Word: western
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...even within the prescribed quotas for military manpower and non-nuclear weaponry, West Germany also built a standing army of 489,000?the largest, best-equipped and most disciplined in Western Europe and second only to the U.S. and Turkey in the NATO alliance. That military machine faces an enduring dilemma: it has to be strong enough for the defense of Central Europe, but never so strong as to provoke the Soviet Union's obsessive fear of a renascent, militaristic West Germany. "We must be cautious," says Defense Minister Hans Apel. "Neither in Eastern nor Western Europe can we create...
Schmidt originally planned to be an architect. Instead, in 1937 at the age of 18, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and served with an antiaircraft unit that fought on both the Eastern and Western fronts. After being commissioned a first lieutenant, he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and held as a prisoner of war for six months in Belgium. Earlier, he had joined the Hitler Youth, as did every other boy in his school. His submissive stance is said to have privately troubled Schmidt in later years. Returning after the war to the devastation of Hamburg...
Schmidt is almost as popular in other Western European countries as at home. Nonetheless, there is a lingering fear behind lots of closed government doors that the Chancellor just might be, or become, too strong; that the goblins of West Germany's past could emerge to influence its Continental behavior. Other Europeans still have deep memories of the Germany of the past and, fairly or not, wonder if the new West Germany ever acts entirely in the present...
...there a trend toward political conservatism in the Western world...
...definitely do not sense such a trend. If such a trend existed, Jimmy Carter would not have been elected President, for instance. What I do sense is the fact that some Western industrial democracies are to some degree restless nowadays, which is only natural given the fact that almost all of them are under deep impact of the world economic crisis. It is only natural that the electorate in the first place holds its own government to be responsible for economic evils. Where you have conservative governments, this can lead to change toward a more liberal or progressive administration instead...