Word: ostpolitiking
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...lengthy, tension-ridden debate over Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik has faced West Germany's Christian Democratic Union with an unhappy dilemma. For nearly two years they have been saying that they would never vote for the Treaties of Moscow and Warsaw, which are essential to Brandt's hopes of easing tensions with Bonn's Communist neighbors. Now that the treaties have been put forward for ratification, however, the C.D.U. does not want to bear the onus of killing them, since the pacts have become the keys to further progress in East-West détente...
...Rainer Barzel two weeks ago agreed to a government proposal that appeared to be a reasonable compromise: a joint interpretation of treaties by the four parliamentary parties that would overcome the objections of the C.D.U. and those of its Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union. Rather than see his Ostpolitik go down to almost certain defeat, Brandt postponed the vote for a week to enable all sides to work out a joint declaration...
...crisis centered on the treaties of Moscow and Warsaw, which Brandt negotiated in 1970 as part of his famed Ostpolitik. The treaties have become keystones to further progress in East-West detente; other major diplomatic initiatives, including the Big Four agreement that seeks to eliminate Berlin as a source of cold war tensions, will go into effect only after the ratification of those two pacts...
What excited West Germans was their country's worst political crisis in more than two decades-one that threatened to bring down the 2½-year-old coalition government of Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt. The crisis also endangered the Chancellor's Ostpolitik, the innovative foreign policy through which Brandt hopes to improve West Germany's relations with its Communist neighbors by renouncing Bonn's claims to onetime German territories, which were seized by Poland and Russia after World...
Brandt would undoubtedly fight the ensuing national election campaign on the issue of Ostpolitik. Since polls show a slim majority of West Germans in favor of the treaties, the Chancellor could be returned with an enlarged majority, and push the treaties through. But West Germans are also deeply worried about rising prices and unemployment, and Barzel could win on the issue of economic policy alone. That would leave the Christian Democratic leader in the awkward position of trying to put together his own version of Ostpolitik in the face of open anger on the part of the Soviet Union...