Word: ostpolitiking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...promised to campaign there personally. The most Europe-minded of the Continent's leaders, he was also saddened by the insistence of Britain's new Labor government that it would "renegotiate" the terms on which it entered the Common Market. Nor could he draw much comfort from Ostpolitik, the pride of his term. As exchanges between East and West slowed, critics accused Brandt of having given away more to the Communists than he had obtained. Brandt was thus already very close to giving up the chancellorship when Guillaume was arrested...
...still remembered by many as the fighting mayor of West Berlin. More important, though, he was a statesman-realist who was determined to confront and conquer Germany's shameful past, a Europe-minded visionary who preached unity for the Continent, and the Nobel Peace-prizewinning architect of Ostpolitik. Konrad Adenauer cemented West Germany's ties with the West, and Ludwig Erhard fashioned the economic miracle that has made the Deutsche Mark the world's most powerful currency. But it was Brandt who made peace with a hostile and suspicious East by convincing Moscow and its allies that...
Mindszenty had, in fact, become something of a thorn for the Vatican. Both in Vienna and on visits abroad, he took every opportunity to assail Hungary's Communist government, obdurately remaining a stumbling block in the Vatican's policy of Ostpolitik-an attempt to improve relations with the Communist countries of Eastern Europe and normalize church activities there. Mindszenty's forced retirement was clearly seen as a way of speeding up the policy in Hungary, where the church has won concessions with painful slowness. Simultaneously with the Mindszenty announcement, the Vatican made public four new episcopal appointments...
Even Brandt's major achievement, Ostpolitik, which opened West Germany's dialogues with Eastern Europe, is now under criticism as being more theater than substance. Instead of his promised increase in the exchange of people and ideas between the two Germanys, there has been a crackdown by East Germany's Communist rulers on contacts with the West...
Willy Brandt and his government apparently regard completion of the Ostpolitik as their first priority, and are willing to achieve this at any price. This may be fine for the West German main state, but it is a serious blow to the legal status of West Berlin...