Word: germanize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crucial respect, the Malta meeting did not represent the inauguration of a new world order at all but a holding action on behalf of the old one. George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev have a shared interest in slowing down the rush of events, particularly the juggernaut of German reunification. Consummate Atlanticist that he is, Bush is sensitive to West European anxiety about the disproportionate strength of a single Germany...
...there is more to the famous and no longer hypothetical "German question" than that. Neither the population nor the size of a united Germany would necessarily result in instability; it is not as though the two countries would attain critical mass if they were fused. Rather, the X factor in the debate, largely unmentionable among statesmen but deeply felt among their constituents, concerns the crimes and punishment of the German nation. Many Europeans, including most Soviets, would prefer to let the next generation, or even the one after that, test fully the proposition that 70 years of German expansionism, culminating...
...Bush had to choose between the success of Gorbachev's program to reform the Soviet Union and the fulfillment of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's plan to create a German "federation," the President would almost certainly pick perestroika, since that is what is driving the new Soviet foreign policy. On this issue, Malta was an exercise in private commiseration and public obfuscation. With Bush at his side at their joint press conference, Gorbachev said that "history" should be allowed to determine the status of the two Germanys, and he warned against any "artificial acceleration" of the "process of change...
...whole matter is heavy with irony. First Germany brought World War II to Europe. Then its defeat led to 44 years of postwar tension. Now events in that same nation are complicating the effort to end the division of the Continent as a whole. Because of the German question, the world is stuck in the pre- post-postwar era, which is neither a felicitous phrase nor a welcome state of affairs...
...variety of sources: an Argentine businessman who dodges currency-control laws to get his savings out of the country; a multinational corporation that seeks to "minimize" its tax burden by dumping its profits in tax-free havens; a South African investor who wants to avoid economic sanctions; an East German Communist leader who stashed a personal nest egg in Swiss bank accounts; or even the CIA and KGB when they need to finance espionage or covert activities overseas...