Word: east
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Countless citizens harbored continuing doubts that East Germany would really change: many who fled last week said they had no faith Krenz would fulfill his pledges. But change -- radical change, unimaginable change -- is coming to East Germany one way or another, and some think it will not stop until it has redrawn the boundaries of the country. The tide of events is washing away leaders and eroding the ideology of a rigidly orthodox state. Swept away too are many of the old certainties that have given shape and substance to the division of Europe settled at Yalta. Among them...
...reaching program" to change the constitution, the economy and the education system. Yet he defined perestroika merely as something to "make socialism more attractive." For him, Soviet-style reform seemed not so much a welcome formula for change as a last-ditch effort to prop up the East German system before the rift between the party and society grows too wide to bridge. He flatly rejected any suggestion that East Germany might be merging into the West. "The question is not on the table," he said. "Socialism and capitalism have never existed together on German soil...
Even the Soviet Union, perhaps the most obsessed of all by historical security considerations, has fewer options than it used to in dealing with reunification. But the Soviet leader may be less worried about losing East Germany as an ally than anyone thinks if, in giving it up, he manages to pry the U.S. out of Europe. Ever since Stalin, the U.S.S.R. has aimed at the domination of Europe and the 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...
...reunified 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...
...reunification or 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...