany...