Cold War Politics in Post War Germany

Cold War Politics in Post War Germany PDF Author: D. Patton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0312299613
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
During the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a divided nation on the front-line of the East-West confrontation, came down with pneumonia every time the superpowers sneezed. Due to the East-West confrontation splitting Germany in two, the Cold War remained irrevocably linked to the question of German unity. In The Politics of Foreign Policy in Post-War Germany , David Patton develops the links between Cold War international pressures, and German domestic coalitions. The book examines a politics in uncertain times, with three major shifts in Cold War relations disrupting politics-as-usual in the Federal Republic. In the early 1950s, external pressures led to a wrenching internal debate over rearmament. Twenty years later, the thaw in Cold War tensions set the stage for a fierce domestic showdown over détente with Eastern Europe. In the early 1990s, Chancellor Helmut Kohl took full advantage of the end of the Cold War to implement his controversial unification policy. At each juncture, the Federal Republic experienced intense debates over national unity, the increased stature of the chancellor in the policy-making process, the emergence of new domestic alliances and a sudden foreign policy reversal. Patton's examination of these three periods reveals how the Federal Republic has changed, yet stayed the same, in the post-war era.

Cold War Politics in Post War Germany

Cold War Politics in Post War Germany PDF Author: D. Patton
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312239886
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
During the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a divided nation on the front-line of the East-West confrontation, came down with pneumonia every time the superpowers sneezed. Due to the East-West confrontation splitting Germany in two, the Cold War remained irrevocably linked to the question of German unity. In The Politics of Foreign Policy in Post-War Germany , David Patton develops the links between Cold War international pressures, and German domestic coalitions. The book examines a politics in uncertain times, with three major shifts in Cold War relations disrupting politics-as-usual in the Federal Republic. In the early 1950s, external pressures led to a wrenching internal debate over rearmament. Twenty years later, the thaw in Cold War tensions set the stage for a fierce domestic showdown over détente with Eastern Europe. In the early 1990s, Chancellor Helmut Kohl took full advantage of the end of the Cold War to implement his controversial unification policy. At each juncture, the Federal Republic experienced intense debates over national unity, the increased stature of the chancellor in the policy-making process, the emergence of new domestic alliances and a sudden foreign policy reversal. Patton's examination of these three periods reveals how the Federal Republic has changed, yet stayed the same, in the post-war era.

Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany

Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany PDF Author: Christopher A. Molnar
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253037751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
During Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, more than a hundred thousand asylum seekers from the western Balkans sought refuge in Germany. This was nothing new, however; immigrants from the Balkans have streamed into West Germany in massive numbers throughout the long postwar era. Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany tells the story of how Germans received the many thousands of Yugoslavs who migrated to Germany as political emigres, labor migrants, asylum seekers, and war refugees from 1945 to the mid-1990s. While Yugoslavs made up the second largest immigrant group in the country, their impact has received little critical attention until now. With a particular focus on German policies and attitudes toward immigrants, Christopher Molnar argues that considerations of race played only a marginal role in German attitudes and policies towards Yugoslavs. Rather, the history of Yugoslavs in postwar Germany was most profoundly shaped by the memory of World War II and the shifting Cold War context. Molnar shows how immigration was a key way in which Germany negotiated the meaning and legacy of the war.

Germany's Cold War

Germany's Cold War PDF Author: William Glenn Gray
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862487
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Using newly available material from both sides of the Iron Curtain, William Glenn Gray explores West Germany's efforts to prevent international acceptance of East Germany as a legitimate state following World War II. Unwilling to accept the division of their country, West German leaders regarded the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as an illegitimate upstart--a puppet of the occupying Soviet forces. Together with France, Britain, and the United States, West Germany applied political and financial pressure around the globe to ensure that the GDR remain unrecognized by all countries outside the communist camp. Proclamations of ideological solidarity and narrowly targeted bursts of aid gave the GDR momentary leverage in such diverse countries as Egypt, Iraq, Ghana, and Indonesia; yet West Germany's intimidation tactics, coupled with its vastly superior economic resources, blocked any decisive East German breakthrough. Gray argues that Bonn's isolation campaign was dropped not for want of success, but as a result of changes in West German priorities as the struggle against East Germany came to hamper efforts at reconciliation with Israel, Poland, and Yugoslavia--all countries of special relevance to Germany's recent past. Interest in a morally grounded diplomacy, together with the growing conviction that the GDR could no longer be ignored, led to the abandonment of Bonn's effective but outdated efforts to hinder worldwide recognition of the East German regime.

