Word: ostpolitiking
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Similarly, Brandt's famed Ostpolitik has lately met with obduracy from East European leaders. The Poles are reneging on their agreement to repatriate thousands of ethnic Germans. The Czechs refuse to discuss the establishment of diplomatic relations until Bonn denounces as null and void from the start the 1938 Munich Agreement that ceded part of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich. Hungary, in turn, will not deal with West Germany until it first complies with Prague's demands...
...population out of its dangerous isolation. So was Russia's Leonid Brezhnev; with the Soviets, the Americans signed 15 far-reaching bilateral agreements for trade and cooperation in space, technology and other fields. The Man of the Year in 1970, West Germany's Willy Brandt, continued pursuing his Ostpolitik with the signing of a treaty normalizing relations between the two Germanys, and won a surprisingly generous mandate at the polls from his people for it. But the primary will and intellect behind the emerging alignments resided in the White House...
...could not agree on a signing date that was acceptable to both Brandt and Stoph. It also seemed that the Communist leaders were not eager to welcome Brandt in East Berlin; they probably feared a repetition of the embarrassingly enthusiastic chants of "Willy, Willy!" that greeted the architect of Ostpolitik on his trip to the East German town of Erfurt in 1970. In the wake of Brandt's reelection, his popularity in the East is at a peak-which is why the Stoph regime is not likely to let him visit the German Democratic Republic until next year...
Some time in the weeks before Christmas, Brandt, 59, will make a historic journey to East Berlin to sign a basic treaty, now assured of ratification, normalizing relations between the two states. But the main innovations of Ostpolitik will be largely over...
Despite the high personal stakes involved, the campaign was more of a shadowboxing match than a toe-to-toe political slugfest. Brandt campaigned as if the election were a plebiscite on his Ostpolitik, even though he knew full well that few West Germans seriously opposed it. With skillful if transparent timing, his government-aided by Moscow, which also approved his Ostpolitik and exerted pressure on East Germany to cooperate-produced an agreement with East Berlin eleven days before the vote. Just before this week's vote, Brandt promised that "if I am reelected, I will not hesitate to propose...