Word: zheleznovodsk
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Helmut Kohl deserves credit for what is happening in Germany, but not quite as much as his occasionally bumptious demeanor suggests. He's in some danger of becoming the Goodyear blimp of the international diplomatic circuit, soaring above everyone from Houston to Zheleznovodsk, inflated with the self- satisfaction of a politician on a roll. He is that, of course, but he ought to be more. And less. The world is watching not because Kohl is leading his Christian Democratic Union into an election later this year but because his country is triumphing over two of the great curses of this...
...foothills and wanted "to develop our relations further upward." After two days of talks, their cordiality escalated to outright chumminess. They emerged from a resort lodge in sweaters and open-necked shirts to stroll bantering through the fields and flowers of the Russian countryside. At the resort spa of Zheleznovodsk, they jubilantly announced that they had swept aside the last significant obstacles to uniting Germany by the end of the year. Yes, Gorbachev said, a unified Germany could join NATO if it liked. And yes, said Kohl, Germany would agree to ways to allay Moscow's fears about the future...
Though the four World War II victors -- the U.S., Soviet Union, Britain and France -- must still formally sign off on unification this fall, the Zheleznovodsk agreement caps nine months of dizzying change in Europe and signals the beginning of a fresh era. As Gorbachev put it, "We are leaving one epoch in international relations and entering another." Added Kohl: "The future has begun...
...deals to come between Bonn and Moscow presents Kohl with a different diplomatic challenge: how to assure his allies in Europe that the German powerhouse, the largest economy in the European Community, is not seeking to control Eastern Europe. Even before he arrived home, Kohl was asked if the Zheleznovodsk agreement was a new Rapallo -- a reference to the 1922 treaty between the communist U.S.S.R. and the Weimar Republic that paved the way for German rearmament after World War I. The comparison is "wholly off," said Kohl, because "the reunified Germany is part of NATO and the European Community...
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