The German Question and the Origins of the Cold War

The German Question and the Origins of the Cold War PDF Author: Nicolas Lewkowicz
Publisher: Ipoc Press
ISBN: 8895145275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
The book analyses the role of the German Question in the origins of the Cold War. The work evaluates the transformation which occurred in Germany and the post-war international order due to the inter-Allied work on denazification. The author analyses the Rationalist aspects of superpower interaction, with particular emphasis on the legal and diplomatic framework which sustained not only the treatment of the German Question but also the general context of inter-Allied relations. The author also tackles the conflictual aspects of the treatment of the German Question by examining superpower interaction in relation to the enforcement of their structural interests. The main argument of the book is that due to the interaction between the elements of intervention and coexistence, the German Question constituted the most significant issue in the configuration of the post-war international order.

Between Containment and Rollback

Between Containment and Rollback PDF Author: Christian F. Ostermann
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503607631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 566

Book Description
In the aftermath of World War II, American policymakers turned to the task of rebuilding Europe while keeping communism at bay. In Germany, formally divided since 1949,the United States prioritized the political, economic, and, eventually, military integration of the fledgling Federal Republic with the West. The extraordinary success story of forging this alliance has dominated our historical under-standing of the American-German relationship. Largely left out of the grand narrative of U.S.–German relations were most East Germans who found themselves caught under Soviet and then communist control by the post-1945 geo-political fallout of the war that Nazi Germany had launched. They were the ones who most dearly paid the price for the country's division. This book writes the East Germans—both leadership and general populace—back into that history as objects of American policy and as historical agents in their own right Based on recently declassified documents from American, Russian, and German archives, this book demonstrates that U.S. efforts from 1945 to 1953 went beyond building a prosperous democracy in western Germany and "containing" Soviet-Communist power to the east. Under the Truman and then the Eisenhower administrations, American policy also included efforts to undermine and "roll back" Soviet and German communist control in the eastern part of the country. This story sheds light on a dark-er side to the American Cold War in Germany: propaganda, covert operations, economic pressure, and psychological warfare. Christian F. Ostermann takes an international history approach, capturing Soviet and East German responses and actions, and drawing a rich and complex picture of the early East–West confrontation in the heart of Europe.

The Politics of Military Force

The Politics of Military Force PDF Author: Frank Stengel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472132210
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
The Politics of Military Force examines the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that result in different policy options appearing rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on Essex School discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works, and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable policy options not only acceptable but even without alternative. Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, The Politics of Military Force provides an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the resulting making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, the book also demonstrates the added value of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naive realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and International Relations more generally.

The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe

The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe PDF Author: Richard Ned Lebow
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822338178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Comparative case studies of how memories of World War II have been constructed and revised in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and the USSR (Russia).

Power and Influence After the Cold War

Power and Influence After the Cold War PDF Author: Ann L. Phillips
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847695232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Challenging conventional wisdom about German dominance in the new Europe, this study presents a new approach to the question of power and influence after the Cold War. Inspired by the debate over German hegemony and drawing on intensive fieldwork, Ann L. Phillips develops two original cases of German relations with East-Central Europe to test competing arguments. As she convincingly demonstrates, the politics of reconciliation and the activities of German party-affiliated foundations illustrate German engagement in the region in its dual faces: restraint and projection. The author uses the less-developed literature on reciprocal influences of domestic politics and the international environment to frame her analysis. These two cases provide evidence not only of the intersection of domestic politics and international relations but of when and how one trumps the other. Contributing to the theoretical debate, Phillips argues that this interplay explains the divergent trajectories bilateral relations have taken since 1990 in ways that more traditional neo-realist or liberal approaches could not. The author's fresh perspective and new evidence demonstrate that East-Central European states play a much greater role in the influence equation than they did in the past.

The Postwar Transformation of Germany

The Postwar Transformation of Germany PDF Author: John Shannon Brady
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472027239
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
As Germany celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany--the former West Germany-- leading scholars take stock in this volume of the political, social, and economic progress Germany made as it built a democratic political system and a powerful economy, survived the Cold War, and dealt with the challenges of reunification. The contributors address issues such as Germany's response to extremists, the development of a professional civil service, judicial review, the maintenance of the welfare state, the nature of contemporary German nationalism, and Germany's role in the world. Contributors are Thomas Banchoff, Thomas U. Berger, Patricia Davis, Ernst Haas, Jost Halfmann, Christard Hoffmann, Carl-Lugwig Holtfrerich, Donald P. Kommers, Wolfgang Krieger, Peter Krueger, Gregg O. Kvistad, Ludger Lindlar, Charles Maier, Andrei Markovitz, Peter Merkl, Claus Offe, Simon Reich, and Michaela Richter. John S. Brady and Sarah Elise Wiliarty are doctoral candidates in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Beverly Crawford is Professor of Political Science, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy of Industrial Societies, and Associate Director, Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley.